fartVader
1d ago
Experts without specific takes are the worst bunch. If Modi hating is your full-time job, then have your attacks honed to perfection. These 'everything is horrible' articles are exhausting and teach you nothing.
"India's is doing badly because Modi......" Come on, keep going. Modi how ? What specific policies did Modi enact that ruined the economy ? What alternatives does the opposition propose that will fix the economy ?".
IMO, This article correctly points out the main challenges to economic development in India.
(quotes from the article)
In private many businesses still complain about India’s complex tax regulation, difficulties in acquiring land, rigid labour laws, weak intellectual property enforcement and clogged courts. It takes almost four years to enforce contracts in business disputes, among the slowest globally, according to the World Bank.
Simplifying tax laws means consolidating the tax code at the national level. States see this as a powergrab and Modi gets termed a fascist.
Judicial reform requires parlimentary inference in the indepdendent judiciary. Democracy watchers view this as a powergrab and Modi gets termed a fascist.
Non-BJP states have among the strongest labor protections in the nation (Delhi, WB, Kerala, Bihar, ex-UP, ). When BJP regains control, it tries to weaken them. Ofc, he gets called a corporate sell out.
Modi is public about his desire for India to have a market-based, private sector-driven economy,” he said. “But this view is not shared by much of the opposition and even the nativist wing of his own party
Modi has many failings. I would be sympathetic towards the opposition if they agreed with informed economists on Modi being too-left wing. Instead, critics of Modi call every pro-market move fascist and his political opposition encourages dragging India back to Nehruvian-era socialist isolationism.
To avoid being hypocritical, here are his specific failings from my perspective.
Lack of eggs (protien) in school diets
India is at the bottom of the Global Hunger Index, below North Korea and above Afghanistan.
India uniquely underperforms on child wasting. The reason goes back to 1970s and the introduction of the wheat, rice & simple carb heavy diets post green-revolution. Under-nourishment is low because because peopel get sufficient calories. However, the lack of protien causes child-wasting.
Indian farm laws massively subsidize wheat, rice and simple carbs, and that's all poor families can afford. Modi tried to fix this by removing grains-specific subsidies in the 2019 farm-bill. This bill recieved massive push-back from opposition and the elite global left for being anti-farmer. Under pressure, Modi's revoked the bill. This was his first mistake.
We need more eggs in school lunches. More protein. Modi hasn't done anything towards this, neither has anyone else.
Demonetization
Demonetization (2017) was a disaster. It is known. That being said, the article primarily focuses on post-covid recovery (or lack there off). India's economy is in a recent (2023-24) rut. I don't have an answer to what recent change has caused this.
Unsufficient progress on ease of doing business
Land acquisition
Modi has failed to pass the land acquisition bill over 2 terms. It has been touted as the biggest impediment to doing business in India. Modi claims he will bring the reforms in during a 3rd term. But he had a big-enough mandate from 2019-2024. The reason for this failure, was due to global and national pressure because the bill was percieved as anti-farmer.
Judicial reform
The slow moving judiciary is the 2nd biggest impediment to doing business in India. India's judiciary is full independent, so the Govt. doesn't have much power here. Afaik, there is massive resistance to any Judicial reform by the Modi govt. So both sides continue to be in an uncomfortable marraige, while cases pile on.
Simpler tax codes
Modi hasn't exactly failed here. It is more so that he hasn't pushed enough. GST was implemented, good. It remains unpopular among the opposition, the left and the global elite. But, he got it through However, other campaign promises remain in 'draft' phase... Overall, I find this to be an insufficient reform. Good start, but taxation remains insanely complex.
Overall, I remain cautiously bullish on India.
From a resource standpoint, it is agriculturally self-sufficient, has an incredible appetite for solar power and has an adequate water supply. Societally, it has strong family structures, a commitment to education and a stable fertility rate. You can't underestimate the long term benefits of this.
Some tax reform, eggs and weaker labor laws should keep India over water for the next decade. If the ease of doing business genuinely improves, then we might just be in for a bumber decade.
If India misses this decade of population-pyramid perfection, then we're FUCKED big time.
fartVader
17d ago
Sunscreen acts as a moisturizer and protects your skin from irritants if your oils have been washed off. It prevents dryness, acne, sub burn and cancer. The good stuff isn't sticky or smelly.
I apply it once a day, but I am also brown and work indoors. Strong recommend.
fartVader
19d ago
It helps that the leader of Singapore is a literal genius. He was the senior wrangler = top math student at Cambridge.
The Senior Wrangler is the top mathematics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge in England, a position which has been described as "the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain".
fartVader
22d ago
There are only 3 public newsletters that I think gives you a genuine alpha over the 75th percentile trader.
