http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/30/google-self-driving-car-unemployment
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/sep/30/abuse-children-asian-communities
Similar things are going on in India too
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Nice graphs, but note the first one. White people seriously believed, and many rednecks still do, that the world was created in 4004 BCE. On Oct 21 at 10 am. That is what the bible says per one famous padre named ussher.
What about fossils dated to millions of years ago? According to Christian gunfire, their god made them in 4004 BCE, but made them look millions of years old. Why? Because he is a god, and he can do it.
Hilarious stuff. These blighters believe it,too
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The Economist | Gujarat's chief minister: The candidate http://www.economist.com/node/21563644?frsc=dg%7Cb via @theeconomist
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India marked its 101st space mission today with the launch of its heaviest communications satellite, GSAT-10, from French Guyana.
The satellite, carrying 30 communication transponders and a navigation payload, is the first of 10 missions slated for the coming year, a hectic schedule that the In...
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The Atlantic Cities: Radiating Death: How Walmart Displaces Nearby Small Businesses
- "No matter which direction you go from Walmart, there's a very high rate of business closures in the immediate vicinity, and the further away you get there's less and less," says University of Illinois Chicago economics professor Joe Persky, one of the authors of the study, which was just published in Economic Development Quarterly.
- The per-mile closure rate increase for drugstores is almost 20 percent. For home furnishings, it's about 15 percent. For hardware stores, it's about 18 percent per mile. For toys, it's more than 25 percent per mile. The research also shows that during the study period, from 2006 to 2008, overall sales tax revenues went down in the two ZIP codes closest to or encompassing the Walmart.
- By 2008, the amount of jobs lost because of store closures was just about the same as those created by the Walmart store's opening. It was, Persky says, a wash. "You may have reasons to want Walmart and you may have reasons not to want Walmart, but economic development is not one of those reasons," Persky says. "And yet that's been, in many cases, the primary argument for bringing Walmart to the city."
"Wal-Mart have mentioned in their public documents that they have spent 53 million dollars in India to get access to the Indian market. They should name the ministers they paid money to," Murali Manohar Joshi saidWal-Mart spent 53 million dollars in India to get access to retail market, alleges M.M. Joshi
http://goindia.about.com/od/wheretostay/tp/glamping-in-india.htm
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One study compared the health status of the inhabitants of five villages within 10 km of the Rajasthan atomic power station and four other villages more than 50 km away. It observed statistically significant increases in several indices including the rates of congenital deformities, spontaneous abortions, still births, and solid tumours in the villages closer to the reactor.The Hindu: Where the mind is full of fear
It is unclear whether the industry itself believes its safety claims. The manufacturer of the Kudankulam plant, Atomstroyexport, is protected by an intergovernmental agreement between India and Russia, which completely absolves it of any responsibility in the event of a disaster. If anything, the risk of a nuclear accident in India is likely to be higher than elsewhere because of weaknesses in the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board.
Worldwide, data centers use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants. Only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity is used for powering the servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.NYT: Power, Pollution and the Internet
With more utilities moving to natural gas, the 100 billion tons of coal still locked in the region need to reach new markets or face being frozen in the ground. Allowing surplus coal to be exported to Asia would throw miners a lifeline and potentially give China access to cheaper coal.Coal fight looms, Keystone-like, over U.S. Northwest
Reports early Monday from China suggest that a mass disturbance or riots may have broken out at a Foxconn factory in the Chinese city of Taiyuan.
It is still unclear what exactly happened, but posts on China’s popular twitter-like service, Weibo, from users in the area show photographs a...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49142549
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The World Health Organization tried not to raise too many red flags on Sunday when they announced that they found a rare and deadly virus nearly in the same family as SARS in a 49-year-old Qatari man in the United Kingdom. We know what you're thinking: Isn't that pretty much the plot to the movie...
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/oh-great-sars-back/57170/
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When there is a plane crash in the U.S., even a minor one, it makes headlines.The world of American medicine is far deadlier: Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets. But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them.WSJ: How to Stop Hospitals From Killing Us
Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley is now mulling a lawsuit against America’s top military officer. Photo: Thomas More Law Center
The Army officer who once taught that the U.S. ought to consider “Hiroshima tactics” for a “total war” on Islam has put America’s top general on notice for a possible lawsuit. ...
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/09/lawsuit-total-war-islam/
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(Reuters) - Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's week-long visit to the Asia-Pacific region helped deepen the U.S. military's strategic shift to the area, even as it illustrated the balancing role that Washington may have to play to maintain peace and stability.
The trip, which concluded on Saturda...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/22/us-usa-china-military-idUSBRE88L0DB20120922
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(Reuters) - A Pakistani minister offered $100,000 on Saturday to anyone who kills the maker of an online video which insults Islam, as sporadic protests rumbled on across parts of the Muslim world.
