Quick notes: Diverting rivers, Terror shift...

• Diverting rivers; think again! It will immediately gift China the justification for pell-mell damming and diversion of all rivers originating in the Tibetan Plateau



• ISIS inroads in Kashmir: 'If fighting stops in Afghanistan, Kashmir could become ground zero for terror groups'.



• Data is a national-security issue: India wants exclusive rights to the tonnes of data lying with e-commerce firms in the country. . . E-commerce policy draft pushes for data protection; Chinese firms on radar.



• China Uses DNA to Track Its People: Enormous system of surveillance and control



• Neel Gala: Tech lead for the SHAKTI Microprocessor Programme




• White man's burden: Unvaccinated French boy reintroduces measles to Costa Rica. 



• Kalashnikov rifle changed the world: Now there’s a Kalashnikov kamikaze drone. 



• Feel sorry for Indians who started school in English medium:

There is one thing I enjoy being in Germany: it's talking in my mother tongue...
Feel sorry for Indians who started school in English medium.
They don't quite know what it means to have a #MotherLanguage #MotherLanguageDay

— maria wirth (@mariawirth1) February 21, 2019




• Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is a global crisis:

Quick notes: 21 Lessons | Solar pumps...

• Lesson for India:

  In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.
  
  However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century - the attempt to concentrate all information in one place - might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.
  
  As algorithms come to know us so well, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens, even more so than in Nazi Germany, and resistance to such regimes might be utterly impossible. Not only will the regime know exactly how you feel - it could make you feel whatever it wants. The dictator might not be able to provide citizens with healthcare or equality, but he could make them love him and hate his opponents. Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form, or humans will come to live in ‘digital dictatorships’.




• Ties with Chinese Communist Party: Alibaba is the force behind hit Chinese Communist Party app.



• India turns cautious on MNCs collecting data: MasterCard and Visa, the two biggest card networks in the U.S., as well as lobby groups that represent Google and Facebook — both of which offer payment solutions in India — spent months fiercely opposing the directive (on data localization). They were joined by as many as 30 U.S. senators, who urged India to rethink its stand on data localization. “We see this as a fundamental issue to the further development of digital trade, and one that is crucial to our economic partnership,” the senators wrote.



• Cabinet nod for long-pending KUSUM: The scheme consists of three components: 1. Setting up 10 GW grid-connected renewable power plants, each of 500KW to 2MW in rural areas; 2. Installation of 1.75 million standalone off-grid solar water pumps to fulfill irrigation needs of farmers not connected to the grid; and 3. Solarisation of existing 1 million grid-connected agriculture pumps to make farmers independent of the grid supply and also sell surplus power to distribution companies and get extra income.



• E-Waste: India generates more than two million tonnes of e-waste annually, and also imports undisclosed amounts of e-waste from other countries from around the world.



• Decimated credibility: Catholic Church credibility on the line at abuse meeting



• Hans target Africa: Chinese 'Ivory Queen' Yang Fenglan jailed in Tanzania

Quick notes: Chinese role | Superpower's backing...

• Do this to China too: Customs duty on Paki imports hiked to 200% after Pulwama attack 

Jaish-e-Mohammed is headed by Masood Azhar. China blocked UN Security Council from sanctioning Masood Azhar as a terrorist & thwarted international attempt to curtail activities of the group. But Indians will buy Chinese products & scream nationalism over #PulawamaTerrorAttack

— Abhinav Prakash (@Abhina_Prakash) February 14, 2019




Not a word on the fact that Masood Azhar who heads the Jaish-e-Mohammed cannot be declared a global terrorist because China is blocking the move. Never a any, even mildest criticism, of China. Ever. What does this prove? https://t.co/xw5IQU3ief

— HindolSengupta (@HindolSengupta) February 14, 2019




• Harboring terrorists: Iran says Pakistan to 'pay high price' over attack that killed 27 Revolutionary Guards



• Backed by a Superpower: US Commerce Secretary is visiting India to exert pressure to change the country's e-commerce policy in favour of the American giants Amazon and Walmart. 



• Retail apocalypse and India's e-commerce rules: With the “retail apocalypse” shuttering stores across America partially due to companies like Amazon and Walmart, would an American politician ever think of making the same populist appeal (India's e-commerce rules) here? 



• Modi Won't Let Amazon Crush India's Retailers, For Now: Simply put, India’s mom and pop stores are just buying time before they are crushed by retail giants, as has been the case in America and elsewhere.

Amazon won’t have to pay a cent in federal taxes for the second year in a row. But it needs NYC's help?https://t.co/ldaAN2GwcR

— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) February 14, 2019




• India's English Albatross:

2. Why doesn't India have larger internet companies? If you had to bet in 2000 that either India or China would build a few of the largest internet companies in 20 years, the former—with its English-speaking IT base and fewer internet controls—should have been the obvious choice.

