Sehban

@omar_quraishi Maybe because "The System" influence is, comparatively, low in this sector .

Was at a lunch yesterday with some friends - none of them are supporters of the PPP - in fact they don’t think it’s done a good job at all of making lives of people better in Sindh and in particular in Karachi However, they were all united on one thing and they mentioned it on their own — that Sindh was doing a lot and is in fact miles ahead of other provinces in providing affordable medical treatment - especially its initiatives like the cyber knife and the cardiac treatment centres - and a log of good work done under the public-private partnership pioneered by the PPP in Sindh in the health and education sectors

@omar_quraishi The medical initiative in Sindh stems from private sector and well, yes Sindh Govt does make sure they are funded. Other than that, healthcare in Sindh is pretty haywire/unplanned,senseless growth & extensions. But,on paper, generally Sindh Health does come as better than rest

@SalAhmedPK On side note..tell us more about this creature "effective regulatory authority"..does any exist here?

Unpopular take: privatising a natural monopoly & establishing an effective regulatory authority to ensure it meets a wide array of consumer demands (even less profitable ones) & refrains from monopolistic behaviour is very very hard. Harder than reforming the utility itself. 1/2

@Zain299543 @omar_quraishi So is that the new norm for "imported things"?

@Sehban @omar_quraishi Springs has a bar code scanner placed everywhere. I'm assuming they can't have fixed prices for imported things but you can find out the price of everything easily.

Went to an apparently high-end store in Islamabad today in an upscale area Reminded me of Bombay Sweets but without the dry fruit and nuts In any case, was browsing around the store trying to buy some confectionary but there were no price tags on any of them In fact as I eventually found out literally none of the items had a price tag - which was odd to say the least Eventually managed to gather some things to buy - but for each I had to ask the staff the price I also asked a couple of them why there were no price tags - and no answer was forthcoming Eventually at the counter when I had to pay I asked for the manager I asked him the same question - why are there no price tags on the merchandise being sold? The answers he gave me: “Most of our stuff is imported and has a high turnover” — Not sure what that meant - also why would that prevent price tags from being placed “The price can be asked from various service counters” — Still didn’t answer the very basic question of why no price tags like in any other store “We have a lot of imported items” — Other stores also have imported items but they all have price tags - how can a large store not have price tags 1. Am pretty sure according to the law and to safeguard the rights of consumers, all merchandise must have the price listed on it - for some reason this store didn’t - and the staff, manager included, couldn’t give a satisfactory answer 2. The fact that there’s no price tag on any item being sold would lend credence to the idea that the reason this is done is to mask from consumers frequent increase in prices 3. When I paid the bill eventually it turned out that prices of the items were 40-50% higher compared to those sold in similar high-end stores in Karachi

@ZulfiqarAhmed69 Actualy they were "inspired" by Brazilian Govt initiative success that's what they replicated. Bait ul Maal was there since forever (in it's enshittified form)

Those arguing against BISP in Pakistan are the most dumbest creed I have ever come across. Their only dumb argument; instead of giving people charity, let’s train them with some skills. But they will never tell you which skills; let’s go to some rural areas in any province and see the poverty levels there and decide which skills be good for these people. Programs like BISP in Pakistan and in other Western countries were inspired by the concept of Bait ul Maal and is the only hope for millions in Pakistan. 🙏👍

@omar_quraishi You should visit Springs then..

@Sehban Never been to a store where this is the case

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it. The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body. His name is David Eagleman. He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams. Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since. Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual. You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open. Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves. This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed. In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first. Now sit with the implication of that for a second. Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years. If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight. But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep. Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense. Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal. They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise. The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied. The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you. Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops. So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly. Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation. A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium. And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case. Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep. Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it. For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all. They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking. The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream. You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen. Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

@MushtaqBilalPhD 🙃

The growing inaccessibility of science that you can understand by paying €27.99

@MushtaqBilalPhD To kinda negate the above odds ..no person has ever won a novel in economics twice.. it's kinda in same pond as someone winning peace or literature award twice

If you apply and get this postdoc, your chances of getting a Nobel prize will increase 86.7%

@readswithravi Yups, I "discovered" lots of my now fav authors this way.. Umberto eco, Updike, gore vidal, Vonnegut..

