“When you walk down the street, how can you feel happy if you’re constantly being reminded of what you don’t have? Advertising breaks your spirit, confuses you about what you really need and distracts you from real problems, like the climate emergency.”
Especially in cities in developing countries such as India, it’s often struck me just how much of our public space people and businesses have casually, illegally appropriated for advertising. Dozens of hoardings covering up building facades. Stands on footpaths. Banners tied to lamp-posts and signal-posts, often obscuring the traffic indicators themselves, on housing society gates, on fences and walls. All of this in addition to loosely sanctioned official hoardings by the roadside and atop residential buildings.
Technology has made this particularly invasive with neon/LED lighting and animation – motion to which you’re instinctively and helplessly drawn.
In most places, it is impossible for your gaze to not meet advertising – in any direction.
Oh for fucks sake 🙄. Don’t sacrifice your 20s – or any other decade of life! – on the erroneous belief that unless you work round the clock, you’re not going to be “successful”. The world is full of people who were all work and now are all regret.
When you reduce life to a rat race, all you see are rats. There’s a beautiful, cooperative, collaborative world outside of the rat’s maze. One filled with highly competent, fulfilled, and impactful people who couldn’t give two shits about your mental box. Y’all invited!
This hustle-all-the-time culture is not only an path to burnout but also to defining yourself by your work, your title, your corporation. DHH makes the case that only a tiny percentage of people experience the sort of blowout success that makes up startup lore, and that most people who buy into the maxim that success is directly correlated to the hours of hard work you put in don’t design and live their life with this realisation.
This reply on the thread also deserves a mention:
It’s also a matter of focus. If you focus 8h a day on anything for a period of several years, you’ll be great at it. Most people can’t focus. They’re constantly distracted, thinking about the past or the future, but are not in the present. You don’t need to work 60h – be focused!
…customers were required to register (with a name, phone number etc) and then pre-load the card. It was announced that the pre-loading could be done exclusively via a particular payments app. Once this step was completed, customers would need to tap their cards at any of the physical kiosks at the venue in order to update the card with the online balance…
… food and beverages could only be purchased at the concert venue using the RFID card, no refunds would be available and that there would be physical kiosks at the venue for topping up the cards…
To load Rs.1000 into the wallet, the customer was charged a fee of Rs.100. On this fee, there was a GST of 18%, so the payment went up to Rs.1118. This was a total cost to the consumer of 11.8%, as compared with paying cash.
To add insult to injury, the money left on the card was not refundable. What was not spent would be confiscated by the payments vendor. Customers were thus required to estimate their expenses without knowing the prices of the goods up front.
Despite having taken the trouble of registering and pre-loading the card prior to the concert, she now had to stand in two long queues at two separate kiosks: one to first update the card so that the online transaction of Rs 500 was fed into the card, and the other to top-up the card with Rs 500 so that she could make her F&B purchases… payment counters soon became longer than the queues at the F&B counters.
And finally
the systems at the kiosks for updating the registered RFID cards stopped working… The mobile data network crashed at the venue with thousands of people trying to access it… the merchants inside the stadium stood firm, in unison, in refusing to sell goods to the customers using any other payment mechanism.
This when we now have UPI. And a plethora of apps that implement it, a well-known way to quickly scan QR-codes to pay. It smacks of rent-seeking by a monopoly.
The problem with this private license-Raj behaviors is it puts people off digital payments in general. There are possibly hundreds now for whom this is the definition of a digital payment experience, and who’d much rather prefer using cash in the future.
India entered the first decade of the 21st-century on a path of massive coal-fired power generation investment, with plans reaching over 600 gigawatts. India now exits this decade with over four-fifths of this high-emission, high-pollution investment intent now shelved, uncompetitive against zero emissions renewable energy.
According to the article, this has been accelerated by two factors: a recognition of the environmental costs of growth-by-pollution, reverse auctions to create low-cost supply backed by large amounts of foreign investments
The result? The government of India enabled $40 billion of new investment and a doubling of renewable energy capacity in just over three years, to 83 gigawatts by September 2019, with another 45 gigawatts of large scale hydro-electricity. (To give a sense of scale, the Hoover Dam generates 2 gigawatts.)
In addition to low-cost electricity, the government of India had introduced another key benefit into its auction process. Not only were the bids being offered about 20-to-30 percent below the wholesale price of electricity, they were also fixed at a flat rate for 25 years. In doing this, India created a deflationary low-cost electricity system running on zero inflation…
Solar energy tariffs in India are among the lowest in the world, but state governments are keen to push them down further. These dangerously low tariffs are turning unsustainable for some developers, who in turn cut corners on quality. Some state power distribution companies (discoms) are also over a year late on paying their power bills.
State governments, especially in Andhra Pradesh, seem to be holding power producers to ransom, either asking them to reduce tariffs even further or risk having the plug on the contract pulled. This is rich, given that
As of July 2019, which is the latest data available from the Central Electricity Authority, state discoms owe a whopping ₹9,735.62 crore to renewable energy companies. Of this, ₹6,500 crore is due from just three states—Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana. Andhra Pradesh discoms, the worst offenders, haven’t paid their dues in over 13 months.
As long as the state is also in the business of running business, instead of merely policy making and enforcement, it will continue to be a threat to economic – and environmental – progress, throttling potentially thriving growth areas.