"I announce today that this blasphemer, this sinner who has spoken nonsense about the holy Prophe...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/22/us-protests-idUSBRE88J0VU20120922
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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-next-panic/309081/
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http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-obesity-soda-link-20120922,0,3046888.story
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http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-obesity-soda-link-20120922,0,3046888.story
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When it comes to the high-flying perks at the top companies of Silicon Valley, nothing is more salivating than the food. Major tech campuses scramble to get their employees the best of the best in food and drink, often three square meals a day, for no extra cost. In short, it’s a level of workpla...
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/22/silicon-valley-company-cafeteria-shootout-best/
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A major part of the budget is to advertise the programmes of the rural development ministry to influence the rural vote bank. A two-hour light-and-sound show in Hindi on the life of an orphan girl Jamuniya who became a village sarpanch, will be shown in villages. It is being dubbed in Gujarati as well to show it to people in poll-bound Gujarat.DNA: Rs100 crore ad blitzkrieg to defend fuel price hike
| Ishita Ayan Dutt: Mamata's nifty shades of grey |
| The Trinamool chief exits the UPA for raising fuel prices but feels little compulsion to do the same in the state she heads |
| Ishita Ayan Dutt / Sep 22, 2012, 00:36 IST |
If popular is white and populism black, then Mamata Banerjee is a curious shade of grey that may be hard to spot in the colour charts.
Isolated and un-consulted at the Centre, Banerjee was determined to, as she said, “bell the cat” over the Centre’s move to raise diesel prices, reduce subsidies on LPG cylinders, apart from approving foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail.
But back home, in the past 17 months, the Ma, Mati, Manush government has felt little compulsion about succumbing to the need to raise prices on quite a few occasions, and it has often chosen ingenious ways to go about it.In August, for instance, the minimum state-run bus fare in Bengal went from Rs 4.50 to Rs 5, apparently for want of 50 paise coins. Yet, a month prior to that Banerjee took to the streets to protest against an oil price calibration by the central government-owned oil companies that translated into a 70-paise rise in petrol prices in Bengal. Meanwhile, in the heat of the current protests over diesel prices, a part of Bengal is frozen in time. Private bus operators have stayed off the roads for three days this week in protest. Taxis and three-wheelers, too, have intermittently gone on strike in the past year and a half, on the same ground.
Power tariffs are yet another example of Banerjee’s double standards. Tariffs by both private companies and state utilities has been raised four times over a year, a cumulative increase of 37 per cent, under the garb of a variable fuel cost, essentially a method to pass on the coal price increase.
Milk is costlier by Rs 6 a litre because the low-cost variety has been substituted by high-cost fortified milk.
Banerjee is also not averse to exercising some ingenuity to maintain her brand with the common man. Country liquor is a case in point. The government allows the sale of the poor man’s liquor through regulated shops across the state with the twin purpose of increasing revenue and keeping illicit hooch at bay.
In this year’s Budget, Finance Minister Amit Mitra resorted to a unique solution to raise revenues. He imposed an ad valorem duty on the maximum retail price (MRP). No problem there, except that unlike any other business neither the producers nor the retailers have the liberty to raise prices without approval from the state, though technically the excise department has allowed producers to fix prices. In effect, then, producers and retailers have to pay the state exchequer more but can’t pass on the higher tax to the consumer.
Some nifty work was visible even in the Railway ministry when it was headed by Trinamool’s Dinesh Trivedi. Ahead of the increase in passenger fares that prompted his party boss Banerjee to sack him, the Railways increased freight rate across the board to garner Rs 15,000 crore to Rs 20,000 crore.
For someone who is hyper-sensitive to price rises by any central entity, Banerjee was curiously silent on freight — even though the impact on the common man she so venerates would have been as burdensome as the current rise in diesel prices.
Bizarre decisions like the one on country liquor stem from an urgent need to shore up revenues for a state that faces a debt mountain of more than Rs 2 lakh crore — and to finance Banerjee’s unrelenting populism.
Earlier in the year, the chief minister announced a monthly honorarium of Rs 2,500 for the 30,000-plus imams. Bengal has a Muslim population of 27 per cent, and Banerjee has gone all out to win that vote bank from the Left; whether it is sporting a headscarf, or saying Insh’Allah in the same breath as Jai Hind at the end of every speech or getting her ministers to resign from the Centre on Friday (“after Jumu’ah prayers”). Banerjee has an eye for detail, while the bigger things can take a hike.
But Bengal is paying the price in every possible way. The government’s now-famous land policy of having the state steer clear of acquiring land for industrial projects has left Bengal high and dry for investment. There’s an endless list of projects that have been in limbo — from Bhushan Steel, L&T and NTPC, to name a few.
