Advertising, coaching classes and education

In the same edition of the The Times of India that carried the news report on Hafiz Contractor, there was a report on a more interesting case. Titled “Coaching class ad leaves IIT dean red-faced”, the report states:
A newspaper advertisement for an IIT entrance coaching class had the campus in a flutter recently. Reason: The [...]

Fear of commercialization and the malevolent universe premise

In my previous incomplete post (published by mistake), I quoted a news report on the one year bar on architect Hafeez Contractor for appearing in an advertisement and asked why some professionals are not allowed to advertise. In a comment, Aristotle The Geek explains:
Most professions in India are regulated by so called autonomous bodies brought into being [...]

Council bars Hafiz Contractor

Fridays edition of The Times of India reports:
In its letter of March 24, 2009, the council, an autonomous body of the Central government, has ruled that Contractor be suspended from practice for one year “from the date of issue of letter conveying the order’’. During the suspension period, Contractor must surrender the certificate of registration [...]

A couple of good posts

I intended to comment on this ugly piece which appeared in The Times of India, but Aristotle The Geek has done it already and his piece has a lot more to say than I usually have the energy to. Read the whole post. Since that saves me some time, I will spend it dissecting some of the [...]

Economics in one unlearnt lesson

I recently found the time to read Henry Hazlitt’s book “Economics in One Lesson” (available online here). The book conclusively demonstrates that any attempts to coerce the free market can only result in the short term gains of special interest groups at the expense of everyone else and that even these short term gains are more than [...]

Laws vs Regulations

Recently Diana Hsieh (of NoodleFood) raised the question ”What is the difference between laws and regulations?” Since I consider myself opposed to all regulations but firmly believe that laws are necessary, this is an important question.
Before I get to law or politics, the first thing to note is that the word regulate derives from the word regular as [...]

Seasteading

I happened to find this website quite by chance. From their introduction page:
Seasteading means to create permanent dwellings on the ocean – homesteading the high seas. A seastead, like in the picture above, is a structure meant for permanent occupation on the ocean
Currently, it is very difficult to experiment with alternative social systems on a small [...]

Moderation

Via Bill Brown at The New Clarion, I came across this piece by David Brooks. The piece begins with
You wouldn’t know it some days, but there are moderates in this country — moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, just plain moderates. We sympathize with a lot of the things that President Obama is trying to do. We [...]

About an year of blogging – a review

Its been about a year since I started blogging and more than a month since I wrote my last post. This is a good time to take a fresh look at my blogging experience. I started blogging out of a desire to “do something about the state of the world”. Since that sounds too close [...]