Results for “time management” 347 found
Buying a Coal Mine Gets Easier!
Long time readers will know that I have been advocating for buying a coal mine and shuttering it, especially a coal mine in India or China. The basic idea is that there are plenty of coal mines which are barely profitable so buying and shuttering these mines could be a relatively cheap way to reduce air pollution and climate change (much cheaper, for example, then letting the coal mine produce and then paying for carbon extraction). (I give an example of how this might work with an actual coal mine for sale here).
One objection, which I noted earlier, was BLM use it or lose it rules:
There are also some crazy “use it or lose it” laws that say that you can’t buy the right to extract a natural resource and not use it. When the high-bidder for an oil and gas lease near Arches National Park turned out to be an environmentalist the BLM cancelled the contract! That’s absurd. The high-bidder is the high-bidder and there should be no discrimination based on the reasons for the bid. See this Science piece.
Well some good news.
The Bureau of Land Management unveiled a draft rule late last month that would place conservation “on equal footing” with energy development and other traditional uses — a proposal that seeks to confront the agency’s long record of prioritizing extraction across the federal estate. A key provision of that rule would grant the BLM, which oversees one-tenth of all land in the United States, the authority to issue “conservation leases” to promote land protection and ecosystem restoration.
The article does a pretty good job of explaining conservation leases but it’s hilarious how the author reflexively labels PERC a right-wing think tank with deep ties to fossil fuels that supports “free market environmentalism” in scare quotes and never feels the need to resolve this with their support of conservation leases. Blank out, as Ayn Rand would say.
Few people have done more to advance the idea of conservation leases than Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Property and Environment Research Center, or PERC, a right-wing, Montana-based think tank that promotes “free market environmentalism” and has deep ties to fossil fuels. Regan points to Williams’ and DeChristopher’s cases to highlight how legacy “use it or lose it” rules have biased public land management in favor of extraction.
“We have these ‘use it or lose it’ requirements that define ‘use’ in these really narrow ways that preclude conservation groups from participating in the leasing markets that affect the use of vast swaths of the American West,” he told HuffPost. “Conservation should be considered a valid use of public lands, and groups should be able to acquire those leases and decide to conserve them in some form or restore them.”
Regan argues the inability of conservationists to participate in federal land leasing, even when they are willing to pay more than a driller or rancher, has only helped fuel conflict in Western states.
…“Why don’t environmentalists just buy what they want to protect? Well, in many cases they can’t,” Regan said.
Hat tip: Robert Keller.
Wings at the Speed of Sound — a review
Was it Ian Leslie I promised this review to? Time is slipping away!
Speed of Sound (songs at the link) was much derided upon its release in 1976, and more recently one scathing reviewer gave it a “1” score out of 10. Yet I find this an entertaining and also compelling work. At least Eoghan Lyng had the sense to call it “definitely infectious and decidedly hummable.” But it’s better than that, and I would stress the following:
1. The album very definitely has its own “sound.” Super clean production, a limpid clarity in the mix, and sparing deployment of guitar. Not all of that works all the time, but there is a coherence to a production often described as a mish-mash. The sound of the whole is best reflected by “The Note You Never Wrote,” a McCartney song sung by Denny Laine, placed wisely in the number two slot. Nothing on either the disc or the original album sounds compressed, rather it all comes to life. It’s better than the sluggish, overproduced, horn-heavy Venus and Mars.
2. The unapologetic presentation has held up fine, rejecting its own era of albums that were overloaded with ideas, overproduced, and too self-consciously parading their messages. Speed of Sound is so deliberately unhip you can hardly believe it — who else in 1976 would pay tribute to “Phil and Don” of the Everly Brothers? And Paul was thanking MLK (“Martin Luther”) when others were still flirting with the Black Panthers. Surely he was right that “Silly Love Songs” would persist, so maybe people were hating on how on the mark he was.
2. At exactly the same time Wings was evolving into one of the very best live acts of the 1970s, far better than the Beatles ever were. (Yes, I know it is hard to admit that.) Their live act sizzled, and yes I did see it back then and I have listened to it many times since. Check out the YouTube channel of jimmymccullochfan, for instance “Beware My Love” or “Soily,” or how about “Call Me Back Again“? For Macca, Wings at this time was essentially a live band, and it proved to be his greatest live band achievement of all time (with some competition from his early 1990s shows), most of all pinned down by Jimmy McCulloch on guitar and Paul on bass.
You have to think of Speed of Sound as a complementary valentine to the live shows, a sweeter and more digestible version of what went into the road. Most of all it is about Paul and Linda, about the maturation of Wings as a group, about opennness to the world and to each other (a recurring Macca theme) and about domestic life, with recurring melancholy thrown in. Maybe those ideas are not your bag, but at least you can accept this as one piece of the broader McCartney tableau.
Now Macca knew you might not know about the live shows, but he didn’t care. He figured he was giving you two monster hits (“Let Em In,” “Silly Love Songs”) in the process, and that was good enough. And yes I agree he was too much the satisficer in this period.
3. The weak songs are “Wino Junko” and “Time to Hide” — 10% less democracy as Garett Jones says! “Time to Hide” is almost good, but it relies too heavily on horns and then drags on. “San Ferry Anne” also has a weak use of horns and the melody never quite takes off. “Cook of the House” goes into a category of its own. I’ll say only Wings [sic] needed to get this out of its system to move on to other approaches. I am pleased, however, that the lyrics are fulsome in their praise of domesticity, compare it to Lennon’s effort in an analogous but not similar vein. I don’t mind “dares to be appalling” as much as many others do. Frankly, I enjoy this song.
4. Excellent are “Let ’em In,” “The Note You Never Wrote,” “She’s My Baby,” “Beware My Love,” “Silly Love Songs,” and “Warm and Beautiful.” That is six very good songs on an album, with “Must Do Something About It” as “pretty good.” The prominence of the former set on Beatles XM satellite radio should not go unremarked, as presumably listeners are not switching the dial away. These songs are still popular nearly fifty years later.
5. “She’s My Baby” is the most underrated cut of that lot. It starts before you realize it and it just gets down to business. Thumping bass, innovative vocal, it keeps on going and then it segues into “Beware My Love.” Does not wear out its welcome.
6. There is no good reason to mock “Silly Love Songs,” which is a classic, ecstatic in its peaks, and which deploys disco influences in just the right way. The vocal and bass lines work perfectly, as does Linda’s vocal counterpoint. It stays vital at almost six minutes long. Once you step out of your ingrained bias, it is easy to see this is better than many of the classic McCartney Beatle songs. I would rather hear it than say Lennon’s soppy “Imagine,” which is ideologically ill-conceived to boot. Macca in this one is sly, mocking, and sardonic too, such as when he subtly refers to the problematic nature of mutual orgasm (“love doesn’t come in a minute…sometimes it doesn’t come at all…”).
7. “I must be wrong” in “Beware My Love” (plus the preceding guitar break) and “I love you” in “Silly Love Songs” are the two highlight moments of the album.
There are definitely disappointments in this work, but it is time we were able to view its contributions with some objectivity. Wings at the Speed of Sound is an excellent album, still worth the relistens. And I really am glad that the Beatles broke up — it meant more music from the group as a whole.
A few random Tucker Carlson thoughts
A few times I was invited to be on the show, typically after I would write something on immigration. I always refused, figuring I wouldn’t get fair treatment and would only feed a very unfair method of conducting the discourse.
I never have been a regular watcher, not of any news show, but I have seen him a number of times, often in other venues or homes, or I might pause when moving through the channels. It struck me each time how remarkably talented and smart and energetic he was, while what he said was very often not smart at all. (I’ve heard the same about his core smarts from a few different people who knew him when he was younger.) It also struck me how fluently he could coin an attack phrase, maybe better than anyone else but DT?
It is now increasingly debated how much he meant the different things he was saying, for instance about the last presidential election. And was it smart to put criticisms of Fox management into texts?
The biggest lessons here are cautionary ones. First, the biggest stars can do some very unwise things, and eventually so many of them do.
Second, “the right wing” should pay heed to the reality that many of its most talented representatives go down such dark paths. Since most (non-right wing) people are reluctant to admit Carlson’s extreme talent, this point does not always come up. Carlson, of course, was doing very well with his chosen path, and he still has the option of doing very well again.
But in which directions will the constellations of the audience and of fame point him? Which exactly was the guiding star he lacked?
How might AI impact developing economies?
Cheap, tailored expertise
Many of the poor have little access to experts, on topics ranging from physical and mental health, agriculture, and entrepreneurship. Hiring experts can be transformative: Bloom et al (2013) found that management consultants substantially improved production at textile factories in India. Many envisioned that the internet would level access to expertise, allowing entrepreneurs in Delhi and farmers in Western Kenya equal access to the world’s best knowledge. But, as anyone who owns a dusty textbook knows, raw information is not enough to lead to action. Most of the world’s knowledge is not written for the world’s poor. Much is written in English, some uses technical jargon, and has metaphors and references that make sense to people in Los Angeles but not in Lagos. AI can unlock the insight in this information for broader audiences. The newest generation of AI chatbots can not only translate between languages, but also change reading levels, remove jargon, and rewrite knowledge to use local customs and metaphors. These chatbots also allow you to have a conversation about the topic, allowing you to ask for clarification for specific parts, or specify that your needs differ from what the system had assumed. While these systems sometimes make mistakes, their quality, and ability to translate is improving quickly. And they allow almost zero cost access to the tailored expertise that would otherwise require hiring experts that would be prohibitively costly for the poor. This tailored expertise might improve business processes across developing economies for motivated people. Some startups are already developing targeted advisors for specific tasks, like choosing between schools (ConsiliumBots). Similar advisors could also help deliver medical advice to rural populations.
