Why commas are important, as demonstrated by my Catskills buddy. ๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚ Image
Btw, the history of Fire Departments in New York City as well as New York State is a well documented old lesson on the dangers of letting laissez-faire or free markets run essential public services.

Firefighting in NY started off as a private good, not a public one. Went badly.
All these privatization worshipping libertarians (which I too was in my 20s) in India won't tell you that firefighting was a subscription service until a century or so ago in NYC, the mecca of capitalism. "Competition" was supposed to guarantee efficiency. In fire fighting.
If you've wondered why so many fire dept buildings in NY have names of so and so company, that is what they were.

Just like you hire someone to take care of your lawn or your plumbing, in the early days of the US experiment, you had to hire one of many fire fighting "companies".
You can guess why that is ancient history now.

When profit & market share are the main motives, that's what will dictate outcomes. If someone's house caught fire, a competing company's truck would show up trying to sell their services. Firemen from competing companies would feud
It was around 1900 or so that Americans realized, yeah, this isn't working. It was something like a dystopian scene. Plus neighbors having contracts with competing fire companies made things worse.

Fire departments got taken over by local governments. FDNY was formed.
Can you imagine a 9/11 where FDNY guys, instead of rushing up the towers selflessly and saving thousands, stood around the twin towers trying to figure out who has the contract to rescue Cantor folks and who has the contract to rescue others?

But that *was* NY's libertarian past
One of the biggest lies told by the American libertarian movement is that "TRUE" laissez-faire or free market has never really been tried.

When that was the 1800s. So many stories of market failure and crony capitalism. US progressive movement in early 1900s was the response.
Be it firefighting or mining or manufacturing or policing or nature conservation or labor practices or even public transport and railroad building, America in 1800s was exactly what libertarians want to make it again. In the 21st century. Completely ignoring those disasters.
Today of course, firefighting in the US is a public good, paid for by our taxes. Whether it is a big city run department like FDNY or volunteer companies in rural areas, there is no "competition". Because competing over who can make most money fighting fire turned out to be bad.

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More from @gauravsabnis

Mar 22
I believe they are very possible.

Whether they actively occur in India & on a wide scale, I don't know.

But I don't get why we can't do EVM with a proper paper verification mechanism. Not this ad hoc "VVPAT" system. I mean the kinda stuff we do in NYC and other places.
This is how we do it in NYC. Like a paper standardized test. You fill out the bubbles. Then you scan the ballot into a machine that instantly counts it.

Best of both worlds. Results in a couple of hours. Plus paper trail.

Verrrrry few places in US do EVM-only voting. Image
After Trump's 2020 treason throwing shade at a system with practically zero election fraud, I don't think any US jurisdiction will ever add EVM-only in the future.

Even the ones that used to be EVM-only are talking about switching to an NYC type scantron system.
Read 28 tweets
Mar 22
"Bro, US defense budget is not a trillion, lol, it is 750 billion, get your facts straight"

No, bro, 750 bn is *just* the Pentagon budget. US spends another 200-300 bn under other budgetary allocation on this supposed defense.

Lemme list some of those.
The most outrageous creative accounting and legislating in this regard is that the cost of actual ongoing foreign wars and operation. That is a separate budget! So the 20 year war in Afghanistan for example, was *NOT* paid for out of the main Pentagon budget but "OCO" budget.
What is OCO you ask? Best embezzlement plus money laundering scheme ever!

All these actual wars we've fought and countries we've bombed in the last 20 years, that didn't come out of the 750 bn. It was a separate money heist, in terms of budgeting.

Hides the actual true costs. Image
Read 21 tweets
Mar 21
People! Stop letting news of newer variants bring you down, unless they are causing a surge in hospitalizations or deaths. Viruses mutate. That's what they do. Why we have new flu shots every year. Covid is going to keep mutating, vaccine or not. Blame Darwin uncle if you must.
As long as vaccinated people are not getting hospitalized, especially mRNA vaccinated folks, freaking out about newer variants is not useful.

It's better to pressure the "global north" to step the fuck up & give free mRNA shots to everyone in the world who wants it, yesterday!
Maybe I'm being too naive but I'm shocked that there is no global progressive movement to pressure Uncle Sam and Aunty NATO to put that expensive global armada to some good use. You can't do squat in Ukraine anyway. Go vaccinate Africa! It'll cost like 15% tops of DoD budget.
Read 21 tweets
Mar 21
For sure. I felt so proud & smart when I got a great GMAT score after just a couple of months of prep and that too during the iipm saga.

But I now realize, I had been been automatically prepping for GMAT (or GRE or CAT) for 20 years, not just a couple of months. Privilege.
That's 760/800. Usually, anything above 720 is treated the same awesome. I say as someone who serves on admitcoms.

Back in 2005, I thought it was a sign of my innate intellectual brilliance.

Looking back, GMAT was designed for someone with my background and privilege.
Read 7 tweets
Mar 21
Spent a lot of the weekend chopping fallen wood with an axe and clearing dead brush with a machete on our new land and it's Sunday night and shoulders and arms are sore in a good way. This land is going to give me some new muscles I think. ๐Ÿ˜Œ
So much naturally aged fallen wood over there, @curiousgawker, we should have a wood chopping competition. Or maybe turn it into an experience. Like how people pick their own apples? Forage or chop your own camping firewood! $10 flat for the weekend.
Our first weekend "working our land" was very productive. Look at this amazing trail she made to the hemlock grove!

In a month or so, we should post a video of this path for contrast. Spring starts today. Those trees are going to be green AF!

Read 5 tweets
Mar 20
Love this ๐Ÿงต

I'm of a slightly older vintage when we used to write down our questions in a notebook to ask at the Boat Club sessions. Must ask mom to bring those notebooks if she can find them. I never threw them away so they should be somewhere in our Pune house.
Heh, this reminds of this time a few years ago when I returned to COEP to do an open quiz, and I came with printed elims sheets and people were like, how very charmingly old school, paper elims. Made me feel so old. ๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚

There was a quizzer in COEP who used to write down every single question anyone asked at any boat club session or a college quiz in a big notebook. And would "prepare" from it before every quiz elim. He very rarely made it to the finals.

We all used to ridicule this practice. ๐Ÿ˜ž
Read 31 tweets

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