Quick notes: Cairn Energy | Lost childhood...

• British colonial loot not enough? UK's Cairn Energy plans to seize Indian assets overseas to recover $1.2 billion ordered by an international arbitration tribunal.
  When will India claim reparations from the UK?



• Biden suggests alternative to China's Belt and Road: Biden plans to unveil a multi-trillion-dollar plan to upgrade U.S. infrastructure. This would ensure increased U.S. investment in promising new technologies, such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence and biotechnology.



• Not easy to slay the Chinese manufacturing dragon: For almost four decades, countries around the world have opted to climb the value chain, abdicating large-scale manufacturing and letting the Chinese do the job.
  
  Along with cost, in many cases, there were other good reasons. Active pharmaceutical ingredients, for instance, are environmentally unfriendly and Indian companies found they were better off buying them from the Chinese which made them cheaply at scale. Steel is another noxious polluter. So you’ve got a situation where the Chinese in 2020 produced 56.5% of global steel and had a 48% share of global shipbuilding.



• No life, no hobbies, burnout, lost childhood: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat



• Ustad DNA: Raag Kedar | Mohd Aman




• Khajuraho as convention destination: Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh is top on the Centre’s charts for development as a destination for international conventions and exhibitions.



• Swappable Battery for Electric Motorcycles: A consortium of manufacturers including Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha announced an agreement for a standardized battery-swapping system for electric motorcycles.




• FDI policy on e-commerce: MNC giants exploiting loopholes.



• Different kinda Vikas: 68% of Japan is covered in forests, and of this 49% is officially protected and can not be logged or cut.

68% of Japan is covered in forests, and of this 49% is officially protected and can not be logged or cut. All protected forests belong to one or more of 17 nationally recognized classes, each with a different purpose, management strategy, and use. This thread will list them all. pic.twitter.com/bVeka2Lxwc

— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) March 26, 2021




• Han Orbit: China and Iran sign 25-year strategic cooperation agreement



• China-US tensions can boost India’s tech dreams: “Everybody that I talk to in the tech sector is moving stuff out of China, anything that they consider sensitive”.

Quick notes: TSMC | Vegan wonders...

• TSMC: “Twenty years ago there were 20 foundries, and now the most cutting-edge stuff is sitting on a single campus in Taiwan.” How a Taiwanese chipmaker became a linchpin of the global economy.
  
  Since every new node of process technology requires more challenging development and bigger investment in new production capacity, other chipmakers have over the years started focusing on design and left production to dedicated foundries such as TSMC. The Pentagon has been quietly pressing for the US to invest more in advanced chipmaking so that its weapons are not dependent on foreign manufacturers.



• Making honey without bees and milk without cows: Tailoring the micro-organism carefully and choosing the right feed stocks for fermentation, it's possible to create anything from honey, to egg whites, to milk. "It is molecularly identical, so it should be the same".



• Getting stale already: Y Combinator's new batch features its largest group of Indian startups



• Transport model: Gadkari's unfortunate obsession with aping America.

Samosaji striving hard for the right going by the quotes he sticks in his office to inspire himhttps://t.co/Ybc8qVcmBy

— Spatel (@Rjrasva) March 20, 2021





• Heat wave: Deadly heat waves will be common in South Asia, even at 1.5 degrees of warming. A wet bulb temperature of 32 degrees Celsius (89.6F) is considered to be the point when labor becomes unsafe, and 35C is the limit to human survivability—when the body can no longer cool itself.



• Jaguar I-Pace launches in India: Costs twice as much as a Tesla Model-3. Indian govt would need to address the country's dirty power grid, which would increase the carbon footprint of EVs plugged into it.



• Secrets for practioners of Meditation:





• North India needs this fix:

People living in neo synthetic cities such as:

Gurgaon/Gurugram
NCR
Noida
& the ilk

must try to get temples (small, functional, accessible) built in at least every other street. https://t.co/59avHvgHpx

— Universal Religious FreeD00m (@by2kaafi) March 22, 2021

Quick notes: Atmanirbhar America | Covaxin...

• Atmanirbhar America: U.S. Senate mulls $30 billion in funding to boost chipmaking sector.. The semiconductor industry has been pushing for an investment tax credit for spending on semiconductor tools.



• Coolies get lectures: U.S. Defence Secretary raises human rights concerns with Jaishankar

  China treats US as dogs.
  
  US treats India as dogs. Because “English Advantage”—this is how one treats ones coolies.
  