Here is more from Daniel Bjorkegren, an economist at Brown University. Here is his paper on nostalgic demand.
The New Madness of Crowds
USDC and USDT are two well-known stablecoins. USDC is fully backing by safe, liquid assets, which are verified monthly by a major U.S. accounting firm under the scrutiny of U.S. state regulators. USDT (Tether) is an unregulated stablecoin with questionable asset backing and opaque operations, founded by an actor from the Mighty Ducks and supported by a bank established by one of the creators of Inspector Gadget.
Yet, when Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) went into crisis, USDC broke the peg, and people fled to the nutty, opaque, unregulated Inspector Gadget backed coin.
(USDC is in blue and measured on the right axis and spiked below par, USDT is in red and measured on the left axis and spiked over par.)
Now, this is in some sense “explainable”. USDC kept some money at SVB and Tether (probably) did not. Matthew Zeitlin, channeling Matt Levine, put it this way:
One problem with being transparently and fully backed is that sometimes your investors can transparently see how much of your assets are in a bank that went bottom up, Tether does not have this problem.
SVB’s troubles stemmed from its investments in long-term government bonds, which dropped in value as interest rates rose. However, the bank’s fundamentals were not that dire. If no one had panicked, SVB could probably have paid off all its depositors in the ordinary course of business. The problem happened because some investors saw information they thought others might interpret negatively, prompting them to withdraw their funds. This led others to believe the information was indeed bad, validating the initial belief and causing a massive $42 billion withdrawal in a single day. Had transparency been less and transaction costs more, this wouldn’t have happened and, quite possibly, everything would have been fine.
Indeed, in the past, banks probably become insolvent on a mark-to-market basis but few people noticed. Today, a bank dips below the line and depositors are heading to the door.
SVB’s fundamentals may have been worse than I believe, poor management undoubtedly played a role. But fundamentals aren’t driving the boat; the boat is being driven by sunspots, memes, and vibes. Tether’s fundamentals are much worse than SVBs ever were. And USDC was even less imperiled than SVB, yet people ran to Tether. Why? Because there wasn’t a Tether sunspot. But be careful. Tether’s stability doesn’t mean that its fundamentals are strong. Not even close. Stability doesn’t mean good fundamentals and instability doesn’t mean bad fundamentals. The mad crowd is capricious. Tether’s time is coming, but no one knows what will spark the fire.
Greater transparency and lower transaction costs have intensified the madness of the masses and expanded their reach. From finance to politics and culture, no domain remains untouched by the new madness of crowds.
Hat tip: Connor Tabarrok and Max Tabarrok.
Why Is Transit Construction in the US so Expensive?
The Transit Cost Project, a project supported by the NYU’s Marron Institute has released the most comprehesive report to date on why US transist-infrastacture is so expensive:
Why do transit-infrastructure projects in New York cost 20 times more on a per kilometer basis than in Seoul? We investigate this question across hundreds of transit projects from around the world. We have created a database that spans more than 50 countries and totals more than 11,000 km of urban rail built since the late 1990s. We will also examine this question in greater detail by carrying out six in-depth case studies that take a closer look at unique considerations and variables that aren’t easily quantified, like project management, governance, and site conditions.
The bottom line is it’s many things that add up. Here are a few items that struck my eye:
Much of the premium [in labor cost] comes from white-collar overstaffing: in our Massachusetts’ Green Line Extension (GLX) case, we found that during the first iteration of the project, the ratio was estimated at 1.8 craft laborers to 1 supervisor by the CM/GC. In New England, the expected ratio is 2.5 or 3 craft laborers per supervisor; thus, GLX had 40-60% more supervisors than is normal in the Northeast.
In New York, each agency insists on having its own on-site supervisor.
Elsewhere in the world 5 laborers to one supervisor is common.
Here’s something I didn’t know:
The second quirk is that American labor is local. Railway workers and construction workers in Europe are nationally mobile and often mobile across the entire EU. Spanish rail maintenance workers move between different parts of the country, staying in temporary worker housing wherever they are posted to. So do tunnel miners in Sweden; many are EU migrants, and on Nya Tunnelbanan none is a native Stockholmer. No such thing occurs in unionized American labor: the tunnel workers and operating engineers in New York are rooted in the region and only work within or right next to the city.
