sidm83

Yeah already saw that. What I found most disappointing was the response of customer support, which rather than trying to understand customers' problems and responding assiduously, flatly give out a non solution (use cards that work) and provide zero alternatives or an extension till they resolve this issue.

After reading multiple raving reviews here and elsewhere, I decided to use Backblaze for remote backups.

This Feb, my payment (auto debit via CC) failed, and upon logging in could not figure out any other way to pay.

I soon received an interesting email from them ( https://i.imgur.com/p19SaFX.png ) which said they do not support Reserve Bank of India (RBI) 's e-mandate policy and advised me to use a card which does not include e-mandate. European customers have a similar issue due to 3D Secure.

I as an Indian citizen only have RBI authorized credit cards, which have been on e-mandate since late 2021. I have faced a similar issue with card auto debit on other websites as well due to this policy, however they all support alternate payment methods.

Backblaze does not, and has provided no alternative since this cropped up 2 months ago. Customer support has no solution as well. I just received an email that failing further payment, my account will go poof next month.

How a company running a critical service such as backups can screw up so badly regarding a fundamental business requirement such as billing is beyond me. They will simply cease operating for almost all European / Indian customers in a little over a month's time.

Even if they manage to dig themselves this, not sure one can trust them enough to continue being a "going concern".

This reminds me of this quote from one of my all time favorite books, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency :

<quote> The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. </quote>

Completely agree, did it in a few countries and truly enjoyed the freedom of stopping anywhere I wanted, wherever I encountered beautiful surroundings, and staying as long as I wanted, not to forget enjoying the place on my own rather than among a busload of fellow travelers.

Must say though that the Swiss certainly make this much easier to do with their excellent public transport and the Swiss Pass, which is your single ticket to go almost anywhere in the country including trains, buses, subway, boats and even cable cars! In the few cases its not included, you get a discounted rate. However parts of the country are so lovely that hiking through them is the only way to truly appreciate their beauty!

Not really a secret. This went viral on twitter 1-2 weeks ago leading to several news reports.

In India, you can book an appointment for MRI scans at private clinics the very same day or at worst within 1-2 days. Costs about USD 100 or lesser.

There is also this startup - https://qure.ai (Not my employer, I know someone who works there) which has already automated the report generation part for several classes of X Ray / CT / Ultrasound scans. This takes away the requirement of having a trained Radiologist to go through the scan and then create a report, which certainly helps in scaling the availability of such scans - you just need the machine and trained staff to operate it, and are not dependent upon having a doctor with a postgrad in radiology to write the reports.

In India, apps like Google Pay (which runs on UPI platform) require you to first unlock the app using your screen lock method and then also require entry of a pin to confirm any kind of money transfer.

This is a false assertion. I have gone through sample birth certificates of multiple states in India, I did not find any of them mentioning caste. Caste certificate is a separate document, issued only upon application, which can then be used as proof for applying for reservation benefits.

Ref https://www.nriway.com/nri-service/nri-birth-certificate https://www.indiafilings.com/learn/caste-certificate-in-indi...

Cis white males and upper caste Indians say hi.

Completely agree with what you say. To get through the inertia during the pandemic, I finally got started with reading Upanishads and ended up reading 6. A lot of content may not make sense, but there were such absolute profound gems of wisdom that I was astonished how someone sitting in a forest thousands of years ago could go into the depths of thought in order to produce such deep insights.

A few years down the line I hope to enter into a guru-shishya (teacher-disciple) regimen to understand more of it, the way it is supposed to be learnt.

For those interested, Aitareya Upanishad by Swami Chinmayanand would be a pretty good book to get started with, it has commentary which most of us should easily understand.

I remember doing something like this with a CRT monitor way back in the early 2000s.

