A war which changed the very nature of war itself: "In the First World War, we invented the machine gun on a tank, and that changed the nature of the war; in the Second World War, we invented aerial bombardment of enemy cities. Historians will look back at the war in Ukraine and realise how drones and autonomy started to take off, and that was a step that changed the nature of war. I think international regulation will eventually be introduced to stop the potential use of killer drones because these are ultimately going to be weapons of mass destruction”.
Still clueless on manufacturing: Our industrial policy is based on a conceptually flawed approach of picking winning firms rather than sectors. This is the opposite of the successful approach adopted in East Asia, which did not select winning firms but adopted a combination of a horizontal, cross-sectoral industrial policy and a focus on some key sectors.
Between 1979–2014, manufacturing remained at 16–18% of India’s Gross Value Added (GVA). Since 2015, it has declined and reached 13% by 2019, the lowest ever since 1960. . read more.
CJI must come clean and apologise: For the Chief Justice to confuse gender with sex and claim there is no such thing as an absolute concept of a biological man, is not only anti-science, it is dangerous if applied to the fields of medicine and forensics.
K K Muhammad: Out of 200 Bateshwar Hindu temples in Madhya Pradesh, 80 got restored during Congress Govt and the remaining 120 temples could not, since BJP Govt didn't support.
Immensely liked the @TheLallantop interview of archeologist KK Mohammad
Mr Mohd was candid in saying that out of 200 Bateshwar Hindu temples in Madhya Pradesh , 80 got restored during Congress Govt and the remaining 120 temples could not , since @BJP4India Govt didn't support pic.twitter.com/SCeiYZXkN9
India's Brand-free Economic Growth: While it is great that India is now making a lot of mobile phones for export, none of these carry an Indian brand name. The Chinese and Koreans, on the other hand, have spawned a half-dozen brands that dominate global markets.
The Modi government's manufacturing push is very good and necessary, but basically it is pushing Indian manufacturing in the same direction as our software (services) industry: Outsourcing -- India's fully (global) brand-free economic growth.
China challenging incumbent automakers: The legacy industry’s greatest assets are not worth as much as in the past... China’s car buyers have fallen out of love with foreign brands. Home teams are routing MNC competitors that had dominated China’s auto market.
China could dominate the next big advance in batteries. In two years, China will have nearly 95 percent of the world's capacity to make sodium batteries.
500 watt-hours per kilogram! CATL announces very energy-dense "condensed battery" for passenger aircraft. It’s likely a semi-solid state battery, an emerging technology with the potential to address issues that have held back the mass commercialization of solid state batteries.
How China plans to get in on US clean energy subsidies: Chinese companies are opening up manufacturing plants in the US and embedding themselves ever more deeply into the supply chains of major critical minerals. The influx of Chinese clean energy manufacturing projects raises the question of whether US industrial policy efforts to revitalize American manufacturing risk being hijacked by its chief rival.
The narrative "they" often sell is that these precious antiquities deserve to enjoy global attention while staying safe in secured museums. A recent New York Times article summed up the colonial thinking that continues around restitution, suggesting that "in America, critics of the surge in returns worry that museum collections built over time by scholars and imbued by a sense of context are being randomly depleted. Should US audiences, they ask, be deprived access to iconic objects that they suggest belong, not to individual nations, but to humankind?".
The fundamental flaw in this argument is that many of these artefacts are not art pieces to be "enjoyed" but sacred objects cherished and worshiped through generations before they are snatched away.
Unemployable: India's worthless degrees undercut world's fastest-growing major economy.
India's migrant millions: Caught between jobless villages and city hazards. This internal migration is bound to intensify as India becomes the world's most populous nation, throwing up enormous challenges for the government to absorb its army of young unemployed.
US Is Getting ‘Lonely’: Deepening links between the Middle East and Russia and China are a huge challenge for the United States. “If the Bretton Woods system is not delivering strongly around the world, there are going to be serious challenges.”
Petrodollar Dusk, Petroyuan Dawn: Iran, Venezuela, Russia and now Saudi Arabia shifting towards Petro-yuan. For nearly 50 years, the Saudis had insisted on payments with US dollars. But that all changed recently. “The Saudi move could chip away at the supremacy of the US dollar in the international financial system, which Washington has relied on for decades to print Treasury bills it uses to finance its budget deficit.”
India Pushes Trade in Local Currency : Malaysia will be a test case that other countries will watch to decide whether trading in the Indian currency is feasible. India has already established a rupee-ruble payment mechanism with Moscow, which experts say is serving as a template for other countries. Last July, banks from 18 countries set up rupee accounts in Indian banks. They include Mauritius, Kenya, Tanzania, Israel, Germany, Oman and Singapore.
Italy introduces legislation to stop invasion of English language: Public officials could face fines of up to $110K for using foreign words in official communications.. France also has a language watchdog – the Académie Française — in which it catalogs and fight against foreign words, especially English ones, creeping into everyday language.
Countries oppose/ban the use of foreign language and even the foreign vocabulary in official communications to preserve their culture since language and culture are inseparable and go together. Invaders/colonisers impose their language for the same reason! https://t.co/YUabTzMdF3
— चमू कृष्णशास्त्री Chamu KrishnaShastry (@ChamuKShastry) April 2, 2023
Design Automation: Huawei makes breakthroughs in design tools for 14nm chips. . Chiplet design: China develops domestic chiplet interface. . . . Japan officially restricts sales of chipmaking equipment to China
Socializing without alcohol: Workplace drinking culture is fading fast. “Co-workers are second only to friends as the main source of pressure to drink.”
Precious water: Intel and TSMC face a new kind of competition. This time, it’s over water.