The mobile system has its own costs. Fringe rates are high because of the need to provide temporary housing: they add 100% to the cost of a Swedish worker, a comparable rate to that of a unionized New York tradesperson, American unions having unusually high fringe rates due to high-cost health plans. However, a nationally mobile workforce is a more productive workforce–such workers gain experience from tunnels built elsewhere, whether for infrastructure or for the mining of natural resources. Present-day New York laborers only have experience with New York projects; thus, they are a dedicated and driven workforce but also a low-productivity one, having never seen more efficient tunnel projects.
Lots more of interest in the report.
Privatization Improves Airports
Laurent Belsie summarizes a new NBER paper, All Clear for Takeoff: Evidence from Airports on the Effects of Infrastructure Privatization:
When private equity funds buy airports from governments, the number of airlines and routes served increases, operating income rises, and the customer experience improves.
…As of 2020, nearly 20 percent of the world’s airports had been privatized. Private equity (PE), usually through dedicated infrastructure funds, is playing an increasing role in privatization, purchasing 102 airports out of a total of 437 that have ever been privatized.
…A key metric of airport efficiency is passengers per flight. The more customers an airport can serve with existing runways and gates, the more services it can deliver and the more earnings it can generate. When PE funds buy government-owned airports, the number of passengers per flight rises an average 20 percent. There’s no such increase when non-PE private firms acquire an airport. Overall passenger traffic rises under both types of private ownership, but the rise at PE-owned airports, 84 percent, is four times greater than that at non-PE-owned private airports. Freight volumes and the number of flights, other measures of efficiency, show a similar pattern. Evidence from satellite image data indicates that PE owners increase terminal size and the number of gates. This capacity expansion helps enable the volume increases and points to the airport having been financially constrained under previous ownership.
…PE firms tend to attract new low-cost carriers to their airports, which in turn may lead to greater competition and offer consumers better service and lower prices. With regard to routes, PE acquirers increase the number of new routes, especially international routes, more than other buyers. International passengers are often the most profitable airport users, especially in developing countries.
A PE acquisition is also associated with a decline in flight cancellations and an increase in the likelihood of receiving a quality award. When an airport shifts from non-PE private to PE ownership, its odds of winning an award rise by 6 percentage points. The average chance of winning such an award is just 2 percent.
The fees that airports charge to airlines rise after airport privatizations. When the buyer is a PE firm, there is also a push to deregulate government limits on those fees. For example, after three Australian airports were privatized in the mid-1990s, the price caps governing airport revenues were replaced with a system of price monitoring that allows the government to step in if fees or revenues become excessive.
The net effect of a PE acquisition is a rough doubling of an airport’s operating income, due mostly to higher revenues from airlines and retailers in the terminal rather than cost-cutting. The driving forces behind these improvements appear to be new management strategies, which likely includes greater compensation for managers, alongside investments in new capacity as well as better passenger services and technology.
From the comments, on CDC reform
These are the word of commentator Sure:
Why the CDC is hard to fix
As of October, 10,020 of the CDC’s 12,892 full-time employees — 78% of the full-time workforce — were allowed to work remotely all or part of the time, according to data that KHN obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.
Experts said the lack of face-to-face work will likely be a substantial obstacle to the top leadership’s effort to overhaul the agency after its failures during the pandemic — a botched testing rollout, confusing safety guidance, the slow release of scientific research, and a loss of public trust.
They also wondered whether Walensky, who frequently works remotely while traveling, can bring about that change from afar and whether a virtual workforce might experience more challenges battling infectious diseases than one working together in person.
“One of the things that a really strong new leader would do is they’d be visible, they’d be walking the halls, they’d have the open door,” said Pamela Hinds, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. “That’s much harder to accomplish when nobody’s there.”
Here is the full story, via Rich Dewey.
Why businesses fail
This paper is about micro-enterprises in Brazil, by Priscila de Oliviera:
Micro firms in low and middle income countries often have low profitability and do not grow over time. Several business training programs have tried to improve management and business practices, with limited effects. We run a field experiment with micro-entrepreneurs in Brazil (N=742) to study the under-adoption of improved business practices, and shed light on the constraints and behavioral biases that may hinder their adoption. We randomly offer entrepreneurs reminders and micro-incentives of either 20 BRL (4 USD) or 40 BRL (8 USD) to implement record keeping or marketing for three consecutive months, following a business training program. Compared to traditional business training, reminders and micro-incentives significantly increase adoption of marketing (13.2 p.p.) and record keeping (19.2 p.p.), with positive effects on firm survival and investment over four months. Our findings, together with additional survey evidence, suggest that behavioral biases inhibit the adoption of improved practices, and are consistent with inattention as a key driver of under-adoption. In addition, our survey evidence on information avoidance points to it as a limiting factor to the adoption of record keeping, but not marketing activities. Taken together, the results suggest that behavioral biases affect firm decisions, with significant impact on firm survival.