Have you ever read a book by an author that was so good it made you want to read everything else they've written?

@rogueonomist Times have made you a gold advocate too...also can I invest with frens if not with family? Or should it be don't invest with family and frens

- Open a VPS account. Keep allocation at 100% equity, and grow wealth tax free. Get tax credit on salary. Contribute every month - Avoid direct investment in PSX, unless ETFs. You will not be able to handle volatility, and information asymmetry - Keep a Savings Account -- if a bank says it cannot be done, push harder - Keep surplus cash in a Money market fund - Do not buy a plot. High chance you will lose it all - Do not invest in apartment project. High chance it will be stranded, and you will lose it all - Target buying an average of 1 gram of physical gold every month (you can buy every quarter or whatever) -- regardless of price. Do not buy silver, or copper, etc. - unless you manufacture fans for a living - Max out any available government housing scheme loans; this is the only property you should buy - Keep renting; this is the most economically efficient decision - Do not buy anything offered by bancassurance or that says life insurance savings plan. Run for the exit. Block their numbers. - Do not invest with family.

@omar_quraishi I wonder how many times in the past a Mayor or his entourage were challenged for traffic violations. The irony is the disconnect btw people and those who want to rule these people

People are criticising the Karachi Mayor for riding a motorcycle without a helmet But the idea behind the 11 second clip seems be to promote the use of EVs since it’s an e-bike And the message is good in times like these with soaring petrol prices and with no clear respite in sight And if the mayor were to wear a helmet then no one will be able to tell who is the rider - and then the same people will say “who is this guy - is this even the mayor?”

Another cruel hike in petrol prices. Please remember that the govt gives at least Rs. 2700 billion annually in subsidies to banks, feudals, military corporations, IPPs, and real estate elites. Ordinary people are being forced to sacrifice their families for luxuries of elites.

@amberdanishh have you ever seen police/rangers mobile and pessanger seat person wearing seat belt?

Mayor #Karachi normalizing trend of not wearing helmet in a city where citizens have to pay 10k challan for not wearing it. Kia jokers hain ye log🤦‍♀️

I served in both NAB and FIA. I have seen investment scams up close. The people crying over “One Constitution” today are not the first victims, and they will not be the last. Here are the lessons I learned that can protect your investment and money. 🧵

@nadeemhaque What's there to analyze?.from developers perspective it was plain ol' grift. More interesting would be to look at what made folks (elites) buy into it..their thought process (opportunity costs?) that led to their investment in that project .

I tried with 600 university professors to initiate a discussion a very interesting abd simple economic problem in pakistan: the CDA demolition and take over of the Twin buildings in Islamabad. Great economic analysis needed. Guess what they cannot analyze . They can’t discuss the issue because they don’t know his to use economic tools to analyse problems. Yet these guys are teaching economics and serving donor consultants. Are these your economic teachers?

@omar_quraishi It's like Who's who of Pakistan...he should make it an annual publication out of it

Speaking of the CSS result, I remember many years ago a reporter in Jang used to dissect the final list of successful candidates and would do a whole story on who was related to whom in the existing government power structure - would make for very interesting reading - as in related to which judge, general and/or MNA/MPA My friend at Dawn in Lahore where I was posted for 2-3 years first pointed this out to me I wonder if @asadalikhatana remembers this

CHINA JUST DREW A LINE ON AI A court in China has ruled it ILLEGAL to replace human workers with AI purely to cut costs. They have put responsibility back on corporations. They can’t automate just to boost margins while workers are pushed out. China has decided that wages, fairness, and employment aren’t optional. And that’s a big shift. While the west races to replace labour as fast as possible, viewing AI as a free-for-all… China has set a precedent that profit alone isn’t enough and corporations must answer to society.

Elites of Islamabad quietly cheered the brutal demolition of poor neighbourhoods — all perfectly 'legal', they said.But the moment the same law touches One Constitution Avenue skyscraper, it turns bearable. Law for the poor. Exception for the elite.