Languages

Hindi forces us to think about everything in terms of male and female. TV चल रहा है या TV चल रही है. Kannada and English don't have sounds.  ख, त्त , थ. Punjabi doesn't have very strong notions of half letters. As we keep adding new words to the languages, it would be nice to add new sounds/letters also. Languages we use were invented long, long time ago. May be we should invented new languages which are keyboard friendly, capture enough sounds, have simple grammar,  is easier to learn even for adults, stops forcing us to think in terms of male/female, is computer understandable (avoid NLP) and perhaps easy to work with Text-2-Speech & Speech-2-Text converters.

Virality

Publishing a feed to all your friends is not viral, it is spam. If publishing a feed results is all your friends also publishing the feed, then that is viral. To make something viral is not about publishing your feed as many times as possible, to make something viral is about causing the receiver of the feed to want to republish it.

Interest

If everybody in the world has enough money to keep in bank such that they can easily survive on interest alone, who will do the work? This will not work for obvious reasons, but this is what everyone dreams to achieve.

May be money should have a half life.

Jammu Airport

Few things happened at Jammu Airport which defies all economics:

1) Taxi service is controlled by a union guy. I wanted a taxi for a day without specifying how much kilometer I will travel. The guy simply refused to give me a per km rate as his commission depends on total value of the travel charges. With per KM model he doesn't knows beforehand what is his commission and hence the refusal to act on this stupid per KM model.
2) The taxis are assigned in round robin fashion. As the number of taxis increase without any increase in tourist traffic (less demand and more supply) the taxi charges will be increased to compensate the decrease in per taxi profit.

Demand & Supply

One of the fundamental premises of classical economics is the rule of demand and supply. In a free market when demand is more and supply is less, prices go high and when demand is less and supply is more, the prices go down.  This works most of the time but not all the time. Here is when it doesn't works.

• Free markets are hard to achieve. Typically we have less number of producers and high number of consumers in any market. This gives unfair advantage to producers to artificially keep the prices high simply because their number is small enough to organize. Real Estate, Sabzi Mandi, Auto Stand, etc are some of the places where producers will typically unite and charge high prices.  With GroupOn and other demand aggregator sites, what we now see in consumers uniting to create artificially lower demand to impact the prices. This would not be required in a free market.
• The second factor is how many times the buying decision is taken. We don't change phone numbers often, which means even if the new plan from Airtel is very good, it will not create enough demand. If I have bought a house at some price, any changes is price later are irrelevant for me. The same is the case with home loan, because of the switching charges and no guaranty by the bank on the floating home loan rate. Only when the buying happens over and over again, it is possible for the demand/supply rule to be effective. If it doesn't happens often enough, the equilibrium is lost. Same is the case with representative democracy where we end up voting only once in five years.  Demand/Supply will not work if consumers just have to make this decision only once or twice. The markets will only be fair if consumer needs to choose over and over and not when they are stuck with their choice for lifetime or a big duration of time.
• The third factor is the time of delivery of the product or service. If the product is only scheduled to be delivered, the decision of payment has already been made and the quality of service/product doesn't comes into picture, only its expectation. When an enterprise buys some software from other company, it is paying for the product as well as the maintenance charges which will happen only in the future. When we sit in an auto, we will know if his meter is bad or the driver is slow or reckless only when have made the buying decision. Or when buying a house, the house will be delivered only in the future which means actual cost of house will be known only in the future.  What this really means is that it is impossible for us to take an informed decision about the purchase or at least is fairly complicated decision to make, which gives the producer unfair advantage it terms of setting prices.

What I want to say is that their exist enough markets which appears to be free but are not, because they don't give consumers enough time/chances to revise their decisions and this gives unfair advantage to the producers, which means fair market theory fails and we need government intervention or group buying or really establish fair prices in these markets.