Aravindh C.

Why do Indians think skyscrapers are desirable?

Something I keep coming back to: The precision machining cluster in Coimbatore exports to Tier-1 automotive suppliers in Germany. The German buyer knows Coimbatore. The Indian policy conversation doesn't.

Today is a historic day. India has entered 2nd stage of our three stage nuclear power program with the achievement of clriticality of PFBR. Congratulations to every contributor to this critical technology that makes India only the second country to operate a large fast reactor.

I think romantic movies do so well in India is because people get to live vicariously. In their own lives, they don't really get to date, fall in love, marry the person of their choice. They are deprived of such a basic human instinct.

The answer, as I present in my testimony, is the next big battlefront of industrial cleantech: process decarbonization. I propose the "new big three", which will be industrial electrification, process applications for green hydrogen, and carbon capture & sequstration (CCS).

On Pakistan: sorry but a left political economy podcast needs to offer a more critical (class!) analysis than simply "solar line go up" or per the guest, "everybody has solar." See FT piece👇how solar advantages businesses/wealthy homeowners, leaving the poor w/ a degraded grid

Govt research in USSR did not have a pipeline to consumer goods US gov research in semiconductors led to a whole industry of consumer products, from calculators to personal computers As long as you have feedback loops with pvt sector, public research is essential for India

Let's look at a counterfactual. What if government spending on R&D is completely slashed? Will corporate R&D follow different and perhaps more efficient path dependencies in raising overall productivity? Soviet Union spend a lot of R&D and much of it didn't translate into productivity. Maybe there is "tech search space" in abstraction that's better perused by markets forces than public R&D?

The core analytical error in the "primary energy fallacy" argument, that renewables plus electrification will dramatically cut total energy needs, is that it treats energy as interchangeable. A TWh of gas isn't just energy. It's dispatchable, energy-dense, and seasonally storable. A TWh of solar is none of those things without substantial infrastructure to make it so. The leap from "EV motors are more efficient than combustion engines" to "the transition is easier than you think" skips over the hardest parts of the problem. Electrification can eliminate some conversion losses while introducing new ones, like curtailment, storage round-trip losses, overbuild, and grid expansion. If we look at how much infrastructure is needed to support an electric heat pump with renewables in the dead of winter, we'll see that gas delivers far more value than a Sankey diagram shows.

Claude use in India by state. Follows the urbanisation+tech ecosystem correlation pretty neatly. At a city level Delhi is at the top. Gujarat the only non-tech hub state to show up prominently. Uttar Pradesh the only major northern state - shows penetration beyond Noida.

This aunty back home wouldve walked past open drains, heaps of garbage, cow dung on the roads and pollution like an apocalypse never even wearing a mask. But here, neatly maintained frozen chicken made her cover her nose. We are truly the most pathetic race.

Everyone Hates Nuclear-Chan