Not Done.

Do you hear me, America? This is just not done. Thus far and no farther. No siree, not this. We shall not be silent.

You may do whatever with us, the aam aadmi, the common man. Frisking, secondary inspections, these don't really bother us. Our government has trained us to take minor humiliations in our stride.

But how dare you do that to our VIPs? How dare you frisk Kalam or detain SRK for secondary inspection? Don't you know, you Stupid Americans, that VIPs are the new High Castes and must not be treated like common people?

Sheesh.

Happy Independence Day!

barbaad gulistaan karne ko ek hi ulluu kaafi thaa
har daal pe ulluu baithaa hai, anjaam-e-gulistaan kyaa hogaa?

Happy Independence Day to my fellow Indians.

Reader, if you require a monument to Hicks, look around you!

Brad DeLong analyzes why interest rates in the US haven't gone up in spite of the flood of government borrowing for the Stimulus.

New Draft Income Tax Code

I'm not quite sure whether we bhalo bashi the FM or not. One wouldn't go so far as to call this a "daft" income tax code, but it's rather nasty. It starts off looking rather nice, but ends up decidedly less pleasant in some aspects.

Salient points

• Valid from FY-2010-11 onwards (AY 2011-12, but the AY term is not in the draft anymore)
• Tax rates, limits and exemptions are now in the law, not announced in the budget yearly as they are now.
• The language of the proposed statute is allegedly simpler than the one it replaces.

The good:

• Less "basic" income tax (1.6L - 10L - 10%, 10-25L - 20%, 25L+ - 30%). Someone earning 25L would end up paying 2.8L less as tax. Watch out for the sting in the tail below with cap gains, though. Depending on how much you churn your portfolio, that 2.8L could be eaten up really fast.
• Increased investment allowance (3 Lakhs). But again, there's a sting in the tail.
• Wealth tax limit raised to 50Cr, but exemptions removed.

The bad:

• Capital gains is taxed at marginal income rates (long term too! Goodbye zero tax on stock market gains. Dividend options of Mutual Funds look attractive again.).
• EET on PF. This means you pay tax on money withdrawn from PF! Thankfully, it applies only to interest accrued and money invested from Apr 2011 onwards
• No interest exemption for home loans.Again, that eats up part of the increased investment allowance.
• All perks are taxed. One hopes there will be exemptions for at least some basic stuff.

The Ugly

• Full text of the draft , if you are in the mood for some reading pleasure.

Interestingly, the corporate tax rate has been cut to 25%. This means individual marginal tax rate is more than that of corporations. Not good, Pranab Da, cholbe na. Whatever happened to progressive taxation, why is the individual being burdened more than a company?

What the left hand giveth, the right taketh away.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Chinese GDP numbers?

China, it would seem, calculates GDP differently from the other major economies of the world, measuring production rather than consumption, retail shipments rather than retail sales, and fund disbursal rather than actual spending. Just ask any business manager what delicious possibilities such an accounting method brings.

(Update: I and the AEI got this wrong, counting inventory is the "normal" way to calculate GDP, strange though that is. Thanks to Deepak for the correction.)

Also, statistics in China is a cat and mouse game between provincial bureaucrats eager to inflate numbers for their benefit, and a National bureau of statistics that attempts to deflate them. How all this adds up to a correct number we are not told. Even Chinese are loath to believe those numbers these days.

What's real then? The amazing growth of Urban China is real, so is the amazing amount of infrastructure growth. Growth in Manufacturing capacity is real. Then why do the Economic Mandarins have to resort to all this jugglery? Is it just a Socialist economy not yet come to grips with reality-based accounting and statistics, or is there something hidden beneath the surface of the world's fastest growing economy - inventory, bad debt, "creative" balance sheets and negative free cash flows being hidden under low-cost capital?

Shudder. Are we looking at the world's biggest "too-big-to-fail" case in the making? Naah. Too extreme a thought. But so was Lehman. And Enron. But who on earth (literally), could bail these guys out if their bubble ever bursts?

In which I build a PC from an Atom.