There may be some truth in the "too woke for normie crowd" allegation. Earlier this year, much before the bad news went global for Netflix, Reed Hastings said this about experience in India during an earnings call:

"The great news is in every single other major market, we've got the flywheel spinning. The thing that frustrates us is why we haven't been as successful in India. But we're definitely leaning in there,"

The general opinion in India is that unlike Prime Video India and Disney Hotstar (Disney Plus' Indian avatar) which created a lot of good local content which served the interest of masses and hence achieved success, a lot of Netflix' local content mostly served the tastes of a sub-segment of the well earning, well traveled elite crowd (read "woke") from the bigger cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Apparently this was because the local producers came from the same group and were not tuned to the tastes of the country at large (or even the affluent segment at large). Many of them have since been fired and Netflix India has also gone ahead and reduced monthly subscription for the standard plan to only INR 199 and a new mobile only plan for only INR 149 (~ USD 2). Has not made much of a difference in the past few months though.

Ref :

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60108294

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/netflix-slashes-i...

My mum had started using a desktop at work (Windows) for the first time in the mid 2000s (she was ~50 at the time) which was used for basic work like creating / editing documents / spreadsheets and emails/browsing. She used to find it challenging to use and usually got her work done by subordinates.

Around 2008 I got myself a new personal laptop and gave her my old one (2003 compaq, setup with Ubuntu) and taught her basic usage during a short trip to home. She picked it up quite well and managed to do all her work on her own, and even used it for general browsing. She continued to use it till around 2015 when she retired and decided to live with us. It functioned just fine even then without slowing down like a typical windows machine, even though the battery had basically become useless and it needed to be plugged on to be used.

Recently we emptied our old home (set to be sold) and she got that laptop back. It still functions the same way, though she has no use for it now as she's used to smartphones/tablets so its set to be donated.

Haven't really watched any Korean TV series yet except of course Squid Games, but I've been hooked to their movies since I first saw My Sassy Girl ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293715/ ) nearly 2 decades ago. Having not been exposed to any Asian cinema except the typical Jackie Chan / Bruce Lee Kung Fu movies, this was quite a revelation as it really appealed to typical Indian sensibilities. Remember re-watching it with family members who were one generation older and they loved it too.

Since then I have been exposed to far more quality Asian cinema especially from Japan but haven't experienced the kind of connect one gets from a Korean film, be it a crime thriller, romance or typical drama. Not sure whether those brought up in the West have the same level of connect though.

On a further note, its great to get exposed to such variety of International entertainment via Netflix et al, who have really leveled the playing field when it comes to distribution.

This is a great response throwing light on the actual new protocol which does seem to make sense.

Again, generalization. What you're talking about mostly refers to small time sites with maybe not more than few dozen orders a day. Typical ecommerce businesses (usually the kind with at least 100s or 1000s of orders a day) write their own code rather than using WP plugins.

As far as PCI DSS goes, there are multiple levels. Even at the tier 2 Indian ecom company I used to work at, we did not store any card info, it was just submitted in an iframe rendered by the payment gateway. And even then we were subjected to annual/semi-annual security audits (this was in addition to quarterly external security audits we ordered ourselves apart from typical OWASP top 10 checks performed by QAs in weekly sprints).

Looking by the number of replies to this it possibly could be a viable side project with a few added premium features like notifications for downtime, data breach reports, etc etc...

In India, this is being dealt with in a different way. Amazon India and Flipkart (controlled by Walmart) are treated as a "marketplace", ie providing a platform for other sellers.

There are strict rules to limit domination of a few sellers on the platform (limits on percentage of sales by each seller). Neither of the two companies are particularly happy about it so probably it works to some extent.

https://www.livemint.com/industry/retail/ecommerce-companies...

I found these critiques soon after reading the book. However, there are many other researches cited in the book and I would take them on face value for the not very scientific but somewhat valid (for me) reason of personal experience.

I got into the habit of all night slogs right since high school and it persisted till recently due to the pressure of sticking to deadlines. So I could relate well to several experiments cited in the book.

Considering we do not know nearly as much as we ought to know yet, I would rather err on the side of caution and give far more importance to sleep than I have previously.

Its not just short breaks. Effect of a good night's sleep are almost magical in this respect.

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is filled with examples on how sleep plays an outsized role in our lives.

One relevant example from the book that comes to mind is an experiment where they instructed some college students to type out a particular sequence of characters on a keyboard and then measured their performance across two days. The group which had a good night's sleep had dramatic improvement in their typing coordination overnight.

