India has previously tried to woo semiconductor players but firms were deterred by India's wobbly infrastructure, unstable power supply, bureaucracy and poor planning.
India must have one world class city, right? If they want to compete with China, they need to kind of do something China is willing to do. Tear down an existing city and just rebuild it perfectly with infrastructure and city planning.
This is practically impossible in a democracy like India. Tearing down a city and rebuilding it will take longer than the term of any elected representative/official. The displaced people will vote him out before the plan comes to fruition.
The only way forward for us is to do things gradually. Every step must preserve citizens' liberty and rights, and remove government regulations so the people can create wealth.
If we had to play this thought experiment out, what cities could be rebuilt incrementally (half of it first)? Obviously the major ones would not be a good candidate. There must be one.
If infrastructure is the problem then you must at some point face the music and pay the infrastructure debt. Otherwise you are basically not serious about moving forward. If one city gets rebuilt and becomes an economic magnet, then that should provide enough political/social capital to roll out more new cities.
I think tier 2 cities like Pune and Bangalore are good candidates. They are both expanding like crazy. It will be easy (not really, but easier) to build out the new developments with next-gen infrastructure. Once the new areas are built up and show their superiority over a few years, the older ones will be upgraded due to public pressure.
As some one born and raised in Bangalore, These kind of projections have been done for long. They don't happen, and there's lots of reasons for that.
For starters I honestly believe to have genuine upgrade of infrastructure and living standards, you need to increase people's income levels. While there's steady upwards income mobility in Bangalore, it's still no where near to cause leap frog progress.
The remainder of reasons go beyond the scope of discussion of a small HN comment. They have lots to do with insane levels of corruption, and socio-economic attitudes of people. Enough money already exists, is sanctioned and spent to leap frog infrastructure to DisneyLand levels. But nearly negligible actually gets spent, needless to say the dishonesty in quality of work done.
Beyond this we just need to acknowledge nearly everyone here(including the common man walking on the street) is corrupt and just wants to loot and scoot at the expense of destroying things for everyone.
The other part just continues. Bangalore is not even a city, its really more like a mix of at-least 4 districts, gradually absorbed in to the original 'Bangalore' city. People will keep coming into the city, and jobs keep arriving. Since the already dismal state of spending, and progress. No new cities can be built in other places, so people continue to arrive. Real estate prices go up, there is no where near Sanitation infrastructure, or Electricity or even roads. But investors keep buying out lands a decade in advance. And people with no discipline or inclination to play this game just have to pay up high rents or pay 2 - 5 times the cost of a home. All this for access to schools, hospitals, career etc.
> nearly everyone here(including the common man walking on the street) is corrupt and just wants to loot and scoot at the expense of destroying things for everyone
I agree with most of your comment, but I refuse to believe this is true. Almost everyone I have personally met in the city (from the auto drivers to shopkeepers to policemen to businessmen) was well-meaning and well-behaved, with an intelligent, nuanced outlook and understanding of common problems we all face.
The problems in our society are systemic, not because "people are bad". People are (in general) good and law abiding.
For example, a common conundrum I've heard about is that in any restaurant that serves alcohol, the customs/excise dept requires there to be only one exit/entry. However, fire safety code calls for multiple exits. So what is the restaurant owner to do?? He has to bribe the safety inspector, or the customs inspector, or more commonly both. The owner is not a bad, corrupt person. The inspectors are not bad, corrupt persons. The people who drafted the various codes did not draft them with an aim to encourage corruption. But combined together, all this causes the problems we see.
I'm glad you had good experience in our city. But its always a little entertaining to hear naive job tourists describing the city this way. Devil is always in details.
>>The problems in our society are systemic, not because "people are bad". People are (in general) good and law abiding.
No. Actually people are bad. Parents line up their kids for civil services exam cram schools, because civil services have ...err... bribe income potential
You know people are genuinely evil when they want their kids to grow up and become corrupt, cheat and steal.
Basically people don't want their kids to be pick pockets in a bus. They want them to dress up well, sit on a table and pick pockets in a sub registrar office or while approving a road tarring contract.
But they aspire their kids to become thieves nevertheless.
I thought I was cynical about the city, but your comment leaves my dull-grey feeling positively bright and sunny. Most people in the city, and indeed across the country or the world for that matter, want a decent life for themselves. At least in Bangalore, government jobs are not the best option for that. Economics dictates that one needs to go very high up in the government service to out-earn a regular, private-sector job. Since most people realize they will not make it that far, it is far easy to get a better life here and now by taking a private sector job - or even be a new-gen gig worker. I do not actually see everyone wanting themselves - or their kids - to just become corrupt babus.
It is very common all around the world, and especially worst part of it for robber dynasties of civil officials to exists. Even rather bad places, people don't realize how shockingly common it is.
