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.