Farming under solar panels: "It reduces irrigation needs, shields crops from heat stress, and stabilizes incomes by diversifying revenue streams for farmers".
Let MAGA eat soy: America’s latest farmer crisis is Government-Grown. Steep losses could fuel farm bankruptcies around the United States.
Forever dependent on foreign tech: India's IT sector nervous as US proposes 25% outsourcing tax. Navarro reposted a call from far-right activist Jack Posobiec for tariffs on services, not just goods.
Blaming AI for India’s IT woes is like blaming Uber for walking less. Truth is: we never built OS, chips or cloud because jugaad outsourcing was too profitable. Time isn’t the threat-our comfort zone is.
Trump attacks his cash cow: Hundreds of U.S. colleges poised to close in next decade. “Over the next decade, we’re going through a very painful but necessary re-balancing in supply and demand.”
Ashtavakra Gita: The Perfect Spiritual Guide to Enlightenment
Wi-Fi signals used to measure heart rate accurately: Signal variations caused by a beating heart enable determining beats per minute. The UCSC team, which included Professor Katia Obraczka, Ph.D. student Nayan Bhatia, and high school student and visiting researcher Pranay Kocheta, used a low-cost ESP32 chip and paired it with a machine learning algorithm to detect changes in the Wi-Fi signal caused by the heart. They then run it through a machine learning algorithm, which can estimate the heart rate with an accuracy of around half a beat per minute
AI Is Coming for India’s Famous Tech Hub: AI might accelerate trends that have already made the industry less labor-intensive. About a decade ago, companies needed about 27 employees to earn $1 million in annual revenue. That number has now fallen to 21 employees ..The industry added 60,000 jobs in the year ended in March, the lowest annual increase in more than a decade.
China Expert: “India must copy this from China to stay ahead!” Manoj Kewalramani -- MUST WATCH!
Japan's chipmaking revival? Rapidus to use AI and robots to automate back end chipmaking processes.. claims automation can slash delivery times by 66% versus TSMC and Samsung.
More white elephants? "India's dream to host Olympics 2036, we are preparing"... Is it to foster sporting culture, or to leverage national pride that borders on jingoism?.... Hosting Olympics is NOT a great investment:
The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is, and yet is not. It
is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease
caring, it dissolves, It has no cause and serves no purpose. It just
happens when we are absent-minded. It appears exactly as it looks, but
there is no depth in it, nor meaning. Only the onlooker is real, call
him Self or Atma. To the Self the world is but a colourful show, which
he enjoys as long as it lasts and forgets when it is over. Whatever
happens on the stage makes him shudder in terror or roll with laughter,
yet all the time he is aware that it is but a show. Without desire or
fear he enjoys it, as it happens.
I am a dream that can wake you up.
Tax payer funded PR stunt: Charter flights to facilitate return of Indian citizens stranded in Israel. Those who are returning will not be paying any fare and the tax-payer is bearing the cost of their return. Why? "Students were a little bit panicked". . . 'Indians don't want to leave Israel'
Schools urge parents to delete Instagram, TikTok: Concern over Islamists' barbaric videos on social media. The warnings are circulating not just in Israel but also in the US, UK - with some singling out TikTok, Instagram.
Harvard faces backlash over support for Hamas: Harvard silent after its students issue pro-Hamas declaration. A dozen CEOs back Bill Ackman’s call to not hire Harvard students who blamed Israel for Hamas attack
I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their… https://t.co/7kzGOAGwp9
Chinese EV Suppliers Plan Side Doors Into U.S. Market: Chinese battery companies critical to electric vehicles are pursuing deals with US free-trade partners South Korea and Morocco, seeking to tap growing demand in America and bypass rules aimed at shutting them out of the market.
Help from China? Russia aims to mass produce 28nm chips by 2027, 14nm by 2030... if China is helping, what are they getting in return? Wide-body aircraft?