  There is a global hierarchy. https://t.co/nd2ZrgFrUi

  — Sankrant Sanu सानु संक्रान्त ਸੰਕ੍ਰਾਂਤ ਸਾਨੁ (@sankrant) March 20, 2021




• Covaxin more effective against variants: Some experts suspect Covaxin could be more effective against variants since it combats the whole body of a virus instead of the "spike-protein" tip.
  
  AstraZeneca: German team discovers thrombosis trigger.
  
  Denmark reports two cases of serious illness, including one death, after AstraZeneca shot.



• 'Brick on Wheels' - A machine that can produce 12 thousand bricks in one hour




• 1,100 megawatts: Pakistan's China-built nuclear reactor starts operation



• Data overlords dictating terms: Big Tech is becoming very powerful and presents multiple threats to entire nations and their citizens.
  
  
• BIG-IP: Hackers are exploiting a server vulnerability with a severity of 9.8 out of 10. As if the mass-exploitation of Microsoft Exchange servers wasn't enough, the vulnerability this time is in BIG-IP, a line of server appliances sold by F5 Networks



• The Mahavakyas: That the Reality is remote is a misconception. It is removed by the instruction that it is within one’s own self.

Quick notes: 5G royalties | Gig economy...

• $2.50 per phone: Huawei to collect 5G royalties from Apple, Samsung and other smartphone makers.



• China wins: China’s CATL, will make prismatic batteries for future Volkswagen EVs.. “The Chinese have become very strong on a technological level which means the supply side is bigger”.



• "Hack everybody you can": Indian organisations hit by hackers exploiting Microsoft Exchange servers vulnerability



• The Gig Is Up for Uber: Uber drivers in UK to get minimum wage, holiday pay and pensions after court ruling.



• Odisha Farmer Builds EV:





• Toxic cesspool: There is a deadly bacteria growing in Hyderabad’s lakes and other water bodies apart from heavy metals, sewage and other pollutants.



• How the State drives innovation: Many of the revolutionary technologies that make the iPhone and other products and services “smart” were funded by the U.S. govt. Take, for instance, the Internet, GPS, touchscreen display, as well as the voice-activated personal assistant, Siri. And Apple did not just benefit from govt-funded research activities. It also received its early stage finance from the U.S. govt’s Small Business Investment Company program. Venture capitalists entered only after govt funding had gotten the company to the critical proof of concept.
  
  Other Silicon Valley companies, like Google, have profited in a similarly immense fashion: Google’s algorithm was funded by the National Science Foundation. Many of the “new economy” companies that like to portray themselves as the heart of U.S. “entrepreneurship” have very successfully surfed the wave of U.S. government-funded investments. Hence, one secret to Silicon Valley’s success has been its active and visible hand, in stark contrast to the Ayn Rand/Adam Smith folklore often bandied about.
  
  Clearly, the role of government is not to run commercial enterprises, but to spark innovation in strategic areas. Government should never have an exclusive license or hold a large enough portion of the value of an innovation so that its commercial use would be deterred in any form or fashion. But at the same time, it is self-defeating even for private-sector innovation if private firms are the only ones to gain all the reward. Indeed, the same criticism made about banks — socialization of risk, privatization of reward — holds for the innovation economy.

Quick notes: Cyber enemies | Server chips...

• Sino-Pak axis on Cyber warfare: There is evidence to believe that China is assisting Pakistani hackers in their campaigns against India, notably including an operation intended to steal sensitive data from the Indian military and plant malware on Indian defense systems launched in 2019.



• 256-core server chips from Chinese Academy of Engineering: Switching from MIPS to RISC-V should not be too challenging given the architectural similarities. Meanwhile, the adoption of RISC-V means that Loongson's upcoming processors will be supported by a broad ecosystem of software and hardware, something that will inevitably make them more competitive.



• Boarding Schools for India’s Outcasts: "We used to produce about six doctors a year [from graduates]. This year we have produced 189".



• Toxic city: Hyderabad home to multiple contaminated sites



• Gardening in hot summers: How to successfully grow a garden in HOT climates




• How to learn a language and stick at it: We’re living in a golden age for free and easy-to-access language-learning content. Lexilogos is an essential website with links to courses, dictionaries and resources in more than 100 languages.



• Gautam Adani world's biggest wealth gainer so far in 2021: Adani has added $16.2 billion, taking his total net worth to $50 billion.



