sometimes_all

You seem to either not have an understanding of ground reality (if your father was using Diners Club in the 60s, he was in the elite).

Well, I wouldn't say "elite", but well off (at that time), but that still doesn't mean that card networks couldn't have made themselves useful if they/the government wanted to. Poverty is not a gating mechanism. Plenty of poor people in the US use credit cards - they practically fund the rewards system since they cannot pay on time - and I seem to remember that the first Americards were figuratively dropped from the skies, regardless of the holder's income or debt levels, which was then used to coax merchants into accepting them. Such sort of "growth" tactics would not have had an effect here since neither the government nor RBI would allow it, nor would the people take too kindly to it. And let's not disparage people for not understanding ground reality. What I'm saying still has basis in fact, just possibly not the facts you seem to care about. The point about people not wanting to use credit cards still stands. Just talk to someone > 60 years old and you'll get the drift. Many wouldn't touch a revolving credit feature here even if it was forcefully handed to them and they could easily use it. As much a fan my dad was of Diners Club, he still told me to not touch a credit card until I had at least twice as much income as expenses.

I don't disagree with you entirely, and your points are not the reason I talk about the sixties and eighties; I talk about them because many people seem to think that India did not have the systems there at all, and that India did not have enough well-off people in the past at all, or that India did not have any sort of knowhow or capability to introduce systems like credit cards (and make it work for quite a bit of the population) at all. That part is incorrect. The systems were there, they just failed for the "hundreds of millions" at that time while still working for the "few million", plus they still hung around enough to succeed now because clearly the potential was always there. Just because they didn't catch on quickly did not mean that they weren't there or were not useful to a subsection of the population. You cannot just go "straight to the digital payments phase" without acknowledging that things were there and what their trajectories were. People seem to forget that relative small scale "of solving problems" for India in terms of adoption is large-scale for other countries. A single-digit percentage acceptance in this country can swallow many countries' populations, poor or otherwise.

Well, yes, but you conflate that credit cards would've worked, had they been available/easy, in a place like India, which in many ways rejected and still sometimes rejects the kind of thinking which makes credit cards successful in places like the US, which is what the GP was saying.

People up until one-two generations ago completely rejected the use case for credit cards for payment, since they just did not want to swallow the premise of using credit as a payment instrument. If that doesn't happen, credit cards do not take off (just as what you are saying). The problem wasn't as much as systems were not available; systems were available but people did not want it. Merchants swallow the cost if the demand comes (this is what is happening right now; credit cards are becoming mainstream despite UPI being there, because younger generation loves using them, and more merchants than before are allowing credit cards on UPI even though they can reject them, because people want to use credit on UPI as well). People at that time just did not want to use credit, so merchants had no incentive to bear costs. Kali Mody brought Diners Club to India in 1961 (my father has fond memories of that instrument). CBI introduced the first bank-issued credit card in the eighties. The system was _always_ there. People just didn't feel they wanted to use it.

People also forget that UPI is not just for consumer-to-merchant. It's also a P2P system, which credit cards definitely aren't.

You make a system that people want, people will use. People used UPI.

The content is good, but the crore/billion toggle is fantastic. A great addition, I hope it catches on in India-specific websites.

I just wish it had a tooltip because its purpose was not immediately clear (CR/BN is a bit cryptic).

NEFT and RTGS are free if you do it online. UPI is free. Many banks waive off IMPS charges.

NEFT and RTGS were introduced in the mid-2000s. IMPS in 2010, UPI in 2016. It's been > 10 years since the latest instrument launch. Enough time for "long term" impacts to show up.

If anything, the impact has been overwhelmingly positive.

What does this have to do with credit cards? India always had credit cards at a scale comparable to most countries, and they always were a regularly-used of payment for medium-sized "white" transactions; they just weren't that useful for day-to-day transactions in terms of most locals' ways of working where the actual India-level scale is, and not the primary way of transacting as in the US. And looking at how Visa and Mastercard work, and what they tried to do in Brazil, I think that's a great thing.

As GP says, you could _never_ get the older generation to use a credit card even when they had the means to do so. But they took to UPI just fine, and many now prefer it over cash.