She is currently on the job market from UC Berkeley. There should be many more papers on this kind of topic!
EDS
If I write about a government program in the abstract, some of you respond in a pretty reasonable manner. Instead, if I tie the program to the status of a well-known personality, such as Hillary Clinton, Obama, Biden, Trump, and so on, the quality of the responses is much lower. Including from very smart people.
Take this insight to heart and apply it to your current thoughts about the new Twitter.
How many of you have written me to say that people “won’t pay $8 a month for Blue Check,” or whatever the latest suggested price might be?
Note from Elon’s own words that a) “You will also get: – Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam – Ability to post long video & audio – Half as many ads”, and b) “And paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us”, and c) “This will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators”.
Please do read those words carefully.
Now I do not myself pretend to know what will work for Twitter. But one implication of this proposal is that a free version of Twitter still will be available. Is it so crazy to think that the forthcoming free version of Twitter will be “good enough” to keep the current users on?
Note also that under the proposed new regime, payments go both ways! Hardly any of the critics note this.
Or do you think markets are most efficient when all payments are set to zero and kept there? Maybe in some settings, but overall? I just do not see why this kind of plan is so doomed to fail. Let’s pay the creators who attract other Twitter users to create more and to induce more Twitter impressions. An externality is present, right?
As a friend of mine once said “Never underestimate Elon”…of course I would invoke more rational responses if I instead wrote “Do not underestimate the current Twitter management team and proposal.” But I won’t because I, like Elon, sometimes enjoy trolling you all.
What I’ve been reading
Frances Spalding, The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between the Two Wars. Wonderful text, quality images, and the whole subject area remains underrated, so this book was a big plus for me. The history of modernism is not just cubist and abstract art on the continent.
Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. I liked this book and found it useful, though I wished for more on Taiwan and more recent times, and for less on the earlier years. Just my subjective preference.
Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford, How to be a Founder: How entrepreneurs can identify, fund and launch their best ideas. Do you have it in you to be a founder? If you are asking that question, this book is maybe the best place to start looking for some answers.
Thomas H. Davenport and Steven M. Miller, Working with AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration. Actual examples!
There is also Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence, which I have not yet read.
Samuel Gregg, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World is a useful corrective to some recent attempts to overrate the import of industrial policy, especially in an American context.
Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen John I found a moving set of (imaginary) letters from one living female painter to another first-rate deceased female painter, both having lived through some similar situations. Excellent color plates too.
Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise. A good look at the essential continuity in Chinese history between the Maoist period and the “capitalist” period. Of course the main thesis no longer seems so crazy as it might have ten years ago.
Model this newsroom estimator
The New York Times’s performance review system has for years given significantly lower ratings to employees of color, an analysis by Times journalists in the NewsGuild shows.
The analysis, which relied on data provided by the company on performance ratings for all Guild-represented employees, found that in 2021, being Hispanic reduced the odds of receiving a high score by about 60 percent, and being Black cut the chances of high scores by nearly 50 percent. Asians were also less likely than white employees to get high scores.
In 2020, zero Black employees received the highest rating, while white employees accounted for more than 90 percent of the roughly 50 people who received the top score.
The disparities have been statistically significant in every year for which the company provided data, according to the journalists’ study, which was reviewed by several leading academic economists and statisticians, as well as performance evaluation experts.
…Management has denied the discrepancies in the performance ratings for nearly two years…
And from the economists:
Multiple outside experts consulted by the reporters consistently said the methodology used in the Guild’s most recent analysis was reasonable and appropriate and that the approach used by the company appeared either flawed or incomplete. Some went further, suggesting the company’s approach seemed tailor-made to avoid detecting any evidence of bias.
Rachael Meager, an economist at the London School of Economics, was blunt: “LMAO, that’s so dumb,” she wrote when Guild journalists described the company’s methodology to her. “That’s what you would do if you want to obliterate signal,” she added, using a word that in economics refers to meaningful information.
“This is so stupid as to border on negligence,” added Dr. Meager, who has published papers on evaluating statistical evidence in leading economics journals.
Peter Hull, a Brown University economist who has studied statistical techniques for detecting racial bias, also questioned the company’s approach and recommended a way to test it: running simulations in which bias was intentionally added. The company’s method repeatedly failed to detect racial disparities in those tests.
Here is the full article, prepared by the NYT Guild Equity Committee, including Ben Casselman. Of course we now live in a world where very few people will be surprised by this. Where exactly does the moral authority lie here for making editorial judgments about content concerning race?