Apparently the author got an insight to pursue deeper into cognitive effects of sleep after a chance encounter with a pianist after a speech he gave on benefits of sleep, where the pianist told him how he struggled with new compositions on evenings and then magically gets them right after a good night's sleep.

When I was getting introduced to river kayaking safety basics, the instructor really emphasized the importance of staying away from these, or to start paddling like crazy if you can't avoid them so that you can get past the dangerous point. In whitewater, there are some sections where these can occur naturally as well when you have water falling off from a height of a few feet.

This need more upvotes lol

This is a brilliant book. You get major new insights every few pages, and many of them are highly relatable with your own experiences with sleep. Probably goes a bit overboard with some of its claims but even then there is too much good in it. Considering we spend anywhere between 25-30% of our lives on this one activity, its almost criminal how we ignore its importance.

I have faint memories of reading Misha comics in English when I had just about started reading. Do remember enjoying it along with other Indian content in Hindi like Champak/Chandamama but unlike these we maybe stopped getting supplies of these later with the USSR implosion as I don't remember coming across them later.

Agreed. Do not see anything worth downvoting at all.

TLDR version : Corruption can only get you so far but to become world class you need to be very good at what you do.

Longer version : Reliance/Ambani family have ties to pretty much the entire political spectrum in India and not just the current govt. This is one of the reasons why they have thrived since 70s when the group was started by Mukesh Ambani's (current CMD) father Dhirubhai. But this is not the only reason they have thrived, they started with polyester and captured the entire upstream upto crude refining. The Jamnagar refinery project was started in the 90s and was setup under the supervision of Mukesh. It is the largest refining complex in the world with some of the best refining margins in the world. Aramco almost bought a 20% stake in it recently, a deal which got suspended because of Covid.

As far as the pan India 4G license goes, it came at a time when others were still topping up their 2G and 3G licenses which were selling at a much higher premium due to the competition. It wasn't as if it was not on offer to others, it just did not make business sense for them at the time. And the license was auctioned around 2009-2010 while the current government only came to power in 2014. The conversion of pan India broadband license to 4G also happened before 2014. Heck, I remember seeing the Jio backbone OFC cables being laid in multiple cities before 2014. Corruption at the highest level (multiple cases involving multiple ministries, even reaching the Prime Minister) was one of the main reasons the previous UPA govt was routed in 2014.

Ref : https://web.archive.org/web/20130606064256/http://www.ground... https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/energy/oil-gas...).

I am currently reading the Aitareya Upanishad with commentary by Swami Chinmayananda (founder Chinmaya Mission), but you can find multiple well rated ones online. For Puranas too there are multiple options though I don't think one could go wrong with the translations by Dr Bibek Debroy (leading Economist and Chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. Look up his limericks on twitter) who has also translated the Ramayana and only the third person to translate the unabridged version of the Mahabharata.

Otherwise if you can read Hindi and manage to find physical or electronic versions, would recommend Gita Press versions. English ones often come with a multitude of pronunciation symbols (due to the limits of English) which unaccustomed readers may find a bit irritating.

Not in India. We didn't even study Indian mythology!

Not him please. Even otherwise I feel not wise to follow a single guru if your interests are more academic otherwise it generally leads to a more cultish experience. There is no single canonical way to 'enlightenment' here, each one can find their own.

What I am doing - starting with Upanishads (aka Vedanta, literally the end part of Vedas, where you get the gist), there are 10 major ones which come with commentary by Adi Shankaracharya. Remaining are not minor in the sense of importance, just that you get to them once you grasp the major ones first as they come without the authoritative commentary. They are overall philosophical in nature.

Next come the Puranas. Again there are about 8-10 of these. These contain most of the stories or the 'mythology' which we heard in our childhood and read in the books.

There are many more but I guess I'll start here and see where it takes me.

Having been very much from the modernist camp, a few years ago I read some Norse mythology followed by some Greek. Whatever I knew of Indian mythology was mostly through festivals, stories told by elders during childhood and some children's books. Norse felt pretty much tribal in comparison and Greek was a bit better than Norse, still it felt short of childhood memories. So I started to dig up more about Indian, and boy it took me a while in wikipedia figuring out the chronology and even the different kinds of literature that existed, a real rabbit hole. I have just about started out and got a long way to go.