So, the scope for generating revenue has narrowed even more, compelling Banerjee to knock on the Centre’s doors for a bailout package. Well, till recently.
But with the alliance at the Centre gone, what becomes of a cash-strapped state with no investment? Banerjee may have just overlooked that scenario; she appears to have chosen too large a belled collar, thereby offering a chance for the cat to wriggle through. A mesmeric popularity may have blinkered her and Trinamool Congress will probably reap the benefits of taking up a people’s issue in the upcoming panchayat elections. But Bengal will be left to count the cost of populism.
I recently wrote about why the accomplishments of chief minister Nitish Kumar - that at last bring hope to Bihar - could not be underestimated. Today, i turn to Gujarat, which has been generally more prosperous in the post-Independence era and has performed impressively under chief minister Narendra Modi. Critics who insist on viewing everything related to Modi through the 2002 lens and, thus, fail to separate their economics from politics have fallen short of 20/20 vision.
Begin with growth. The relevant comparison here is with larger, richer states. Based on per-capita Net State Domestic Product (NSDP) in 2009-10, Gujarat ranks third, behind Maharashtra and Haryana but ahead of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab and Karnataka in that order.
Modi came to office in October 2001. In the following eight years spanning 2002-03 to 2009-10 (2002-10), NSDP grew at 10.5% annual rate in Gujarat and at 10.1% in the nearest competitor, Maharashtra. The rate during the preceding eight years, 1994-02, was 5.9%, behind only Haryana's 6.3%. Modi inherited a vibrant economy and has taken it to new heights. Gujarat had ranked sixth in terms of per-capita NSDP in 2002-03. Outperforming Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Punjab, it moved up to the third spot in 2005-06 and has remained there.
While the performance in agriculture has received the greatest attention, perhaps the most exceptional feature of Gujarat's success has been the performance of manufacturing. Compared with the national average of 15%, manufacturing in Gujarat accounted for 27.4% of the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) in 2009-10.
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The only evidence you have of last week is your memory. But memory comes from a stable structure of neurons in your brain now. The only evidence we have of the Earth’s past is rocks and fossils. But these are just stable structures in the form of an arrangement of minerals we examine in the present. The point is, all we have are these records and you only have them in this Now.
As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows, and the question is, what are they? Each Now is an arrangement of everything in the universe. We have the strong impression that things have definite positions relative to each other. I aim to abstract away everything we cannot see (directly or indirectly) and simply keep this idea of many different things coexisting at once. There are simply the Nows, nothing more, nothing less.PopSci: "There Is No Such Thing As Time"
Refraining from driving on a Saturday is regular practice among Orthodox Jews... Many European cities, like the Southwark district of London, will be closing streets to cars for the entire day. Massachusetts is the only state to observe a "Car-Free Week" for the past three years.World Carfree Day (WCD)
"Abraham Lincoln gave us the definition of democracy 'of the people, by the people and for the people', but our Manmohan Singhji has given us a new definition 'of the foreigners, by the foreigners, for the foreigners'," said Modi, while addressing a large gathering at Vivekananda Youth Convention here.Modi said the local traders and retailers would lose employment following this move of the ruling government. "Now onwards pen, pencils, notebooks would not be sold by your neighbourhood shopkeeper, but some 'gora'," he added, while taking a jibe at the UPA regime.
http://www.firstpost.com/blogs/unorganised-sector-hindu-rate-and-terminological-terror-457021.html
By R Vaidyanathan
The reforms debate has taken an interesting turn in the last few months. It consists of, according to our pink paper experts, allowing Wal-Mart in retail (now confirmed with a formal announcement) and the abolition of General Anti Avoidance Rules (GAAR), so that Vodafone need not pay the tax demanded. Now a third point has been added, that the opaque coal block allotments should not be tampered with. The argument has been taken to the extent where the interest of a couple of allottees is equated to the welfare of country by some experts.
So the entire reforms project has been converted to a three-point agenda and the general conclusion is that they had (till recently) been stalled by this government and a mulish (or foolish) Opposition.
An even more interesting aspect of the reforms discourse is the use of terms to abuse critics or opponents of some of the policy measures contemplated. The first prize goes to the term “unorganised sector”. Anything which is not acceptable to the reforms elite is ”unorganised” and “inefficient” – implying a sort of disorganised activity that needs global companies and hedge funds to try and fix it.
Will FDI in retail really be an improvement?
The word “unorganized”, of course, raises visions of a terrible mess. But what exactly do we mean by unorganised no expert is willing to explain. For instance, in the retail trade, my neighborhood vegetable vendor and kirana stores are unorganised. My neighborhoodkirana person starts his shop at 6 am and closes at 10 pm. He remembers almost every customer’s requirements, offers credit if needed, and makes home deliveries anytime, but he is “unorganised” only because he is not a company with a logo to advertise and shareholders to cheat.