Emergent Ventures India, fourth cohort
Here is the latest EV India cohort, and I am delighted to see more applications from young women and teenagers. I note also that a lot of the applicants for EV India are increasingly from smaller towns, or were raised in small towns before moving to larger cities for their projects.
EV India now has 75 winners! And I met most of them in Udaipur this last weekend. Here is the list of new winners:
Siddharth Kanungo is a chemical engineer by training and founder of Primer, an interactive conversational learning platform. Primer is designed for self-learners to learn subjects like mathematics, physics, computer science, that are usually offered in a university-level setting.
Keertana Subramani is a 23-year-old educator and social entrepreneur who wants to provide high-quality, accessible learning experiences. She received her EV grant to build SUVY Classes, a platform that vets and trains tutors for quality, and offers engaging, live classes for any learning need, and at twenty cents a day.
Arun Iyyanarappan is a 28-year-old electrical and software engineer passionate about creating alternate systems for electric power consumption. He received his EV grant to build a cost-effective solar powered house to show proof of concept for electrifying homes in rural areas at low-cost.
Gowtham Tummeda is a 21-year-old student interested in biology and programming and views biology as a software problem. He received his EV grant to build an end-to-end AI platform for biological data analysis. His larger ambition is to use the platform to model, design and simulate changes to strands of DNA at protein level using Deep Mind’s Alpha Fold.
Tejas Sidnal is an architect and researcher from Mumbai. He is the founder of CarbonCraft, a design and material innovation startup converting carbon emissions into building materials by fusing material knowledge of clean technologies with traditional techniques. He received an EV grant to reduce the curing process for Carbon Tiles from 28 days to under four hours for tiles that store captured carbon.
Hiya Jain is an 18-year-old interested in using EdTech to make education equitable. She received her EV grant to travel to San Francisco and better understand the EdTech space. She is currently working on UnMold, a project connecting high-school students in developing countries to PhD students running high information, low pressure, cohort-based courses to inject inspiration into a system.
Shruti Karandikar is a 16-year-old high school student from Bangalore. She has started ‘Screens for the Unscreened’ to collect phones, tablets, and laptops and donate them to underprivileged students. This is being converted into a non-governmental organization called ‘Mobilize’.
Sainadh Chityala is a 22-year-old engineering student. He received the EV grant to develop software to power self-driving cars in unpredictable and chaotic driving environments in urban India.
Samarth Bansal is a 28-year-old independent journalist and programmer in India. His reporting has appeared in Indian and foreign press like the The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Mint, and HuffPost, etc. He writes The Interval, a fortnightly newsletter. He received his EV grant to merge his two interests – developing AI platforms for journalism and serve the news at higher speed and lower cost.
Apurwa Masook is a 23-year-old structural engineer who graduated and cofounded and spearheaded India’s first Indigenous Student Rocketry Mission. He is the founder of Space Fields, a team of hustlers, engineers and space aficionados working towards affordable access to space. He received his EV grant to support Space Fields’s efforts in developing a low-cost high-performance green compositepellant to power next generation of Launch Vehicles.
Snigdha Poonam is a 38-year-old journalist and author from Delhi. She has written about identity politics, income inequality, tech culture, and crime. Her first book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World, won 2018’s Crossword Award for nonfiction. She received an EV grant to travel across India to for her investigative work on scams and fraud in the contemporary Indian political economy.
Aniruddha Kenge is a 20-year-old student of industrial design with an interest in carbon-based materials, especially graphene. He is working towards decarbonizing plastics and making their use, reuse, and production sustainable, swiftly. He received his EV grant to develop hemp fiber-based bio-composites in India that can replace multi-use plastics.
Keya Krishna is a 16-year-old high school student in Washington DC interested in the intersection of science, technology, and public policy. She received her EV grant to measure pollution exposures at a hyper-local level with a high level of spatial and temporal granularity, specifically focusing on the pollution exposure of school-going youth.
Abhilash Mishra is the Founder and Chief Science Officer of EquiTech Futures. He trained as a physicist and holds an M.Phys from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Astrophysics from Caltech. EquiTech Futures is a network of innovators from around the world using data science and AI to tackle societal challenges. Abhilash received his EV grant to develop and scale cohort-based courses, research residencies, and educational networking, through their programs EquiTech Scholars, EquiTech Residency, and EquiTech Institutes.
Reuben Abraham is the founding CEO of Artha Global, a new Mumbai and London based policy research and consulting organization that provides the scaffolding for efforts aimed at building state capacity. He was named ‘Think Tanker of the Year 2022’ by Prospect Magazine for putting together a large platform that enabled inter-disciplinary work to tackle the Covid-19 crisis in India.
