What happens when you keep making notes about your dreams, and use the notes-summary as an AI prompt to paint your dreams?
This insta stream. Trippy!
Talking about trippy things, since the last newsletter, I stumbled upon visulizations that @flowingdata puts out on Twitter - and they are crazy… like the one below!
I’ll be honest. I am really motivated to learn R now, just so that I can create such cool visualisations myself.
Anyway, until that happens, let me talk about things that I have already learnt? Like in an ad, does it matter if an image is zoomed in or out?
Watch the short video below, where I share the answer to the above question, as found in a research paper.
The above viceo would be the 7th episode of #CoreInsights (you can always watch all episodes in the Youtube playlist).
In another video, created for one of our clients at CoreVoice, I looked at top VC/PE deals from last week (27Feb -5Mar 2023).
Incidentally, amongst other things (said in the video), I also spoke about Icertis raising some debt in 2022 - guess who was the lender? SVB! What are the odds! If you are someone living under a rock, let me tell you that the SVB shutdown story is all over the news!
Every time there is a big bank collapse, people talk about the role of regulators and government (amongst other things).
And every time, one talks about government, someone or the other reminds us that we get the government that we elect.
And that brings me to my last bit for today’s newsletter - elections.
I want to talk about how I think the election model will fundamentally change, at some point (not just for India, but globally).
I was out running with a friend once, when I remember sharing these thoughts with him. I am not sure if he agreed, or disagreed or was too confused or unbothered about it all. But this is what I shared…
This whole logic of having elections once every few years (spread across few days) made sense when the only way to conduct elections required people to physically go to a ballot box to cast their votes. A model like this cannot work unless some frequency of voting is setup - once in 2 / 4 / 5 years etc.
But today a certain %age of the population can technically vote online (assuming a reliable and secure system can be built to enable such voting)? And when you can vote online, you can also vote any time. And thus the need for such a long waiting period between two elections becomes unnecessary. In fact, would there be any need for a waiting period at all?
Imagine an “election app” where you can login - whenever - and can change your preferred MLA / MP from your constituency at any point of time. And so can everyone else. So on any day, it would be clear who has the “majority” support and who doesn’t. That’s it - no need to wait for 5 years to vote someone out.
What will this achieve? I am thinking, it would take away the incentive for politicians to spend too much time in campaigning? When there are no specific election-days, politicians / political parties will probably spend time optimizing for a daily good-rating scenario. Bunch of that will depend upon marketing skills (that some parties clearly have more, than others) but a lot will also be a function of doing actual good work.
This would really be a dynamic democracy - and if democracy is really an efficient system of governance, this system should theoretically work much better than the present model with election every few years - where once someone comes in power, they just have to please you enough around the next election and not majorly upset you in the interim (deploying the “peak-end” rule as we call in behavioural science).
I had almost forgotten about this conversation till I stumbled upon the below news yesterday…
Estonia becomes the first country in the world, where more than half of its voters, cast their votes online (link). May be the model that I am imagining, is not that far away?
Alright, so this is it for today. If you like what you read here, I will be grateful if you recommend some of your newsletters-reading friends to check out what I write.
Have a great weekend and may you get to do more of what you love and less of what’s shitty (even when it may pay well)! See you, when I see you.