adithyareddy
https://www.deccanherald.com/india/meity-forms-team-to-probe...
- Low GDP per-capita, offset by immense scale, which means the central government can mobilize massive resources for national projects, but municipal bodies are financially starved (municipal revenues in India are < 1% of total tax collections, for context it's 6% in South Africa and 10% in Brazil). Cities are completely dependent on the state for money, unlike countries where cities control their own property and commercial taxes, so they raise very little on their own, and states have multiple other priorities so cities never get as much money as they need.
- Leading off the previous point - executive power over cities is very fragmented, most authority rests with state chief ministers and state-appointed bureaucrats rather than empowered local mayors, so city planning is subordinate to state-level political priorities. City management itself is divided among uncoordinated state-level bodies (separate agencies for roads, water, power, and transit). There's a lot of accountability voids where something goes wrong and everybody thinks it's a different body's responsibility. The poor coordination also means you'll have things like a road laid on Monday, and on Wednesday the water authority digs it up to fix pipes underneath.
- The Indian constitution guarantees freedom to move and reside anywhere, so it's not legally possible to control rural to urban migration like China did with its Hukou system. E.g. Bangalore adds anywhere from 350k to 600k people a year almost entirely from internal migration. Much faster than housing, transit, and civic utilities can keep up with.
Things are getting better, although slowly and unevenly:
- Mass transit is expanding rapidly
- Door-to-door solid waste collection now reaches roughly 98% of urban wards (tougher than you would think because the unrestricted migration tends to create a lot of ad-hoc unplanned settlements on the outer parts of cities)
- The central government is working on allowing cities to issue municipal bonds to raise their own funds.
- Bangalore now (as of last year) has a single body called the Greater Bangalore Authority that has statutory oversight over previously uncoordinated agencies that handle water, transport, power, transit etc. Other state governments with major cities are watching to see how it plays out, and will likely copy + adapt it to their own major cities based on how it goes.
If you're a video game company, you invest millions of dollars in a project up front, for years, and you don't know until after release whether you:
- Make back all the money you spent plus a healthy profit on top.
- Just break even, but you lost the opportunity cost of all the other things that money could have been spent on with better utility.
- Your game flops and you wasted all the money you spent developing it.
It's also highly uneven. Extremely likely that King (Candy Crush) and Mojang (Minecraft) are making a ton of money, and everything else is a money pit where you pour in millions of dollars and you don't even make your money back.
(a) Have a camera (b) Are recording?
I would definitely give it a shot if you haven't tried it before.
I much prefer it to having to click through links to find things. My last handful of searches were:
- Looking up open hours for a local store
- Defining words
- "postgres select where string has prefix"
- "cloudformation read parameter from ssm"
Things where I want to look up a fact, but want an answer right away without having to read through multiple pages.
Harm reduction is about shifting probability distributions, not guaranteeing outcomes. Kids can still get into pill bottles with childproof medication caps, but accidental ingestion of aspirin by children reduced by 40-55% after they were mandated. [0]
I've always defaulted to using https://yarnpkg.com/ to search for packages cause the npmjs.com search is so slow, but while the yarnpkg.com search is super fast, actually clicking on a package and seeing the details page takes forever.
This is super fast for both search and the details page, and it's super keyboard friendly which makes it even faster to use in practice. Definitely going to become my go-to search now. Love it, thanks for building it!
Zulip in general is a great example of a large open source Django app that's been maintained and actively developed for a long time. I use it as a reference quite a lot.