Dinesh Kulkarni

@DealsDhamaka Hassle starts w/ simple things such as @RBI not even recognizing gov-issued OCI as a valid ID document. My Washington state (not US) issued DL works but not GoI-issued OCI. For US residents, US FATCA causes Indian FIs to turn you away - not worth the headache.

Most high-earning NRIs are now settled in the US, Europe, or parts of Africa. Many who move to the Middle East either go for blue-collar opportunities or are people who already earned well in India and moved for a better quality of life and lower taxation. Starting with Africa, sending money back to India can be challenging due to tighter financial systems and restrictions. Many NRIs settled in the US and Europe increasingly question the value of investing in India. With rupee depreciation and high taxes on investments, it becomes difficult to consistently generate returns that outperform the markets where they currently live. Earlier, Indian real estate was considered a strong emotional and financial investment for NRIs, a physical asset back home. But after seeing decades of legal disputes, land grabbing issues, and family conflicts, many have become cautious. I personally know multiple families who made 10-12 trips to India trying to resolve property issues and eventually gave up. Those who moved to the Middle East after earning well in India often see significantly better tax structures there. Many of them left India specifically for financial and lifestyle reasons, and therefore don’t feel strongly motivated to invest back in India. I’m not an economist, this is purely based on personal observations and discussions over the years with people who moved abroad.

@moseskagan Unfortunately, pols are not really ignorant and hence can't be educated. They simply don't care. Collect votes by promising the affordability w/o political costs. Villainize entrepreneurs & taxpayers to get elected. Voters prefer sweet lies to bitter truth. So it works.

Stripped of all the financial engineering, developing an apartment building right now looks like this: Invest $$$, wait for 15-20 years for that $$$ to come back to you, then earn your profit in subsequent decades. I keep wanting to ask our local politicians if *they* would invest their *own* $$$ in a proposition like this, absent faith that local government will allow them to operate the building in a manner consistent with making a reasonable profit for decades.

@drgurner "Distraction" is a very charitable take. It is deliberate stoking of class warfare to keep one's own seat while hurting society at large. Criminal (in the non-legal sense) if you ask me. Very definition of regressive; not progressive!

JK Rowling made a billion dollars on her book sales alone. You really can "earn" a billion dollars by providing value to the world, or creating something people love. Congress, however, could definitely serve the people better. All finger pointing is distraction.

@drgurner @AlexAndBooks_ @MrBeast To be clear, there are great books written by authors w/ diverse backgrounds. But great book needs to be the criterion; not the author's DEI value. Can't shove social agenda down kids' throats. They can & do throw up.

@drgurner @AlexAndBooks_ @MrBeast Only in part - my two kids showed no interest in the school-assigned Newbridge books - in spite of their love of books. I tried reading some of those & agreed with my son & daughter - very hard to relate for grades 1-5 & poorly written. Advertised primary virtue was DEI author.

Interesting perspective on school vs. books by @MrBeast: "I graduated from school thinking books suck, books are boring, and I'd never read a book. But in reality, they were just giving me sh*tty books that I hated." "I loved The Goal, and I loved Walter Isaacson's biography on Steve Jobs and Elon Musk...but the problem is just every book they gave me in school was terrible."

@deedydas @benitoz Sad story of wasted potential - smartest individuals not doing anything of lasting value. Hopefully some see the light & do something better.

@benitoz "we make markets more efficient"