All of this when there is so much opportunity and head-room. The share of renewables in India’s energy mix is still low, even compared to China and the US leave alone other Western European economies running to close to 100% on renewables; electricity generation capacity is also a fraction of China’s:
Paper (URL, PDF) by Arvind Subramanian, India’s former Chief Economic Advisor, and Josh Felman, former IMF representative to India. Part of the abstract:
In the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), two key drivers of growth decelerated. Export growth slowed sharply as world trade stagnated, while investment fell victim to a homegrown Balance Sheet crisis, which came in two waves. The first wave—the Twin Balance Sheet crisis, encompassing banks and infrastructure companies—arrived when the infrastructure projects started during India’s investment boom of the mid-2000s began to go sour. The economy nonetheless continued to grow, despite temporary, adverse demonetization and GST shocks, propelled first by income gains from the large fall in international oil prices, then by government spending and a non-bank financial company (NBFC)-led credit boom. This credit boom financed unsustainable real estate inventory accumulation, inflating a bubble that finally burst in 2019. Consequently, consumption too has now sputtered, causing growth to collapse. As a result, India is now facing a Four Balance Sheet challenge—the original two sectors, plus NBFCs and real estate companies—and is trapped in an adverse interest- growth dynamic, in which risk aversion is leading to high interest rates, depressing growth, and generating more risk aversion.
That there are no easy solutions is encouraging. It means policymakers and regulators are going to have to confront the problems of bad debt head-on: account for it, speed up resolution, speed up divestment of poorly managed public banks and infrastructure companies, and set up more transparent data collection/publishing in place.
Although traffic drives on the left-hand side of the road most vehicles are imported from the United States and are left hand drive.When driving abroad in the Bahamas you should therefore exercise caution, especially when overtaking.
Nailed it. So, in the Bahamas, I was riding in a taxi. American vehicle (Left hand drive), driving on the left side of the road. We’re following say…a van…going down the road. Taxi cab driver decides to pass, but he can’t see. At all. Because there’s a van in front of us, and he (taxi driver) is on the wrong side of the vehicle (to be able to see oncoming traffic). So, he sits in the middle of the front (bench) seat. He slides over to the right as far as he possibly can, so he can see if it’s safe to pull out and overtake the van. Now, at this point, he can barely reach the brake, and can barely reach the gas, and leans far into the passenger seat (in the front) and sticks his head as far right as he can, so he can see if anything coming, then he pulls out, and we pass the van. So dangerous there are no words. It should be illegal.
Delivery workers across Mexico are under severe pressure. Fatal crashes are a known risk, and reports of robberies are practically a daily occurrence. To protect themselves and each other, delivery workers are turning to messaging apps and social networks to document grievances and rally for change.
They monitor each other in real time using WhatsApp when making deliveries in neighborhoods with high crime rates. They also collaborate to make Google Maps indicating the location of past robberies and addresses to avoid.
This is necessary because both their employers and the law have yet to keep up:
…workers say that companies do not always take their concerns seriously, often redirecting them to a chat box or email. And the constant pressure to make more deliveries exacerbates safety risks: If a worker cancels a delivery because they feel unsafe, their rating in the application can drop.
And
platform-based drivers and delivery people in Mexico are categorized as independent contractors, just as in the United States. That means they are ineligible for state or employer-funded health care, have no paid time off, and can be disconnected from their application of employment with no advance warning.
For example, it is quite common for people in the West, including fairly well educated people to lump together Indian and Chinese civilizations as representative of some sort of “eastern” mode of civilization. This, however, greatly misinterprets both Indian and Chinese civilizations as well as Western civilization. It would be more accurate to posit that while Indian civilization does share some commonalities with Chinese civilization, it shares an equal number of elements with Western civilization, including in some crucial areas, such its philosophical premises. Thus, the civilizations of Eurasia are generally quite distinct from each other, and none deserve to be lumped together. This is not to obscure the fact that some regions have more similarities to one another than with other regions. Observers of South Asia would know that today, despite the earlier historical influence of Buddhism in Southeast and East Asia, South Asia is generally closer culturally (and genetically) to the Middle East than it is to East and Southeast Asia.
The article also proposes that instead of distinguishing Europe from Asia, one look at it as a single landmass that has
…several regions, including Europe and many others. Different manners of division could emphasize civilization (Western, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, and so on in Samuel Huntington’s sense) or common zones of interaction (the Mediterranean, for example).
…established in 1945, the CFA franc is used in two African monetary zones, one for eight west African countries and the other for six mostly petro-states in central Africa. Since 1999, it has been pegged to the euro, giving the member states monetary stability while supporting trade with Europe.
In return, the members have to keep half of their foreign reserves in France, on which the French treasury pays 0.75 per cent interest.
A French official sits on the board of the regional central bank in both zones, and the currency is printed by France.
Apparently things are changing because Macron the French President thinks it’s anachronistic and also because
“The optics are so bad I don’t think it is sustainable for France to continue this arrangement,” the adviser said. “There is such a strong demand from African youth to take back their monetary independence.”
This is especially true of the software locks on the equipment that require access to dealership-only software to fully repair. A documentary by Vice cataloged how farmers have taken to hiring hackersand buying black market software to bypass the software locks so they can keep equipment in the fields.
I depend exclusively on the network of unofficial but highly skilled repair stores in India for my consumer electronic devices, including my iPhone and MacBooks. Apple’s official presence in India – even Bombay- via channel partners is slow, expensive and focused on getting you to buy a new device instead. But these devices are getting harder to repair. My non-retina 2012 MacBook Pro is vastly more maintainable than a new 2018 MacBook Pro, as is say an iPhone 5s versus a newer iPhone 11 Pro. Ditto for kitchen and such appliances – I’ve almost always bought the base version of a more expensive brand than a version loaded with gee-whiz. Repairability and longetivity is important to me.
Regardless, what seems to be happening with John Deere farming equipment is at a different level altogether.