Also, credit card issuance and acceptance in India is growing quite a bit right now, despite (because?) of UPI.

What I am really impressed by is that experts and the army itself is open to criticism and commentary (I am sure there are limits, and censoring will be happening on the more important parts), but coming from a country where the government seems to think that any critique is "anti-national", such articles seem like a breath of fresh air.

A more open space means better ideas with potential edge get shared, which is better for everyone.

Interesting, I am not able to see it, and I have memory enabled.

To quote Don Draper: "that's what the money is for".

By all means go work for big tech if you want to, it's a free country, but then you don't get to wash your hands off the bad things your company's doing by saying stuff like "the execs made us do it" or "the execs overruled us".

There's nothing unproductive in calling out denying responsibility/culpability. Some would say it's practically mandatory.

Employees are not in a position of strength

Employees that are paid multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars plus equity, and likely can jump ship to another company without a hitch are not in a position of strength?

Please. Meta is one of the few firms where employees genuinely had a chance to stop this from happening, with all the "engineers are first-class citizens" bit.

I'd rather people own up to their responsibilities than dodge around theoretical nonsense.

Only it was all a ruse to ensure people didn't jump ship too quickly and make the bleeding too heavy

You go when we tell you to go! Not before!

Seems that they didn't add explicit options for resination/indifference, but there is at least one archetype you get at the end which does fit that mold:

  The Shrug
  patron saint: Matt Levine
  AI is a thing that exists and you regard it with detached amusement, like everything else. It's overhyped, sure, but so is most stuff. You'll use it when it's useful and ignore it when it isn't, and you find the discourse more interesting than the technology. You are unbothered.

I figured out fairly early in my career that if a company/team really wants you, the recruiter is going to roll out the red carpet, irrespective of seniority. It's happened multiple times for me, and has led to the few successful offers I've had. But if they're ambivalent, or you're just there to fill in the statistics, then problems will pop up: lack of proper communication, no clear timelines, canned responses, ghosting, the list goes on.

So I look for markers: if I see a quick turnaround time for my emails, I know that I'm in the right interview loop. Else I spend as much time as the other party spends on me, ie not much.

India has about a billion debit cards, but people mostly use them for ATM cash withdrawals, if that (banks used to give them by default during account opening, but have stopped this since UPI came into the picture). Only a single-digit percentage of people use credit cards, but they use them often and for relatively high-value transactions. The rewards game in the credit card space is slowly but surely reaching US levels, and they are associated more with stability and credit-worthiness since banks don't hand them out like candy, and India is, until recently, a debt-averse nation to revolve balances.

Mostly people use UPI, which is equivalent to debit cards given that amounts go directly from one bank to another. But UPI also supports some credit cards and lines, so there's that.

I use LLMs for structured learning of old economics and philosophy books out of copyright. Is quite useful for me, given that I have no background in either of these areas.

Reading the article, it seems that they didn't set out to do _only_ that, but it was one of the few things that worked.

It is my opinion that while you do not judge people who have to choose between integrity and dinner, you can definitely judge people who made decisions and structured their life in such a way that they had that choice, and not only did they choose money, but did it in such a way that what other people would call riches was subsistence for them because of the lifestyle they led.

There is a point where you have enough money

You forego the option of choosing when you end up chasing a goal or living a standard of living which requires you to continuously choose money every time. It takes a lot of thinking to come to what "enough" means. For some, enough is a few hundred thousand dollars max. For some, even a billion is not enough. You can definitely appreciate the former when they reach that goal and stay there, but it becomes difficult to appreciate the latter (and they are the focus of most of the criticism here), because you do need to sacrifice more than a bit of integrity in that case.

I for one am happy that they were only able to ban Telegram (and by the looks of it, they weren't really successful because there are reports that the app continues to work). Nothing of much consequence happens due to this, and the government ends up looking like clowns, which they are.

As the internet becomes more critical for work and education, they're finding out that they cannot impose shutdowns for too long without hampering everyday life and commerce, which would make people angry.

The more the people in power get repeatedly shown up like this, the faster things will improve.

