121–130 of 241 posts
Could negative currency be useful? For instance a fungible, negotiable debt instrument, registered on a blockchain so it can't be unilaterally destroyed. Put contractual language on it to the effect that "Registering acceptance of this note obligates you to pay $X to the U.S. treasury by date Y." Bob buys an apple from Alice but doesn't have the cash, so instead accepts/registers a -$1 note from Alice, who now has le…
That reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent it back in the business-reply envelope. I guess they were happy I had paid my bill because they finally stopped sending them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is too good to be true, police would have smashed him just out of ego
Only if you want to see the worst in people. The bribe accepting police is also, in many cases, not doing this out of malice. Police financing in India is pretty fucked up, and I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. Anyways if you are the police in that situation, it makes much more sense to let the "activist" sort of g…
At the risk of being downvoted, I feel compelled to offer a foreigner's perspective here. As a foreigner who has lived in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai for 2 to 6 months many times, I have to agree with the other commenter that I did not find a functioning society. Things I saw during my visits:
- Cops refusing to file a report after a theft.
- No medical or police help during accidents. It's up to the untrained passers-by to administer some form of first aid and take an injured person to medical care facility.
- Motorcycle riders driving on sidewalks.
- Cars driving on the wrong side of the road.
- Drivers not yielding to pedestrians at crosswalks.
- Tuk-tuks refusing rides in gross violation of government regulations.
- Damage and pilferage of public property in Indian Railways.
- Eunuchs extorting money from unsuspecting people in broad daylight.
Some of these things are not exceptions but the rule. This does not consititute a functioning society per my expectations and standard of living. This is a total breakdown of law, order, civility, decency, and courtesy in society.
That reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent it back in the business-reply envelope. I guess they were happy I had paid my bill because they finally stopped sending them.
I once read a similar apocryphal narrative. Someone, kept receiving 0$ credit card bills and the company sent repeated reminders with warnings. The person called, sent letters to discuss the situation but to no avail. The person finally gave up and wrote a 0$ check and they stopped sending letters. However, it led to a computer systems crash as the credit card company software encountered a "Divide by Zero" error due…
Reminds me of Bobby Tables
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if you want to see the worst in people. The bribe accepting police is also, in many cases, not doing this out of malice. Police financing in India is pretty fucked up, and I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. Anyways if you are the police in that situation, it makes much more sense to let the "activist" sort of g…
> I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. At the risk of being downvoted, I feel compelled to offer a foreigner's perspective here. As a foreigner who has lived in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai for 2 to 6 months many times, I have to agree with the other commenter that I did not find a functioning society. Thi…
You could be downvoted, the real reason is so many Indians don't even think this is anything wrong. Globalization has presented an opportunity for Indians like me to travel abroad and see how well the systems work outside. For a lot of Indians, something like this is invisible. Often the exposure is to infrastructure seen through Hollywood movies or these days, YouTube.
The 3 years or so I spent in Bay Area,CA literally floored my mind. Things as simple as getting a California State Identity card without bribes, to VTA drivers saying Good morning. Trains run on time, parks are kept clean. People pay taxes, police doesn't ask for bribes, people cleaning up after their dogs in parks. I have even seen emergency services arrive in like minutes in case of accidents in places like Sunnyvale.
Heck when I was there the Santa Clara County was doing some water harvesting project for millions. That's like a small residential area equivalent in Bangalore, the scale and audacity of ambition itself was shocking to me. The contrast being, a place like Koramangala in Bangalore, would probably debate to death to a get a leaf composter and instead burn the leaves and pollute the air around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if you want to see the worst in people. The bribe accepting police is also, in many cases, not doing this out of malice. Police financing in India is pretty fucked up, and I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. Anyways if you are the police in that situation, it makes much more sense to let the "activist" sort of g…
> I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. At the risk of being downvoted, I feel compelled to offer a foreigner's perspective here. As a foreigner who has lived in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai for 2 to 6 months many times, I have to agree with the other commenter that I did not find a functioning society. Thi…
Beyond that, the degree to which the governments in India have stifled economic growth and the potential of the country is truly horrifying. Up until around 1990, the governments agenda was perpetual poverty as they made it impossible for people to start businesses, by imposing significant red tape, and requiring regulatory approval for every little thing (look up "License Raj").
