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While it says it can help me with a lot of the tools that I use, it has no actual capacity to hook up with them and the instructions it provided were either incorrect or outdated. 

I was disappointed but thought hey, lets see what fun stuff it could do so I made it draw some ASCII art. Simple enough right?

Well. Not so fast. 

that does not look like a blue whale to me.

Oh yes OfCourse. I love that..."Tiger"

I then asked it to draw an easter bunny. 

This is what I got.

                      (__)

                       (oo)

   /------\/     /    \

 * / |    ||    *     *

    ~~   ~~    ||===||

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

I wanted to try one more time, before I gave up. So i asked it to draw a roller coaster. 

Behold the best roller coaster ever.

                       (__)

                       (oo)

   /------\/     /    \

 * / |    ||    *     *

    ~~   ~~    ||===||

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

    (__)

    (oo)

   /------\/

 * / |    ||

    ~~   ~~

I love cows. 

Young kids, with their lives ahead of them are driven to depression in numbers greater than ever before. All this when on the face it of it all, everything is hunky dory. There are smiling images peering out of the screen on Instagram and Snapchat, but behind this veneer there is melancholy and infinite sadness. A literal void that is leaving the youth of today utterly hopeless. There is plenty in the store front but the godowns are empty.

Why this Void?

We have forgotten our original identities. We identify with the bodies and make all attempts to nourish the vessel without caring for the occupants. We are fed a constant diet of naked materialism but the soul starves since it has no connect with god.

The six enemies of the mind lust, anger, greed, bewilderment, intoxication, and envy are always ready and deployed by depression, anxiety, gloom, and frustration to affect the mind. What's the solution?

The key in my opinion is looking inwards. Understanding the eternal nature of our being. When we realise that we are spirit souls and we have been seeking this ephemeral happiness from the material for countless births already. There is no chance in hell that this time it will be different.  From that starting point we can understand that the eternal source of happiness is Krsna. 

Sadcitananda.

“Because we are spirit soul, our position is ānandamāyā. Ānandamāyā means always blissful. Because we are part and parcel of God… God is blissful, all-good, sac-cid-ānanda…Sat means eternal, and cit means full of knowledge, and ānanda means full of bliss”

We cannot expect light when we are unplugged from the mains. We similarly cannot expect to be happy in this material world separate from Krishna. The material world is empty and full of pain but association with the supreme and the understanding that this body and thus the pains associated with the body are temporary give us the power to bear and to sail through this miserable world.

For those so interested, the Bhagwat Gita provides tremendous insights and resources. I highly recommend it to every seeker of the truth. I also recommend it for every weary traveler who has had enough of this material existence. Do not commit suicide, not only is it a grave offence but it also doesn’t help us get out of this loop of birth and death. It just leads us off into another cycle. Why not prepare so that  by the end of this life here on earth we are ready to never have to come back. We are ready to go back to our original home. Back to Godhead.

I have linked the article above and have also summarized his main assertions against the concept of flipping below :

1. It robs India of intellectual property and data

2. India loses tax revenues

3. India loses Market capitalization

4. Indian investors get shut out

I am attempting to respectfully counter Sanjeev's comments with utmost regard for his work.

Intellectual property and Data

This is partially correct, since in a flip scenario the intellectual property ownership is passed on to the new parent company. The nuance here is that in the case of established start-ups where intellectual property has already been created this transaction happens at a certain prescribed value that brings in monies into India and is thus not a one sided transaction. In the case of fledgling start-ups, the IP is often valued next to nothing and thus India does not lose anything. 

With respect to data, My counter question is that when it is stored in an offshore AWS server, does it really matter if the Indian subsidiary or the foreign parent owns it?

Tax Revenue

Businesses that are creating businesses in India by employing people in India and are accessing customers in India do already create substantial value in terms of taxes, both direct and indirect. 

Further, in the eventual case of an exit, if more than 50% of value is derived from India the proceeds will ultimately be taxed in India. This is enabled by Indirect transfer provision that was enacted post the landmark Vodafone judgement. Therefore again, India does not lose out on tax revenue. 

Even more safeguards have been provided via the Place of effective management (PoEM) rules which dictate that any foreign business which is substantially controlled and operated from India will be considered an Indian business for tax purposes and will be subjected to tax in India. 

Tax rates in India are very competitive and measure up with the best in the world. 

