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Showing posts from March, 2024

Ukraine war part 7 - After 2 years

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In part 6 of this series, I had made 2 major sets of assumptions: https://rpdeans.blogspot.com/2023/10/ukraine-war-6-logistics-politics-and.html Manpower : Ukraine had deployed all its trained manpower and all volunteers (1 million), to be left with an army of around 500,000 men, which is lower than Russia’s and of worse quality &    Plans : Russia would conduct several small attacks across the front – most likely in Avdeevka, giving the Ukrainians a choice of either defending and accepting an unfavorable casualty ratio, or giving up ground.  These assumptions were correct. Russian operations, particularly the capture of Avdeevka have exacerbated Ukraine’s manpower problems and worsened loss ratios.  Trends in losses : What is significant with the current manpower numbers, is that they have, in my view, crossed a tipping point for Ukraine and have moved loss ratios more sharply in favor of Russia. This is inevitable if the bulk of the Ukrainian army now consists of conscripted

The real Ed tech opportunity

  There are as many recent articles on the fall of Byju’s – the world’s most valued ed tech startup, as they were on the rise of Byju earlier. I have commented on the deluded thinking around unicorns in my earlier blog posts. https://rpdeans.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-coming-unicorn-meltdown.html While Byju’s had problems with corporate governance, ethical concerns around its selling, unrealistic (in retrospect) expectations around growth from investors – as do other startups, I want to talk about opportunities I believe Ed-tech startups are missing and how Ed-tech, if does what it was originally intended to do, can transform education in India and with it the quality of our workforce and ability to compete. What tech is supposed to do :   The internet and the tech startups around it, were supposed to transform business by doing the following: -Reduce costs by replicating data or infrastructure (e.g. textbooks or classrooms) digitally, thereby  improving quality (i.e. high quality