— Dan Wang (@danwwang) February 12, 2019




• Forgetting the Self:




View this post on Instagram







Search for what’s within the space suit 👀👩‍🚀 . #Repost @babaramdass . When you walk down the street you see other beings who are doing things, who are thinking things, who are wearing things, who are older or younger, who have personal lives. You see all the individual differences, but you also see them as packaging which holds that being. • This is a 1931 body and it’s decaying at a certain rate. It’s inevitable. I mean, I may prolong it or slow it down, but it’s inevitable. The personality of this being has a lot of residual little neuroses hanging around in it. It’s also charming, it’s delightful, it’s warm, it’s intelligent, it’s a personality, and those are my vehicles for being here on Earth. • It’s like a space suit, when you see those guys on the moon, and they’re encased in these suits. Those suits allow them to be in that particular element, and so we are in an element which requires that we be sheathed in a body and a personality. • Notice what I’m doing. I’m suggesting that we are not an identity with our personalities or our bodies, we are something more than that, and the predicament we face in recognizing this part of ourselves is that it isn’t ‘see-able’ with our eyes, isn’t ‘tasteable’ with our tongues… isn’t recognizable by any of our external senses. • So do we take this whole part of ourselves and assume it isn’t real? • [Continue reading via STORY or LINK IN @babaramdass BIO 🙏🏾] • Artwork by @brunofsky

A post shared by Bhakti Fest (@bhaktifest) on Dec 28, 2018 at 2:13pm PST

Quick notes: Silicon prowess | Uighur detention...

• Significant milestone: China's SMIC to start 14nm mass production in H1 2019 . . .very jealous guy here



• Spy hotbed: Hundreds of Chinese and Russian spies in Brussels



• Will other Muslim countries react? After years of silence, Turkey rebukes China for mass detention of Muslim Uighurs



• Dr. Jason Fung: 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem'




• Fish pass: Hilsa to be found again in Ganga river near Prayagraj. Earlier Hilsa fish used to reach up to the then Allahabad (now Prayagraj). However, the movement of Hilsa stopped after the Farakka Navigation Lock came up in 1976. Fish pass or Fishway is a structure or natural barriers like dams, locks, and waterfalls to ensure the natural migration of fish.



• ‘The tonic of the wilderness’: The Japanese practice of forest bathing is proven to lower heart rate and blood pressure, reduce stress hormone production, boost the immune system, and improve overall feelings of wellbeing.  Forest bathing—basically just being in the presence of trees—became part of a national public health program in Japan. 



• Yuval Noah Harari: Humans are Losing Touch with the Physical World

Quick notes: Punitive action | NPA nightmare...

• You can't win against Walmart (and Amazon): U.S. considers withdrawal of zero tariffs for India -- strongest punitive action since Trump took office. The trigger was India’s new e-commerce rules that restrict Amazon.com Inc and Walmart-backed Flipkart. Also a factor is India's data localization drive against MNCs such as Mastercard and Visa. 



• Sharia too? Kaangress says it will scrap triple talaq law if voted to power

Does the Bareilly “Nikah-Halala” not shock your conscience? https://t.co/VJsPsZAQk4

— Arun Jaitley (@arunjaitley) February 8, 2019




• The NPA nightmare: Indian banks may have an over Rs30,00,00,00,00,000 bad loan storm coming



• Magnetic north just changed: Why is magnetic north changing so fast?



• The miracle mineral the world needs: Compost can do something that mineral fertiliser cannot. It doesn't just provide phosphorus and other vital nutrients – it can also restore the soil structure by adding organic matter.



• Ultracapacitor: Tesla's clever acquisition of Maxwell. One way that ultracaps can be recharged in a vehicle is through regenerative braking, wherein the kinetic energy of braking is captured and used to generate electricity that is then stored in the ultracap. This is something that Lamborghini is doing with Maxwell technology. Another use of an ultracapacitor in a vehicle is to take care of peak transient load requirements. When the battery system alone just can't get it done, then the ultracap can kick in to handle the electrical demand.



• Physics suggests that the future has already happened: Our intuition tells us that the future can be changed, but Einstein's theory of relativity suggests that there is no real difference between the future and the past.  The future, present and past may actually not be as different as we think.



• Nuns 'sex slaves' scandal: Fresh blow to Catholic church. It is the first time that the pope has publicly admitted this abuse is taking place

Quick notes: RCom bankruptcy, Laundry business...

• Populism gone wild: Kangress promises 'farm loan waiver for all'.



• RCom Bankruptcy: How India’s banks ran up a $7 Billion phone bill



• Urgent need to connect bank databases: Shell companies have been used extensively for laundering the proceeds of crime. They thrive as bank databases are unconnected. In the Nirav Modi case, there was a Swift database, Punjab National Bank’s core banking system and the foreign exchange transactions database. All the three databases were not automatically connected.



• How London's streets are paved with dirty money.
  
  o London’s Laundry Business: Billions of pounds of corruptly gained money has been laundered by criminals and foreign officials buying upmarket London properties through anonymous offshore front companies – making the city arguably the world capital of money laundering.
  
  o The City of London: Capital of an Invisible Empire.
  
  o The tax haven in the heart of London: It is the hub of a global network of tax havens sucking up offshore trillions from around the world and sending it, or the business of handling it, to London. 



• 'Complete Streets': Planning should factor in all people using our streets, not just drivers. "When you plan just for cars, you get cars, and we now have so many that traffic is horrendous and getting worse, it just won’t work anymore". It translates to roads being reduced and lanes narrowed, parking spaces eliminated, bike lanes added and the walk from curb to curb shortened.



• Hats-off to those who made this happen: Bengaluru’s 75-year-old Selvamma goes high-tech using a solar-powered fan to grill corn on the roadside.

pic.twitter.com/8mQOts7maK

— Raghurama Sastry M (@raghu_madgula) January 24, 2019




• China Is A Naval Powerhouse: China shipyards build civilian and military ships at the same time and most if not whole R&D and staff cost is dumped on civilain market. US navy shipiards not only don't do civilian ships but mostly have narrow specialization.



• Why our screens make us less happy: