This Week I Learned - Week #10 2019

This Week I Learned -

* Azure is generally available in 44 regions around the world. Availability Zones, a high-availability solution for mission-critical applications, are supported in the following 8 regions -
1. Central US
2. East US
3. East US 2
4. France Central
5. North Europe
6. Southeast Asia
7. West Europe
8. West US 2

GitHub is a social network for code

* Google has opened up "more than 20 million lines of code in more than 900 projects—including Chromium (the project behind the Chrome browser and operating system), TensorFlow (our open-source machine-learning library), and our popular container management system Kubernetes"

Over 50 funds that manage retirement benefits of over 15 lakh employees have exposure to IL&FS

Fabindia founded by American Mr John Bissell in 1960 has grown to have annual revenue of over Rs.1000 Crores and with stores across the country. It was launched as an export business in 1960, contracting villagers to make traditional rugs. Rejects were sold to well-to-do Indians from a warehouse in Delhi. The first store opened in Delhi in 1974.  As of July 2020, Fabindia operated 327 stores across India and 14 international stores. 

* Almost all those billionaires - some 50 to 60 of them - hold the bulk of their wealth as shares in the companies they manage. As those share prices rise and fall, so does billionaire wealth. The Sensex crashed from 21,000 to 8,000 in 14 months when foreign institutional investors (FIIs) pulled their money out in 2008-09. That made many billionaires into mere millionaires, and naturally reduced wealth inequality.

* 85 per cent of wealth in India is held in the form of physical assets like land; only 15 per cent is in financial form, and of that the bulk is in bank deposits (2015). It's different in wealthy countries, where about half the wealth is held in financial form - T N Ninan

* Despite millions of Kerala’s workers finding work in the Gulf region, the unemployment rate is the highest among large states, while agricultural employment has dropped steadily to barely six per cent of the total due to the high stipulated minimum wages (2016).

* Pakistan was formed with 19% of British India’s population, 13% of land but with 33% of its army

Kekule worked out the structure of benzene in his sleep

Leonardo Da Vinci "often switched his focus to new domains right in the middle of a project, leaving works unfinished. Here’s a classic example: After Leonardo won a coveted commission to create a large statue of a nobleman perched on a horse, Leonardo procrastinated by going down multiple rabbit roles. For example, he dissected horses to understand their anatomy, created new systems for feeding horses, and designed cleaner stables. He never completed the statue, and he never published the treatise on horses he started"

* The Indian Railway system has 7,300-plus railway stations that carries millions of passengers every year over 67,000-plus kilometres in the country. It employs more than 1.3 million people. Amitabh Pandey's book When It Clicks: Field Notes from India's E-Commerce Revolution (156 pages) is about how he went about enthusing teams inside the Indian Railways and facilitating online reservations. Commenting on the Indian ecommerce industry, he says there is a 'tendency towards hubris when large sums of money are available to burn' and that there is an attitude 'get me the best there is, money is no object! This leads to unnecessary waste.' Amitabh Pandey studied Economics at St Stephen’s College and Delhi School of Economics. He taught at an undergraduate college of Delhi University and then joined the Indian Railways where he worked for twenty-four years, during the course of which he conceptualized, implemented and managed the Railways’ online ticket reservation system at the IRCTC. In 2007, Amitabh shifted to the private sector and spent five years building business software. He now lives in Noida and writes full-time.

* "The British didn't divide and rule. We divided and they ruled." - Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and Rajaji

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