The terms “unorganised” and “inefficient constitute, what I call, terminological terrorism (TT), imposed on us by our colonial rulers, but we repeat the same without understanding how this usage has come about. To be sure, even among the so-called experts, there is no unanimity about the terms. One expert told me that all stock exchange-listed companies are “organised” and another told me that any corporatised entity is “organised.”
The Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) defines “unorganised” as “all unincorporated enterprises and household industries which are not regulated by any of the acts (like the Factories Act or the Sales Tax Act) and which do not maintain any annual reports of profit and loss (P&L) accounts.”
Well, I have news for the CSO. My kirana shop pays sales tax and so even though his is a proprietorship, the shop is “organised.” So the definition is not about being corporatised.
In contrast, the government of India – and various misgoverning state governments – are classified as “organised,” which is highly amusing.
India’s terminological terrorists, who are leading the reforms debate without knowing the basics, are talking little sense when they say that the “unorganised trade” will become organised if Wal-Mart is allowed in. Not only that, they also use the term “inefficient” as TT and say the current supply chain is inefficient.” My vegetable vendor carries half a mini truckload of goods on his TVS 50 moped in the morning at 5 am only to be told he is “inefficient.”
Actually, small unincorporated enterprises use capital much more efficiently than big businesses, since big firms can expect banks to write off their loans or, in the worst case scenario, they may even skip paying shareholders.
The second important TT is about India being an “emerging power” and hence it should take all steps to become an “emerged” market. These pundits do not know that till 1820 – from the first century AD – India and China had half of Global GDP. After 1820, due to colonisation, etc, it has fallen. A path-breaking study by Angus Maddison clearly establishes that India and China are re-emerging powers, or retrieving their global economic position. They are not “emerging powers.” (See Table-B-20, Appendix B; pp 263; The World Economy: A millennial Perspective, by Angus Madison, OECD Development Centre Studies, 2007).
The third example of terminological terrorism is much more fascinating – it is calling the low economic growth rates of the sixties and seventies as the “Hindu rate of growth.” Today, as growth in the Indian economy slows, there is regular wailing about slipping back to the “Hindu rate of growth.”
Let us be clear. The term Hindu rate of growth has no theoretical or empirical basis. No economist has done any econometric study to establish that Hindus are responsible for the low growth of sixties. The term was coined in the 1970s by a well-known Left economist Dr Raj Krishna to describe the inability of the economy to grow at more than a modest 3 percent real rate per annum, when other economies were growing at a much faster pace.
He did not find anything wrong with the Nehruvian Socialistic pattern of economics adopted by us. Instead he attributed this to the philosophical temperament of most Indians, their belief in contentment and lack of killer instinct. C Rajagopalachari (or Rajaji), that far-sighted statesman, used to call the Nehruvian system as the licence-permit-quota raj. But the assertion by Krishna – a one-time editor of the Economic and Political Weekly - suited one section of sarkari leftists since it seemed to explain our low growth without finding fault with the wrong economic policies of Nehru which bankrupted our country for more than 40 years.
The other section of leftists and communists were happy since it gave them a handle to ridicule followers of the majority religion – though that was not Raj Krishna’s intention. It encouraged them to demand more Nehruvian absurdities and socialism. In the eighties, when we were growing at more than 5 percent, or when, in the 1990s, after PV Narasimha Rao liberated the economy from Nehruvian socialism and we were growing at more than 8 percent, nobody called these rates as Hindu rates.
The interesting point is that even contemporary pro-capitalist or pro-market writers such as Surjit Bhalla or Swaminathan Aiyar tend to use the same terminology instead of calling it by its true name: a Nehruvian rate of growth.
There are other issues in using such TTs. For instance, most of my students, who were born post the 1980s, do not know much about the sixties or seventies or even the wicked sense of humour of Raj Krishna. They ask me repeatedly – why do reputed pink papers call the past growth rate as the “Hindu rate?” – when I try to talk to them about the permit/licence/quota raj.
Many of my American colleagues are intrigued by the usage of this phrase and recently one person sent me a mail asking me about it. Many of them read our business papers because of their interest in India and are puzzled by our masochism in deriding ourselves without justification. So let us be clear: the 3 percent rate was the Nehruvian growth rate and not the Hindu rate of growth.
I recollect the three most popular electives offered in economics during my college days. They were European economic “history”; American economic “systems” and Indian economic “problems”. It tells us how much TT is embedded in our genes and how much we have internalised the same. May be the next generation of economists will start investigating issues pertaining to “terms” before jumping for reforms.
The author is Professor of Finance, Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore. The views are personal and do not reflect that of his organisation
_______________________________________
R.VAIDYANATHAN
PROFESSOR OF FINANCE
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT
BANNERGHATTA ROAD
BANGALORE
INDIA_560076