- https://stratechery.com/
- money stuff - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine
- https://sinocism.com/
Do they sound unreasonably dense and hard to parse? Yes, they are meant to be. You don't get an alpha by doing easy things.
Otherwise, the best way to be a stock trader is to become a rich person's golf buddy, and hope you overhear some stuff between drives.
Boring choice, but I'd choose NYC.
If you don't need to commute, you can buy a house in a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood or one that is mid-gentrification. I am not too different from you in age or compensation, and Greenpoint, Brooklyn is my dream neighborhood. The area near 11th ARR in Paris is my #2 and Somerville, MA is my #3.
Every place that is sunnier and as happening as NYC is culturally isolating to someone who is not from there. So Madrid, Tokyo and Barcelona lose on those grounds.
fartVader
26d ago
Ah man, I have been getting busy :(
We had a full fledged India discussion, and I missed it.
Glad to see the other folks generally echo my opinion. India is a beatuiful mess. The left ran India for 50 years. Nehru was a university professor turned cult-leader. Indira was Nixon. Rahul Gandhi made his own grave and earned his 'Pappu' moniker. There are no left-wing or right-wing parties in India anymore. They are all socially-conservative, and try (unsuccessfully) to be fiscally liberal.
fartVader
29d ago
It is about making it lucrative to those who are on the fence. The people with strong opinions on kids are not changing their opinions.
fartVader
1mo ago
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have ZERO work life balance. I don't think the average American can even fathom what 'zero' work life balance looks like. Americans think they work hard when compared to Europe. But East Asia is a whole another beast.
fartVader
1mo ago
downstream of the cultural issues
You are techincally correct. The last couple of generations grew up in the suburbs and hated it. Now they don't want to go back.
With the demise of organic in-person culture, suburbs and small cities can feel isolating. Other than a few places like NYC, you'll quickly find yourself isolated because you never meet anyone. NYC forces you to collide with people like almost nowhere else in the US. The other big cities also achieve this to a small degree. But past that, every other place in the US makes a newcomer feel like they're trapped in their own head. Now newcomers suffering didn't used to matter as much, but pretty much every young professional is being forced to move into some other city as a transplant. They all get shuffled around, each getting more and more isolated.
So yeah, people want housing and they want it in a place where they won't be miserable.
fartVader
1mo ago
The oldest gen-Z is 26 years old. Their home acquisition numbers are reflective of inheritance and a minority with social media success. Addtionally, home ownership is a useless metric if you don't know their monthly premium. Home ownership is only 'liberating' if is is somewhat affordable.
fartVader
1mo ago
There is no amount of social welfare that can convince a person to have kids. There are more important things that are aren't in place.
You need
- Labor support (Retired parents and an extra room)
- A stable partner (Time to date through your early 20s, rather than slog it out in your career)
- Your own house (lol, good luck)
All govt. assistance ends up being fed to landlords downstream. Italy tops the list of western-european countries where 25-35 year olds still live with parents. Don't try anything another solution unless you fix housing first. Everything else is downstream.
I know a ton of people in their late-30s who're struggling to have kids / 2nd children becasue they're too old. The urge to be parents exists. Things just take a LOT longer to stabilize.
fartVader
1mo ago
replacing Castro's secret son this next election cycle
Still think about the video of the opposition leader eating an Apple.
no one speaks English/French anymore
Canada's point based system that incentivizes uneducated 18 year olds to move on an instant GC has to be the most brain-dead immigration policy I've witnessed. To repurpose a popular quote : "When Mexico India sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs trucks. They’re bringing crime."
It's sad. Canada is an appealing country to immigrate to. But, their system appears to prefer under-educated and under-resourced immigrants. Compare this to the H1B immigrants in the US. They are high skilled immigrants who pay more taxes than the average American, can't claim social-security benefits and usually takes 5-100 years to get a Green Card. (I am talking about those who aren't abusing the H1B through loopholes)
Wait times at medical clinics have gone from weeks to months to years
Isn't this because the entire graduating class of Canadian doctors moves to the US ? This is a
housing is 5x more out of whack than the US
True. But both Canada and USA are pretty under built by world standards.
downtown is going to look like New Delhi
Dude, get your cities right... It's Ludhiana.
fartVader
1mo ago
The sea route around Africa is already being used because of Suez instability.....and it is already a massive pain in the ass. Shipping companies to the US are preferring to go through the Pacific and Panama rather than go through Africa. Africa is a lot bigger than the maps indicate, and re-entering the mediterrainean from the south-west for European shipping is prohibilively expensive.
fartVader
1mo ago
Oh they do, and they care a LOT.
Here are the countries that explicitly avoided signing up for any Belt-and-road deals. That list of QUAD countries (US-Aus-Japan-India) and Israel.