It is exceptionally hard to root out once you got few generations of those corrupt babus in power.
Very common too in Russia, where a KGB official comes to a high school to recruit kids into their "academy," and openly state the income potentials from bribes, and that with full knowledge of parents, with some even facilitating that... That's even more common with all kinds of "elite education" facilities there, whose only point is to be a gatekeepers to recruitment into government jobs. Call it a modern caste system.
Busting it means busting a double digit percentage of population who participated in such system.
I would like this to put statistically. Out of 40 students in my class (1990s), no one aspired to be an IAS or IPS. There could be two reasons. (1) They didn't want to be corrupt, OR (2) They might be thinking it is beyond their intellectual reach.
Further, I was brought up in a public sector township. All the families were having one Govt job. Still only a few (1 or 2) wanted to join a govt service.
I don't want to generalize anything. Because the sample set is too small. But just want to bring a perspective. If you have seen something like 15 out of 40 wanting to become an IAS officer just to get bribed then please put the figures. This is specifically for @Kamaal.
Indeed. I think a massive social upheaval needs to happen here in India - and I honestly don't know if it will ever happen. Tossing around numbers in the range of billions and trillions is kinda useless if every time I venture out of my house, I see a great multitude of people spitting everywhere, throwing garbage everywhere, urinating everywhere. Money and education seems to make no difference as I see rich people drive fancy cars and indulge in the filthiest of habits. The abysmal quality of life for the average person is the main reason for brain drain. Moving to any western country will bring about a stratospheric increase in quality of life, freedom of thought and expression and general peace of mind resulting from the massive reduction in corruption regarding daily life.
I have this simple mindset, if you want to succeed then start with world domination plans and fail somewhere in the middle. India hasn't gotten the memo yet, they are trying to dominate their own nation instead.
India is not an Autocracy where a few million can be automagically teleported to another city where the PB has decided to build a factory. Do not think this is something that will happen in a few thousand years in India , for starters many consider a place of residence to be sacred and passed on from generations (slowly changing) and would never allow something like this to happen
My only rebuttal to this, and I don't know much about it and am only an outside observer from America, is that India has amended its constitution 104 times since 1951.
So from my perspective, anything can happen. Obviously if certain topics just don't have consensus due to the culture, then it won't, but that's my observation.
Sure thing , can happen (from federal or state). We had a communist reform in my state where implementation of the land act transferred land rights to the tillers in the 50's. So it is possible with an act of parliament or state law. Is that going to be simple to enact such a thing , absolutely doubt it.
I seriously doubt that .. Land and house are "sacred" in India .. It is next to Gods in a way .. People worship their houses , to bring such a change is near to impossible
Slightly off the topic, but from my limited knowledge, I think that amending the constitution is not as big a deal in parliamentary democracies as it is in the US. The UK doesn’t even have a codified constitution[1]. These living constitutions are much more flexible.
> is that India has amended its constitution 104 times since 1951. So from my perspective, anything can happen.
This is unfortunately very true. India's states derive power from the Union, and not the other way round. And the dominance of a single political party at the federal and state level during certain phases has made it relatively easy to subvert and amend democratic safeguards in the constitution.
For those curious, India's first amendment to the constitution allowed legislators to make "reasonable" restrictions on free speech after some sections of the media started criticising the newly elected government of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister [1].
Why do you need to tear down a city to build another one? There are already numerous special economic zones across the country (especially at/near ports) that have seen great success when it comes to more traditional manufacturing. The problem with semiconductors is they need very specialized equipment, talent, materials and overall infrastructure that is just not available in India. So "unstable power supply" is a very simplified (and incorrect) argument.
Because I doubt the semiconductor industry is the only industry complaining about this. Tourism? How about the actual citizens? Shipping and transportation? Talent in software that just want nothing more than to leave the country when they get a chance?
Rebuilding is important because the major population centers have already been defined. Otherwise you’d need an exodus every time a new city is built.
What does any of that have to do with semiconductor manufacturing? You can have the best tourism, quality of life and everything else, and still not be able to build stuff domestically. Look at the USA, for example.
The USA is the victim of having a reserve currency though. It's simply not economically viable to export products from a nation when every other nation wants to dump their products into that nation.
Look at their methodology. They don't take into account the role of money in politics. Bribery of govt officials and politicians is legal in the US (they call it lobbying) so only the rich get to control politicians and their policies. Further, massive media conglomerates controlled by billionaires have an outsized influence on govt policy.
As such, while the US has the veneer of being democratic, it really isn't.
And I haven't even gotten into gerrymandering, which makes a complete mockery of democracy.
History has shown us that mass rebuilding of cities is a terrible idea.
Strong cities develop organically. Slow evolution of the built environment has a kind of 'antifragile' nature. It prevents you from accidentally doing too much of the wrong thing at the same time, and ensures you are building things that people actually want.
