India does not have a water issue, they have a population issue, but it’s really hard to mange the population, so natural resources are being consumed beyond sustainability.
This problem is not confined to India, it’s a problem with humanity. Nature is working on a correction.
You could also say that resources of India had been depleted by greed, overexploatation and the lack of proper governanace. You can't run a multimilion city on borewells and groundwater - the government should had built proper infrastructure - pipelines, reservoirs, water meters, sewage treatment plans etc.
I beg to differ, India's population density is comparable to many Western European countries. They a problem of population distribution. Like many developing nations, populations cluster in large cities leading to pressures on resources.
> India's population density is comparable to many Western European countries.
I went down worldpopulationreview.com's list; I'll post my list annotated with country size as a reply to this comment.
Findings:
India, the country, is #28. It has essentially equal population density to the Netherlands (#29, in Europe!), while being a modest 87 times larger. Belgium (#33) has only slightly less density, and India is merely 102 times bigger.
The next European country down is England at #50. It's much closer to the size of India -- 8% as large -- and has two-thirds the density.
Pakistan is #55; it's about four times the size of England with comparable density.
#59 is Germany; it's less than half the size of Pakistan with comparable density. Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, who you might have thought would have super-high density, are equal to Germany. (Monaco and Vatican City really do have super-high density.)
The only other country-sized European countries in the top 70 are Switzerland and Italy, #68 and #69. They have half the density of India. Italy is a tenth of India's size. Switzerland is slightly larger than the Netherlands.
Bangladesh, by the way, is #12, with more than double the density of India (in about 1/20 of the space).
So I can't agree that India's population density is comparable to "many Western European countries". It's comparable to a couple of diminutive European countries. Equal density over 100 times the area is not what you would expect; it's something very unusual about India.
In fact, we can just compare the regions directly. Europe has 743 million people in 10 million square kilometers of land for an average density of 74.3 people per square km. India (including Pakistan and Bangladesh) has 1740 million people in 4 million square km, for an average density of over 400 people per square km (roughly equal to the density of India the country, which makes sense), about 6 times the figure for Europe.
Areas are taken from Wikipedia, with water area removed where Wikipedia lists water area. This list is the full top 30 "countries" plus whoever I thought was of interest down to #70. Many areas are rounded.
1. Macau 30 square km
2. Monaco 2.2
3. Singapore 720
4. Hong Kong 1,070
5. Gibraltar 6.7
6. Bahrain 778
7. Vatican City 0.44
8. Maldives 298
9. Malta 316
10. Sint Maarten 37
11. Bermuda 39
12. Bangladesh 138,000
13. Palestine 5,800
14. Saint-Martin 53
15. Mayotte 374
16. Barbados 439
17. Lebanon 10,300
18. Taiwan 36,000
19. Mauritius 2,000
20. Aruba 179
21. San Marino 61
22. South Korea 100,000
23. Nauru 21
24. Saint Barthelemy 25
25. Rwanda 25,000
26. Comoros 1,659
27. Tuvalu 26
28. India 2,970,000
29. Netherlands 34,000
30. Israel 21,000
33. Belgium 29,000
37. Japan 365,000
47. Vietnam 310,000
50. United Kingdom 239,000
55. Pakistan 860,000
59. Germany 357,000
68. Switzerland 40,000
69. Italy 294,000
Most european countries have highly cultivated land and are industrialized through and through. It might go faster nowadays, but it took them hundreds of years to get there. Turning the middle of nowhere into arable land doesn't happen over night in any case.
This makes them able to efficiently provide for their population with the land they have available. India has some way to go in that respect.
This is not accounting for differences in geography or resources - like water - that are directly limited unless you want to build infrastructure for artificial water purification too.
I suppose it's more of the density than the population. India is massive by all measurements, but west and east sides are completely different. In the west, you have Mumbai, a city full of dust, slums, and millions of people riding trains in a single evening, all fighting for resources.
East side, is full of greenery, rainforest, and a peaceful living with hardly any population compared to west.
The Drought Early Warning System (DEWS) revealed that more than 42% of the country’s area is abnormally dry, which is 6% more than that of the previous year.
... as many as 26 out of 36 meteorological subdivisions in India have recorded deficit rainfall. This is the second driest pre-monsoon that the country has witnessed ever since 1954.
China managed in a similar situation. I think it may be harder to fight people for resources, or just reducing their resource use, than making sure they are never born.
I’m still trying to figure out why every major costs the same. Most non-STEM majors are using the same methods, and devices that were used 50, a hundred years ago.