Zi Cheng “Sam” Huang is a 26-year-old ethnographic researcher interested in elite spaces and cultural replication. Currently, they are assisting on a project about the beliefs of AI researchers. In their free time, they coach Peking University in competitive debating, effective altruism, and started a fellowship for talented young debaters to engage in effective altruism. With their EV grant, they seek to understand scaling education programs in India especially IITs.
Mohammad Ruhul Kader is an entrepreneur and writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He founded Future Startup, a digital publication covering the startup and technology scene in Dhaka with an ambition to transform Bangladesh through entrepreneurship and innovation. He writes about internet business, strategy, technology, and society. He is the author of Rethinking Failure: A short guide to living an entrepreneurial life. He received his EV grant to scale Future Startup into a leading destination to learn about entrepreneurship, tech, and business in Bangladesh.
Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy (21) and Benjamin Hoffner-Brodsky (22) are data scientists from Chennai and Davis with backgrounds in computational social science research and government. They founded Jhana, a Bangalore-based artificial intelligence lab, and are interested in simplifying and democratizing legal processes and information, and in building alignment and ethics tools for back-checking deployed AI systems. They are building a state-of-the-art, automatic legal search interface for lawyers and students.
Tushar Khandelwal (24), is a former investment banker turned social entrepreneur. He is the founder of Sigma91 – a career accelerator for ambitious teens, and has built a community of over 400 highly talented teenagers.
Akash Kulgod is a 22-year-old researcher, writer, and techno-optimist from Belagavi, with a degree in cognitive science from UC Berkeley. He is the founder of Dogluk — a startup-DAO aiming to augment the ability of dogs to detect disease by transforming their olfactory perceptual abilities into digital and multidimensional signatures. He is also a team member of the Rajalakshmi Children Foundation. You can follow his substack for his writing and podcasts about Dogluk, effective altruism, and the psychedelic revival.
Raghav Gupta is a 24-year-old industrial engineer and the founder of EquiDEI, a crypto-fintech startup. EquiDEI is a blockchain based protocol designed to monetize unbanked supply chain assets of small and medium sized enterprises in India, to provide low risk liquidity options. His ambition is to use his startup to generate wealth and liquidity and jobs for the SME ecosystem.
SealXX is a bioplastic solution to replace single-use plastics based on the concept of biomimicry, and it is founded and run by five teenagers across the world. At SealXX, they want to make the everyday products by mimicking protein-based natural processes by reducing the need for plastic reliance. Chandhana, Nithi, Roy, Nathan, and Elly, cofounders of SealXX were awarded an EV grant to develop and scale their biomimicry process.
- Chandhana Sathishkumar is a 17-year-old Neuroscience and BCI researcher, an author, TED-Ed Speaker, NFT artist, and Guinness world record holder. She has experience working alongside Walmart; with Brains@Play to develop Accessify (a brain-controlled browser extension); and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to research fetal brains.
- Nithi Byreddy is a 17-year-old innovator and author researching the applications of carbon capture in climate science. She has worked on creating a blockchain-based solution to reduce people’s carbon footprint and has worked with IKEA to create sustainable innovations to reduce their carbon emissions.
- Roy Kim is a 16-year-old innovator and environmentalist interested in mimicking the mechanisms and designs of nature to create sustainable environments, mainly cities. In addition to working alongside Walmart, he is currently developing a theoretical ecological urban utopia and further exploring the applications of biomimicry in our society.
- Nathan Park is a 17-year-old entrepreneur who is interested in economics and business management. He is currently doing research on the economics of the housing market, and running a student-led, scientific publication called MIND Magazines that seeks to make science universally accessible to everyone.
Nexteen is an innovation accelerator program for 13-19 years-old students with programs aimed at exposing students to exponential tech to work on global challenges. Here are some of their ambitious students:
- Vedanth Nath,16, is is a high schooler, football enthusiast, and the creative engine at Nexteen. Prior to Nexteen, ran Media House, and has worked in in the WASH Sector. He also leads Tech and Youth at LooCafe helping them become the largest Toilet-WASH Company in the country.
- Karthik Nagapuri, 22, is an innovator, Defi developer, and student getting his completing the last year of his undergraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence. At Nexteen, he’s building the tech infrastructure that would be useful for innovators who are part of the program. He also worked on Safe Block, a crypto wallet nominee system. He is also the winner of a separate EV grant for building open API framework and tech for LooCafe.
- Ayush Srivastava,19, is a serial entrepreneur who likes to work on operations of new startups to help them grow. He has helped operationalize several startups before Nexteen.
- Anvitha Kollipara,16, is an entrepreneur. She works on scaling, bringing international accreditation, and acquiring partnerships with companies such as Adobe for the non-profits she founded. She was named one of the top three teen change-makers by Forbes for her work with CareGood Foundation.
