Warren Buffett is diving headlong into U.S. equities with a strong warning to cash-hoarders:

Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts. [New York Times]

“Buy American”, he says. “I am”.

Well that’s good to hear, but the question is “Do I (and you) dare?”

Today, October 15th, is Blog Action Day: a day when thousands of bloggers around the world come together to write about a particular issue. This year, that issue is Poverty and according to site they “aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web!” I am happy to play a small role in talking about this critical issue.

And more than 3 billion people - or half the world’s population - live on less than $2.50 a day.

Apathetic Perspective?

My perspective on poverty is obviously shaped by the environment in which I was raised and when you live and grow up in a country like India where unfortunately you stare poverty in the face every single day. The Atlas Of The Real World which contains maps of the world in which countries are shown not based on actual territorial sizes, but on different criteria like number of immigrants or wealth of its citizens, presents this altogether disheartening map of Poverty:

Map Of The World where each territory shows the number of people living on US$2 a day or less.

It leads to a kind of, for want of a better word, apathy. Seeing something everyday only makes you notice it less. It’s not that you don’t care, it’s that you are overwhelmed and that feeling gradually leads to despair, despondency and finally surrender. You roll down your car windows to drop a coin into the ever-waiting begging bowls at traffic signal after signal until you end up realizing: (1) “It’s too big for me alone to handle” and (2)”There is nothing I can do about it”.

(1) might be true. You “alone” probably cannot “solve” this problem in the standard definition of the word. But, (2) is certainly not true. At least, not anymore.

Think. Then Act Locally and Globally

You have always heard to “Think Globally, Act Locally” but with the Internet on your side you can act Globally at a fraction of the cost of what it would have been just a few years back. Just a few things to consider doing today (and always):

Act Locally:

1. Donate: Old clothes, books, toys.
2. Mentor: Education is a pet panacea of mine and my friends often tease on the extent to which I think it is the “one solution to all problems”. While I could rant endlessly on the various ways a sound education to every child until the age of 18 could reshape our entire planet and create a generation of smart, responsible citizens, I’ll check myself since I am talking about acting locally and just advocate mentoring or tutoring as a simple and effective way to make a positive difference in a child’s life.
3. Raise awareness: See poverty in your neighbourhood? Think you have a solution? Your local Representatives and Congressmen should hear about it. From you. Now.

Act Globally:

1. Visit The Hunger Site: You click on a button, the sponsors of the site give to charity. Simple and effective.
2. Play FreeRice: 20 grains of rice are donated everytime you answer questions on a variety of subjects. (I wrote about this site last Novemeber)
3. Setup a microloan on Kiva: Another concept virtually impossible without the Internet. You give a small loan (even as low as $25) to a needy person across the world and watch as it helps that person fulfill his/her dream of an enterprise. The entrepreneurs are pre-screened and commit to working hard to lift themselves out of poverty and pay back your loan which they indeed do (99.7% of the time!).

These are obviously just a few things you can do but for a lot more ways you can make a difference, check out these resources:

1. 88 Ways to Take Action Against Poverty Right Now
2. Make Poverty History
3. Oxfam International

Spread the word today by blogging or emailing your thoughts. Let’s Unite To Make Poverty History!

In answer to his question “Is it rational to vote?”, Norvig writes:

[...]We can estimate the total monetary value by noting that the current office holder presided over a $3 trillion war and at least a $1 trillion economic meltdown. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) estimated the cost of the Bush presidency at $7.7 trillion. Let’s compromise and call it $6 trillion, and assume that the other candidate would have been revenue neutral, so the net difference of the presidential choice is $6 trillion.

The value of not voting is that you save, say, an hour of your time. If you’re an average American wage-earner, that’s about $20. In contrast, the value of voting is the probability that your vote will decide the election (1 in 6 million) times the cost difference ($6 trillion). That means the expected value of your vote is $1,000,000. What else have you ever done in your life with an expected value of a million dollars per hour? Not even Warren Buffett makes that much.

[Is it rational to vote?]

The assumption behind this calculation stems from your being in a swing state, but if you are a citizen of the United States and if you lived through the tragicomedy that was the 2000 Presidential Election, then this might not be such a far-fetched valuation after all.

Let’s get it started!

[News3Online.com]

Once you begin watching this, I challenge you to look away. Gary Vaynerchuk (of Wine Library TV) keeps you entertained and engaged with 15 rocking minutes of in-your-face “If you believe in it, go for it”:

[Via Waxy]

Internet Full

Hilarious!

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.
[Via Waxy]

But if you want to know your PAN number, you just go here: https://incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/knowpan/knowpan.do - and then enter just your Last Name and Date of Birth??!!

Heaven help you if you share your last name with someone else who was also born on the same day. My friend in India just got a different pan number on the site than on his physical PAN Card!

Not sure if the PAN number in India can be misused as much as the Social Security Number here in the U.S., but this site is just an open invitation to trouble-makers.

[Update: It gets better! Turns out it's quite easy to hack into any person's online tax-filing account.]

10 years, four employers, numerous clients, a software boom, a software bust, a little bit of Microsoft-hating, Java-loving, Microsoft-loving, Java-hating, Ruby-On-Rails-loving … if you think Software Engineering is just all about riding the next big wave (until the next big wave comes along), then you think right.

Meanwhile the more things change, the more they truly remain the same. My application server still spits out stack-traces expecting me to understand hundreds of lines of exceptions to figure out why it failed when it should have told me in plain English. Software still fails to work when you most expect it to (and worse, it sometimes works when you are confident it shouldn’t). Service-Oriented-Architecture, or SOA, is DOA. Amazon is still the only company that understands website-usability.

And, oh, real flesh-and-blood people are still needed to write software. Guess I’ll be shifting 0s and 1s around just a little while longer!

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
[Via KK]