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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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Feb 1 • 9 tweets • 7 min read
India is legalizing cryptoassets. There’s significant fine print, especially around tax, but overall this is a win.

Speech (video):
Speech (transcript): indiabudget.gov.in/doc/budget_spe…
Summary: pib.gov.in/PressReleasePa…
Full Bill: indiabudget.gov.in/doc/Finance_Bi…
The speech is bigger than crypto, however. If you read it, you get the unmistakable impression that India is more tech savvy than many realize.

Digital universities, drone farms, telemedicine, open source…embraced and understood at the highest levels.
indiabudget.gov.in/doc/budget_spe…
It's a bizarre experience to see a national politician who is conversant with technology and can calmly describe its benefits to the public as part of a dry budget speech.

It shouldn't be bizarre, but it is.

In other words, this was also my impression:
Compare India's budget to the recent US infrastructure bill, where the one future-forward item was charging stations for electric vehicles.

As @micsolana noted, America's federal government knows what they want to destroy, but not what they want to build.
piratewires.com/p/trillion-dol…
As I've said before, the extent to which India is trending up and America is trending down is insane. Even in 2010, I would not have believed these curves would ever be converging, let alone crossing in some places.

But I just can't argue with the trend.
To understand what I mean, first take a look at India's trends in:

- lighting
- highway buildout
- airports
- tap water

Basic infrastructure has dramatically improved.
Then India's trends on technology.

- Internet connectivity
- Internet startups
- Vaccination status
- Mobile payments

Almost every graph you plot, it's up and to the right.

References:
[1] archive.is/wip/0qQJU
[2] archive.is/wip/fkPXY
[3] tigerfeathers.substack.com/p/the-internet…
It's not just graphs. It's very visible on the ground.

With that said, today's proof points are less important than the relative rates of growth. Growth determines what the world looks like in 2030.

India — and Indians — will be a big part of that world.
Many of these graphs come from @sanjeevsanyal's outstanding overview of the Economic Survey of India. Worth reading.

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More from @balajis

Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 2
In San Francisco
It takes 20 years to build a public bathroom
They held a ribbon-cutting ceremony
And a press conference
This is not a joke
"BART will hold a ribbon-cutting event to mark the reopening of the Powell Street Station restrooms that have been closed for more than 20 years." bart.gov/news/articles/…
You laugh, but the SF model is being exported all over the US, from Seattle to LA.

It's legalized graft, on an enormous scale, always in the name of the people, at the expense of the people. Read @ShellenbergerMD's book about this catastrophe of a city.
amazon.com/San-Fransicko-…
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 27
My rebuttal is that California is rolling blackouts while China is scaling nuclear.
As noted, I have nothing against @PeterZeihan the person. But since you asked, I do disagree with some of his ideas. China is a technologically advanced, formidable power. And the US is not on the right track. Defending freedom means grappling with this.
My position:

- I regard China under Xi with apprehension
- But I don't think the US is a guarantor of order anymore either, as it is characterized by chaos at home and war abroad
- I don't have significant investment in China
- But like many Chinese, I prefer trade to conflict
Read 6 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 26
The person of color victimized by this terrible crime is suing SF's DA directly. That's a new twist.

Just a little while ago woke whites wanted to end qualified immunity for police. Perhaps this case will end absolute immunity for prosecutors themselves. nlg-npap.org/absolute-immun…
Of course, the push against immunity came from a certain direction. But life is unpredictable.

Allowing regulators, prosecutors, judges, etc to be individually sued could break the system. What's on the other side?

Maybe anarchy, maybe accountability.
fedsoc.org/events/prosecu…
The discourse has, so far, entertained the idea of police being sued for over-enforcement. We are now seeing prosecutors being sued for *under*-enforcement.

Setting emotions aside, these are (in a sense) type I and type II errors respectively, and both should be disincentivized.
Read 8 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 22
Russian troops have been massing near the Ukrainian border for weeks. Negotiations not looking good. US carriers also apparently now positioned to deter China if something happens in Ukraine.

No idea what's going to happen or which reports are accurate. Monitoring with caution.
Some thoughts:

1) Fog of war applies. Who knows what reports are real? Military deception is a thing.

2) This is one of those things (possible simultaneous conflicts with Russia and China?) that you'd think would get more attention. Not that attention necessarily helps...
Also, if you're truly taking Gell-Mann amnesia into account, every article has to be put through the filter that media corporations are unreliable narrators.

But *if* they didn't butcher this quote, then Russia is saying negotiations are at a "dead end".
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Read 14 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 20
Before/after health is to transhumanism what before/after wealth is to cryptocurrency.
In both cases, the visceral and visible improvements are the direct consequence of powerful new ideas.

The philosophy around digital cash predated the gains by decades. As does that of transhumanism. They came together in the person of Hal Finney, who was an extropian.
"He’s always been optimistic about the future," says Hal Finney's wife, Fran. "Every new advance, he embraced it, every new technology. Hal relished life, and he made the most of everything."
archive.is/gNLv5
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 16
India is indisputably much safer than America. The infrastructure has improved *dramatically* over the last ten years and the internet works.

Photos will always be accused of being cherry picked, but the respective rates of ascent (and, unfortunately, descent) are palpable.
By the way, I'd rank this as among the most surprising developments in my life.

In 1990, 2000, or even 2010, if you'd told me an Indian city would flip an American city, I'd have been very dubious.

But now? It's obvious. Chennai > SF in a heartbeat.
One reason I'd have been dubious is that it's easy to destroy a city (as even SF's mayor now admits is happening), but hard to build one up.

Yet it's happening. The right photo essay would illustrate the rise of Asia and fall of US cities.
Read 4 tweets

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