Long envied by outsiders, Europe is getting poorer: Europeans are experiencing a decline in their purchasing power. Adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, wages have declined by about 3% since 2019 in Germany, by 3.5% in Italy and Spain and by 6% in Greece. Real wages in the U.S. have increased by about 6% over the same period
Seymore Hersh: US played critical role in Crimean Bridge attacks. “Of course it was our technology. The drone was remotely guided and half submerged—like a torpedo.”. . Proxy war? Leaked documents reveal the extent of U.S. involvement in the Ukraine fight.
Noam Chomsky’s corrosive effects on linguistics as well as politics: “A deep disregard and contempt for the truth, a monumental disdain for standards of enquiry, a relentless strain of self-promotion, remarkable descents into incoherence, and a penchant for verbally abusing those who disagree with him.” .. What’s sad is to realize that no matter how deceitful or duplicitous their researchers can get, major universities tend to whistle and look the other way.
Self-loathing: Qualification for a job at BBC's South Asia desk.
Beware of BBC. They are part of the Hinduphobia machine.
They've even turned something as boring as vegetarianism into a sensationalized and caste/oppression-fraught topic.
Today Geeta Pandey published this. It has all the woke buzzwords. Shame on her:https://t.co/GDg95s8gBK
— Probably Not Actually a Monkey (@ApeThinks) July 29, 2023
TikTok Pushing Chinese Propaganda: TikTok is facing numerous government inquiries in Europe and abroad about its ties to the Chinese state. One of regulators’ top concerns about TikTok is a fear that it could be used by the CCP to warp civic discourse in democratic nations.
Brain-drain: A third of India's most sought after engineering graduates leave the country. Nine out of 10 top scorers in the annual joint entrance examination held nationally for admission to the IITs and other reputed engineering colleges have migrated. Up to 36% of the top 1,000 scorers, too, have taken this path.
India to lose 6,500 millionaires in 2023: Dubai and Singapore remain preferred destinations for wealthy Indian families..‘Millionaires’ or ‘high-networth individuals’ (HNWIs) refer to those with investable wealth of $1 million or more.
Germany's BIG FAT Churches: The two main churches have total assets worth about €300 billion with combined annual turnover of €150 billion. State payments are only a small part of church income in Germany, with taxes to the tune of €13 billion annually making up the bulk of it.
In addition, there's a sizable amount of income from church assets about which the clergy keeps mum. The two churches are said to be the biggest landlords in Germany, owning forests, farmland and other real estate, as well as holding stakes in businesses such as publishing houses, breweries, banks and insurance companies.
Biggest losers of AI boom are knowledge workers: The transformation will pile pressure on higher-wage knowledge workers whose activities “were previously considered to be relatively immune from automation,” according to McKinsey study.
A few years ago, McKinsey had estimated that about half of worker hours worldwide were spent on tasks that could be automated. Now it’s raising the figure to as high as 60-70 per cent. Employees could find that their time is reallocated — or that their jobs disappear.
EU Hits Google with Antitrust Charges: Google faces EU break-up order over anti-competitive adtech practices. Google may have to sell part of its adtech business.
Chip slowdown: Top 10 foundries see revenue drop nearly 15% Year-over-Year.
Nisargadatta: Change your world without trying to change others
Organ donors: India has one of the world's lowest rates of organ donation. The current health system limits the health benefits of donated organs and allows private hospitals to profit without contributing much to the system.
Japan's $2.38B Research Center for 2nm node: The research hub will be comprised of Japanese and American semiconductor companies, as well as multiple universities from Japan, the U.S. and Europe. Among the Japanese universities, the business publication names the University of Tokyo, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and Riken. . . . . . . . . this is how you do it
'Namma Yatri': Autorickshaw union in Bengaluru launches its own ride-hailing app
Vehicular pollution in Delhi: “While the need is to scale up public transport, when you look at the actual investments in the city, the focus has been on building more roads — bigger roads, flyovers, overpasses and underpasses — to facilitate vehicular movement. And there has been virtually no effort to make paths for pedestrians or cyclists.”
