ISRO's Space Docking Experiment (SPADEX)

 Yesterday's launch of the PSLV-C60 flight has successfully deployed a pair of satellites which will conduct an orbital rendezvous and docking in space:

s2a systems: "Low elevation pass of the ISRO Space Docking Experiment SpaDeX A and SpaDeX B."

medical earnings in the US: cartel

doctors have a cartel, and thus are obscenely well paid. but diabetes care doctors make half as much as plastic surgeons? something is wrong here. 

lack of this kind of cartelization (even nurses have one) is also the reason why engineers moan, eg in IEEE, about esp h1-b immigrants. that's right, engineers have not been able to create a cartel. that's why it's a boom and bust business. that's why after an aerospace bust in the 1970s, aerospace engineers were driving taxis. that's what I think will happen to AI engineers in the 2025-26 as the AI bubble bursts.

don't blame immigrants. it's your own fecklessness that causes your salaries to drop. I remember 20 years ago some guy (forgot his name) on IEEE email groups griping about the same thing. now it's groypers blaming h1-b.

what really happened to suchir Balaji?

 

indian IPOs take off

not sure if this is all that brilliant (valuations are too high in general), but yeah, beating hans feels good. 

Quick notes: Pak missile | Stock market cocaine...

• White House: Pakistan's ballistic missile programme emerging threat to US . . . Led by Russia & China, Pakistan eyes “Elite League” of group that can hit U.S with nuclear-armed missiles



• How Pakistan’s oil discovery could change global markets:




• Pakistan’s stealth move: To acquire 40 Chinese J-35A jets in 2 years amid IAF fleet woes



• Caliphate nextdoor: Pakistan may use Bangladesh as a corridor to send arms to India's northeast. Pakistani ships are now sailing into Bangladesh ports and the earlier orders to examine all cargo on these ships has been waived.



• Adani deal: Andhra Pradesh is likely to pay as much as 23 per cent over the price it agreed in the contract once the taxes and duties are included. Annual payments to Adani once the power supply is fully operational will be roughly equal to state spending on social security and nutrition programs for the previous fiscal year



• More Men Are Addicted to the ‘Crack Cocaine’ of the Stock Market: A new type of addict is showing up at Gamblers Anonymous meetings across the country: investors hooked on the market’s riskiest trades. . . problem worse in India.



• Narayana Murthy on Mass Migration To Bengaluru, Pune: These cities have become extremely challenging to live in, difficult to navigate, and have witnessed rising pollution levels. They are heading toward becoming unlivable



• "No Silicon Valley": Startup Founder Reveals Why He Left Bengaluru In Just 16 Months... "Bengaluru is a place that encourages companies to grow fast and fail fast. That kind of pressure didn't align with the needs of a healthcare business, which has no room for error and demands significant trust from people... I felt excluded because I didn't speak Hindi and I wasn't an alumnus of the IIT".



• AI reality check: The Next Great Leap in AI Is Behind Schedule and Crazy Expensive. Leading developers like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are finding their models aren’t improving as dramatically as they once did and profitability remains elusive.




• Sino-Russian joint efforts in semiconductors? Russia plans EUV chipmaking tools that it says will be cheaper and easier to build than ASML's — country outlines new roadmap to smaller chips

the eclipse of bollywood

from the FT's new India newsletter.

no end to the AI excitement

will all this end well? by past experience, no. there will be another AI winter. from the FT.

obama the avenging angel. who failed.

I have long wondered if Obama was some sort of a kalki-figure destined to destroy america. sort of an avenging angel, of black and rop background. this essay, long and tortured as it is, says the same. and he failed, too. 

kudos to musk/twitter, and netanyahu. and trump, too.

and the Jews have finally figured out the destructive Dem anti-Jew nihilism.

https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/rapid-onset-political-enlightenment

why whistleblowing may be a bad idea

if you know something, just keep quiet about it. If you are a person of substance, take no risks, and be paranoid about your security. my substack:

https://open.substack.com/pub/rajeevsrinivasan/p/ep-148-comrade-kirillov-and-the-art?r=66qfh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Japanese carmakers in deep trouble

thanks to american hubris, climatism and electric vehicles. yet another industry snatched by Hans. 

Microsoft, I bow to thee

the smartest, most ruthless, most innovative, most successful MNC since the vatican. 

 

regime-change as playbook

 https://open.substack.com/pub/rajeevsrinivasan/p/ep-147-the-depressing-regularity?r=66qfh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Mekong and tonle sap lake dying

the aftereffects of too many dams, esp in china. 

suchir balaji, whistleblower, Om Shanti.

Quick notes: Slowing AI development | Falling fertility...

• Google CEO: AI development is finally slowing down—'the low-hanging fruit is gone’



• India's crisis in Engineering and management studies: Manufacturing sector has struggled to grow due to increased dependence on imports from China. On the other hand, the service-sector firms are either solving last-mile delivery problems or offering basic services -- sectors that don’t really need higher-order engineering and management capability.



• BikAss ain't working: Why 7 crore new farmers in the last 7 years is bad news: The increase of people taking up farming in the last seven years is the highest in some of India’s poorest states, with usual suspect Uttar Pradesh leading from the front, along with compatriots Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.



• Mohan Bhagwat on falling fertility rate: 'Population below replacement rate risks extinction,' says RSS chief.
  