- Harsh Vardhan Shukla,19, is a YouTuber turned entrepreneur, completing his undergraduate degree in business development while working on the side on nanotech projects. He works on content production (videos) and podcasts.
Emergent Ventures India is now large enough for top-up grants and repeat winners! Some familiar names below:
- Nilay Kulkarni, a 22-year-old software developer from Nashik, for his fintech start up.
- Swasthik Padma to scale his start-up TrashTrap to scale Plascrete – a high strength building material made by converting non-recyclable plastic waste – for commercial use.
- Chandra Bhan Prasad to continue his excellent scholarship on Dalit capitalism and Dalit dignity.
- Naman Pushp, co-founder of Airbound, for his early efforts to explore sustainable on-ground mobility.
- Onkar Singh to continue developing his open-source CubeSat.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort and third cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
The tax provisions of the new climate and taxes bill
I can’t quite bring myself to call it the Inflation Reduction Act. One thing I have learned from experience is how hard it is to judge such bills upfront. For instance, I just learned that the electric vehicle tax credits do not currently apply to any electric vehicle whatsoever, nor will they obviously apply to any electric vehicle to be produced in the near future. Now the United States might take a larger role in battery production, or perhaps the law/regulation will be modified — don’t assume these standards will collapse. Still, the provisions are going to evolve. Or maybe there is a modest chance that provision of the bill simply will never kick in.
I don’t know.
How about the corporate minimum tax provisions? It sounds so simple to address unfairness in this way, and how much opposition will there be to a provision that might cover only 150 or so companies? But a lot of the incentives for new investment will be taken away, including new investment by highly successful companies. (You can get your tax bill down by making new investments, for instance, and that is why Amazon has paid relatively low taxes in many years.) Most of the companies covered are expected to be manufacturing, and didn’t we hear from the Democratic Party (and indeed many others) some while ago that manufacturing jobs possess special economic virtues? Furthermore, some of the tax incentives for green energy investments will be taken away. Has anyone done and published a cost-benefit analysis here? That is a serious question (comments are open!), not a rhetorical one.
Here are some other concerns (NYT):
“The evidence from the studies of outcomes around the Tax Reform Act of 1986 suggest that companies responded to such a policy by altering how they report financial accounting income — companies deferred more income into future years,” Michelle Hanlon, an accounting professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Senate Finance Committee last year. “This behavioral response poses serious risks for financial accounting and the capital markets.”
Other opponents of the new tax have expressed concerns that it would give more control over the U.S. tax base to the Financial Accounting Standards Board, an independent organization that sets accounting rules.
“The potential politicization of the F.A.S.B. will likely lead to lower-quality financial accounting standards and lower-quality financial accounting earnings,” Ms. Hanlon and Jeffrey L. Hoopes, a University of North Carolina professor, wrote in a letter to members of Congress last year that was signed by more than 260 accounting academics.
How bad is that? I do not know. Do you? My intuition is that the book profits concept cannot handle so much stress. By the way, kudos to NYT and Alan Rappeport for doing that piece. It is balanced but does not hold back on the skeptical side.
And here’s one matter I haven’t seen anyone mention: the climate part of the bill, and indeed most of the accompanying science and chips bill, assume in a big way that private sector investment is deficient in solving various social problems and needs some serious subsidy and direction.
Now the direction of that investment is a separate matter, but when it comes to the subsidy do you recall Kenneth Arrow’s classic argument that the private sector does not invest enough in risk-taking? Private investors see their private risk as higher than the actual social risk of the investment. This argument implies subsidies for investments, as much of the rest of the bill and its companion bill provide, not additional taxes on investment. This same kind of argument lies behind Operation Warp Speed, which most people supported, right?
And yet I see everyone presenting the new taxes on investment in an entirely blithe manner, ignoring the fact that the rest of the bill(s) implies private investment needs to be subsidized or at least taxed less.
Overall the ratio of mood affiliation and also politics in this discussion, to actual content, makes me nervous. The bills went through a good deal of uncertainty, and so a significant portion of the intelligentsia has been talking them up. Biden after all needs some victories, right? And at some point the green energy movement needs some major legislative trophies, right? What I’d like to see instead is a more open and frank discussion of the actual analytics.
It is very good when a top economist such as Larry Summers has real policy influence, in this case on Joe Manchin. But part of that equilibrium is that other economists start watching their words, knowing some other Democratic Senator might fall off the bandwagon. There is Sinema, Bernie Sanders has been making noise and complaining, someone else might have tried to extract some additional rents, and so on.
The net result is that you are not getting a very honest and open discussion of what is likely to prove a major piece of legislation.
Here is the original post.