"People in other places are not saints. You might get cheated, swindled, or taken advantage of. Paradoxically, the best way to avoid that is to give strangers your trust and treat them well. Being good to them brings out their good. If you are on your best behavior, they will be on their best behavior. And vice versa. To stay safe, smile. Be humble and minimize your ego. I don’t know why that works everywhere in the world—even places with “bad” reputations—but it does."
This just got me! Its so true. That's been my experience too.
I have a feeling that male and female travel experiences may differ in this regard. "To stay safe, smile." seems pretty naive to me. Clearly, the author is male. I would proffer "always have an exit", "do not walk into something you cannot walk out of" and "do not stray too far from the crowd".
Even for white males, whilst it might help convince people you're one of the nice backpackers and not the rude backpackers or defuse situations caused by your faux pas, being trusting absolutely doesn't get you any sympathy from who make a living out of scamming or robbing tourists. Sure, escalating probably isn't the best way out either and the minor annoyances that cost you a dollar might be best overlooked, but switching your guard off is a terrible idea in a lot of parts of the world
Yeah, the author seems to be writing for a white male audience in some regards.
My wife and I host bicycle tourers when they pass through our town. One was Thomas Meixner, an East German who started travelling the world on bike when the wall fell. He's visited something like 120 countries and biked 250,000 km.
My wife asked him if he thought a solo woman could do what he did in the places he did it. He tactfully changed the subject.
My rule of thumb while travelling: Most people are good and will help you if go up to them and ask, and most of the people who initiate contact with you want your money.
While travelling I've never had a problem walking up to someone pretty much at random and asking for directions or recommendations, etc. Sometimes this turns into more than just a quick conversation, and that's great, meeting locals can be the best part of a trip. Hotel and restaurant staff are a great resource, too - ask questions.
However, most of the people who approach you as a tourist, particularly in places with lots of tourists, want your money. The swindlers and cheats aggregate in these places. They don't wait for tourists they want to rip off to approach them, they actively go after their prey, being practiced at taking advantage of their openness, confusing them, etc.
There are exceptions. Common sense goes a long way. Be way more careful when partying.
+1 Reminds me of something I heard from (I think) Penn Jillette:
In public spaces, if you pick someone out of a crowd for support, or you are randomly/unexpectedly put in a situation where you depend on a stranger, you're probably safe.
If someone else picks you without solicitation, or appoints themselves to support you, be careful.
>There are exceptions. Common sense goes a long way.
On a visit to London last year, walking down a street with some kiosks displaying pictures of aquatic life in the waters around the British isles, I was approached by a women who asked if I would mind taking a brief survey about the organization sponsoring the kiosks (Royal something or other). In the end she gave me £5 note for my time.
I think we are applying the wrong model here. We should not try to force-fit an app store model. A more applicable model is that of a decentralized internet and intranet. As in the case of intra-net, even though there were no visible benefits to the end-user, it did help the business itself improve margins by making information broadly available. Then just like the internet I would see these AI optimisations to work with one another Ex: It's totally possible that a model from Amazon and DHL talk to each other to optimize package delivery given a constraint like a truck parked on a loading dock and unable to move.
#1 Just like the intranet there are a lot of productivity gains that firms like Tesla, Meta, Google and Amazon can gain internally by optimizing their own workflows. That in itself should justify the investment. Granted some of these optimisations will use their own chips instead of Nvidia, but Nvidia will get a lion-share of this.
#2. Then there are other verticals - pharma, oil and gas, logistics who can optimize their internal workflows to gain productivity. It just helps them improve their margins. No end user benefit may be realized and that’s fine.
#3. Nation states are buying GPUs too. Ex: Falcon2 was trained on a cluster owned by a middle eastern country. Nation states see something larger at stake here than just releasing an app. This does not have to even be a profitable endeavour.
This I think is confined to 21st century western world. Asia (India + China largely) on the other hand is seeing a reverse phenomenon where the next generation frequently end up being more wealthy than their parents and grandparents.
This “western world” chart is showing approximately 5 generations from the “big economic boom” that created the middle class.
India and China are just now seeing the emergence of generation 2 or 3. What will it look like by gen 5? Based on the experience of young adults in China right now, not so great. India? We’ll see.
Thank you for bringing this clarity. And as an Indian citizen I am glad we took this step towards building an independent payments infrastructure, given how critical a payments clearance system is to the functioning of a modern economy.
I don't want other governments to hold us hostage through Visa's and Mastercard's where we are just one sanction away from economic meltdown. Just like what happened recently in Russia.
As a country we should be looking at securing other such critical support systems - Power control systems, Telecom hardware etc. That's the only way IMO to be truly independent!
In case you are not aware, UPI is basically a rebranded IMPS with Venmo style of address. Until UPI actually works internationally it is still a domestic payment system.