• Facebook + Google versus the news industry: Lobbyists for Facebook and Google threw their weight against new U.S. legislation that seeks to aid struggling news publishers by allowing them to negotiate collectively against the tech companies over revenue sharing and other deals. The bills come not long after Facebook battled with Australia over how much it should pay news publishers for their content.

Quick notes: Cyberwar | Scania bribes...

• Did China just wake us up to cyberwar? “Our defensive preparedness is almost non-existent. When Kudankulam happened, it was not the govt that went out to find who was behind it. It was a bunch of private hackers who did. Whatever capability exists in India is mostly outside the govt”.... As for offensive cyberwar capabilities, “If you can’t even defend your own networks and assets, what offensive capabilities are you likely to have”.
  
  India still groping in the dark: At least one connection opened by Chinese state-sponsored hackers into the network system of an Indian port was still active. “There is a need to guard smaller companies that are part of the grid. Because if one is hacked, entire systems can be compromised.”



• Chinese cyberattack on Microsoft morphs into global crisis: The Chinese initially targeted high value intelligence targets in the U.S, but it has changed since. “They went to town and started doing mass exploitation -- indiscriminate attacks compromising exchange servers, literally around the world, with no regard to purpose or size or industry.”
  
  Chinese hackers targeted SolarWinds customers in parallel with Russian op.



• Sweden's Scania admits to bribing officials in India: Scania paid bribes to win bus contracts in India in seven different states between 2013 and 2016



• India is the capital of the groundwater crisis of the world:

This figure shows how India is the capital of the groundwater crisis of the world.

More than 1 meter/year declines in many areas. We need to talk more about this. #Retweet pic.twitter.com/dfsCt97TIp

— Groundwater Resources of India (@IndHydrogeology) February 28, 2021




• India wants Chabahar Port in INSTC: India, Russia and Iran had jointly conceived the INSTC (International North South Transport Corridor) in 2000 as a multi-modal transportation corridor, which would link the India Ocean and the Persian Gulf with the Caspian Sea through Iran and move onward to North Europe via Russia... New Delhi is concerned over the prospect of Islamabad and Beijing expanding footprints on Chabahar Port if it is connected with Gwadar Port in Pakistan as proposed by Iran.



• Bandish in Raag Hameer: Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan | Hafeez Ahmed (Tabla)




• Malaysia: Friendly and tolerant country where its three major ethnic communities live in harmony.

Quick notes: DeGoogle | Tamarind detox...

• Android phones stripped of Google services - /e/ OS: Now you can buy smartphone with /e/ OS in the US and Canada



• Presumptive denial: U.S. panel recommends export 'choke points' to prevent Chinese dominance in semiconductors



• Tech Independence: China expected to match or exceed U.S. annual R&D spend of around 3% of GDP. More will be allocated to state-funded research, with China’s Science and Technology Ministry announcing priority areas such as hydrogen energy, electric vehicles and supercomputing.



• Beijing’s weapons programmes funded by British taxpayer: Top British scientists helped China develop nuclear weapons tech. Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics is looking to expand “its international presence in order to attract leading talent to assist China’s development of nuclear weapons.”



• Reuters: Chinese state hackers target Indian vaccine makers SII, Bharat Biotech, says security firm



• Thinning out Uighur population: China's policy of transferring hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang to new jobs often far from home is leading to a thinning out of their populations. Uprooting them and relocating them in other Chinese provinces "reduces Uighur population density." . . . . . When Hans clash with Khans, should we take sides?



• Detoxing Fluoride With Tamarind: Calcium accumulation is concentrated in the Pineal Gland where it causes calcification. As the Pineal Gland produces Melatonin, the hormone responsible for regulating our sleep cycles by inducing a state of sleep at night, as well as controlling the timing and release of female reproductive hormones, it is vitally important on a systemic level. Plus Melatonin is vitally important for reducing the risk of cancer.
  
  Fluoride displaces Calcium within our systems. Calcification of the Pineal Gland is disastrous for our spiritual and mental development. The Pineal Gland is referred to as our third eye in Eastern Traditions. It is also responsible for our muscle development. Fluoride toxicity has been related to IQ deficiencies. It is because of it’s neurotoxic action that it interferes with our hormones and our sleep so savagely. Tamarind helps the body to detox fluoride.



• Research, not rote learning: Rethink approach to teaching science. Make it about passion not compulsion. Focus on Innovation in order to be truly #Atmanirbhar.