China's CATL: The world’s biggest EV battery producer is about to get even bigger. The company has announced a new $7 billion factory in Hungary and another planned factory in Mexico. The manufacturer could be looking to expand with plants in the U.S. and Indonesia, as well.
Every River is under attack by the sand mafia: After the sale of liquor, the quickest way for politicians to earn a fast buck is from the sale of minerals, boulders and sand. The demand for minerals, boulders and sand is so great that it has fueled a black market and the goons who control this trade do not hesitate to kill law enforcement officers and reporters who have tried to expose them.
Sino-Pak Bioweapon?
Those in the intelligence and scientific community, watching the developments, warn that by using Pakistan, China had outsourced a highly contagious network of laboratories where antigens a hundred times more infectious than the present Covid could be created or `dropped in’.
Who Abandoned Bagram Air Base? Biden essentially blamed his generals. “They concluded—the military—that Bagram was not much value added, that it was much wiser to focus on Kabul. And so, I followed that recommendation.”
Delete Chrome: “Chrome is the only major browser that does not offer meaningful protection against cross-site tracking... and will continue to leave users unprotected.” Having promised to ditch tracking cookies, Google changed its mind. “If you use Chrome, you give up your privacy”.
Google “has trackers installed on 75% of the top million websites,” several times as many as Facebook. Similarly, just look at the recent reports suggesting Google will pay Apple some $15 billion this year to be the default search engine on its devices.
Light pollution from street lamps linked to insect loss: Artificial street lights disrupt the behaviour of nocturnal moths, reducing caterpillars numbers by half. Modern LED streetlights appeared to have the biggest impact.
Tamal Bhattacharya returned from Afghanistan, and said Taliban in 90's and Taliban now are different. But Sharia law in 90's and Sharia law now are not different.
Delhi can strengthen its old links to the Tajik and Uzbek factions, provide covert help to TTP and Baloch fighters, and cooperate with Iran in propping up the Afghan govt.
Women's lib in China: A Chinese platform is erasing radical feminist accounts that shun men and the patriarchy
EVs in India: Given India's reliance on coal, electric vehicles could at best be 10% more efficient than petrol in terms of CO2 savings.
Chinese drone swarms - new tactical possibilities: Large drone swarms, intended for coordinated surveillance and attack, were launched from truck-based, forty-eight-unit launchers and helicopters in a recent test.
Networking sophistication will control the extent to which groups of
small drones could function as precision-guided munitions. They would
need to operate with a data link or real-time video exchange technology
in order to be retasked and sent toward fast-changing targets such as a
moving ship or armored convoy. Uncoordinated drone swarms would be much
less effective as an inability to share data would negate any dispersed
surveillance advantage that might otherwise be afforded.
Drone Warships? Countless examples of the advantages drones will bring to maritime warfare.
Who am I? “The earliest mistake is made – who do you take yourself to be? Mostly we are living in an idea of ourselves that is constructed through our society, family, so many factors."
An Indian success story: Indian electronics and lifestyle startup Boat raises $100 million. . . . . Trendy, affordable audio products and accessories
Amazon did not help when debt mounted amid lockdown: Future Group alleged that Amazon's actions "lacked good faith" when the group's retail business was severely hit by the lockdown. Amazon merely put up a "facade of 'facilitating' the raising of finance by the Promoters".
Raising a swarm: India’s R&D spending on drone technologies is not even equal to the
annual maintenance costs of the fleet of imported systems. The lack of a long-term acquisition plan or a roadmap, a
version of the Integrated Guided Missile Development program for
drones, means there
is virtually no indigenous ecosystem for UASes. Worse, all the major
components for lightweight drones, the auto-pilot or the brain of the machine, the battery pack, the motherboard and the propellers and
motors, are imported, the majority from the world leader in drones,
China.