$50K per year for an English degree vs $50k per year for a Mechanical Engineering degree, the English majors are getting jobbed. Think about all the majors that don’t require the underpinnings of constant technology upgrades, or need the latest and greatest technology.
OEM: how can we make money on a commodity platform, when someone else controls most of the design parameters and they are dictated to us, and margins are razor thin, because most people who buy PC’s want to spend the least amount of money.
OEM Sales: we have companies lining up to bundle software on our computers and they are all willing to big money to be bundled, and even more money to be bundled and not be removable.
OEM: yay, we can be profitable!!!!!
Not one person really thinks the bundled software is of any value, other than the cash the bundling fee generates. If it was illegal for OEM’s to bundle software you’d see even more contraction in the PC OEM market.
Yeah, I remember the big art history boom times. It was crazy, it seemed that everyone was getting into the space, salaries seemed to be going up almost daily, the completion was cut throat.
The professor should stick to teaching computer science and not try to be market economist.
Growing up in the 60’s my next door neighbor, Eddie, an elderly man, who played semi-pro and a little pro ball. His cousin is Stanley Coveleski, a pitcher who is in the hall of fame, he still holds some World Series records, Stanley’s two brothers were pretty good as well.
Anyway, Eddie actually knew most of the greats, Babe, Ty, had a lot of pictures hanging out, playing cards, drinking, barnstorming etc. Eddie told me back in the late 60’s that ice was ruining the arms of pitchers. Eddie was a catcher and for barnstorming trips he got to catch a lot of great pitchers. Eddie said the icing of arms was what was causing pitchers to have so many problems. Eddie said that when you apply ice you stop the healing process, then the stresses and damages don’t get fully repaired, keep repeating and eventually something fails. He predicted that the problem would keep getting worse, because they were starting to have kids ice their arms in little league, creating very unstable arms at an early age.
A few years ago the guy who invented the RICE protocol admitted that he had no clinical basis for using ice. He used it because everyone else was using it, and that it was probably doing more harm than good, because the ice was removing the small amount of inflammation, signaling the body to stop the repair.
Eddies told me that for kids coming up they should keep them on a pitch count and give them more rest, and never any ice, let the body recover on its own. The body will build up the ligaments and tendons to combat the repeated stress, making recovery faster and easier over time. Because back in the day guys would throw 40 or 50 complete games a year and you can’t do that without having a “gorilla arm”, he said all great pitcher’s pitching arm!looked different than their other arm, you could see the buildup, the arms weren’t bigger just different.
Eddie was 75 and could still drop down into a catchers squat and bounce right up, then he’d say, “no ice”.
Turns out the guy was right, unless you’ve got compartment syndrome where you have a dangerous swelling problem you should let your body heal itself naturally. The little bit of swelling is your body putting blood and other fluids at the injury site to enact repairs, and using ice do remove those fluids is dumb. It’s like lowering a moderate fever when you are sick, you are compromiseing your bodies ability to fight the infection. Eddie told me that when he felt himself getting sick when he was younger he would go to a sauna and sweat it out, but now that he was older he’s take the hottest bath he could stand for as long as he could stand it. He lived into his 90’s and I never remember him being sick. I do the sauna trick when I’m sick, and it usually drastically reduces the severity and length of the cold or flu.
+1 for sauna / sweating out any cold or flu. Even when I'm feeling like death, a 60 min sweat session at the gym that morning usually means I'm back to normal by the next day.
Doesn't take all that much effort to work up a good sweat when you're sick too.
I used to swear by exercise to sweat out a cold, but then a couple of times it seemed to pull it deeper into my lungs and linger as bronchitis for a long time. "Rest and fluids" seems to do better now.
Except when it doesn't.
There doesn't seem to be much predictive power in personal anecdotes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/health/03real.html : "In one study by Austrian researchers, for example, a group of 50 adults were split into two groups and tracked for six months. One group was instructed to use saunas regularly; the other group abstained. At the end of the study the sauna group had contracted fewer colds. “This was found particularly during the last three months of the study period, when the incidence was roughly halved compared to controls,” the scientists wrote. Other studies have found similar results. But doctors caution that saunas can be hazardous to those with heart or circulatory problems."
https://www.healthline.com/health/can-you-sweat-out-a-cold#s... : cites the same study and says it may prevent colds, but cites one study saying that hot dry air specifically (3-minute exposures thereto) doesn't help... seems not the regular kind of sauna: "Use of this type of sauna has little in common with that of a regular sauna, where one usually stays longer than 10 minutes and sweating is desired." Hmmph. I'll say that one is only partly relevant.