With a mixture of the above and General Anti Avoidance Rules (GAAR) it is very unlikely that the Indian exchequer ends up losing revenues. 

India loses market capitalization

To this point, I have a simple poser. Does market capitalization mean value to India?

Can Flipkart list in India? 

Is access to foreign capital or foreign debt bad? 

Would Sanjeev want a look at how most funds are structured ?

Indian investors get shut out

This no doubt is an outcome of the flip. More so because of a September 2019 amendment in the RBI FAQs that restrict Indian participation in foreign entities with Indian subsidiaries. 

However, founders are making a measured call to chose between Indian investors vs their global cohorts. Even with the friction of the flip and considering that they gain no tax benefits at all. 

Should we not instead focus on tangible improvements in the ecosystem that ensures that we are able to nurture and grow these companies with a mix of Indian capital as well as Indian mentoring. Scores of start-ups gush over the quality of advisory and mentoring received from foreign incubators whilst the same quality is very rarely accessible to them in India. 

The larger question therefore is, if the Indian investor ecosystem is so great why are founders making a beeline to get money from foreign investors? 

It made me smile

Thought I would share with you

But I never put never put pen on paper

Not a finger on the keyboard

I scrolled down, switched tabs

The thought passed

Now I can no longer recall

What was it that made me smile

Will do a better job, next time

That there isn't redemption every time around. 

That people are fundamentally broken and do not operate on logic. 

That different people work on different operating systems of life and may not be necessarily compatible. 

That everything is temporary and the bad times as well as the good times will not stay forever.

Maybe we need to  realize who we are, inside and out. 

We need to stop running around just sit and watch the show. 

For sometimes, you don't really have any agency on matters at. 

You are just strapped into the ride. Like it or not.

Via : https://seths.blog/2020/09/who-is-good-at-discovery/

True Independence is independence of the mind, its been 70 years now. Lets get rid of these false ideals. Wear your brown skin, all shades of it, with pride.

Hundreds and thousands of living entities meet death at every moment, but a foolish living being nonetheless thinks himself deathless and does not prepare for death. This is the most wonderful thing in this world.

#dailyreminder

I have personally encountered racism but in Australia and the UK, never in America. Not to say that because I haven't faced it doesn't exist. I talk primarily with the protests in mind and how the militarization of American police and their disregard for black citizens perhaps is the most important catalyst here.

What is also important to note is the sharp left turn that discourse has taken in American politics. Campus Marxism has become rampant on mainstream media and in Washington DC. While I understand the sex appeal of communism and socialism on college campuses, utopian ideas of equality and freedom espoused by those who have obviously never lived under either of the two systems. Therefore, lacking the knowledge that these systems propagate.  These ideologies also deprive people of material benefits therefore lacking any redeeming feature. But then almost all of us were such idealists in School and college, but then we grew up, we realized the fallacies in these systems and realized that capitalism, warts and all, is perhaps the best system to eliminate poverty and provide people with a better lifestyle.

What puzzles me therefore is the rise of these ideas in DC. How does the temple of capitalism get defaced by these communist ideals?

I have done some thinking and I think twitter is to blame. 

Bear with me as I explain this.

Twitter, and other similar platforms survive on outrage, there is little to no good news around those corners. The entire modus operandi of users to get followers and increase engagement at Twitter seems to be to get people riled up. Angry people 

1) Vent out on the platform 

2) Scream at those who might not agree and 

3) repeat the cycle ad nauseum resulting in increasing revenues for twitter.

You could say twitter has monetized outrage. Now on twitter all users are equal, but some users are more equal than others. These are your verified twitter handles. The blue tick mark next to their name somehow lends credibility to their word, all else equal it tells you that this is a person of influence in the real world and therefore you must believe in what he says.

Verification on twitter is a black box, perhaps entrusted to young interns to identify influential voices on the platform. Campus leftists, SJWs, and their Ilk get easily verified because hey that is a name that intern remembers. The soap box on campus has now been replaced by this galactic microphone that allows them and empowers them to carry their message loud and wide.

At the same time journalism has met is untimely demise. With media outlets losing revenues and slashing budgets the painstakingly compiled news report has been replaced by the English grad who picks up tweets from the internet and compiles them as a story, 10 times a day. This lazy copy paste hacks mainstreams the outrage economy established by twitter. Do we really need a news report a day on twitter feuds and who said what to who? But that is exactly what you are served and what you gulp up.

