Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India initially courted foreign companies to invest more in the country after his 2014 election victory, but his administration has turned protectionist as his party's re-election prospects have dimmed in recent months. Mr. Modi has increasingly sought to bolster Indian firms and curb foreign ones through new policies, including one that requires foreign companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express to store all data about Indians on computers inside the country.
The current BJP govt did not get protectionist all of a sudden. E-Commerce policy changes are not an important topic for any partys re-election prospects.
There are far more serious issues for Indian electorate...farmer distress, rising unemployment, promises not being kept, effects of super stupid demonetization, GST implementation etc. Add social polarisation of the country with Hindu-Muslim division being played for the BJP's right wing Hindu support base .
What is wrong if payment processors are asked to keep data inside geographical boundaries? (Tho technically it doesn't make much sense.) It cannot be seen as "protectionist" or "isolationist".
FB is useful for certain sections traditionally finding it difficult to get their voice heard.
I know activists in many languages including English - good / bad according to your political philosophy - who command a huge following on FB where they don't need an outlet in mainstream media to have their opinions heard. This is important for anyone who's not in the mainstream...for an example, take US, what if you don't get included in a NYT or Fox or WSJ...you may get some minor players.
You can always retort "why they cannot start a website or blog". But Facebook removes the effort needed (including the multiplier effects of having an audience, sharing, a much superior commenting system, archival etc.) of running a website/blog. There's no platform with the sophistication of Facebook where such community activity can be planned and rolled out.
Using a car analogy...its like using a Mac instead of Slackware.
I am typing this from a Linux Mint installation...its good for mainstream use, we need a Linux Mint type of Facebook...very usable, but not evil/spyware/manipulative.
My first trip outside my home country was to US...to San Francisco, October 1999. I was in my mid twenties.
I landed with $30...straight went to a Safeway and found a bottle of Popov. Then and now its only $10. Its fine stuff...especially when you filter it through a Brita.
On way to where I stayed those days - somewhere in Fremont - I saw the first big splashy billboard...garden.com Then and now I don't understand their business. I remember the billboard. I thought of PT Barnum...'there's a sucker born every minute".
San Francisco showed what US can be...the generosity and love which made Haight and Ashbury, the greedy blocky buildings of Cupertino, the tranquillity of Half Moon Bay and so on.
Almost two decades and many adventures later, at NYC I am still amazed by US...what a country, what an idea and imagination.
Movie theaters already make basically zero money on the tickets because they have to pay the movie distributors a fortune every time they show a movie in their theater.
Distributors cut is usually between 50 to 60%. Exhibitors keep the rest. I don't think exhibitors pay distributors money to show a film.
What is the Liberal position on immigration, and how will that position benefit America?
Birth rates are declining in the West as a whole. (Look at Europe, Russia and the classic case of Japan.) Even some of the states in India have stabilized. For economy to keep growing you need more consumers. Immigration helps that. (Unless you want folks of your own skin color.) Any counter argument about jobs being lost - at least today you have the least unemployment in decades.
May be you can make a case about "when automation comes they immigrants will be a financial burden". I guess a huge subset of the population will require some sort of UBI.
Canada has a sensible (you can call it progressive as well) immigration policy. They take in 1% of their population - about 350K migrants - an year. (I was a Canadian immigrant once, now an American immigrant.) For an American immigrant, your primary identity is of an American, and that's the whole point of United States of America.
This can happen. The top level associates and hangers-on are more rabid than the top dude himself. (Usually its a "dude".)
In India when the current hindu right wing administration got into power in 2014, someone from the home ministry (or close to Prime Ministers office) was identified as debasing Wikipedia articles on Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, and a true giant of a statesman.
The current PM Modi may understand he has differences of opinion about Nehru and his contributions to Indian society, but his acolytes and henchmen will do the dirty work without prompting.
FB is nothing but a media company, with a news feed that resembles live TV, albeit personalized and "customisable" to an extent.
In any publicly listed for profit media corp the tussle will be between the editorial department which wants full control on content vs marketing / sales which needs sales from selling space. FB has no editorial department, its the users for most part and algos, but marketing / sales is where FB earns its valuation and profile.
What do marketing/sales do? Sell space on news feed, and sell user data.
I feel FB will be profitable even if it stops selling user data. But then almighty greed.
The only plus for current fiasco..."FB boy for POTUS" is DOA.
Certainly Facebook deserves bankruptcy. Try to imagine if all the time wasted on Facebook was invested in ANYTHING useful. Too bad it isn't going to happen.
Think of days before Facebook, the supposedly available "free time" was not "invested" anywhere.
Your ugly and silly rant aside, I have not heard a cogent argument Britain staying outside EU will be good for it. Also, I have not heard a persuasive argument what can replace globalism/NAFTA or whatever.