Just look at some of the awful mistakes made by planners in the 20th century.
* Entire neighbourhoods were bulldozed in many American cities to make way for huge road infrastructure projects. These projects mainly displaced socioeconomically disadvantaged people and ethnic minorities, with enormous and long-lasting impacts. Decades later, it is broadly acknowledged that massive road infrastructure is toxic to cities. It causes pollution, is enormously expensive to maintain and destroys the character of a city.
* Many countries built lots of huge Le Corbusier-inspired residential towers. Since then, we have learned that the 'towers in a park' ideal is incredibly destructive to communities and the urban fabric of cities. But the allure of big towers in 3D renders is hard to overcome - China went ahead and built enormous numbers of them in the last 30 years, even though urban planners worldwide already knew how bad they were.
* We covered the countryside in endless sprawl. Houses were built around the idea that everyone must own a car and drive everywhere. Communities are too sparse to support natural urban life - shops, cafes, community spaces and so on. Real, ecologically diverse nature was razed in favour of an endless grassy monoculture.
I believe we should have some humility and stop trying to revolutionise the world's cities, thinking that we know best. Instead, we should stick to improvements that we know definitely work. Transit-oriented development. Dense, walkable neighbourhoods. Quality green space for all. Elimination of private cars from city centres. Reliable electricity and clean water. District heating. Sustainable urban drainage. Strong environmental protection for bodies of water. And so on.
> * Many countries built lots of huge Le Corbusier-inspired residential towers. Since then, we have learned that the 'towers in a park' ideal is incredibly destructive to communities and the urban fabric of cities. But the allure of big towers in 3D renders is hard to overcome - China went ahead and built enormous numbers of them in the last 30 years, even though urban planners worldwide already knew how bad they were.
I'd say it worked well, and is not anything "unsustainable." Tell how exactly it is "wrong"
* They eliminate a lot of street life. Towers almost always have completely dead frontages at ground level - and they are unlikely to be directly adjacent to a real street. You will be driving to a mall - private space that has none of the democratic nature of a public street.
* They often reduce the connection between neighbours. Meeting someone in a lift or a corridor isn't the same as stopping to talk to someone in the street.
* The 'parks' are normally poor quality. Humans tend to feel more comfortable in enclosed spaces[1], whereas the parks are open fields that feel overshadowed by the large towers.
* The parks often feel unsafe too. A significant reason for this is that towers eliminate most of the 'eyes on the street'. You are likely to feel much safer walking past a row of terraced houses than between tower blocks at night.
* The buildings are often poorly built/maintained and become eyesores.
* They are often built in conjunction with wide roads and excessive parking.
Most countries have a good example of how housing towers go wrong. France has its Grands Ensembles - many of which are really cool buildings but which have not aged well[2]. Glasgow is now demolishing many of its towers[3]. Here's an in-depth report from Create Streets, a social enterprise that studies this kind of thing in the UK[4].
For balance, there is a more positive example in Vienna's social housing[5].
Yes, and it's often referred to as 'gentle density'.
The idea is to build relatively dense housing, but at a human scale - mostly 3-5 storeys. Combined with narrow streets that support walking and cycling, this creates enough density to support a 'real' city centre with shops, restaurants, offices and so on.
Corbusier contemporary / radiant cities was based around automobile scale.
Chinese super/megablock urbanism connects to sufficient public transit and work mostly as planned. Add residence community governance layer (coordination mechanism for managing Wuhan covid lockdown) and you have a fairly functional setup, good civic participation especially in newer blocks with more mix-use at ground floors. It's a working urban model for megacities for massive countries, and one that would apply particularly well with India's density, flat terrain, assuming India can overcome infrastructure / transit deficit. Less proven strategies being explored now are managing internal migration and urbanization to growing tier2/3 cities to balance development.
But for a developing country with poor infra/housing stock, it might be developmentally prudent to just start spamming high density urbanism to get the ball rolling. There's enough cheap excess labour in India for generations to fix things up after the fact. But IMO India's problem is she's not ready to urbanize when huge % of population are farmers. Caste system fucked development priorities, too much focus on information services that employs the privileged few versus low end manufacturing opportunities that employs the masses. $2000 per capita and lack of development causes 700,000 infant mortalities per year, India needs coal plants and factories to alleviate poverty before it can afford sustainable cities. At least transition enough farmers to factory work to reduce stubble burning and justify the excess pollution.
> India is offering more than $1 billion in cash to each semiconductor company that sets up manufacturing units in the country as it seeks to build on its smartphone assembly industry and strengthen its electronics supply chain, two officials said.
Semiconductors are the new food. Everyone wants to make them themselves. No one wants to depend on foreign fabs anymore.
