30 Oct 2021
climate-change
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global
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governments
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policy
If you haven’t caught the climate change fever yet, you almost certainly will catch it in the next
few weeks. Even a cursory glance of the news will familiarize you with COP26. As the climate
conference approaches, Western publications have gone all-in and bet that the conference will
generate a large amount of news. They are right about this, the conference is definitely going to be
a hotbed of some stunning news stories. Some countries might announce new targets, others might go
back on their existing targets or not commit to anything new, etc. Every change in policy will be
followed extremely closely and dissected and analyzed from every possible angle. Only one question
will remain unanswered: What is the point of all this hoopla?
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24 Oct 2021
america
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democracy
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politics
The American political system is strange. It has three branches; the Executive, Congress and the
Judiciary. Judges within the judiciary are appointed by the Executive with approval from
Congress. The President is the highest official in the Executive branch and elected directly by the
people. And all members of Congress are also directly elected. All the lawmaking power lies with
Congress and it is generally very hard to repeal laws which have already been enacted. On the
other hand, the Executive branch is a fickle-minded body where the current President’s whims and
fancies are the primary deciding force. Treaties are signed by the Executive branch. And wars begin
and end at the Executive branch’s will. This makes America an unreliable republic to have any kind
of long-term agreement with.
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30 Sep 2021
monthly
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reading
·
series
This month’s theme is the Chinese state. Lately, there has been a lot of news out of China. As Xi
Jinping guides the China story towards the inevitable conclusion of overtaking the US economy in
size, he has started announcing reforms that look unthinkable to many but deal with the key
underlying issues in late-stage capitalism. Rising tuition fees and the unsustainable costs of
tutoring are a key issue in India. Coaching classes that train students for the entrance exams of
leading engineering and medical colleges cost about INR 50,000 per annum, which is a third of the
annual per-capita income of India. China’s crackdown to make these coaching classes non-profits is
the most refreshing reform that I have seen imposed on this industry in the past decade. Another
industry that has been on the rise in India is online gaming and online gambling. The rise of this
industry has made strange cases unusually frequent. (These cases remain the exception and not the
norm.) China’s recent regulation on gaming time for minors is an ambitious step. I am not convinced
about its utility; but I can see that drastic changes are required to curb Big Tech’s unfettered
access to data collection and the Chinese state does not balk under pressure from Big Tech
lobbyists. This alone is encouraging to me and I hope that it convinces democratic governments to
try something in their own jurisdiction.
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15 Sep 2021
essay
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open-source
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software
A few days ago, AWS released version 1 of OpenSearch, a fork of ElasticSearch. OpenSearch is
open-source software licensed under the Apache License v2. ElasticSearch’s creator, a for-profit
company called Elastic Co. has been involved in a dispute with AWS for months now. The dispute
began when AWS packaged ElasticSearch and started offering a managed service on their cloud
platform. There seems to have been no partnership between AWS and Elastic, and this lack of a
partnership has irked Elastic no end. This raises a question that others have attempted to answer:
What is the business model for free and open-source software? Who should fund its development? Who
should benefit from the profits made using that software?
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14 Sep 2021
bureaucracy
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government
I have dealt with government services in multiple places now, and I believe that I have found the
common pitfalls that service providers often fall into. This post is not a rant. There is already a
lot of documented evidence of governments that were unable to deliver services well, frequently
leading to consequences ranging from mild annoyances to tragic outcomes like death: Regional
passport offices, post offices, nationalized banks like State Bank of India and Regional Transport
Offices (RTOs) in India, Immigration centers in Japan, and healthcare.gov and DMV in the US. This
post lists some of the simple enhancements that service providers can implement at low to medium
costs to improve the consumer’s experience.