The report is about Brexit. But it can be easily applied to US...the players are the same, the same agenda (though I have no clue what they want other than some chaos.)
If that's indeed the business model (create market share, move to self driving vehicles), what will stop from any of their competitors to replicate this model with cheaper self-driven transportation?
Yahoo had "huuuge" market share. It may still have.
Any rental company teaming with a software shop has a good shot. Even a ZipCar type of outfit.
I guess Uber got lucky. The guy running the outfit seems to be your garden variety sociopath and has run out of ideas. What they need is someone like Zuckerberg (he's indeed good, you can like/dislike Facebook.)
Aadhar may have flaky back-end systems, and will be exposed/leaked/hacked any day from now. (They use the super champion web-scale Mongo DB.)
Its a good idea, the benefits may outweigh the concerns. That said I do not know why they wanted bio-metric info other than the dudes championing Aadhar had big brother ideas. The ex CEO of Infosys - Nandan Nilekani - was heading Aadhar. He's one of those smart rich fools. He became popular among the East coast crowd when the other smart not-so-rich fool Thomas Friedman quoted him on NYT saying "world is flat".
Started typing "Twitter..." in the subject line and "Twitter and profit" auto-completed from a previous post.
Twitter should consider themselves as a not-for-profit service, retain its independence and so on. (May be the business model of Craigslist.) For that to happen, the current management and the VCs need to be nuked from the orbit.
Why is this bigotry? The claim in the report/article is absolute nonsense. It does not matter if the claim came from Jesus Christ or Mohamed or Siva or Buddha!
The PR guys wanted to show their boss in good light. But when making such claims please make sure its somewhat reasonable.
You are a class A moron and a liar. I did not say Kerala's education spend is Rs 220 CR, I said "office expenses" would include cost of software.
Kerala's expenditure on education is around Rs.15,000 crore in 2016-17 - refer page 25 of the detailed financial statement straight from Finance dept.
Yes, and what does that entail? Salary to teachers/staff.
The 150k value per machine includes not just Office software but FOSS replacements for other highly valuable ones like Matlab, Animation software, Molecular modelling, Interactive geometric sketching etc.
What silly nonsense! Add software costs which NASA uses to send rockets out of solar system and you will get a $5000 per machine figure. Then the cost savings will be even higher. And the idiots behind the PR release may get free PAZHAM PORI from the morons running the scheme.
They are talking about savings based on money they don't have.
The linked report says the assessment is based on Rs 150K ($2200) per machine cost for using proprietary stuff. No government in India will spend that sort of money on software licenses, forget about the spent on educational sector. This is imaginary stuff.
Here's the annual budget for the state of Kerala - https://kerala.gov.in/documents/10180/3793571/Revised%20Budget%202016-17_3 Go to page 4, and you can see a section for "Office Expenses" (which should include hardware, software, chairs, hammocks, water coolers, desks, fans and whatever else) for the whole state, including Department of Education - its Rs 220 CR, less than the claimed cost savings.
Its like claiming "I saved $100 million when I decided not to purchase an Airbus."
I am from Kerala. I have heard about the chappie mentioned in the report...a self aggrandizing fool.
The stock is down and advertising revenue is down.
Last year I spent some money on advertisement on online platforms. 80% of spent went to Facebook, 15% to Google properties, and whatever remaining to Twitter.
The ad platform of Facebook is *the* most sophisticated - the sort of filtering and targeting you can do is detailed, you can build an audience. Twitter is the worst, even the interface is from 1999.
Facebook is not making significant missteps. And Twitter is not taking any steps...forget about missteps. Whoever who's running Twitter should rework their ad platform, then it may or may not make profits.
But the core issue of Twitter...why push for profits? If the inventors were not greedy they could have used the model of Craigslist, remain as a useful public service. There will be enough money for your needs, not your wants.
When these people stay in the USA, they generally depress wages and send all the money they earn back to their home countries anyway, which does the rest of the US economy no good at all.
This is beyond ridiculous - especially the part "they send all money to home countries". When they buy houses, automobiles, send their children to school, pay taxes etc. they are a net contributor to the society. And what they do with their money is none of anyone's business...they may send it to their home countries, donate to a Trump charity, or they may go to Las Vegas.
You can make a valid argument H1B program needs tweaking, but you don't have to add gross generalizations, untruth and FUD to the mix.
Slashdot Mirror
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India initially courted foreign companies to invest more in the country after his 2014 election victory, but his administration has turned protectionist as his party's re-election prospects have dimmed in recent months. Mr. Modi has increasingly sought to bolster Indian firms and curb foreign ones through new policies, including one that requires foreign companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express to store all data about Indians on computers inside the country.