Funny, when I was in the US, my Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Mexican, French, British, and 99% of the American coworkers had absolutely zero issues with my Indian accent, except that one American guy who would ask me to keep repeating even though the rest of the room had already understood and processed what I said.

The problem likely lies deeper than just the accents; and by the way, the English requirement (including a verbal test) is already set in place for most of the workers. The regular halfway-decent ones will likely already have TOEFL scores hovering around at minimum the high 100s, and in the non-university hiring pipelines I have seen, the English/ESL tests seem to be common if you are not from an English-speaking country, so if you are seeing people where nobody can understand what they are saying, you need to take a better look at your employer's hiring practices.

Minor nit: Fastest ever recorded ball bowled was 100 mph. I believe you were thinking 150 kmph.

Also, if we're talking about street/amateur cricket, or even higher-level cricket a couple of levels removed from international, you are rarely going to have rockets hurled at you. Most will be 120 kmph tops.

The extreme steps some of the people took according to the article is really sad. But it makes me wonder what they were thinking?

I left the US a long time ago after only a few years of work because I felt it didn't make sense that it should take me decades to get the right to live stress-free in the country (or marry an American or somehow hack through for an O1 visa) even if I did everything right and more, but only two months to get a new job in case I lost my previous one, or pack up and leave. Why would I make a major financial/life decision that keeps me rooted to the US with this in mind? And this is not a recent happening; this imbalance has been going on for many years now, across different federal administrations.

Yes, you earn a lot more in the US, and the QoL is better. But the risk-reward ratio has been steadily declining for Indians, probably for decades, to the point where it's probably underwater. I can definitely empathize, but it's a bit difficult to back anyone who bought a house in such scenarios without at least a green card or a solid exit plan in mind.

That's nice, but used to what end, especially if you are not a Instagram/Facebook user, and have a decent ad-blocker set up?

The only reason I pay for M365 family is for the 1 TB per member storage. Excel is a bonus, and Word and Powerpoint are basically not needed any more.

If a better storage deal comes along, I'll happily cancel.

There used to be a time when it was just accepted that most of the good conferences/gatherings would be in the US, and it would either be important to go to, or be relatively straightforward to reach and attend (especially for Canadians), and nobody would think twice about it.

Now you have some very talented/consequential people just refusing to visit the country. Regardless of any qualms about the "content and logic", this should set off alarm bells for any American. Plus, this would've been a whine if he'd complained and had gone anyway. But he is not going, and has explained his decision. That makes it more of a statement.

Oh wow, you went from one place to some totally different place at the drop of a hat. Where did me "coming" to Western Europe come into the discussion about racial stereotyping about Indians? I'm not in Western Europe, and I don't plan to live there, not sure how you got that impression.

I think there's no reasoning with someone who only wants to deal in absolutes. Have a good day.

I'm sure you do. But your real life experience is not everyone else's real life experience, so there's no really need to make blanket statements about people.

Way to paint with a really broad brush...

"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"

sure Americans tried prohibition and all that but its not gloom and doom

Why can't you voluntarily try to influence your alcohol consumption by paying a "alcohol tax"?

Gujarat in India is a dry state. UP has an alcohol tax of 69%. Hasn't stopped people at all, in fact such rules have backfired - loopholes, alcohol tourism, illicit production causing all sorts of havoc.

I mean I have never consumed and never will so why is it that your society finds it acceptable?

Neither have I. But the problem lies exactly where you're heading. I've had a ton more pressure to drink in India where teetotalism is considered ideal, than in the western world where drinking is considered a lot more acceptable. Funnily enough, the more "taboo" or "socially less acceptable" something is, the more the people who partake also force you to do it.

Apologies. I haven't even spent a minute in Blighty, so I took their post in good faith. I should've learned from my experiences with their news...

Why would you have to apologize? If I had to apologize on behalf of all the drivel Indian newspapers write, it'd take me more than a month.

It's pretty clear that newspapers around the world are now decoupling from the actual wishes and necessities of their subscribers/licensees. The latter are not to blame, especially when they are willing to pay for their news.

Plus I don't have to read the BBC if I don't want to, but media literacy, combing through nonsense and finding the actual necessary bits, etc. are important, and that needs me to read news from different sources and countries, including that of BBC sometimes.