Jane Street made ~$40B in 2025 with 3,500 employees, a ~2x from the year before. At ~65-70% profit margin, that's $8M profit / employee, the highest for a 1000+ ppl company. High-frequency trading continues to be the most efficient money making engine. I want to share an old story about my Jane Street interview in 2014. Jane Street was known for hiring a lot of math, physics and CS olympiad winners from top universities and putting them through many rounds - including, for trading roles, a gauntlet of mental math. It was my 6th interview and my final round and I recall being asked "What is the next day after today in DD/MM/YYYY where all the digits are unique?" They'd toy with you and say "You can use a pencil and paper, if you want" but you knew that was an instant no. Painstakingly and as quickly as I could, I came to an answer. "How confident are you that this is correct on a 0-1 probability scale?" the interviewer said. "0.95", I blurted out, not fully knowing how to answer that. "Are you sure?" After thinking harder for a few more seconds, I realized I could've flipped the digits around to get a closer date. I gave the interviewer my answer. It was correct. "0.95 huh?" he chuckled. That's when I knew I failed. Note: fwiw, other companies that come close in efficiency are - Tether ($90M+ profit/emp) - Hyperliquid ($80M+ profit/emp) and on revenue: - Valve ($50M/emp) - OnlyFans ($37M/emp) - Craigslist ($14M/emp) - Anthropic ($12M/emp, run rate) - OpenAI ($8M/emp, run rate) For comparison, Nvidia is very efficient at scale and is $4.4M/emp.

@aakashgupta Smaller scale - PanAm offered triple miles in Summer 1990 (before bankruptcy). My housemate & I, both grad students, did India trip + $100 shopping on flight to get enough miles for a free India ticket. Delta bought PanAm assets in bankruptcy & honored free India trip w/ miles.

In 1999, David Phillips bought 12,150 cups of chocolate pudding and turned them into 1.25 million free airline miles. Adam Sandler later made a movie about it. He was a 35-year-old civil engineer at UC Davis when he spotted a Healthy Choice promotion offering 500 frequent flyer miles for every 10 product barcodes mailed in. Double the miles if you sent them in by May 31. Three weeks away. Phillips ran the math nobody else did. The cheapest qualifying product was Healthy Choice individual pudding cups at Grocery Outlet. 25 cents each. That meant $2.50 of pudding bought 1,000 airline miles. The airlines themselves valued those miles at $20. He drove a van across California with his mother-in-law, cleaned out 10 different Grocery Outlets around Sacramento, and stacked 12,150 pudding cups from his garage to his living room. When cashiers got suspicious, he told them he was stocking up for Y2K. There was no way he could peel that many barcodes alone before the deadline. So he called the Salvation Army and proposed a trade. He'd donate every cup if their volunteers peeled the labels first. They agreed. Phillips kept the barcodes. The Salvation Army fed people with $3,000 worth of pudding. And he claimed an $815 federal tax deduction on the donation. He mailed the barcodes by May 31 and waited. Two months of silence. His friends told him corporations always renege on these promotions. His own kids asked if he got scammed. Then a giant package arrived. Paper certificates worth 1,253,000 frequent flyer miles. Lifetime AAdvantage Gold status at American Airlines. $150,000 worth of flights. The Wall Street Journal put him on the front page in January 2000. The London Times followed a week later. Paul Thomas Anderson read the coverage and built Punch Drunk Love around him in 2002. Phillips paid for his movie ticket with pudding. Over the next five years he flew his entire family to 43 countries. Net cost after the tax write-off: $2,325. That's $54 per country.

@sciencegirl Utter nonsense! Income tax Cash handling costs for businesses (paid employees) Sales tax The drain is relentless & if you want the biggest drain, look at gov expenditure; not banks. That gets you far before txn fees even matter.

Explaining why they want to ban cash

@SarahTheHaider I use Google keep. Almost no formatting but searchable (with some annoyances). It is like a big shoebox of post-it notes. Left paper behind over a decade ago & never regretted it due to search, copy-paste etc.

@Snowflake Native Apps now let consumer of app define a maintenance window for upgrades. @aminst79 has a blog post that's worth reading before details in product docs: medium.com/snowflake/take…

@YounisJoseph My personal experience w/ Gemini as doctor has been far better than most doctors I have seen combined. Of course, doctors are gatekeepers for ordering scans/labs & writing prescription. So I suck up & pay for poorer service. @DrSuneelDhand

I’m so tired of these intellectually vacant takes. Do any of you understand the technological, regulatory, and social overhaul needed to “replace” physicians with robots? Tech isn’t even there yet. Just because your chatbot can spit out intelligent differentials doesn’t mean we have scalable robots with visuospatial and tactile feedback systems to conduct just a simple physical. When we get there, if we do, no job is safe. So either nobody studies anything, or go to med school…

@drgurner @GunnelsWarren The culture of envy spread by self-proclaimed guardians of poor is a type of a rot. As an immigrant (moved ~4 decades ago) I am still surprised at the disregard for innovation, entrepreneurship & wealth creation in the very country that benefits most from those qualities.

