Kartikeya Bhatotia

Some notes and observations on the urban condition from my recent trip to Delhi. bhatotia.substack.com/p/one-battle-a…

I am “continuing to monitor the situation”.

A dominant source of financial accumulation for Indian elites is now real estate speculation, what Michael Levien called "dispossession without development". An entire infrastructure of under-utilised airports, metros & residential complexes have been built to facilitate that.

@klarnic_debt I could name a few

Girl please.

According to @freedomhouse, this is what democratic decline in the United States looks like in comparative perspective freedomhouse.org/report/freedom…

@mattyglesias @TheEmissaryCo Yep. the entire point is that the welfare loss per dollar is much higher for low income Indians even if the macro exposure looks manageable for India overall.

@TheEmissaryCo I don’t think that’s right, the loss of access to discounted sanctioned Russian oil is very bad for them — indirect impact.

I guess if you are a sociopath, the fact that the economic downside of this war is much worse for India than for the United States counts as an argument in its favor but this is truly some wild long-term geopolitics we are engaged in.

This is the front page of today’s @timesofindia. Count the number of avoidable deaths.

That poll you’re citing? It may just be simulated AI responses

There is troubling long run steady state where much employment growth for the urban “working class” is contingent on demand from the top 10% - maids, cooks, drivers, peons etc. Much corporate ‘innovation’ itself targeted marketizing this labor market of “convenience or petty services.” Locked into a dangerous and structurally stagnant growth model. Chronic inadequacy of demand will bite harder

A common waterborne bacterium found across South Asian rivers, ponds and wastewater systems carries widespread resistance to multiple antibiotics — including drugs of last resort nature.com/articles/d4415…

The problem of graduate unemployment is widening in India. Salaried-job creation significantly lags rising education levels and an expanding youth population. India Edition daily (free read 👇) bloomberg.com/news/newslette…?

@bitcoinmalayali Early 1960s peak is because of famine in China probably

The Indira era with socialism was the beginning of the Great Decline, but you all diss Nehru and not the real culprit, Indira. Ofcourse, third world ideologism explains this.

Brilliant economic paper, directly models the "Structural Jevons Paradox" happening right now in the AI industry. The cost of running an LLM is dropping, but total computing energy is exploding anyway. It mathematically proves that as the unit cost of digital intelligence and coding drops, the aggregate demand for complex AI agents and the infrastructure to support them surges exponentially, creating a massive new downstream ecosystem that requires human management. Reveals a massive paradox where dropping the price of AI usage does not save money, but instead encourages developers to build vastly more complex agents that eat up exponentially more computing power. Because of this relentless progress, small companies building simple applications on top of these models get completely crushed as the core AI naturally absorbs those exact same features over time. They also discovered a brutal dynamic where a perfectly working LLM becomes economically worthless the moment a competitor releases a smarter version. Ultimately, the researchers prove that this combination of massive computing costs and the need for constant user data naturally pushes the entire AI industry toward an unavoidable monopoly. --- arxiv. org/pdf/2601.12339v1 "The Economics of Digital Intelligence Capital"

How much the world has changed over the past two decades! The WORLD BANK has released a report on industrial policies for development.

@SagirAhmed98 They’ve done it before. In 1986 and 2018, Kaziranaga relocated several rhinos to Dudhwa in UP.

Something I appreciate about conservation efforts in Assam is that state pride isn't turned into state property. The species are regularly exported and repopulated in other parts and in other states that previously had them. I wish for the return of our lost ecosystems on earth.

I have reviewed global democracy indices and have serious doubts about the value of continuous measures of democracy. The most modest ones, that solely distinguish between democracy and autocracy, are the only credible ones. Here are some comments on these democracy indices.👇

622 sanitation workers died in sewers, septic tanks across India in 9 yrs; 52 families got 0 compensation Vrinda Tulsian @vrinda_tulsian reports for ThePrint theprint.in/india/622-sani…

Belgian aristocrat to face charges over murder of Congo’s first premier ft.trib.al/EnMaEnK

Humanity on the C train. New York, 2017 | Rachel MacKnight

@DiscourseDancer Writer of the zeitgeist

Mildly scared of tweeting anything else today.

@PratitiLikhchi And not even sure whether informal interventions like social media statements help at all except satiating a few online advocates. It may be the bigger "tokenistic" intervention after all.

@PratitiLikhchi Well, no. But not sure why that is the expectation. She hasn't had a formal opportunity to voice her opinion as a parliamentarian. So silence being a foregone conclusion does seem like jumping the gun.

Has our historic first queer representation queen Menaka Guruswamy said anything about the trans persons amendment bill? No?