sumants.bsky.social

I am trying to reclaim my handwriting. But I am lazy and indisciplined about practice and need to be tricked into it. So, I have a proposal.

@abhijitkadle True, but damn, Singapore McDonald's is 🔥🔥🔥

A big nope. A heap of processed food.

@venkatananth Pay for ticket, watch sports on phone while stuck in traffic.

@sumants no idea 😂

the question with stadia should not be about capacity but how often they are utilised. absolute key.

Coverage in @the_hindu regarding the second edition of QFIs Big Fat T20 Quiz. We're just a week away! Do register if you haven't - forms.gle/d6sTuMovNz986j…

@venkatananth Isn't this going to be in the middle of the Bannerghatta national park? How do they expect people to get there?

why is that? simple economics. a stadium earns its cost across event days, and not number of seats. construction and maintenance are fixed costs. the only way to spread them is to put bums on seats as often as possible, which means, host more events.

When two grifters meet, you shouldn't expect anything more to come out of it than a grift. This is pure stock market manipulation by the US, and literally everyone knows India can't afford to buy half a trillion in goods from a low-volume high-price supplier like the US.

It’s a gag lost to time. Acme is a Greek word for “pinnacle” that became ubiquitous for a time because it gave companies better placement in the phonebook. The Great Depression version of SEO.

I don’t think people understand the gravity of what we are looking at in this photo. This should infuriate every single one of us.

Can't overstate how important it is to celebrate and publicize these historic wins in the face of huge rightwing ideological & political apparatuses.

This is coming up just a kilometre away from the Bannerughatta National Park. Don't be surprised if the forest is denotified after the new cricket stadium comes up. In 2020 the buffer zone around BNP was reduced by 100sqkm. Today illegal quarries and mines dot the zone. After the stadium, expect at least a few hundred apartment complexes around it. Say goodbye to BNP. #CONgRSS is just a Hindi real estate agent in Karnataka.

He's honest. Good of this US leader to spell out the US rules, which Japan, Korea & Germany already came to feel: When Japan was about to overtake the US in terms of GNP, (1) its economy was knocked out by the Bank of Japan (see my book Princes of the Yen quantumpublishers.com)

Faut arrêter ce mythe fatigué que faire de la physique ou des maths vous donne accès à tous les autres disciplines (comme si elles étaient plus faciles ou inférieures et pas des sciences à part)

An important rule of thumb. If a revolt is a genuine revolt for the people, to increase the power of the people, global media will ignore and suppress it. If a revolt is organised and funded by US imperialism to overthrow an inconvenient or opposing govt, it will be everywhere.

"India is overcrowded" is the most successful gaslighting campaign Indian babus ever ran on their own citizens. They underbuilt the country for forty years and convinced 1.4B Indians to blame themselves for it. Every overcrowded space you've ever queued in is a supply failure the state engineered, not a demographic accident. Five lifts in a hospital, one working. Seven railway counters, one ticketer. Toll plazas, water boards, municipal offices: built once in 1972, patched once in 1996, abandoned ever since. The only exception is airports, and even those lounges are gigafried at peak. Why did this happen? 4 reasons, none of them are "too many people." 1. Cost of capital. Rupee down 60% against the dollar in two decades. Inflation 5-7% on paper, 8-10% in reality. Risk-free rates above 7%. No rational allocator underwrites a hospital with a 30-year payback under those conditions. Capital flows into software and consumer brands; anything with a 3-5 year ROI window. Parks, ports, metros, dams, schools need multi-decade underwriting that India's macro structurally cannot support. 2. The regulatory stack is engineered to prevent construction. 50+ clearances across municipal, state, and central bodies for any large project, each with its IAS gatekeeper extracting rent. Real builders give up. The only construction happening at scale is therefore illegal, which is exactly why slums mushroom while sanctioned housing projects sit at 15% completion for a decade. 3. The corruption tax. Budget 15-20% of project cost in bakshish before pouring a single slab. Stacked on top of GST, stamp duty, capital gains, property tax, labour cess. Software shops escape it; they ship from a laptop. Anyone touching cement, steel, or land pays the surcharge in cash, off the books, with zero recourse and zero deductibility. 4. State capacity has collapsed into pure friction. GST portal crashes on filing deadlines. MCA21 is a relic. Every regulator (SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, FSSAI, BIS) optimises for CYA, never throughput. Babus paid 1990s salaries to administer 2026 complexity respond rationally by doing nothing. India's perpetual undercapacity is a capital allocation story the political class would rather you never learn. The 1.4B is a feature. The people running the country are the bug. Until cost of capital drops, the regulatory fat gets gutted, and the corruption surcharge gets squeezed out, the lifts and the counters and the hospitals will stay exactly as broken as they were when your grandfather first complained about them in 1987.

As an Iranian woman who lived in Iran for 19 years, I grew up wanting to become a surgeon. I never once heard in Iran that surgery was “for men.” Ironically, the first time I heard certain STEM fields or specialties being treated as more suitable for men was after moving to the United States. Being this uninformed is surprising, Alice. It is irresponsible, unprofessional, and dehumanizing toward Iranian women. We are far more capable than what you see on your Twitter feed. Iran has serious issues involving women’s rights and legal restrictions, but presenting Iranian women as secluded figures who are barely allowed outside is a caricature closer to Taliban Afghanistan than reality. Iranian women are educated, visible, and active across society. The World Bank reports female youth literacy in Iran at about 99% for ages 15 to 24, which directly contradicts the image of women isolated from education or public life. According to the World Bank Gender Data Portal, women’s formal labor-force participation in Iran is low, around 13 to 14%, while men’s is around 67%. That gender gap is real. But labor-force participation only measures paid work or active job-seeking. Research also suggests women’s informal, family-based, agricultural, and unpaid work may be undercounted. Using that number to portray Iranian women as secluded or invisible locked up in their homes is misleading. If you want to discuss life for Iranian women, talk about how sanctions affect access to cancer diagnosis and treatment, including breast cancer care, since breast cancer is the most common cancer affecting Iranian women. Talk about how sanctions restrict livelihoods, increase economic pressure, and make it harder for men and women to find adequate jobs and build stable lives. Iranian women are strong and have spent decades fighting for themselves while building careers, movements, and communities. Reducing them to helpless, voiceless figures is ridiculous and unforgivable. #Woman_Life_Freedom #زن_زندگی_آزادی #از_دموکراسی_بگو

This week’s comic for @thenewsminute

As a brainwashed and hypnotised Republic suddenly discovers that the Indian economy is in deep shit, a 1999 warning from a Prime Minister with an MA and BA from Panjab University; a BA from Cambridge; and a D Phil from Oxford, should sound prescient. @HindustanTimes @FinMinIndia

What power do courts have to enforce implementation of their judgements by the legislature and the executive?

Indian nationals being compared with Pakistani terrorist to block bail.

It's cute that people still believe that the SC is operating on principles of justice and the public good.