Israel and Israel-Saudi relations are the center of how the next generation of trade routes to the west pan out. On one hand you have the West-Israel-Saudi-India corridor. West friendly nations with a poor endpoint in India, but all of Israelis, Saudis & Indians are economically ascendant. On the other hand, you have the Belt-and-road initiative that goes China-Pakistan-Iran-Iraq-Turkey-West.
The Iran-Iraq-Turkey corridor looks comically unrealistic, but if Israel becomes a no-go zone and Saudis pull out then the competitor wins by default. If the Houthis can keep the Suez Canal unstable, then China suddenly finds itself in control of how the next generation of trade routes pan out. If Hamas loses, then Saudi-Israel relations normalize, Houthis become irrelevant and now China is left holding the worst option with B&R.
fartVader
1mo ago
Tiktok is getting pushback because the parent company is controlled by China. That is all you need to know, and that's the only bit that matters. Anti-semitism and Gaza are excuses. 'Think of the kids' is an excuse and so are accusations of 'Tiktok killing attention'.
Don't get me wrong, Tiktok performs badly on all of those accusations. But, it is just the latest in a long line of social media companies that all transformed the youth along similar lines.
The US will go to any length to control the global narrative of 'freedom'. Tiktok is the greatest deepest invasion on American soil since communisms capture of academia, and the US is woefully underequipped to push it back. The US uses Israel to complain about Tiktok, because if they revealed the real reason, then it would correctly show the US for the paper tiger it has now become. The US is still the most powerful country in the world. But Pax-Americana is over.
fartVader
1mo ago
2 things can be true at the same time.
-
Women's health needs to be studied more because their hormones show large fluctuations every month and over a lifetime. More women take a daily dose of drugs (birth control) than men, and the higher potential for damage requires higher funding for women's health.
-
In an equal world, women and men are assumed to have the same expected lifespan. The worse outcomes for men suggests that theyre the ones being discriminated against.
For the longest time, our understanding of medicine came from the outcomes on American college students. They tended to be young, male and white. So it is reasonable to expect every other cohort to be less understood. Women are the largest of that cohort that felt left behind, and raising funding for them makes sense. Ofc, the make up of colleges since the 2000s means that this is more so an act of 'correcting the past', than fixing the present.
a cringe side story from a few weeks ago.
In feb, 2 close friends were crashing at our shared house for a weekend getaway. My roomate, an amazing cook, spent the entire morning making us his special waffles. He placed the waffles in a plate in front of me.
It was the morning. I was scrolling. I hadn't had my coffee. God, the excuses only make it worse.
But I ate the served waffles. I ate. I ate. I ate. And in my absent mindedness, I thanked my roommate for the amazing meal and went my merry way. Minutes later, it hits me. I went back to the living room. The guests had woken up. They'd heard about the special waffles. The amazing waffles that I knew all to well. But there were none. They found an empty plate, my gluttonous ass and a distinct lack of waffles.
The horror. Find every idiom on embarassment and those would still not be enough. I was red in the face. I was aghast. I could not meet my friends in their eyes. I was ready to cry. The last one wasn't a metaphor. Hell, I mean them all literally.
My bros were forgiving. After some initial confusion, justified leg-pulling, a heart-felt apology and genuine forgiveness, they moved on. But, it has kept me awake ever since. I'm supposed to be socially well adjusted. I'm supposed to be an adult. I don't have any real skeletons in my closet, but I have done worse things than eat an extra waffle. Yet, it's funny how this social faux-pas weighs on me more than any failure, outrage or altercation that I can remember.
I was in Carragher's shoes and I hope the poor lad can find sleep soon enough. Cringe is a powerful insomniac. (Lost some context here. Carragher is a football player turned tv personality. Yesterday, he had a similar faux-pas among his friends/colleagues and you could see the visible discomfort on the poor man's face)
P.S: I have since prepared a 5 course meal for the friend who cooked the waffles, now it weighs lighter on my conscience.
fartVader
2mo ago
This is a total shot in a dark.
But, does anyone in the bay area want to start a reddit competitor ? I don't wanna talk much more about it.
If you are:
- Senior+ level fullstack engineer
- Could rebuilt old-reddit from scratch if they had to (at moderate scale)
- Has strong intuitions & opinions about every part of the stack
- Likes to mentor
- At a FANG-ish/Unicorn and
- In the SF/LA area
- Moderately presentable
Then I would love to talk to you.
I have fleshed out a lot of it pretty well. But wanna see if there are people intersted in joining in.