But I'm afraid that at some point we will run out of raw metals to mine, including rare earths. There is already a shortage of lithium because of electric vehicles. Could the mass manufacturing of semiconductors squeeze global metal supplies even more? Iron, gold, cadmium, silver, platinum, titanium, these resources are finite and not renewable. Even if we run out in 10,000 years, what happens then? We need to recycle more of our old electronics, including computer chips and processors. A brilliant mind should come up with an industrial process that takes a few thousand chips and breaks them down into separate components. Turning manufactured electronics back into raw metals (except plastics, paint, and glue, which should be discarded).
Hopefully in 10,000 years space mining will be a relic of the distant past, like the black and white photos of Appalachian coal miners in history books, and we will have moved on to creating the materials we need by adding or removing electrons and protons from other more common materials.
What types of social safety nets exist to facilitate a brilliant mind risking everything on such an industrial process, which has social utility but would probably not be profitable for a long time if ever? It's a noble goal for sure, but I'm afraid we're rapidly advancing towards a future where only the biggest corporations can even begin to experiment with creating that type of process. :(
In 10,000 years will it be technologically and/or economically viable to mine landfills for these materials? The elements are still there, potentially in greater concentrations than the ores from which they were originally mined.
I would hope that in 1000 years we will be herding asteroids filled with these materials from the far reaches of our Solar System into an orbit around our earth or moon for mining.
This xkcd talks instead about surface area, but suggests that the Earth holds a good chunk of the mine-able volume that can fuel industry.
Now, if we could siphon off hydrogen from the gas giants and fuse them into heavier elements, we could have orders of magnitude more material to work with.
It isn't just surface area, but also the elemental composition. When the earth was molten, every siderophilic[0] element sank into the earth's core, leaving the crust with relatively low concentrations of precious metals[1]. All the precious metals we can mine are from later asteroid impacts, not the initial material that formed the earth. Mining asteroids would potentially give us more access to those precious metals.
The Earth is too massive - almost all of the earths mass is below the crust and inaccessible due to extreme temperatures and pressure, bad sci-fi movies not withstanding.
Most asteroids have so little gravity that mining them out would be quite feasible.
Rare earths aren't actually that rare, and they're pretty well distributed throughout the planet, it's just that China is willing to screw their environment and undercut costs enough that other countries have been more than willing to outsource their production to China.
But when these resources are "used up" it's not like they disappear (as opposed to, say, helium), and at some point in the future it will be economic to recycle them and mine them from landfills.
India has a chance this time. Govt seems committed to “start” the leap frogging process. For example there is new energy around building infrastructure, especially expressways. Also China’s recent actions are also a wake up call and acting as the fuel in the fire for India to get its own house in order.
Only if the Modi government isn’t capped it’s going to be no different than the Chinese system. Possibly worse: the facism and genocide with none of the efficiency benefits!
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Though you know you mostly won't win a thing, and actually lose money. Its always fun to dream up a winning scenario and enjoy in your fantasies.
That's pretty much it. Everything else damned, people are treating the voting slip as an expensive lottery ticket. Lose economically, socially and suffer on the long run, for small time thrill in a day dream.
If "Make in India" succeeds, then If "I get a high paying job", then If "Save enough".... If then , If then, If then.... Soon you are driving high end German cars, and staying in expensive Gated communities.
Why do you say there is nothing to show for it? To take one example - mobile phones - India is now the second largest manufacturer of mobile phones in the world [0]. Samsung recently started the largest mobile phone manufacturing unit in the world in Noida. There are now over 200 mobile manufacturing units in India, compared to just 3 in 2014 when "Make in India" was launched.
A few auto manufacturers - Kia, SAIC and Citroen as I recall - have also set up new plants in India since 2014, although in this sector India was quite adept before 2014 also.
> There are now over 200 mobile manufacturing units in India
That's a bit of a stretch.
The prime majority of them just assemble from knockdown kits to circumvent India's tarrifs, and bureaucratic phone registration scheme. Though I see more of them going for a more complete assembly in a few years time.
Assemble, yes, but a lot of the components also come from India. Xiaomi, for example, source 65% of their components from India itself. Of course, the really important parts like the processor, screen, camera, etc probably come from elsewhere because AFAIK they are not made in India yet.
> circumvent India's tarrifs
Adding those tariffs was intentional and part of the "Make in India" initiative. IIRC customs duty on a phone was 1% a few years back but it is now 21%.
> I see more of them going for a more complete assembly in a few years time.
Yes, very likely. Even with automobiles, initially only assembly was done in India, but over time an entire ecosystem of industries making many of the required components spawned here.
I don't know much about Algeria, but most cars and motorcycles sold in India are built here from the ground up with most of the parts sourced locally. There are a few luxury brands like Lexus, Jaguar, Lamborghini, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, etc which are sold as CBU (Completely Built-Up ie imported as-is) or CKD (Completely Knocked-Down ie all parts imported and only assembly in India). The customs tariffs on such units make them unattractive for the low to mid-segment vehicles, which make up the vast majority of those sold in India.