Matt Taibbi wrote a sharp piece on how this Social justice crusade has destroyed the American press and in the subtext you see a familiar face again. Twitter.

There are were maybe around 200K verified accounts on twitter in 2016, surely, they are more in number now but that is a very small minority of users. This small subset using the amplification that twitter and mainstream media offers has the capacity to influence a large number of people. After all, only 10% of America is on twitter, the rest just get to know about what was said and done in the news.

So, do I agree with the DJT when he wants to curb twitter, no.

Will twitter regulate itself? no chance.

So, what should be done now? I frankly do not know.

But this is in my mind an accurate summary of how we got here, where parts of Seattle are autonomous areas with communism enforced by open carry guards.

Surreal.

On the flipside, employers too will realize that if a job can be done by Joe from his remote working log cabin in Montana it can also be accomplished by Ram in Delhi, India and that too less than a third of the cost. An example is Tulsa Advisors who are running a global accounts and finance firm from New Delhi. They are working with global companies to take away the headache of maintaining books and accounts while letting entrepreneurs focus on their core business .

Entrepreneurship too should find a fillip in this crisis, as many people get laid off or just happen to have more time on their hands, they will gravitate towards setting up their own fledgling enterprises. They will find that they have greater access and ease of reaching potential customers than they imagined.

We have experienced the same with our practice. People tend to form cabals at work and if the fulcrums of these cabals leave others tend to follow suit. Now this may cause short term disruption to the work of the firm on account of short staffing and the like it has absolutely no impact on the long term future of the firm.

People want to see patterns that affirm their logic and decisions, people who leave tend to see nothing but gloom at the firms they leave. Imagining a future where there is no one to put out the fires when they are gone. This, sadly for them, does not materialize. In any organization of scale n number of cogs can be replaced and things still continue to proceed smoothly. This is true also of professional services firms.

Ages ago a dear friend of mine left a firm that had been working with for some years. She was dissatisfied and left on not very friendly terms. When she left I don’t any part of her wished well for the firm, and so I saw the pattern myself where every action of the firm was supposed to bring it closer to doom and how everyone was leaving and the firm would soon collapse.

Except nothing like that happened. The firm is still strong, still growing. They perhaps got new people in who did exactly what they were paid to do and things keep moving on.

Like they always do.

What stings in times like this is the feeling of betrayal, when you nurture people over time and provide for their professional growth as well as personal needs you tend to expect a certain level of loyalty. Loyalty not to stick around for life, I mean who does that now, but loyalty enough to not stick a knife in your back and try to make things difficult for you and your clients.

When that does not happen you do tend to feel a tinge of sadness and a bucket load of anger. One has to realize in such times that there is no role for emotions at work. Emotions are for personal life strictly. at work one has to be detached and  business like. Decisions that favor the business have to be taken no matter how uncomfortable and only then can success of the enterprise be ensured.

Just how many small businesses will be able to swim?


As the GST train rolls onward to the proposed implementation date of 1st of July, millions of small Indian businesses are woefully under prepared for the transition to the new tax regime.

GST has been rightly billed as a landmark tax reform. It heralds not just a new unifying tax but also a new way of doing business for an overwhelming majority of Indian businesses. Whilst its success in fostering growth remains to be seen, its disruptive potential has not been properly assessed by most commentators.

The transition to the new regulations will not be easy in the given circumstances. With little more than 50 days to go for the implementation date. You would think it will be highly unusual for there to be no clarity as to which products and services will be taxed under which rate when GST comes in. This prevents many businesses from ascertaining the impact of GST upon their bottom lines, the business owners have no way of knowing if their inputs are going to become dearer and how much additional cash they will have to inject into their businesses.

Small service businesses are already apprehensive of the tightening of their cash kitty on account of GST recovering taxes from them on a mercantile basis. This is in contrast to the prevailing system under service tax regulations wherein businesses up to a certain size were allowed to pay taxes on cash basis.

To make matters worse, there is an abundance of confusion around various procedural aspects of the new system. For example. there is no clarity on filing of returns from  It is a known fact that GST is going to increase the overhead of small to medium sized businesses significantly. This will be even more notable where such businesses operate in more than one state. The GST acts talk about submission of data at three different times per state every month. On the other hand the government has stated on a number of occasions that only one return per month per state shall be required. In the absence of an official notification to this effect, confusion reigns supreme.

There is also the small matter of the significant rejigging of current business practices and procedures that the new tax system requires. This is something most businesses do not acknowledge and as a consequence are unable to prepare for.