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31 Aug 2021
monthly
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reading
·
series
This month’s theme is art and the artist. I chose this theme because events in my life have
reminded me of the value of the abstract and incomprehensible. As places around the world open up
under varying levels of restrictions, the contemporary locations and events were art is showcased,
namely, cinemas, theaters, live concerts and art museums, are returning to their earlier glory and
posing an interesting question to a subset of the population that has the luxury of deciding whether
they want to attend: How much risk are you willing to take to see an artist perform live? This
month’s list begins with an art critic who argues that our appreciation of art from the times when
life expectancy was low is bound to increase, owing to our own deeper experience of mortality
through pestilence. The list also includes articles about the perpetual search for the line between
art and the artist and about the limits of on-screen fantasy and escape, when the spectator’s real
life is in disarray.
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22 Aug 2021
politics
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power
At first glance, the minimum age requirements on various powerful positions seem unnecessary. Why
should a meritorious individual be restricted from doing something that they would be good at simply
because they are too young? Over the past few years and especially over the past few weeks, I have
understood one of the reasons for these requirements: Power should be handed to people who have the
philosophical backing to handle it; they should be grounded in the understanding of their role; they
should not exploit the people who are newly under their power; they should know where the boundaries
of their power are and where it is being used for exploitation. Age is a proxy for this
maturity. Older people are assumed to have this maturity and younger people are assumed to be naive,
immature and ignorant. This is never really true. Age is a bad proxy for maturity. It fails in both
directions: Older people can be less mature (and younger people more mature) than their age would
lead you to assume. Most of these failures are not consequential as the power that these old people
hold in society is insignificant. But the power that they hold in your personal life can be
considerable and this is what I will dig into in this post.
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31 Jul 2021
monthly
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reading
·
series
This month’s theme is cities, islands and the places that we live in. Few events in my life have
triggered as much introspection about the city that I live in and the places that I go to as the
ongoing pandemic. Over the past year, people have left cities and retreated into the countryside,
finding that their work remains unaffected even if they don’t go to offices and don’t meet their
coworkers in real life. But how should we account for the damage to the city’s fabric because of
these exits? Optimists continue to believe that things will go back to the way they were and that
there will be no long-term impact due to this aberration that we are living through; I count myself
in this group, foolhardy as it might be to expect a future identical to the past. Revolutionaries
and activists see the leveling of lifestyles between geographies as a step towards equality, a
spiritual return to the mixed socioeconomic class communities that were fixtures of towns and
villages up to the late 19th century. In an effort to explore this ongoing change more fully, this
month I recommend a photo essay that documents a nurse’s daily life, an article about the differing
paths for social change depending on the average income of the district that you live in, and an
essay about how the place that you grow up in is embedded within your personality.
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25 Jul 2021
internet
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social-media
American President Joe Biden recently made a sensational comment insinuating that Facebook’s
permissive stance towards vaccine misinformation was “killing people.” This sensational attempt to
blame Facebook for his administration’s inability to hit vaccination campaign targets left a bad
taste in my mouth. I could not quite understand how he could credibly blame a private company, while
he himself sat at the helm of the Federal Government. It reminded me of an exchange from the TV show
West Wing in which the president says, “School boards and local elections are where true governance
takes place.” In the TV show, the president’s comment is used to show how unhinged and paranoid the
President had become and how he had let personal enmity cloud his judgment. (His advisors point out
to him later that he has bigger fish to fry and can’t get involved in these local elections or swing
them using his pulpit.) In the real world, Biden has used this technique to create a scapegoat for
his administration’s failings.
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30 Jun 2021
monthly
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reading
·
series
This month’s theme is disorder, dishonesty and dysfunction. In that spirit, this month’s list
includes the story of a missionary dabbling in things that she should probably have stayed far away
from, the profile of a Trump administration operative who was an exceptionally bad manager and
irritated nearly everyone whom he worked with, a list of the winners of the recent absurdity in the
US stock markets and how it has helped those who got in early reap huge benefits by selling what
basically amounts to snake-oil, and, a contemporary historical study of how hot-button topics on
the Internet have evolved over the past 2 decades.
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