Project Tiger: "There is the enormous pressure of the economic transformation of India – the building of highways, roads and mines that are cutting off access to what once used to be wildlife corridors along which tigers moved unhindered".
Himalayas: The climate time bomb threatening India. in addition to being located in a seismic zone, Uttarakhand is threatened by accelerated melting of its glaciers.
Reverse-engineering: Russia has been sending US weapons captured in Ukraine to Iran. “Iran has demonstrated the capability to reverse-engineer US weapons in the past. A reverse-engineered Javelin could be used by Hamas or Hezbollah to threaten an Israeli Merkava tank.”
Iran reverse-engineered the TOW anti-tank guided missile, creating a near-perfect replica they called the Toophan. The Iranians also intercepted a US-made drone in 2011, a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 “Sentinel”, and reverse-engineered it to create a new drone that crossed into Israeli airspace in 2018 before being shot down.
Russian fighter jet crashing into U.S drone over Black Sea:
Our banks are well-secured: Silicon Valley Bank committed one of the most elementary errors in banking -- handling interest rate risk -- a core function of banking business.The RBI's stringent norms, which saved the Indian banking system during the 2008 crisis, were further fine-tuned following the 2014 bad loans bout. And unlike the US, RBI's regulations on capital, provisions, and reserves apply uniformly to all commercial banks, big or small.
Karma⚡️Credit Suisse which which was first to assign Zero Lending Value to Adani Group Bonds following Hindenburg allegations and supported the hit job, is in Deep trouble.#CreditSuisse 's biggest backer, Saudi National Bank, has said We cannot increase stake because we cannot… https://t.co/AOAnVL41dTpic.twitter.com/qiMrdpuQMD
Credit rating corruption: Moody's had a 'Grade A' rating on Silicon Valley Bank — right before it collapsed.
Unlike Indian universities: Chinese Academy of Sciences is doing some very impressive stuff. I've yet to see any other university as forward looking in modeling and simulating process technologies. 3nm CFET Nanosheets, OCD analysis, overlay analysis, isotropic etch simulation, CVD deposition modeling
Chinese Academy of Sciences is doing some very impressive stuff. I've yet to see any other university as forward looking in modeling and simulating process technologies. 3nm CFET Nanosheets, OCD analysis, overlay analysis, isotropic etch simulation, CVD deposition modeling pic.twitter.com/aMttgOHbqC
Are Offshore Wind farms Killing the Whales? For all the finger-pointing, everyone does agree that a lot of whales are dying. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says an “unusual mortality event” for humpback whales along the Atlantic coast has been ongoing since 2016. Critics say that the activities associated with offshore wind development, such as the driving of supports into the sea floor, can harm marine life.
Brahmapuram Disaster: Imagine the media reaction had Kochi fire happened in a BJP state.
Twitter's India Rival Integrates chatGPT: Koo will allow users to use chatGPT directly within the app to create posts about any trending event. Initially, the feature will be made available exclusively to Koo’s verified accounts.
Tibet Is Less Free than North Korea: Tibetan children have been separated from their parents and forced to attend state-run boarding schools, where Mandarin is the sole language of instruction and where students are subject to intense political indoctrination”.
“No country can match the scale and sophistication of China’s surveillance state, in which residents’ activities are invasively monitored by public security cameras, urban grid managers, and automated systems that detect suspicious and banned behavior, including innocuous expressions of ethnic and religious identity.
Gen Z embracing sobriety: A growing number of young people in the UK are choosing to drink less or stay sober, rejecting the country’s boozy traditions for a healthier — and more affordable — way of life. It’s not always easy to do in a country where so much socializing, networking and deal-making revolves around alcohol.
Kochi city covered in toxic haze from waste dump fire: The towering Brahmapuram landfill in Kerala is the country’s latest trash mountain to catch fire, causing dangerous heat and methane emissions. India creates more methane from landfill sites than any other country
De-dollarization: A flood of nations is trying to cut dependance on the dollar, fearing ‘weaponization’ by the US. From India to Argentina, Brazil to South Africa and the Middle East to Southeast Asia, nations and regions have accelerated efforts in recent months towards arrangements aimed at reducing their dependence on the dollar.
At the heart of these de-dollarization initiatives is the fear in many capitals that the US could someday use the power of its currency to target them the way it has sanctioned Russia, according to political economists and sanctions experts.
Stealing crown-jewels of tech: ASML says ex-employee in China stole chipmaking tool info. What is unclear is whether this can be used by China to build its own advanced deep ultraviolet (DUV) or extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography scanners.
Nalanda: The university that changed the world. The library's nine million handwritten, palm-leaf manuscripts was the richest repository of Buddhist wisdom in the world, and one of its three library buildings was described by Tibetan Buddhist scholar Taranatha as a nine-storey building "soaring into the clouds".
Only a handful of those palm-leaf volumes and painted wooden folios survived the fire – carried away by fleeing monks. They can now can be found at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the US and Yarlung Museum in Tibet.
China's ChatGPT response: Baidu, Alibaba, JD.com and NetEase, some of China's biggest tech firms, have in the last week announced their plans for ChatGPT rivals.
LFP, a different kind of Lithium ion: LFP cells use lithium iron phosphate as the cathode and graphite as the electrode. LFP cells aren’t dependent on nickel and cobalt, two materials that are expensive and supply-constrained. The technology, led by China’s BYD a decade ago, has advanced in its latest form in the BYD Blade battery, while CATL is also a leading producer.
While less energy dense than Lithium ion, LFP cells are far less prone to the thermal runaway that might cause fires or degradation from overheating; a range of sources now also suggest they last significantly longer.