The real obstacle IMO are semi capable countries are loath to share capability due to geopolitics. US can entice and coerce TSMC / Samsung for fabs by having IP controls and massive market for IC demand. Even EU is failing to court TSMC because they constitute only 5% of TSMC customers. 1B + Indian poor infra just isn't enticing, even less so when access to IC = geopolitical power / control. India has too long history of non-alignment and indigenous spirit to be gifted IC autonomy by those able.
Great comment! You hit the nail on the head with regards to India's geopolitical standing, which is often forgotten when discussing these incentives. In order to come up with really enticing incentives, you need to have deep understanding of what guides technology companies in their decision making AND deep understanding of the geopolitics of IC. There are relatively few people in Indian politics who have this kind of knowledge.
What do you think the Indian government would have to offer the international IC community to actually attract chip-makers?
QUAD unproven, India still wants Russian S400 despite CAATSA, dependence on sourcing from Russian MIC for decades to come, working relations with Iran. That's just some medium-term geopolitical positions against India. India will have problems getting leading edge for same reasons as China. Ultimately, India is too big to ever be junior partner and be subsumed under US controlled semi. Even if India had Chinese market capacity to absorb 300B of semi imports per year, they'd still have problems getting IC deals because at that point, a rich developed India that controls Indian Ocean is much scarier than rich China that controls SCS.
IMO India should hope Chinese semi efforts + EU/SK/JP attempts to spin off de-americanized supply chain succeeds - more semi tech spreads, more access to tech via political leveraging between blocs, better chance for indigenous Indian efforts. In the mean time focus on other achievable choke points like wafers, gas production, photo resist and insinuate itself into current global supply chain. Flex it's China-balance position and try to coerce modest 28nm fab for Indian MIC and slowly build from there. Realize it took SK/TW/US 40 years to build up capabilities. China will be lucky to do it in 30. No short cuts. The elephant in the room is obviously just getting country infra / business environment in order. IMO leading industries are whole of society problems. A country with $2000 per capita and heavy brain drain needs to solve the basics first.
Astute observations, you seem to know this space well. Judging from this and your other comments, you also write really well (high information throughput!) - have you considered sharing your knowledge with a wider audience?
Muslim Kashimiris lost all moral ground to claim biggest democracy farce when they cleansed 400,000 Hindu Pandits from the kashmir valley with threats of "leave, convert or die" and leave the women behind, if you leave [1]. This is what ISIS did to the Yazidis except it happened in 1990 and no one, including the Indian state, did anything about it.
Today when you lose 4G access the Indian state can point to the Islamist driven genocide and claim they are preventing another Islamist genocide. The choice for other Indians is would you have an Islamist state which is 100% purely Sunni Muslim with 4G Internet or one with a restive population with lesser freedoms but gives some semblance human rights to the 10-20% minority that is not Sunni Muslim but rather Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Shia and would get driven out, raped or just killed the moment the Indian state pulls back.
As to Ambani/Adani clique, the very jibe is farcical. There are dozens of billionaries minted in the past decade since Modi came to power. 90% of Adani's $55B wealth was added in the last 12 months on the stock market through publicly listed entities.
As to Ambani, I do wish he owned the country. Imagine if he could do to every service what he did to Internet data and voice calling - the cheapest rates in the world and near universal coverage. Heck, every country wishes he could own their telecom infrastructure lock, stock and barrel.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadIndia must have one world class city, right? If they want to compete with China, they need to kind of do something China is willing to do. Tear down an existing city and just rebuild it perfectly with infrastructure and city planning.
This is practically impossible in a democracy like India. Tearing down a city and rebuilding it will take longer than the term of any elected representative/official. The displaced people will vote him out before the plan comes to fruition.
The only way forward for us is to do things gradually. Every step must preserve citizens' liberty and rights, and remove government regulations so the people can create wealth.
If infrastructure is the problem then you must at some point face the music and pay the infrastructure debt. Otherwise you are basically not serious about moving forward. If one city gets rebuilt and becomes an economic magnet, then that should provide enough political/social capital to roll out more new cities.
I think tier 2 cities like Pune and Bangalore are good candidates. They are both expanding like crazy. It will be easy (not really, but easier) to build out the new developments with next-gen infrastructure. Once the new areas are built up and show their superiority over a few years, the older ones will be upgraded due to public pressure.
For starters I honestly believe to have genuine upgrade of infrastructure and living standards, you need to increase people's income levels. While there's steady upwards income mobility in Bangalore, it's still no where near to cause leap frog progress.
The remainder of reasons go beyond the scope of discussion of a small HN comment. They have lots to do with insane levels of corruption, and socio-economic attitudes of people. Enough money already exists, is sanctioned and spent to leap frog infrastructure to DisneyLand levels. But nearly negligible actually gets spent, needless to say the dishonesty in quality of work done.