The current BJP govt did not get protectionist all of a sudden. E-Commerce policy changes are not an important topic for any partys re-election prospects.
There are far more serious issues for Indian electorate...farmer distress, rising unemployment, promises not being kept, effects of super stupid demonetization, GST implementation etc. Add social polarisation of the country with Hindu-Muslim division being played for the BJP's right wing Hindu support base .
Stray cows roaming around is probably more of a problem for Indians than whatever E-commerce stuff. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/07/16/amp-stories/why-india-has-million-stray-cows-roaming-country/
What is wrong if payment processors are asked to keep data inside geographical boundaries? (Tho technically it doesn't make much sense.) It cannot be seen as "protectionist" or "isolationist".
Not so fast.
FB is useful for certain sections traditionally finding it difficult to get their voice heard.
I know activists in many languages including English - good / bad according to your political philosophy - who command a huge following on FB where they don't need an outlet in mainstream media to have their opinions heard. This is important for anyone who's not in the mainstream...for an example, take US, what if you don't get included in a NYT or Fox or WSJ...you may get some minor players.
You can always retort "why they cannot start a website or blog". But Facebook removes the effort needed (including the multiplier effects of having an audience, sharing, a much superior commenting system, archival etc.) of running a website/blog. There's no platform with the sophistication of Facebook where such community activity can be planned and rolled out.
Using a car analogy...its like using a Mac instead of Slackware.
I am typing this from a Linux Mint installation...its good for mainstream use, we need a Linux Mint type of Facebook...very usable, but not evil/spyware/manipulative.
My first trip outside my home country was to US...to San Francisco, October 1999. I was in my mid twenties.
I landed with $30...straight went to a Safeway and found a bottle of Popov. Then and now its only $10. Its fine stuff...especially when you filter it through a Brita.
On way to where I stayed those days - somewhere in Fremont - I saw the first big splashy billboard...garden.com Then and now I don't understand their business. I remember the billboard. I thought of PT Barnum...'there's a sucker born every minute".
San Francisco showed what US can be...the generosity and love which made Haight and Ashbury, the greedy blocky buildings of Cupertino, the tranquillity of Half Moon Bay and so on.
Almost two decades and many adventures later, at NYC I am still amazed by US...what a country, what an idea and imagination.
Movie theaters already make basically zero money on the tickets because they have to pay the movie distributors a fortune every time they show a movie in their theater.
Distributors cut is usually between 50 to 60%. Exhibitors keep the rest. I don't think exhibitors pay distributors money to show a film.
The "I wanna be POTUS" dude and Lean On Woman are embarrassments. They should be deleted.
What is the Liberal position on immigration, and how will that position benefit America?
Birth rates are declining in the West as a whole. (Look at Europe, Russia and the classic case of Japan.) Even some of the states in India have stabilized. For economy to keep growing you need more consumers. Immigration helps that. (Unless you want folks of your own skin color.) Any counter argument about jobs being lost - at least today you have the least unemployment in decades.
May be you can make a case about "when automation comes they immigrants will be a financial burden". I guess a huge subset of the population will require some sort of UBI.
Canada has a sensible (you can call it progressive as well) immigration policy. They take in 1% of their population - about 350K migrants - an year. (I was a Canadian immigrant once, now an American immigrant.) For an American immigrant, your primary identity is of an American, and that's the whole point of United States of America.
This can happen. The top level associates and hangers-on are more rabid than the top dude himself. (Usually its a "dude".)
In India when the current hindu right wing administration got into power in 2014, someone from the home ministry (or close to Prime Ministers office) was identified as debasing Wikipedia articles on Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, and a true giant of a statesman.
The current PM Modi may understand he has differences of opinion about Nehru and his contributions to Indian society, but his acolytes and henchmen will do the dirty work without prompting.
FB is nothing but a media company, with a news feed that resembles live TV, albeit personalized and "customisable" to an extent.
In any publicly listed for profit media corp the tussle will be between the editorial department which wants full control on content vs marketing / sales which needs sales from selling space. FB has no editorial department, its the users for most part and algos, but marketing / sales is where FB earns its valuation and profile.
What do marketing/sales do? Sell space on news feed, and sell user data.
I feel FB will be profitable even if it stops selling user data. But then almighty greed.
The only plus for current fiasco..."FB boy for POTUS" is DOA.
Hyperloop is the new Segway.
Certainly Facebook deserves bankruptcy. Try to imagine if all the time wasted on Facebook was invested in ANYTHING useful. Too bad it isn't going to happen.
Think of days before Facebook, the supposedly available "free time" was not "invested" anywhere.
The folks who planned this should be given the Darwin award. May be Nobel too. They are worthy of both.