There is exactly one project which currently holds out a glimmer of
hope for futuristic military projects, the Mehar Baba Swarm Drone
Competition, an IAF-funded project for creating swarm drones. The winner
of the contest to build a fleet of 50 drones to deliver humanitarian
assistance and disaster relief will bag a Rs 100 crore IAF contract. But
such projects, which bring in the brightest in Indian industry, are few
and far between... Unmanned surveillance gives us a huge tactical advantage on the seas, which satellite and aircraft-based surveillance don’t
Developers point to
Turkey, which has built up an ecosystem over the past 15 years and is
now a world leader in armed drones. Turkish armed drones have tipped the
scales in virtually every recent conflict in its extended
neighbourhood, from Syria and Libya to Nagorno Karabakh. It might only
be a matter of time before drones appear in our neighbourhood too, as a
wake-up call.
Latest terror strategy: Pakistan using Chinese drones to airdrop weapons in Indian border areas
VikAss is visible: “Look at, India, it’s so filthy, the air is filthy”.
Turns out, globalization wasn't such a blessing: Back in the ’90s, when the post-Cold War consensus was just emerging, economists tended to take a simplistic either-or view of trade—either you were a free trader or a protectionist—and forced people to choose sides.
Paul Krugman branded just about everybody who questioned the rapid pace of globalization a fool who didn’t understand economics very well. Now Krugman has come out and admitted that his own understanding of economics has been seriously deficient as well. Many of these working-class communities have been hit hard by Chinese competition, which economists made a “major mistake” in underestimating, Krugman says.
The Economics Nobel Isn’t Really A Nobel: Technically, there is no Nobel Prize in economics. The Nobel Foundation doesn’t pay out the award or choose the winner, but it does list the prize on its website along with the Nobels. Members of the Nobel family have spoken out against the award.
JioPages: A made-in-India browser that focuses on data-privacy, JioPages is available in eight Indian languages.. The rising anti-Google sentiment among a section of Indian entrepreneurs could work in JioPages’ favour.
One distressing thing I have noticed in our corner of rural India is the steady decline of the bicycle, replaced by the motorcycle. Distances as short of 1-2 km are routinely covered by motorcycles.
Recently in my ancestral village a speeding motorcycle killed a morning walker.
Shenzhen SEZ: Lessons from the hardware capital of the world. “In India, SEZs are identified with tax and exchange control
relaxations. But the Chinese SEZs were basically areas exempted from the
application of various domestic laws, rules and procedures by giving
each SEZ chief wide discretion
to adapt international best practices.”
While tax breaks and concessions are essential, they are not
enough to sustain an environment conducive to business. This just proves
that at the end of the day, there is no replacement for effective
governance.
Revolt against Xi Jinping? “An official call to arms against Xi: The clown who insists on wearing the emperor’s new clothes.”
Equalisation levy: Foreign-owned e-commerce players will have to pay equalisation levy from the next fiscal. The levy, which hitherto was applicable only to digital advertising players such as Google, has now been expanded to cover “e-commerce supply or services”. Setback to Chinese e-commerce players like AliExpress, Shein and Club Factory selling in India.
Two types of c-virus:
Type-L is more virulent and was responsible for the intial outbreak in China. Type-S is relatively less aggressive.
Cuba’s ‘wonder drug’ Interferon Alfa-2B:
Interferon drugs are man-made versions of the proteins that the human
body creates. The drugs equip the body to tackle viruses, preventing
them from multiplying in the body. Interferon drugs first emerged for
cancer therapy. Interferons have also been used in the treatment of HIV and AIDS.
Binge-watchers: Netflix, Facebook to cut data traffic in India to ease network congestion
The New York Times changed headlines 3 times in order to satisfy the Radical Left. What should have been a good story got “worse & worse”, until the headline alone made it very unfair. Fake & Corrupt News that is very dangerous for our Country!
Curbing the data lords: WhatsApp is facing pressure in India to let authorities trace and read encrypted messages. Indian policy makers, have been looking for ways to tamp down global tech giants’ influence, examining methods China has used to protect domestic startups and take control of citizens’ data.