Singapore’s PayNow interfaces with UPI as well as PromptPay (Thailand). It’s only a matter of time before these payment rails get interconnected and SWIFT is history.
Absolutely, the US government has a long tradition of weaponizing US Dollar and SWIFT to cut off countries from global trade. This is a fact that has been happening ever since the petrodollar was invented. Governments all over the world, especially India, have realized this is a big vulnerability and a threat to their country's sovereignty. India, Brazil and several countries across the world have invested in their own infrastructure as they rightly should to keep their economic independence.
For those who don't know India has been on the receiving end of US sanctions for a variety of reasons. While the reasoning behind the sanctions has been long debated, it is plainly obvious from the Indian vantage point that economic independence is very critical for their survival.
> For those who don't know India has been on the receiving end of US sanctions for a variety of reasons.
According to wikipedia[0] there‘s only ever been two sanctions against India by the US. A short lived one from 98-99 because of a nuclear ban and a much longer one from 92-2011 related to the space program/missile development.
A quick search didn‘t turn up any current US sanctions either. Were there more sanctions or are you referring to these two?
There were recent (2019-2022) conversations about sanctions against India for buying S-400 missile launchpads [0]
This was dropped after a last minute amendment of CAASTA [1].
Though, if we're actually being honest, there was no real chance of sanctions actually being placed - it was just a negotiating ploy, and Indian Weapons manufacturers are increasingly working with American companies like GE and General Dynamics for IP transfers, though they lag behind Israel, France, and Russia in that market (FCPA's ability to pierce the corporate veil and an imo rightful aversion to IP transfers to generic competitors plays a big role in America's lag in the Indian defense market).
> A quick search didn‘t turn up any current US sanctions either.
The US and Indian governments have had bad relations for a long time. The US has the habit of weaponizing anything and everything. While not exactly sanctions, people don't forget things like PL480[1] that easily:
> Many of us still have hurtful memories of the mid-'60s when, after two successive years of savage drought, India desperately needed American wheat under the US Public Law 480 on rupee payment — and at relatively low prices because the country had no foreign exchange to buy food in the world market. Indira Gandhi had just become prime minister and chose to go to Washington on an official visit. Lyndon Johnson gave her a gushing welcome and responded to the food problem confronting her effusively, promising as many as 10 million tons of PL480 wheat. However, at an early stage the transaction turned sour.
> Infuriated by India's criticism of American bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong in the course of the Vietnam War, the irascible Texan put food shipments on such a tight leash that India literally lived from ship to mouth. With every morsel we swallowed a little humiliation. When told that the Indians were saying exactly the same thing as the UN Secretary-General and the Pope were, Johnson had retorted: "The Pope and the Secretary-General do not need our wheat."
Interesting. There are a lot of stories from the 1960s about us giving/trading food to India.
The US had a massive surplus, and was trying very hard not to destroy excess food.
They sent food to India, because the alternative was to let it go bad. And they would thank India for taking it.
But when diplomats realized this was happening, they tried to use it to extract concessions from India.
So India was being told “please take this food,” then “now that you’ve taken the food you owe us.”
India wasn’t exactly pure in this either.
India has been thankfully free of widespread famine since the British left. But internal controls created shortages, which were unnecessary.
India could have fed itself, but that was politically untenable, just as it was politically untenable for the US government to destroy food or stop paying farmers to overproduce.
> Domestic mismanagement in India can hardly be called a sanction by the U.S.
There is more to this.
The partition of India in 1947 divided Punjab in such a way that most of the fertile land went to Pakistan. Food shortages were soon a reality that would take decades to resolve.
There is also this theory that explains the partition of India in terms of the (then) looming Cold War. Creating Pakistan and supporting its claim on Kashmir prevented the USSR direct access to the Arabian Sea through Afghanistan and then India.[1][2][3]
> [Jinnah] was backed by British imperialists, notably Winston Churchill, who believed Pakistan would prove a faithful friend to the West and a bulwark between the Soviet Union and a socialist India.
> independent financial system
It is not a question of the financial system in particular, but of attitudes. The US has historically not shied away from using every available tool in order to achieve its geopolitical goals, be it finance or aid. But these actions cast long shadows that have to be dealt with generations after the people involved are long dead and buried.
The US has a tradition in messing with banking, but it’s not long. While sanctions have existed forever, weaponzing the banking system did not start until the last decade or two, when more power was given to FATF, and other non-elected international bodies led by the US.
> Which non-Western countries are competing on creativity?
As I see it, Asian economies like India, China, Japan, South Korea offer a reasonable competition to Western economies today.
1. Samsung is a very viable competitor to Apple in hand held + wearables creative space.
2. Indian fin-tech solutions IMO today are some of the best in the world. All I need is a phone to shop for things (from buying a car to paying for parking) and have not used a credit/debit card for a year now (I live in India). Same in Indian edu-tech space. A lot of kids have quit school and are learning at home. Full time. I have not seen this happen anywhere before.
