K. Kumar's Blog, page 15

More on The Stranger and Existence

There is a haunting line at the end of The Stranger that I have been thinking about recently:

"Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living."

When you think deeply about this sentence, and what it says about human existence, I am not sure I have read anything...

Hiero and Human Relationships

I was rereading Hiero by Xenophon and I was fascinated by a section of the text related to the tyrant and his relations with his subjects.

For to take from an enemy against his will is, I think, the greatest of all pleasures, but favours from a loved one are very pleasant, I fancy, only when he consents. 

For instance, if he is in sympathy with you, how pleasant are his looks, how pleasant his questions and his answers; how very pleasant and ravishing are the struggles and bickerings.&nbsp...

Love and Tumult

I recently published my second novel, Love and Tumult. (For more information, click on the tab above.) I started writing the book in July 2013 and I wrote the first draft over a two month period. The story takes place primarily in Africa and is a reflection of how I was feeling at the time. I reread the book a couple times and I thought it was good to go in early 2014. At the time I decided to set it aside and focus on something else, and then come back to it later on and see how I felt.
Last...

La Roya

I have been reading some stories about la roya:

Source: Financial Times
These are a couple quotes that stuck out to me:

The economic consequences of such large crop losses could be devastating for the rural economy of Central America, just as overall growth slows in the region. Coffee farmers are having to deal with a double whammy of la roya damage and plunging coffee prices, which are now at multiyear lows.

The spread of la roya in Central America appears to be related to&nb...

Autonomous Solution to Human Development

I read this book a couple months ago about El Salvador and the author noted a concept he read about in a U.N. report: autonomous solution to human development. The idea is that if social and government structures do not provide for education and upward mobility (i.e. human development) then people will naturally take their own initiative to improve their lives. In the context of El Salvador and Central America, the idea is that migrants and children have been coming to the United States, at g...

On Public Service III

I think Americans take their political leaders and system for granted. Even though it may seem like our system is dysfunctional, it is really better than most of the other political systems I have seen throughout the world.
Here are a couple examples to think about:

Sao Paulo is the largest city in the Americas. Brazil has about twelve percent of the world's fresh water. Yet the largest city in the Americas is running out of water. This is what happens in places with weak political leaders. Ind...

On Public Service II

When talking about politics, I always start from the premise that all political structures are highly imperfect and that you cannot look at any form of government in isolation. If you do, you'll only find fault. The best thing you can do when thinking about politics is to drastically lower your expectations. The people you elect are flawed, they are biased, and put simply, they are human. Thus, you should not be holding them or the system itself on a higher pedestal. Indeed, any time you feel...

On Public Service

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the upcoming 2016 elections in the United States and whether Hillary Clinton will run for President and whether she will change her strategy to appeal to the more progressive side of the Democratic party. And then on the Republican side, there is a lot of discussion about who will win the primary and whether they will be able to beat Clinton. It is an interesting thing to me, this debate on the elections and the broader idea of public service....

More on Money and Negative Yields

This is another article about the current financial system:

Source: Zerohedge

So here we see that 20 percent of all sovereign debt is trading at negative interest rates. This is further indication of the amount of money sloshing around the financial system, and I am sure that all the governments in the world are so grateful that investors have so much confidence in them that they are willing to pay them money in order to have the privilege of letting them borrow their money. 
But one should...

Apple and the Swiss Franc

I came across this article a couple weeks ago:
Source: Bloomberg
This is a fascinating snapshot of how absurd and distorted the worldwide financial system has become the past couple years. The global central banks have created so much money the past so many years that yields for certain securities have gone to zero and in some cases are negative. 
Think about that for a minute. In this scenario, an investor is buying a bond that will pay no interest and will only return the principal at the...