And so, after several years, I was back on Sardar Patrappa Road.

I have no idea who the venerable Sardar was, but I hope he liked electronics, because that's what he will always be associated with in Namma Bengaluru.

The mission: build a simple low-cost PC that suffices for simple browsing and basic use for junior, and also doubles up as a home media server and file server.

My shopping list was simple

• An Intel D945GCLF motherboard + Atom CPU
• 2GB DDR2
• 160GB SATA HDD
• DVD writer
• Mini-ITX "cube" case.

The first four took all of 2 minutes to get, and the person at the shop I decided to patronize seemed to know his stuff, and know what I wanted as well. The mini-ITX cube was something I couldn't find.

And so I settled for the smallest micro-ATX tower I could find - approximately 300mm x 300mmx100mm. The total came to below what I expected, and it seemed like I was getting a good deal, so I haggled less than I'd planned to. One can never be sure, though. For the record, I paid Rs. 8750 for the above, plus Rs. 350 as VAT. My target was to be below Rs. 10K. Incidentally, I could have saved another 400 by going for a cheaper but slightly larger case, but I was thinking small today.

And there I was, back home with these. The case was bigger than I wanted, but not too bad.



So, off came the case cover.



This particular case had a disk tray, which is supposed to hold the hard disk and the optical drive. Six screws later, off it came, and the case was now ready for its new occupants.



The disk tray holds both the disk drive and the optical drive, both easily screwing onto opposite sides of the tray.



The D945GCLF motherboard comes with an Atom CPU and cooling fan pre-installed. This saves some bother, or prevents some fun, whichever way you look at it. I think Intel only ships the Atom pre-installed on a motherboard.



The motherboard fit smoothly into the case, not surprising since it was built to fit into an even smaller form factor.



In went the 2GB DIMM, and power connections were plugged in ..



The disk tray, now holding its cargo, was installed back into position, we are now into the home stretch.



Back went the case cover, and we're ready to check if things work.



And peace, astute reader, I know I haven't said anything about a display or I/O. I had these lying around, (paid) remembrances of my former employer that had gone to the great bit bucket in the sky.



... and we're on the road - BIOS come up smoothly to the sound of high fives.



Without further ado, the Ubuntu install CD went into the DVD drive, and started endowing the lump of hardware with a living soul - er, an OS. No Microsoft software is foreseen to run on this. Living souls must be kept away from Mephistopheles.



And, so it came to pass, that a login prompt was displayed, and all was well.



Not soon after, came this blog post - yes, from the very computer that was built this very day.

What remains? They say a computer is never fully built; it is built and built again. The odd niggle needs fixing - an LED that doesn't work (did I connect it right?), a fan that's too loud for the gentle ears of Mrs. Hatter (Atom doesn't need all that much cooling and has its own motherboard fan; perhaps I can turn the case fan off), ...

And then to create and test out all the file/media server goodness. But that's another day, and another blog article.

Coexistence, for now.

I've now settled into a mode of peaceful browser-co-existence. Chrome and Firefox take up one browser window each, and compete for the honour of having more tabs open than the other.

Firefox 3.0.13 isn't all that bad, but once you go Chrome, it sure does feel like home.

I have a handful of sites that I like to use with substantial scripting or extension support, which remain open in my Firefox window, and Chrome takes care of the rest.

Next stop: move to the Chrome dev channel, and check out their in-the-works scripting support.

Next-to-next stop: find a way to get rid of my unease about Google becoming the next Microsoft.

Is this how an Empire is born?

Is the Stimulus Working?

This image is making the rounds of the web, originating in a report authored by Christina Romer.
The report says:

The fact that the observations lie along an upward-sloping line shows that, on average, things have improved more in countries that adopted bigger stimulus packages

Plausible, at first sight, until you look at the three outliers at the top right. Remove those three, and the remaining 19 would result in a flat line. And which are the three? China, Japan and Korea.

So, the fair conclusion would be - the current round of economic stimulus works, if you are in East Asia.

Just in case ...

Just in case you only heard half the Emraan Hashmi story, here's the other half.