Beyond this we just need to acknowledge nearly everyone here(including the common man walking on the street) is corrupt and just wants to loot and scoot at the expense of destroying things for everyone.
The other part just continues. Bangalore is not even a city, its really more like a mix of at-least 4 districts, gradually absorbed in to the original 'Bangalore' city. People will keep coming into the city, and jobs keep arriving. Since the already dismal state of spending, and progress. No new cities can be built in other places, so people continue to arrive. Real estate prices go up, there is no where near Sanitation infrastructure, or Electricity or even roads. But investors keep buying out lands a decade in advance. And people with no discipline or inclination to play this game just have to pay up high rents or pay 2 - 5 times the cost of a home. All this for access to schools, hospitals, career etc.
I agree with most of your comment, but I refuse to believe this is true. Almost everyone I have personally met in the city (from the auto drivers to shopkeepers to policemen to businessmen) was well-meaning and well-behaved, with an intelligent, nuanced outlook and understanding of common problems we all face.
The problems in our society are systemic, not because "people are bad". People are (in general) good and law abiding.
For example, a common conundrum I've heard about is that in any restaurant that serves alcohol, the customs/excise dept requires there to be only one exit/entry. However, fire safety code calls for multiple exits. So what is the restaurant owner to do?? He has to bribe the safety inspector, or the customs inspector, or more commonly both. The owner is not a bad, corrupt person. The inspectors are not bad, corrupt persons. The people who drafted the various codes did not draft them with an aim to encourage corruption. But combined together, all this causes the problems we see.
>>The problems in our society are systemic, not because "people are bad". People are (in general) good and law abiding.
No. Actually people are bad. Parents line up their kids for civil services exam cram schools, because civil services have ...err... bribe income potential
You know people are genuinely evil when they want their kids to grow up and become corrupt, cheat and steal.
Basically people don't want their kids to be pick pockets in a bus. They want them to dress up well, sit on a table and pick pockets in a sub registrar office or while approving a road tarring contract.
But they aspire their kids to become thieves nevertheless.
It is very common all around the world, and especially worst part of it for robber dynasties of civil officials to exists. Even rather bad places, people don't realize how shockingly common it is.
It is exceptionally hard to root out once you got few generations of those corrupt babus in power.
Very common too in Russia, where a KGB official comes to a high school to recruit kids into their "academy," and openly state the income potentials from bribes, and that with full knowledge of parents, with some even facilitating that... That's even more common with all kinds of "elite education" facilities there, whose only point is to be a gatekeepers to recruitment into government jobs. Call it a modern caste system.
Busting it means busting a double digit percentage of population who participated in such system.
Further, I was brought up in a public sector township. All the families were having one Govt job. Still only a few (1 or 2) wanted to join a govt service.
I don't want to generalize anything. Because the sample set is too small. But just want to bring a perspective. If you have seen something like 15 out of 40 wanting to become an IAS officer just to get bribed then please put the figures. This is specifically for @Kamaal.
So from my perspective, anything can happen. Obviously if certain topics just don't have consensus due to the culture, then it won't, but that's my observation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
This is unfortunately very true. India's states derive power from the Union, and not the other way round. And the dominance of a single political party at the federal and state level during certain phases has made it relatively easy to subvert and amend democratic safeguards in the constitution.
For those curious, India's first amendment to the constitution allowed legislators to make "reasonable" restrictions on free speech after some sections of the media started criticising the newly elected government of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_of_the_Constit...
Rebuilding is important because the major population centers have already been defined. Otherwise you’d need an exodus every time a new city is built.
Can you imagine tearing down Detroit and rebuilding it from scratch? What about Seattle?
Impossible, isn't it?
India is even more democratic than USA, so it's never going to happen.
Not according to these folks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
USA is 25, India is 53.
As such, while the US has the veneer of being democratic, it really isn't.
And I haven't even gotten into gerrymandering, which makes a complete mockery of democracy.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
Strong cities develop organically. Slow evolution of the built environment has a kind of 'antifragile' nature. It prevents you from accidentally doing too much of the wrong thing at the same time, and ensures you are building things that people actually want.
Just look at some of the awful mistakes made by planners in the 20th century.
* Entire neighbourhoods were bulldozed in many American cities to make way for huge road infrastructure projects. These projects mainly displaced socioeconomically disadvantaged people and ethnic minorities, with enormous and long-lasting impacts. Decades later, it is broadly acknowledged that massive road infrastructure is toxic to cities. It causes pollution, is enormously expensive to maintain and destroys the character of a city.