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Yes. Policemen are getting pretty low wages. But there are always a lot of people who want to work there, because they can get bribes. And they actually paying percentage of those bribes to their higher-ups and so on, so it's like a pyramid. And a lot of people want things to stay that way. Policemen are getting good income. Their masters are getting huge income. Ordinary people can pay much less to policeman, than t…
> It's that terrible win-win to everyone situation and that makes it very hard to destroy. It does make it sound like there's a bribery-free equilibrium really close by though. Like imagine all of these things happened as part of a single reform: - Policeman and management salaries go up. - Fines go down. - Taxes go up. - Anti-bribery enforcement goes way up. The idea would be to acknowledge that regardless of the br…
That won't yield much because the gap between even a 100% increase in salary and the amount of bribes they collect is vast.
E.g. salary of an inspector could be, say INR 40k-50k per month but the bribes being collected typically would be millions of INR. Suppose an inspector has 15 people reporting to him who are collecting INR 200 from 300 people per day and the inspectors share in this is just 5%. Then the amount per month is 200 * 300 * 30 * 15 * .05 = INR 1350000. If I assume the salary to be 50k per month, this bribe amount is 27 times that. It is just not possible for the government to get the salary even in the same vicinity (just for kicks, Indian President's salary is about INR 500000 per month).
That reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent it back in the business-reply envelope. I guess they were happy I had paid my bill because they finally stopped sending them.
Did they ever deposit the check?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if you want to see the worst in people. The bribe accepting police is also, in many cases, not doing this out of malice. Police financing in India is pretty fucked up, and I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. Anyways if you are the police in that situation, it makes much more sense to let the "activist" sort of g…
> I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. At the risk of being downvoted, I feel compelled to offer a foreigner's perspective here. As a foreigner who has lived in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai for 2 to 6 months many times, I have to agree with the other commenter that I did not find a functioning society. Thi…
I think it all comes down to population and resulting resource crunch, leaving folks trying to find all sorts of ways to use situations to their advantage. While one can argue that it comes as a part of culture as well, I would say the said culture develops because while we can act self-less and well-mannered for some time or even some generations, poverty and competition eventually gets to you and makes you behave it all sorts of ways.
Corruption only adds to the plight. That must be stopped.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. At the risk of being downvoted, I feel compelled to offer a foreigner's perspective here. As a foreigner who has lived in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai for 2 to 6 months many times, I have to agree with the other commenter that I did not find a functioning society. Thi…
For the most part, a functioning government is non-existent in India. The primary activity of both the federal/central and state governments in India is theft (through bribes as well as taxes), and being a drag on the economy. It's not unlike a Mafia-run protection racket. If you don't pay bribes or taxes, you either get in trouble, or don't get basic services. A good chunk of the tax revenue is robbed by at various…
The more things change, the more they remain same. You can't exactly fix these things with laws. You need to have cultural change at some point in time.
I remember a colleague telling a story about a product company shuttering its offshore center in India. A lot of Indian colleagues stood up and spoke passionately about the benefits and advantages of doing business in India, including access to talent. Apparently the boss in US, he was a CTO just stoop up asked us a simple question:
What do you guys make in India?
It was a fairly simple question, it was a kind of brutal self appraisal, but apart from making soaps and clothing and ball point pens, you really struggle to answer the question. What IP do we build here? and what do we make that we sell, like products? Compare this with any top world economy today like US, China, Germany, UK etc. You begin to realize how far behind we are.
India is all about reselling things we don't make. In this kind of an economy, higher your population, more hands the goods change through. Each person gets a cut, you could linear interpolate this, have a 3 billion population and even exceed US economy. But it will change nothing in people's living standards, or quality, it won't give them quality education or health care, or anything for that matter. Basically numbers look beautiful, while nothing changes on the ground.
Lastly Indian love for bureaucracy and red tape is undying and eternal. This comes from aristocracy and government. People think being management jobs means doing 0 work and having access to slaves who serve them while making big money. Ivy League grads aspire to do MBA's from top colleges. Programmers want to be managers ASAP. Pretty much all my cousins have a distance education MBA. No appetite for engineering.
In short you can't change this with laws. People have to change.