Interesting readings

The
price of half-truths by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in
the Indian Express.

Rise
of crony journalism and tainted money in media by
R. Jagannathan on Firstpost.

Telecom,
power, oil: Guide to crony capitalism, Indian style by
R. Jagannathan on Firstpost.

Trampling on the individual in India:

- Gagged
and Bound: Why India's `free internet' is a big, fat lie
by Danish Raza on Firstpost.

- Why
we need more blasphemy, not less by R. Jagannathan on Firstpost

- Aakar
Patel on FirstPost on the problems of free speech in the Indian Penal Code.

- Lakshmi
Chaudhry on Firstpost about Aseem Trivedi's arrest.

- Salil
Tripathi in Mint on Aseem Trivedi.

- Kian
Ganz describes the problems with freedom of speech in Indian
law in Mint.

In
India, the music fest comes of age by Isha Singh Sawhney
in the New York Times.

Matthew Yglesias reminds us
of the
elementary logic in favour of low taxation of capital income.

Fear
grips public sector banks by Dinesh Unnikrishnan, Anup
Roy and Joel Rebello in Mint.

What
drives volumes on BSE
and Why
lower trading fees may not be a game-changer by Mobis
Philipose in Mint.

Materials from Ila
Patnaik's
blog: Sovereign
warning, RBI
is fighting the right
battle, The
emerging slowdown
and Chidambaram's challenge.

Kayezad
E. Adajania on recent developments at SEBI on moving towards
principles-based regulation
(link).

Vikram
Doctor tells a story of coal mining in India that goes back to
Dwarkanath Tagore.

Golden Dawn -- a far-right party where goons hang out in the
streets and kill immigrants in daylight in Greece. 1936?
No, 2012.

The Apple/Samsung case has set off shock waves across the world,
about the threats to innovation that the patent system, particularly
the US patent system, poses. I have always been skeptical about how
the sanctity of property rights was invoked in the phrase
`intellectual property rights', even though knowledge is the
ultimate public good: non-rival and non-excludable. On this subject,
read: Timothy
B. Lee on
arstechnica. Gary
Becker
/ Richard
Posner on the Becker-Posner
blog; Jordan
Weissmann on qz.com writing about a new working paper
by Boldrin
and Levine. I have to confess, though, that the one thing in
this landscape that I dislike more than Apple is Intellectual
Ventures.

Poul-Henning
Kamp in ACM Queue on the great crisis facing the world of
software today. Perhaps more poignant in India than elsewhere.

It
all began with an email by Yanis Varoufakis: The
unexpected twists and turns of economics as a profession.

Offtopic: Read a great short
story Enoch Soames:
a memory of the eighteen-nineties by Sir Max Beerbohm, written
in 1916, and after that read a
story A
memory of the nineteen-nineties in the Atlantic
magazine, November 1997, by Teller, and after that read a great article
The
honor system about Teller, by Chris Jones in Esquire
magazine.

An entry level
3-d printer at $400! I can remember buying printers that
print on paper for more than that.