The 29th Day

About a month ago, I won the Listserve. What do you write when you have the opportunity to send an email to over 20k ppl? Being a corny dork (a cork?), I wrote about exponential growth. Here it is:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andy <no-reply@thelistserve.com>
Date: Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 4:01 PM
Subject: [The Listserve] The 29th Day


In ancient India, the inventor of chess showed his game to the King, who was so pleased with the invention, the King announced that he would grant the inventor anything he desired.  The inventor sat in silence thoughtfully, then replied that he merely wanted some rice to feed his family. To determine how much rice he would receive, they would use the chessboard as a counter. The inventor suggested that, for the first square, he would receive one grain of rice, two for the second square, four for the third square, doubling each the amount for each successive square. The inventor would receive all the rice on all the squares of the chessboard. The King laughed at this seemingly modest request and immediately accepted, tasking his treasurer with calculating the entire amount to grant the inventor. Weeks went by without hearing from his treasurer until one day, the King summoned his treasurer and asked why there was such a delay. When the treasurer showed him the total sum exceeded the rice count of his entire kingdom, the King was bankrupted and the inventor became the new King.What was the total amount?

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18,446,744,073,709,551,615 or 18 quintillion

This heap of rice would be larger than Mt Everest.

There is a pond with invasive water lilies. The water lily population doubles each day and if left unchecked, will cover the entire pond in 30 days, smothering all other life in the pond. Each day, the caretaker of the pond checks the population, and will only take action to cut the water lily population when they have covered only half the pond.

On what day will the pond be half-covered?

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The 29th day. This leaves the pond caretaker only 1 day to save the pond.

Exponential growth, or compounded growth, is a very powerful thing. Positive things like savings, investment, networks and technological innovation can bring incredible improvements to one's life, if allowed to compound without interruption. On the flip side, if left unchecked, dangerous things like inflation, debts, diseases or even dangerous ideologies can sneak up on you so quickly that you won't notice until it's too late.

Don't wait until the 29th day.

BRICs

Here's something I wrote for my company newsletter about my travels:

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Over the past two years or so, I've been fortunate enough to travel to each of the BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India and China. This group was identified by economists in the early 2000s as the four countries with the greatest potential to become the largest and most important economies in the future. Here were my experiences (no economic charts of GDP, I promise):

The first thing you notice about a country is what you can tangibly detect with your five senses: see, smell, hear, taste and feel. I will never forget the gilded gold surfaces that seemed to cover everything in St. Petersburg like a glimmering sheen, nor the smells of a Mumbai food market blocks away from the world's densest slum. I remember the rich yet simply seasoned broth of a freshly slaughtered chicken caught in the dusty dirt roads of Anhui, China; my bones rumbled by the beating of the African-origin Olodum drums in a street festival in Salvador's historic Pelourinho district. These things stay with you long after your souvenirs and trinkets collect dust in the attic.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Before you even arrive, you must find a (preferably legal) way into the country. I was lucky enough to visit India just months after their modern electronic visa-on-arrival program was launched: I applied online and received my visa confirmation in 18 hours. On the other hand, getting a Brazilian or Russian visa is an exercise in surreal absurdity, which required what I would describe as bureaucratic near-extortion in the case of the latter (in Brazil's favor, I guess it's not unreasonable for the consulate to close without warning to watch their own World Cup matches). I think I'd rather wait for Godot.

The next thing you notice is how much you take language for granted. Some countries are luckier than others: Brazil, China and Russia have high literacy rates, relatively homogenous populations and standardized languages/dialects. Each language has its own sound and rhythm: from the dancing vowels of Portuguese to the syncopated consonants of Russian to the whining singsong of Mandarin. On the other hand, India is a miniature United Nations within itself: each region has a different religion, ethnicity, cuisine and unrelated language. Ironically, this means that English has become the most popular "bridging" language in India out of all the BRICs, which results in surprising ease for English-speakers to survive in India.

Finally, I have to say something about the people. There are endlessly creative and productive ways that the citizens of the aspiring world powers manifest their skills. Of course, you can observe the results of their labor in incredible megaprojects such as China's high-speed train, which has enabled millions of migrant workers to visit their hometowns on a regular basis; and Brazil-Paraguay's hydroelectric Itaipu Dam on the Iguaçu, which generates more power than the entire country of Paraguay consumes. Yet there is also the simple industriousness of the everyday citizen, which can be found by using Uber to hail a Lada driven by an ordinary Moscow resident as well as the sophisticated leather and plastic-recycling industries operated out of Indian slum-dwellers' homes. Take the brutally efficient subway in Moscow and you will never wait on the platform for more than 3 minutes (which is not something I can say in supposedly fast-paced NYC). Despite the vastly different social and economic development models, the BRICs all depend on its citizens for its resourcefulness, from whom I felt a sense of limitless and immense capability.

What you hear in the Western news about the emerging world is sometimes sensationalist or even frightening. Yes, there's poverty, bureaucratic mismanagement and even wars. However, based off my experiences with the people, I have no doubt in my mind that the BRICs are well on their way to becoming the global powerhouses of the future.