* Many countries built lots of huge Le Corbusier-inspired residential towers. Since then, we have learned that the 'towers in a park' ideal is incredibly destructive to communities and the urban fabric of cities. But the allure of big towers in 3D renders is hard to overcome - China went ahead and built enormous numbers of them in the last 30 years, even though urban planners worldwide already knew how bad they were.
* We covered the countryside in endless sprawl. Houses were built around the idea that everyone must own a car and drive everywhere. Communities are too sparse to support natural urban life - shops, cafes, community spaces and so on. Real, ecologically diverse nature was razed in favour of an endless grassy monoculture.
I believe we should have some humility and stop trying to revolutionise the world's cities, thinking that we know best. Instead, we should stick to improvements that we know definitely work. Transit-oriented development. Dense, walkable neighbourhoods. Quality green space for all. Elimination of private cars from city centres. Reliable electricity and clean water. District heating. Sustainable urban drainage. Strong environmental protection for bodies of water. And so on.
I'd say it worked well, and is not anything "unsustainable." Tell how exactly it is "wrong"
* They eliminate a lot of street life. Towers almost always have completely dead frontages at ground level - and they are unlikely to be directly adjacent to a real street. You will be driving to a mall - private space that has none of the democratic nature of a public street.
* They often reduce the connection between neighbours. Meeting someone in a lift or a corridor isn't the same as stopping to talk to someone in the street.
* The 'parks' are normally poor quality. Humans tend to feel more comfortable in enclosed spaces[1], whereas the parks are open fields that feel overshadowed by the large towers.
* The parks often feel unsafe too. A significant reason for this is that towers eliminate most of the 'eyes on the street'. You are likely to feel much safer walking past a row of terraced houses than between tower blocks at night.
* The buildings are often poorly built/maintained and become eyesores.
* They are often built in conjunction with wide roads and excessive parking.
Most countries have a good example of how housing towers go wrong. France has its Grands Ensembles - many of which are really cool buildings but which have not aged well[2]. Glasgow is now demolishing many of its towers[3]. Here's an in-depth report from Create Streets, a social enterprise that studies this kind of thing in the UK[4].
For balance, there is a more positive example in Vienna's social housing[5].
[1] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/getting_enclosure_right_creati... [2] https://favelissues.com/2018/01/22/les-grands-ensembles-a-so... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/22/disappearing-... [4] https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/cre... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE
The idea is to build relatively dense housing, but at a human scale - mostly 3-5 storeys. Combined with narrow streets that support walking and cycling, this creates enough density to support a 'real' city centre with shops, restaurants, offices and so on.
I think these videos convey the idea well:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o
Of course, this is not to say that you _can't_ build other kinds of housing. But many cities are badly balanced.
Chinese super/megablock urbanism connects to sufficient public transit and work mostly as planned. Add residence community governance layer (coordination mechanism for managing Wuhan covid lockdown) and you have a fairly functional setup, good civic participation especially in newer blocks with more mix-use at ground floors. It's a working urban model for megacities for massive countries, and one that would apply particularly well with India's density, flat terrain, assuming India can overcome infrastructure / transit deficit. Less proven strategies being explored now are managing internal migration and urbanization to growing tier2/3 cities to balance development.
But for a developing country with poor infra/housing stock, it might be developmentally prudent to just start spamming high density urbanism to get the ball rolling. There's enough cheap excess labour in India for generations to fix things up after the fact. But IMO India's problem is she's not ready to urbanize when huge % of population are farmers. Caste system fucked development priorities, too much focus on information services that employs the privileged few versus low end manufacturing opportunities that employs the masses. $2000 per capita and lack of development causes 700,000 infant mortalities per year, India needs coal plants and factories to alleviate poverty before it can afford sustainable cities. At least transition enough farmers to factory work to reduce stubble burning and justify the excess pollution.
Lol what? We warn against big-bang software rewrites because shit always goes wrong. But you're confident rebuilding a city perfectly is no big deal?
Semiconductors are the new food. Everyone wants to make them themselves. No one wants to depend on foreign fabs anymore.
But I'm afraid that at some point we will run out of raw metals to mine, including rare earths. There is already a shortage of lithium because of electric vehicles. Could the mass manufacturing of semiconductors squeeze global metal supplies even more? Iron, gold, cadmium, silver, platinum, titanium, these resources are finite and not renewable. Even if we run out in 10,000 years, what happens then? We need to recycle more of our old electronics, including computer chips and processors. A brilliant mind should come up with an industrial process that takes a few thousand chips and breaks them down into separate components. Turning manufactured electronics back into raw metals (except plastics, paint, and glue, which should be discarded).
Are asteroids known to contain rare earths?
https://xkcd.com/1389/
This xkcd talks instead about surface area, but suggests that the Earth holds a good chunk of the mine-able volume that can fuel industry.
Now, if we could siphon off hydrogen from the gas giants and fuse them into heavier elements, we could have orders of magnitude more material to work with.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschmidt_classification#Sid...