All in all, given the lack of clarity and preparation the first months after GST may see panicked reactions not unlike those that followed after demonetization. Businesses, specially ones that wish to not just stay afloat but thrive, should learn to swim in these waters.

The proposed GST regulations envisaged a four tier rate of taxation

·         Merit rate for essential goods and services

·         Standard rate for goods and services

·         Special rate for precious metals

·         NIL rate

·          

But as it appears from the GST council meetings that ended on the 19th of October, we may have instead a five tier rate as follows:

·         Merit rate at 6%

·         FMCG products and non-essential food items etc. 12%

·          Standard rate for goods and services 18%

·         Luxury goods 26%

·         Nil rate

In essence the GST is based on the one nation one tax rate principle, does that mean there should only be one singular rate across different categories of goods and services? 

In the current environment where VAT is applicable there exist a multitude of bands for goods taxable regime. The rate of tax that each product is subjected to depends upon a number of factors including but not limited to

·         Economic utility,

·         Sector significance,

·         Progressive principles of taxation and not to forget the main aim

·         Maximizing revenue collection for the government. 

In this light to be able to impose a single broad rate on all categories would surely have adverse consequences. Imagine the prices of commodities in the 5% VAT bracket after being subjected to GST at the rate of 19% instead. There will be an unfavorable impact on retail consumers and evasion may increase across board. The government and successive reports have all argued against a regime saddled with umpteen exemptions and abatements since it introduces administrative challenges at multiple levels.

This is where multiple bands step in, however does having multiple bands across products undermine the one nation one rate principle?

Not in my opinion, to make trading and compliance easier it is important that the rate on a particular good or service be equal across states. The presence of multiple rates slabs does not violate this tenet and still allows for a uniform progressive rate across the country. The essential aims as far as the GST is concerned are two fold

1)      To create one common market across India and

2)      To remove the cascading effect of indirect taxes.

The proposed structure of GST succeeds on both counts with or without the banded approach to tax rates.

Even with the banded approach, it makes little difference from an end consumer or even the manufacturer/dealer/service provider if there exist more than one band as long as they are able to utilize input credits and avail refunds in the case of inverted duty structures.

In the illustration in the end is perhaps a decent exhibit for why we need to perhaps have differential rates to ensure parity and equitable distribution of the tax burden.

Lo and behold, the odd and even situation. From the 1^st of January 2016 only odd or even numbered private cars will be able to ply on Delhi streets on alternative days. There we fixed it.

The data however disagrees.

As pointed out by several commentators,the odds and even plan is just too odd to work.  Some arguments that expose this folly are :

• Road Dust contributes a larger amount of particulate matter to our air. While all vehicular pollution contributes only a total of 41550 units of PM2.5 and PM10 to our air, road dust exceeds that figure in PM10 numbers alone ( 41750) ( Source)

• The number of people who commute using private transport is still a small percentage, reducing the number of cars in half will barely make a difference to the pollution levels.  (source)

• This plan is going to significantly impact  single car families, and specially women who may be forced to curb their transportation needs, as Naina rightly pointed out. ( source)

Whilst the aim is to encourage public transport, the current infrastructure is already overburdened. Pushing more people into the system is like putting the cart before the horse. The system should first build the requisite mechanisms in place and then nudge the population into behavior change.

One of the most important factors that people tend to ignore in this whole debate on public transportation is the lack of facilities for pedestrians who are often forced to walk in muck and filth to reach public transportation. Till all the links of this system are strengthened it will be stupid frankly to expect Delhi to ditch their cars.

How do we bring about change then?

Introducing night sweeping, improve and clean our sidewalks, remove encroachments from roads. A glance at the figures would show that Moving brick kilns out of Delhi, banning burning of waste, night sweeping, and improving power supply to curb use of gensets can reduce PM2.5 and PM10 figures by as much as 33% and 47% respectively.

Banning entry of the large number of polluting trucks that enter Delhi on a daily basis  will also help reduce vehicular pollution, banning old diesel vehicles is another easy step.

I know Mr. Kejriwal has the desire to be seen as somebody who does work, but if he would do some homework before coming to knee jerk decisions it would serve him and the population of Delhi much better.