3. Toyota's are way more reliable than BMW's, Audi's and Ford's.
4. TSMC vs Intel is another good example.
I foresee a lot of innovation happening in Asia right now to go global in this and next decade.
Um, TSMC sources many parts which are made exclusively in America. The machines TSMC uses for all of its highest end semiconductor work come from a company called ASML which whilst being a Dutch company sources many of its most sophisticated parts from the U.S. and Europe. But before we bother to argue about what is and is not a knowledge economy, humor me this one possibility.
Perhaps there is no such thing as a "knowledge" economy. At least not in a mass sense. Maybe instead the design knowledge which will drive automation is derivable from only a fraction of the population. That is only a small fraction of the population is capable or necessary for producing this knowledge. Perhpas the Utopia in which every child achieves a doctorate in engineering, medicine, etc was just a fantasy.
Perhaps the people who most perpetrated this story were motivated to. Because they were either complicit in the dismantling of the West's lower middle class economy or perhaps because they were apologists of untrestrained "free markets" and they needed a way to square their dogma without seeming cruel.
Perhaps the consequences of globalization minus the dogmatic fantasy of "everyone will be educated into being einstein" left the nagging uncomfortable suspicion that growth had its limits and someday we would have to admit that the only answer to making sure an equitable portion of wealth made its way into everyone's pockets wasn't an endless growth, every mom blasting their womb with Bach, an STM on every crib nerdocracy but instead gasp dare I say it? Redistribution!?
> admit that the only answer to making sure an equitable portion of wealth made its way into everyone's pockets
This is the key difference between the two ideologies. One side believes equity should be distributed equally regardless of achievement, the other believes equity distribution is directly correlated to productive measures of success.
"From those with the greatest ability, to those with the greatest need."
> One side believes equity should be distributed equally regardless of achievement
I'm not sure this is true. I think a lot of people including economics professors like to consider themselves fairly humanistic. And I think the idea of a mass of people permanently living near or below poverty bothers them.
And I think they take it somewhat for granted that their favorite economic theory has in our recent past effectively provided a middle class standard of living for many people. But when we start talking about dismantling the mechanisms which have created the large middle class and how it could decrease quality of life and increase poverty, they don't offer an honest assessment based on the fundamentals of their theory. That would be to say, "well yes such changes may induce pverty here."
Instead there is kind of a shrug. We'll become a service economy, nevermind making a comparison of the quality of the new service jobs against those being transplanted.
Or we'll become a knowledge economy, the great brain of global capital. Again never really contending with the question of whether that is even possible.
This allows them in my opinion to advocate politicies which harm people whilst shrugging off any guilt because instinctively they know to willfully empoverish people is wrong. It is this dishonesty that bothers me.
My gripe is not with those advocating against redistribution. Though my personal politics are for a mass ownership of property in some regard. My gripe is with people who have setup what might be a fiction (maybe it could be real too) as the answer to making choices which create suffering. And then for that image to have become a dogma we all expected to accept without questioning its basis in reality.
I'm willing to accept that I could be wrong. But I come from a working class background. I've known a lot of working class people over the years and the idea that most or even many of them are going to pivot into IT or what have you is just nonsense. The vast majority have pivoted into low paid service work without much social insurance of any kind.
I am someone who has a masters degree and I have taken Distributed systems, Computer Architecture and Advanced Algorithms at Bradfield. In my experience, I would rate Bradfield better than a master degree for these reasons -
1. Was more relevant and practical. It was taught by people who have worked building real things in the real world.
2. Better ROI on time spent learning. In about 8 weeks (roughly 2 hours every week) and some self study I had the confidence to apply the learnings and continue learning more. Time comes at premium to me as I am working full time and have a family to take care of
3. Cheaper than a university course. It costs 2k USD roughly for a course.
During the same time, I also tried OMSCS from GATECH. I felt I got way more from these Bradfield's courses by spending less time and money than OMSCS as well. That said, its just me and YMMV.
Thank you for building it! This is super useful. I have always been frustrated with not having access to a clean calendar, given that I use mac os (for personal stuff) and windows (for work). Apple built-in calendar app and Outlook calendar for Windows are too clunky to use. cal -y is convenient if you have a terminal window open, which I often don't have . Most of the times when I need to do something with the dates I am on my browser and what you have built comes in handy.
The "(2011") in the title is a bit confusing in this regard since that's when the review was published; but the subject is more obvious if you know the book itself was published in 1978.
+1. I was on H1B Visa for a decade (6 + 4). Worked at Amazon (AWS networking) for 5 of those years and changed jobs 4 times in those 10 years. I honestly loved working at Amazon, job was challenging, learnt so much because people around me were incredibly smart, and this job practically gave me a career. I moved back to India last year though and now given the cost of living here, I don't have to work if I don't want to for the rest of my life.
This just got me! Its so true. That's been my experience too.