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110907132044.h...
I was surprised to learn that the earth is about as massive as Mercury, Venus, Mars, the moon and a few more moons combined.
Most asteroids have so little gravity that mining them out would be quite feasible.
But when these resources are "used up" it's not like they disappear (as opposed to, say, helium), and at some point in the future it will be economic to recycle them and mine them from landfills.
Once you get the fascism down, the propaganda that creates the illusion of efficiency will be there, too. They kinda go hand-in-armored-gauntlet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ARM DUNG PRO x85.9
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
My comments are mild, compared to everyone else’s inflammatory comments. Can you ban them also?
Though you know you mostly won't win a thing, and actually lose money. Its always fun to dream up a winning scenario and enjoy in your fantasies.
That's pretty much it. Everything else damned, people are treating the voting slip as an expensive lottery ticket. Lose economically, socially and suffer on the long run, for small time thrill in a day dream.
If "Make in India" succeeds, then If "I get a high paying job", then If "Save enough".... If then , If then, If then.... Soon you are driving high end German cars, and staying in expensive Gated communities.
A few auto manufacturers - Kia, SAIC and Citroen as I recall - have also set up new plants in India since 2014, although in this sector India was quite adept before 2014 also.
0. https://www.timesnownews.com/technology-science/article/indi...
That's a bit of a stretch.
The prime majority of them just assemble from knockdown kits to circumvent India's tarrifs, and bureaucratic phone registration scheme. Though I see more of them going for a more complete assembly in a few years time.
Assemble, yes, but a lot of the components also come from India. Xiaomi, for example, source 65% of their components from India itself. Of course, the really important parts like the processor, screen, camera, etc probably come from elsewhere because AFAIK they are not made in India yet.
> circumvent India's tarrifs
Adding those tariffs was intentional and part of the "Make in India" initiative. IIRC customs duty on a phone was 1% a few years back but it is now 21%.
> I see more of them going for a more complete assembly in a few years time.
Yes, very likely. Even with automobiles, initially only assembly was done in India, but over time an entire ecosystem of industries making many of the required components spawned here.
What do you think the Indian government would have to offer the international IC community to actually attract chip-makers?
QUAD unproven, India still wants Russian S400 despite CAATSA, dependence on sourcing from Russian MIC for decades to come, working relations with Iran. That's just some medium-term geopolitical positions against India. India will have problems getting leading edge for same reasons as China. Ultimately, India is too big to ever be junior partner and be subsumed under US controlled semi. Even if India had Chinese market capacity to absorb 300B of semi imports per year, they'd still have problems getting IC deals because at that point, a rich developed India that controls Indian Ocean is much scarier than rich China that controls SCS.
IMO India should hope Chinese semi efforts + EU/SK/JP attempts to spin off de-americanized supply chain succeeds - more semi tech spreads, more access to tech via political leveraging between blocs, better chance for indigenous Indian efforts. In the mean time focus on other achievable choke points like wafers, gas production, photo resist and insinuate itself into current global supply chain. Flex it's China-balance position and try to coerce modest 28nm fab for Indian MIC and slowly build from there. Realize it took SK/TW/US 40 years to build up capabilities. China will be lucky to do it in 30. No short cuts. The elephant in the room is obviously just getting country infra / business environment in order. IMO leading industries are whole of society problems. A country with $2000 per capita and heavy brain drain needs to solve the basics first.
India has the ambani/adani who literally own govt/public property today. They run the show. Wonder why they Havent started already?
As someone who has to see the bureaucracy up close with its ingrained corruption, I say this is not possible.
The taxes, the licenses, the mood of the people, the attitude of govt is just not proper.
Change takes time. I remember days when we used to host events and had to call up participants and offer them free food so they would come.
And now Indian software is producing some fantastic global products. Things take time.
Today when you lose 4G access the Indian state can point to the Islamist driven genocide and claim they are preventing another Islamist genocide. The choice for other Indians is would you have an Islamist state which is 100% purely Sunni Muslim with 4G Internet or one with a restive population with lesser freedoms but gives some semblance human rights to the 10-20% minority that is not Sunni Muslim but rather Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Shia and would get driven out, raped or just killed the moment the Indian state pulls back.
As to Ambani/Adani clique, the very jibe is farcical. There are dozens of billionaries minted in the past decade since Modi came to power. 90% of Adani's $55B wealth was added in the last 12 months on the stock market through publicly listed entities.
As to Ambani, I do wish he owned the country. Imagine if he could do to every service what he did to Internet data and voice calling - the cheapest rates in the world and near universal coverage. Heck, every country wishes he could own their telecom infrastructure lock, stock and barrel.
[1] http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/kashmiri-pandits-off...
https://www.meity.gov.in/writereaddata/files/EoI_Semiconduct...