The Delhi government has announced its decision to provide Wi-Fi in the ubiquitous busses that roam, and occasionally break down, around the city. This is on top of its decision to install 1.5 million CCTV cameras, and provide free Wi-Fi to the citizens that voted the AAP to power. It is a different matter that both measures which have been often announced and touted but have seen little to nothing in actual implementation. These initiatives are all well and good, and probably appeal to that small, but enormously vocal, minority that does care about such things but I have not seen anything being done to actually improve the quality of life of the many millions that live in this dense and dusty city.

Why not start with improvement in sanitation and public amenities?

Let’s put it bluntly, we do not need to go too far away from our polished office complexes, our airbrushed apartment complexes and bungalows to realize that the rest of Delhi is drowning in its own refuse.  There are huge parts of Delhi that look more like the worst parts of sub Saharan Africa than a country which portends to be a super power. Filth and squalor are the norm , rather than an exception. Yet, no one seems to care and no one is asking any questions

It is a sign of how ass-backwards our development strategy is that we will probably have Wi-Fi in busses before we have clean toilets or rubbish free roads, how providing Facebook to the top strata is a greater priority than providing an improved standard of living to the entire city. It is important to remember that improved sanitation matters not only optically but also helps improve the health and well-being of those who would otherwise live their lives out in squalor.

One of the solutions is to mobilize more people to actually clean the city up. There is no dearth of poor and homeless folks in Delhi who would rather work an honest day’s living but are forced to starve and live on doles for want of options. On the other hand the Delhi government has allocated a princely sum of Rs 500 crore annually for advertising its own glories, in effect preaching to the choir that elected it so emphatically less than a year ago.  At a salary of Rs 4000 per month, quite a decent sum for many destitute individuals, the government can mobilize an army of over 100,000 individuals to clean up different corners of the city on a regular basis.

Other facets would involve installing toilets and a robust garbage disposal mechanism, but these ideas need more resources and perhaps some subject matter expertise, which I sorely lack. What they require first and foremost is willingness, the realization that there may be things more important to the vast majority than to be able to access Facebook on their mobile handsets.

The role of the internet in advancing human learning and capacity has been beyond our imagination and expectation; it has allowed unprecedented interchange of information and across international borders enriching us and opening our eyes to the world at large and helped create and foster communities. It should therefore come as no surprise that a United Nations report has gone as far to declare unrestricted access to the internet a human right.

The internet has also become an integral platform for businesses because of its speed , connectivity and its open, transparent and frankly; egalitarian nature. The internet acts as an equal opportunity medium for all businesses allowing them to and fro access to consumers and other associates without favour or bias, this parity allows for the emergence of business models which are beneficial to the interests of consumers to emerge and challenge the entrenched players their respective industries. Without equal access to the internet such disruptive models, new applications, stores and, services that we utilise on a daily basis would have remained a pipe dream.

It is in this context that I am alarmed by the recent events aimed at impinging the principles of net Neutrality. It is our belief that internet service providers should be restricted to only providing access to data and should not be able to provide preferential access based upon source, to one stream of data over another. This discriminatory approach is detrimental to one and all and by virtue of such restrictions impinges upon the freedom of expressions of users by enabling telecom companies to restrict access to methods of communications and services which may not be conducive to their business models.

I am of the opinion that the internet cannot be broken into silos. Service providers in businesses that provide utilities are paid on the basis of the volumes consumed by the customers. Electricity companies cannot levy separate charges for the use of a table fan versus an air conditioner, similarly water distribution companies cannot an additional charge if the water they supply is used to prepare an evening’s refreshment instead of watering the lawn. Further, should the end user be able to utilise the water or electricity delivered by such companies to earn extraordinary profits It would be absurd and unjustifiable of such companies to demand a share of profits from the users.  Just because a billion dollar deal takes place over the phone does not entitle the telecom operator to claim a share in the profits of the user. In the same manner a telecom operator or an ISP should function solely as a pipeline and not be able to distinguish between various uses of the data or levy separate charges for one use over another. Allowing such discrimination has a far reaching impact by affecting not only businesses by creating an uneven playing field, but also prevents free discourse and  putting a stop to ideas that do not conform with the views or pockets of the operators.

The solution in my opinion, is to treat Internet Service Providers on par with utility firms, the customers should be charged on the basis of the data consumed by such customers irrespective of what the individual packets of data convey. Allowing enterprises to discriminate between an email, a lovers note, a cat video or a revolutionary manifesto sets us all on a slippery slope away from the freedoms that we cherish and seek to maintain.