Divine Cake

I have tasted only the chocolate cake, and it is great! Its very light, and fresh (our office ordered from them). I don’t think they have an outlet as such for you to just go and buy one piece, but you can order a one pound cake – which means 10 pieces.

They need about a day’s notice. However if you give an order early in the morning, you can pick it up in the evening. They also deliver (and obviously charge for it).

They seem to concentrate more on the quality of the product as opposed to fancy rapping and fancy “presentation”. Love it.

The number: 0112 576 750

People say: based on their experience

A BBC announcer asked two men what they would tell a 15 year old (I think), if the child asked “shall I go to business school or should I start my own business?” (something to that effect).

The guy who had an MBA from a prestigious university said: “business school”

The other – a millioner entrepreneur who never had a formal education – said: “if you are up to it, use the money you would have spent on you MBA as seed capital, and start your own business”.

Two very different views, based on their own experience.

I found that interesting. Also, now I will be careful when I take / give suggestions from / to others.

The increase in cost of food

Economics 101: (un-targeted) price ceiling are meaningless. Food prices continue to increase. There is a supply / demand imbalance. Demand is growing due to changes in eating habits in India and China. They are apparently eating more grain and more meat as they get richer. It takes more land area to grow grain to produce meat.

The American government subsidizes bio fuels, encouraging production for bio fuel (reducing what is available to eat), thus driving up the price of corn and in the process, prices of other food.

What I suggest:
In Sri Lanka: let the price increase to encourage farmers to produce more, see that proper infrastructure is there to transport produce, see that there is adequate storage facilities, encourage competition.

In the US: Please stop skewing price signals by taking away the subsidy for bio-fuels.

You would want to read the Economist’s “Food and the poor: Global food shortages have taken everyone by surprise. What is to be done“

When a picture is not worth a thousand words

People use graphs / pictures to make it easier for others to understand something. Take a look at the following graph, and it will take quite a long time to understand the numbers. If one just looks at it only for a few seconds, that person may come to a wrong conclusion; and not understand what the writer intends to say. One gwalduck commented (date 3/27/2008 in his/her list of comments) about it, and only then did I actually understand the graph!

This is taken from the Economist (link)

The offending graph is:

We order alco – our manager foots the bill

Our manager is one of those rare individuals: the type who is well off, and is not stingy. He took us out for dinner yesterday. Most of us wondered whether its okay or not to order alcohol as a) its generally expensive and b) he doesn’t drink alcohol.

We came to the following conclusion. One lime juice will cost him LKR 190 ++. Two 25ml of Vodka will cost him LKR 95 x 2 ++. So, the guys who wanted to have a shot (including yours truly) went for two shots.

Question: Is it okay to order alcohol if someone else – whether friend, manager, client etc – foots the bill? I believe what we did is okay given the calculation. Another shot would not have been okay.