  
• Naidu & Stalin's push for more babies in AP & TN: A new population crisis with global implications



• Why most Indians choking on smog aren’t in Delhi: According to Swiss firm IQAir, eight of the 10 most polluted cities in the world last year were located in the Indo-Gangetic plains. Delhi receives significant attention due to its position as the capital of India



• Green Great Wall: China completes 3,000-km green belt around its biggest desert - 46-year campaign to encircle its largest desert with trees, part of national efforts to end desertification and curb the sandstorms that plague parts of the country during the spring



• Salmon back in Klamath river: After 100 years, salmon have returned to the Klamath River – following a historic dam removal project in California. "Seeing the videos of the salmon returning home brought me to tears of happiness and relief".



• Hans eating EU alive: German manufacturers warn of the sector's 'formidable crash'
  
  
• Chinese Carmakers Are Trouncing Once-Unbeatable Japanese Rivals: Foreign carmakers used to make combined net profit of $21b on average every year in China, but this fell by one-third in 2023 and then halved again in the first six months
  
  
• Significant edge in air combat: China’s 99% efficient afterburner tech could make it ‘unrivaled in air combat’



• Banning kids from social media: What countries do to regulate children's social media access




• Non-Christians be damned: Texas education board approves optional Bible-infused curriculum for elementary schools

ironic: see shooting of health insurance CEO in NYC

 BigMedicine ki jai

Goldman Sachs guardedly bullish on india

https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/indias-economy-is-likely-to-stand-firm-in-an-uncertain-world

are your children better off than you?

this is a major question for any parent. given the general belief that India is a growing economic power, one would think that this is given in India. but I have observed in Kerala that many people are mired in a no-win situation, and that they do not progress from generation to generation. btw, raj chetty's research in the US implied the same in the US: social mobility there is much less what one believes, given the old Horatio Alger story etc. 

one set of people I have observed are the housemaids. we find large numbers of them coming daily from nearby rural areas to work in middle-class households (often traveling an hour each way by bus). 

the sad state of affairs is that every housemaid has the same story: a husband who is usually a day laborer, who brings very little money home, because he spends it all on booze and lottery tickets. he often beats the woman up as well. and it is up to the woman to scrimp and save on her income, which may be around 15,000 rupees a month, to bring up and educate her children. 

what is sad is that the children don't do any better. they end up depending on the mothers working into their late 60s to bring in money, and the sons end up the same way as their fathers. the daughters end up the same way as their mothers: either hand-to-mouth existence, or they become housemaids too. 

they are a single medical emergency away from bankruptcy. 

this is true also of those who have gone to the "gelf" from the lower middle classes. they may make money, but fritter it away on conspicuous consumption, with no long=term savings. 

it is true that other migrants have done well: for instance, nurses have ended up taking their husbands as well as siblings and even parents to Europe or the US as migrants (although that is getting harder and harder) and anyway they are able to send decent sums of money home as remittances. 

similarly, middle-class skilled migrant professionals to the middle east like doctors, engineers, accountants etc have also done quite well. 

but the fact remains that the lower-middle class migrants end up being (un)skilled labor in the middle east, or drivers, or other such hard occupations, and their health is ruined, and they are not able to return and earn a living for a long time in India. 

the case of Kerala might be unusual in that there really are no jobs at home: no agriculture, no industry, and nobody wants to do the hard labor kinds of work. so that makes it attractive for so-called Bengalis (who are mostly illegal alien Bangladeshis and rohingya) to come over and work in Kerala.

on the contrary, here is a paper from 2018 that seems to have a far more rosy picture of intergenerational mobility, and according to it, the south is stellar. 

https://barrett.dyson.cornell.edu/NEUDC/paper_560.pdf

you tell me, is this true, or is my observation of stasis more true?

kakistocracy: INDI alliance's hallmark

the nehruvian state, I thought, was the very picture of a kakistocracy: rule by the very worst possible people.

I stand corrected now: the INDI alliance is even worse. for example it has the DMK and now some maharashtrian partner that openly abuse Sanatana dharma. this is against the very constitutional provisions of equal rights and religious freedom.  these INDI people brandish the constitution as some sort of talisman, but they have no problem in positioning the appeasement of RoL and esp RoP as intrinsic to the constitution, at the cost of demonizing and reducing the space for Hinduism. 

here's their favorite magazine, the warmongerist, defining their style of management as its word of the year. 

https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/11/29/the-economists-word-of-the-year-for-2024?utm_content=ed-picks-image-link-1&etear=nl_special_1&utm_campaign=a.special-edition-newsletter&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=12/7/2024&utm_id=2020638

tsunami warning in people's republic of Berkeley?

were the feds trying to scare the woke lefties?

India enslaved by chatGPT and microsoft

 one of the ill effects of english.

Warmongers Laughing All the Way to the Bank

 

forget the useless degree mills!

 same thing needed in India. create people with skills ie builders, not people with degrees ie babus

reorient education towards vocational training, not humanities degrees!

Trump Threatens BRICS Nations With 100% Tariffs

Donald Trump threatens BRICS countries—including Russia, India—with 100% tariffs if they act to undermine US dollar

“We require a commitment from these countries that they will neither create a new BRICS currency, nor back any other currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the U.S. of “weaponizing” the dollar and described it as a “big mistake.”

Russia has specifically pushed for the creation of a new payment system that would offer an alternative to the global bank messaging network, SWIFT.

Trump threatens 100% tariff on the BRIC bloc of nations if they act to undermine US dollar