saravanannkl

China is a different story, let's exclude that.

India's requirement is 12 years seems a lot, but practically Indian citizen's path to citizenship in US is more than that(~10 years to get GC + mandatory 5 years after GC). EB1 might be an exception, which will also come around 6-8 years. But most end up waiting more than 15 years to become US citizens.

US restricts employment visas with a specific time limit. L1(7 years) and H1(6 years). After that period, you have to stay out of the country for 12 months, before you can reapply again. The other option is to apply for Green Card (Permanent Residency). So most of them end up applying GC rather than move out of the country for an year.

US has weird rules that inherently makes difficult even for employment based visas. E.g. If your visa is near expiry, then you can apply for extension. But the extension processing times takes up months. You can't travel out of the country during that period. Even if your petition is approved, then you have to go to US embassy in your country of citizenship to get visa stamped in your passport. Unless you have a visa stamped in your passport, you can't reenter US. Practically there is no visa appointment slots available at US embassies in India at this time. You are in a soup if you have to travel on an emergency

https://twitter.com/debarghya_das/status/1520966725210042368

https://twitter.com/USAndChennai/status/1517067638584664064

If a foreigner works in India on an employment visa, I don't think they have to run into issues what someone faces with the US immigration system. Just see what Curl's author Daniel Stenberg experience with US Visa process,

https://daniel.haxx.se/us-visa.html

Thanks. I am bit wary about Android devices as they become slower after some time.

Thanks. My primary use cases are reading library books, long form articles for offline reading and classic books. So Overdrive/Libby and Calibre support is critical. Kobo seems good for those tasks. I am bit wary about Android devices as they get slowed down after some time.

No. Tinderizer is fine. Amazon provides an email id for your device. If you send any document to that email address, then it gets delivered to your kindle. If you use Convert as subject line, then it converts the attachment into Kindle format (AZW3). Otherwise it will send the attachment as is to your device. Tinderizer uses this feature. To send email to this kindle device address, you have to whitelist the from address. It is one of the step that you have to do while setting up Tinderizer bookmarklet.

Account closure was due to different reason. Few months back I ordered a phone from Amazon India, but they delivered a perfume. When complained to CS, they closed my account with a vague reason reason that I violated ToS by using a duplicate account. This account closure after I had this account for more than 10 years and have used it in Amazon.com and Amazon.in. Earlier this month, I have a filed a consumer court case (similar to small claims in US) in India.

I am looking for Kindle alternatives as Amazon has closed my account unilaterally. I was looking for alternatives and Kobo seems to be the only alternative to Kindle. RSS integration via Pocket seems interesting. Apart from the ereader feature, how does Kobo compare against Kindle ? Do you have any recommendation for which model to buy ?

There is a free service called Tinderizer[1], which sends web page to kindle using a bookmarklet. It works by opening the web page in a browser, apply readability javascript code, convert to PDF and emails to your kindle email address. All of this done in backend in a very few seconds. It will automatically appear in your kindle shortly after that. It won't work properly for subscription sites as it takes snapshot of the non logged in user. I have used this service for nearly a decade until Amazon decided to close my account.

[1] https://tinderizer.com/

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Government digital services are improving, but not at the pace that people may expect. Modi scrapped the practice of getting attested documents. Now you can self attest. There are also some interesting initiatives like digilocker[1] where the government documents are issued and stored based on Aadhar number. You can use that to submit documents to third parties directly from digilocker. People have opened bank accounts using Aadhar [2] within minutes.

There are some challenges to address. You still have to deal with the bureaucracy. E.g. I went to apply Aadhar for my wife at my local municipality office. The person who was distributing the application form asked me to come after 5 hours. The reason he gave was there is some meeting going on and he can't give the form to me until the meeting was over. I had to then involve my ward councilor and the chairman(mayor) to get the form. Now official gave a different reason. People are wasting the forms, so we are not distributing it. I thought you must be kidding me. Since I knew the elected officials I got these forms. Think about people who don't know important people in that office.

There are privacy concerns about Aadhar. Government need not collect biometric information for Aadhar. They should have made Aadhar similar to US social security number instead of collecting biometrics.

[1] https://digilocker.gov.in/ [2] https://twitter.com/deepakshenoy/status/744208624545763329

Thanks for the reply. I could not find your mail id in your profile. You can send me an email to {My HN username}{at}gmail and I can send you more details

Is solar viable for small installations without any subsidies ? I was recently looking at a 30KW proposal for a small enterprise in Tamil Nadu. The quoted price is Rs. 36 lakhs. At the rate of Rs 6.75 per unit, it doesn't even cover the interest costs. Does this match with your capex costs or is this way off ?