@GunnelsWarren Weird that we never include athletes or musicians for those that get criticized for high payment, just people who actually help provide jobs for other people.

JPMorgan's CEO made $770 million last year while 40% of Americans have less than $500 in savings.

@PhilipGreenspun @WTNH WA is a newer state but the same story. Even D were running the state fine till 2021 w/o any income tax. Then came cap gains tax as "excise" & now millionnaire's tax. All on top of rising sales tax.

@WTNH The state lasted from 1636 to 1991, 355 years, without an income tax. Was anyone ever motivated to ask what changed that an income tax is now required?

If elected as Connecticut governor, Republican candidate Betsy McCaughey promises to eliminate the state income tax, which was implemented in 1991. wtnh.com/on-air/thiswee…

Bar chart race shows dynamism. There is always displacement at all levels incl the top. New ideas, new people.

@yajnshri amazon.com/Upanishads-Raj…

Which dharmik book should I buy? Please share the books you have and have already read.

@lennysan Maybe CS majors just have greater awareness of the threat the some other majors? Knowledge is power. Others may regret in due course of time when their industries feel the hit.

I was chatting with a group of Princeton CS students and they told me the CS enrollment has been way down. I looked into it, and it's definitely a trend: - Nationally, 62% of CS programs reported declines in 2025 - Down 9% over past 2 years across UC schools - Most striking, existing CS majors are feeling the most regret about their choice of major with the rise of AI (more than Humanities majors 😬) Whether we'll need more or fewer engineers in the future, the supply of new ones is shrinking. Maybe a temporary blip, maybe a sign of things to come. The silver lining though is that if there's a surge of demand for engineers, existing engineers will become super valuable.

@aravind > gets rid of its debt What mechanism do you see for removing or even reducing the massive & growith debt?

Those who still believe in de-dollarization and the end of USD are delusional. The US is controlling VZ oil, the world's largest, VZ's huge reserves of gold, and all its resources. The US is on the verge of controlling Iran's oil and its resources. It influences Iraq, OPEC, Nigeria's exports. In shipping, it is controlling Panama Canal, Suez, Straits of Hormuz, Greenland, Malacca. It is couping regimes at will. Taking down powerful countries like Iran with brute force. It has surrounded every major power with its bases. But most importantly has allies all over the world and NATO for its support. It is even getting Russia on its side. The same Russia that was harassed by the China influenced corrupted elitist western deep state for decades now. The US is still producing the greatest tech and innovations which others merely copy or improve on. It still runs the world's financial system, banking networks, and the internet. But for some delusional people, somehow the US is failing, the USD is crashing, and China - which has made enemies all around it, including major powers like India, Japan, and Korea, and also failing to protect the one or two allies it has - is winning. The only way the USD is crashing is the US itself letting the USD erode temporarily as it resets its economic system, gets rid of its debt, and brings about a new crypto backed USD, if needed. The "de-dollarizatio" and "US is failing group" are totally influenced and carried away by Chinese propaganda of China is a superpower. China is not a superpower. By any means. It was beaten and literally made to pack bags and backoff by India itself in recent times. But communist China won't go into the night without a fight that tries to bring down the whole world. So we must brace for a war, a plandemic, or both.

@drgurner @DarioAmodei I am not sure it is being ignored but the change is happening too fast for society that handles changes over decades - when symptoms are widespread. Societal split among ideological tribes doesn't help as most run instinctively to Marx or Hayek/Friedman.

@dwarkesh_sp This was right above your recent post about European renaissance!

+1 to this. Often they are spam and/ or sent w/o email address verification. Among culprits - Indian Income Tax Dept sending me notices for someone else w/ no way to correct them.