I can do
- most ML work (model building, model deployment, some pipelining, all prompt engineering),
- soft-skill work (talking to people, finding investors, out reach, PR)
- and L3 Google Engineer level programming (I can make reddit from scratch if I had to, but it would be an all python static website that is barebones like hackernews than reddit yknow. Good enough to be an engineer in a team, not to architect backend systems).
Some questions
- Why this - I have a specific 'killer feature' in mind that sets it apart
- Why now - I have a strong hypothesis for market opportunity
- Why you - how many people care passionately about internet forums
- Why AI - There is an AI component that makes it easier to get funding in this climate
Likely follow up questions
- Have you validated the hypothesis with a large enough set of real customers - No
- Do you have a demo yet - No
- Is the proposal anything more than 'reddit but better'. Yes, yes yes. But I don't wanna puke it all out.
It isn't that small scale. But would love to talk to people if they're interested.
I want to take this in another direction. - 'The universal empathy for the remaining life of a parent who has lost a child at a young age.' Susan is a billionaire with power, access and status. Everything you wish for, she has. And I am certain that she would give it all away to bring her son back.
Events like this hold up a familiar but often ignored mirror to the face of young people like me. My parents are still around. I will have kids one day. I have the one thing Susan has lost: time and agency.
Or close to 3% of US population at current rates will die by a drug overdose
No matter how much money I earn, it takes 1 not-so unlikely event to unilaterally turn me into a hollow husk of a person. Whether that be a permanent disability due to a car accident, death of child/spouse or slightly misplaced tap on my head.
From a utilitarian perspective, I am better off minimizing the changes chances of a unilaterally disastrous event, than trying to get billions. Because the money only matters if these disastrous events don't happen. I could live an unimpressive life where my kids live tiil a ripe old age, and I bet Susan would trade my life for hers any day. The negative utility of losing a child is THAT high.
Have kids, help them not kill themselves and you're already living a life that's the envy of many billionaires.
After a 24 hrs existential crises resulting from having the mirror held to my face, I shove it into the closet of 'things to think of when I have time.' I wake up, 2 continents away from family, 1 continent away from my partner, and innocently continue grinding it out in hopes of making a couple of millions in silicon valley at the expense of my 20s and 30s. Some people never learn. Hopefully, I won't stay this way for too long.
Even on this anonymous no-name forum, I feel the urge to say I'd never wish such a tragedy on anyone. I wish she finds the support and space needed to get through this difficult time.
fartVader
3mo ago
That makes a lot of sense. Where I lived, the church bells only rang twice a day.
fartVader
3mo ago
The 'Adan' (call to prayer) is less grating than the church bells of Europe.
That's the most surprising part for me.
I grew up in a 33-33-33 Hindu-muslim-Catholic neighborhood, so both the Church bells and Adan are familiar sounds. Adans are sung. So they've always sounded more intrusive and distracting to me. The church bells last less than 30 seconds, have no words and ring out with a pleasant decay. The sounds have a generally warm timbre. (for the lack of a better phrase). On the other hand, the throaty and nasal composition of the adan feels sharp.
I wonder if the adan in Iraq is qualitatively different, or I'm just observing some level of internalized bigotry.
fartVader
3mo ago
I had decent dating success in graduate school
You're in NYC, the options are practically endless. (from fellow late 20s south Asian male who used to be in NYC). Climbing and mixed-gender sports are the easiest places to get started. If you were socially well adjusted enough to get laid in school and be a TA, then you'll be alright.
all Match Group apps (Tinder, Bumble, etc.)
Bumble is not owned by the match group
Circumvent the Ban
Also, yes. Circumvent the ban. If you can't afford a new dual sim phone, then you can't afford to date in NYC. Use your middle name or change the spelling. The wifi thing sounds like a good idea. Similarly, if you don't have enough new photos, then you need to be going out more. Dating apps won't help here. See, even if you get dates, you need to be interesting enough to hold their attention. If your life is boring enough that you can't come up with good photos for hinge within 3 months, then you would have gotten ghost with or without the ban.
Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to do the "recommended" facial verification on my old profile
What's the worst they can do ? Ban you again ?
I've been playing around with some models for generating photos based on Stable Diffusion and I've managed to generate some fairly realistic pics of me,
The extent to which a man will go to stay inside.
Agreed on all counts. There are zero real democracies that have managed a transition from poverty to wealth. They all grew as autocracies and converted to democracies once stable.
India is unlikely to become autocratic, but the current setup has too many checks and balances. I am a big proponent of reducing states rights and opening the judiciary (primarily by allowing fast track appointments for those who excel at standardized testing , setting targets for case clearance as part of promotions and limiting the supreme court to matters of constitution, rather than morality).
That's a good start. India has fair elections. Let those elected to the parliament choose the path for the nation. Too much beaurocracy is no good.
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