Your ugly and silly rant aside, I have not heard a cogent argument Britain staying outside EU will be good for it. Also, I have not heard a persuasive argument what can replace globalism/NAFTA or whatever.
Hmmm...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
Some hankee and pankee did happen.
Hmmm....
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
The report is about Brexit. But it can be easily applied to US...the players are the same, the same agenda (though I have no clue what they want other than some chaos.)
They should collaborate, co-mingle or do some sort of strategic conaplication. They are made for each other.
If that's indeed the business model (create market share, move to self driving vehicles), what will stop from any of their competitors to replicate this model with cheaper self-driven transportation?
Yahoo had "huuuge" market share. It may still have.
Any rental company teaming with a software shop has a good shot. Even a ZipCar type of outfit.
I guess Uber got lucky. The guy running the outfit seems to be your garden variety sociopath and has run out of ideas. What they need is someone like Zuckerberg (he's indeed good, you can like/dislike Facebook.)
Aadhar may have flaky back-end systems, and will be exposed/leaked/hacked any day from now. (They use the super champion web-scale Mongo DB.)
Its a good idea, the benefits may outweigh the concerns. That said I do not know why they wanted bio-metric info other than the dudes championing Aadhar had big brother ideas. The ex CEO of Infosys - Nandan Nilekani - was heading Aadhar. He's one of those smart rich fools. He became popular among the East coast crowd when the other smart not-so-rich fool Thomas Friedman quoted him on NYT saying "world is flat".
Started typing "Twitter..." in the subject line and "Twitter and profit" auto-completed from a previous post.
Twitter should consider themselves as a not-for-profit service, retain its independence and so on. (May be the business model of Craigslist.) For that to happen, the current management and the VCs need to be nuked from the orbit.
Oh well, this is like comparing a Tatamobile with a Ford 150. Its not even Apples to Oranges.
Why is this bigotry? The claim in the report/article is absolute nonsense. It does not matter if the claim came from Jesus Christ or Mohamed or Siva or Buddha!
The PR guys wanted to show their boss in good light. But when making such claims please make sure its somewhat reasonable.
Kerala's expenditure on education is around Rs.15,000 crore in 2016-17 - refer page 25 of the detailed financial statement straight from Finance dept.
Yes, and what does that entail? Salary to teachers/staff.
The 150k value per machine includes not just Office software but FOSS replacements for other highly valuable ones like Matlab, Animation software, Molecular modelling, Interactive geometric sketching etc.
What silly nonsense! Add software costs which NASA uses to send rockets out of solar system and you will get a $5000 per machine figure. Then the cost savings will be even higher. And the idiots behind the PR release may get free PAZHAM PORI from the morons running the scheme.
They are talking about savings based on money they don't have.
The linked report says the assessment is based on Rs 150K ($2200) per machine cost for using proprietary stuff. No government in India will spend that sort of money on software licenses, forget about the spent on educational sector. This is imaginary stuff.
Here's the annual budget for the state of Kerala - https://kerala.gov.in/documents/10180/3793571/Revised%20Budget%202016-17_3 Go to page 4, and you can see a section for "Office Expenses" (which should include hardware, software, chairs, hammocks, water coolers, desks, fans and whatever else) for the whole state, including Department of Education - its Rs 220 CR, less than the claimed cost savings.
Its like claiming "I saved $100 million when I decided not to purchase an Airbus."
I am from Kerala. I have heard about the chappie mentioned in the report...a self aggrandizing fool.
The stock is down and advertising revenue is down.
Last year I spent some money on advertisement on online platforms. 80% of spent went to Facebook, 15% to Google properties, and whatever remaining to Twitter.
The ad platform of Facebook is *the* most sophisticated - the sort of filtering and targeting you can do is detailed, you can build an audience. Twitter is the worst, even the interface is from 1999.
Facebook is not making significant missteps. And Twitter is not taking any steps...forget about missteps. Whoever who's running Twitter should rework their ad platform, then it may or may not make profits.
But the core issue of Twitter...why push for profits? If the inventors were not greedy they could have used the model of Craigslist, remain as a useful public service. There will be enough money for your needs, not your wants.
This thingy is the new Segway.
When these people stay in the USA, they generally depress wages and send all the money they earn back to their home countries anyway, which does the rest of the US economy no good at all.
This is beyond ridiculous - especially the part "they send all money to home countries". When they buy houses, automobiles, send their children to school, pay taxes etc. they are a net contributor to the society. And what they do with their money is none of anyone's business...they may send it to their home countries, donate to a Trump charity, or they may go to Las Vegas.
You can make a valid argument H1B program needs tweaking, but you don't have to add gross generalizations, untruth and FUD to the mix.