East India Company returns: Govt’s tough stand on Ecommerce FDI may put a stop to Amazon’s food sales in India
Ganga, the wonder river: In the late 19th century, British scientists and hydrologists became intrigued by the fact that Ganga water did not go bad, even after long periods of storage, contrary to the water of other rivers in which a mounting lack of oxygen quickly promoted the growth of anaerobic bacteria. In 1896 the British physician E. Hanbury Hankin wrote in the French journal Annales de l’Institut Pasteur that cholera microbes that had a life of forty-eight hours in distilled water died within three hours in Ganga water. Dr. Hankin was able to secure corpses of cholera victims in the river and isolated samples of Ganga water with a large concentration of the bacillus E. coli. Much to his astonishment, he found that after six hours the microbes had completely disappeared. Hankin concluded that the water of the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers in India was “energetically bactericidal” in general and particularly destructive of the cholera vibrio.
Christism exposed: Catholic Church threatens to expel nun for protesting against rape-accused Bishop “Your deeds on 20th September 2018 and on the following days were of most grave external scandal and harm to the Church and the FCC. You went to the Ernakulam High Court junction and participated in the protest held by the SOS Action Council on 20-9-2018 without the permission of your superior.”
The old RSS did a lot for Hindus in the deep South when it was still Hindu. But that merit doesn't carry over into the present, now that its "secular-national" central leadership makes common cause w/ the enemy & humiliates its local chapter for siding with the Hindu resistance. https://t.co/VUJ9F1CZxn
the big government push to make sure all women deliver in hospitals will make the % go even higher than 42% and cost the nation a ton of money in insurance. that's a crock because giving birth is not a disease. midwives usually competent to deliver. #AllopathsBehavingBadly
David Godman on Papaji, Ramana & Nisargadatta: At the very moment that each thought rises, if one vigilantly enquires ‘To whom did this appear?’ it will be known ‘To me’. If one then enquires ‘Who am I?’ the mind will turn back to its source and the thought that had arisen will also subside. By repeatedly practising in this way, the mind will increasingly acquire the power to abide at its source.
Exit tax on fleeing millionaires: There is an exodus of millionaires from India, and the govt suspects the rich are trying to escape scrutiny and tax liability.
Strategic loss for India? Iran invites China for Chabahar development. "Any Chinese presence at Chabahar, even if not involved in the operation of the port, could be used as a way of undermining India’s influence with local authorities".
The Friend of My Enemy: Iran is not comfortable with India because of its strategic partnership with the US and the new India-Israel relations. Ali Khamenei mentioned the Kashmir issue in some of his sermons for the first time and comparing it to the injustice meted out to Palestinians.
Uprising? New nationalist movement emerges from Pakistan’s Pashtun protests
Trump flirts with re-entering TPP: “If you want to send a message to China, the best way to do that is to start doing business with their competitors”
Death: Whatever is, is you. You are the unlimited, which is not susceptible to the senses. By limiting yourself to the body, you have closed yourself to the unlimited potential which you really are
From Sanskrit to Macedonskrit: "Stop translating, I understand what you are saying. You are speaking here some corrupted form of Sanskrit".
Brain drain: Taiwan battles a brain drain as China aims to woo young talent away
A Challenger to Silicon Valley Emerges: The U.S. approach is “We’ll build a better product and just win over all
the countries”. The Chinese approach is “we’ll fund the
local partner to beat off the American companies”. All the rest of the world will basically be a land grab between the U.S. and China. Chinese-led venture funding is about
15 times its size in 2013, outpacing growth in U.S.-led financing, which
roughly doubled in that time period.
Who knew!! Not just Russia, the United States has a history of meddling in foreign elections.
Trump Towers in India: Ads in Indian newspapers have been promising drinks and dinner with Trump Jr. if buyers make a down payment of 2.5 million rupees for an apartment. Other investors are financing the construction, while the Trump family is benefiting from licensing fees it charges to put the Trump name on the buildings.
Persons accused of big white collar crimes in India take safe refuge in UK or USA. Can a person accused in USA or UK take refuge in India?
We are not helpless. Our strength is in being united to bring these fugitives to justice system in India. No use in accusing each other.