And the "Other studies have found similar results" link's abstract says this: "The common cold has great socio-economic impact. To date, no prophylaxis has been scientifically shown to be effective. A number of older reports implied that visits to the sauna and other thermotherapeutic measures might provide a certain degree of protection. More recent data suggest that this supposition is probably true. Nevertheless, there are a number of important questions still to be answered in this area."
The cited study 1990 https://doi.org/10.3109/07853899009148930 is evaluating "consistent sauna use preventing colds" rather than "get in the sauna to sweat out a cold", and in fact stated that
"The average severity of the common colds per cent
was 1.8f0.8 in group 1 and 2.0k0.7 in group 2. The
mean duration of common colds per event was 6.7 k3.9
days in group 1 and 7.5k5.6 days in group 2. Neither
yields a significant difference between the two groups."
So, that one study found a minor preventative effect, but no curative effect.
Interesting that they also state
"The average frequency of sauna bathing was 26.8 55.5
(mean k SO) per six months. The frequency of common
colds during this time was 33 in group 1 and 46 in group
2. This difference between the two groups is statisti-
cally significant (P <0.05). The expected frequency ac-
cording to previous reports (1-9) and based on the six
months preceding (Table 1) the study would be 50 per
six months in each group."
They expect 50 colds per group of 25 people in six months? On average each person getting a cold for a week every three months?
Looks like that's not far off, depending on the age distribution. Kids 4-8 per year, over 60 maybe 1/year. Wow.
I could never understand how something that was less refined, diesel, meaning that it had more unnecessary “stuff” could produce less emissions. Diesel always did, and always will, as far as I’m concerned he snake oil when it comes to emissions.
It contains more energy for a given volume, so you get better fuel economy than with petrol. It might not be better for the particulates and NOx that we are now optimising for, but its better for CO2, that we were optimising for. So I don't think the snake oil label is warranted.
Diesel engines are also significantly more efficient at converting that energy into usable torque. That's why an idling diesel consumes almost no fuel - it isn't doing any work.
If they don’t get a Board seat it would be the dumbest $300m ever spent, but if they don’t get a Board seat it means their interests are already protected and represented.
I’m done with Reddit. It was a nice ride, but now it’s officially over. They’ve been trying to turn reddit into Facebook, a personal data vacuum, but now it’s going to get ugly.
Considering the valuation, remaining as an unpaid moderator for a reddit sub, is absolutely crazy. Hopefully all the mods up and leave, nothing like letting others get rich from your free efforts.
While I think this is a little extreme, I understand fully the sentiment behind it.
It's lamentable considering how simple the site is but there exist currently, no good alternatives! I suppose we can attribute that at least partly to the Network Effect. I've been tired of it since the front-end redesign; I grew weary of the dark patterns, the constant nagging to use their app when on mobile, the fact that my back button took me to the top of the page and (most of all, in fact) the overall quality of the threads, so my usage has decreased dramatically over the last 3 months. I suspect I we are no longer longer Reddit's target audience and they will do very well going forward but it's a shame for me at least, that something I've been using for over a decade is fading into background noise.
I worked at reddit for 4 years but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up doing to the site (which, like you mentioned, is manifesting through the redesign, the dark patterns, and so on). They've now taken $500M in VC since I left.
A few months later, I decided to start a non-profit with the goal of building a site that would actually be able to stick to its principles and address a lot of the issues that I think are hurting online communities: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
It's in private alpha and is still fairly small, but it focuses on higher-quality non-fluff content and discussions, and gets several hundred posts/comments a day. If you (or anyone else) is interested in an invite, please read the blog post I linked above and send me an email at the address listed in there and I'll be happy to give you one.
I was going to mention tildes but who better to do it than you!
I have been using tildes for about 6 months so far. I love the technical side of the website. Its fast and its minimal and doesn't seem to be sucking up my data. I also love the interactions I have had while using it.
What its missing is the specialty stuff. On reddit I can find a whole community focused on one programming language. On tildes I'm lucky to see a programming post.
But this leaves me with an interesting problem, how can you have a website that has enough users to make up a group for specialty interests without it becoming big enough that it turns in to reddit. It almost seems like the only way is to have totally separate sites for every interest.
Yeah, agreed. That's mostly just due to the small userbase, and hopefully we'll be able to build up specialized communities as the site grows (and the hierarchical group system should work very well for them).
It's worth remembering that reddit didn't even have user-created subreddits until it was over two and a half years old, and only had a handful of admin-created ones before that. It takes quite a bit of growth and time to be able to support specialized communities.
This comment would have been fine without the preceding humblebrag. "Oh its so difficult dealing with massive interest from HN, but oh well I'll take the hit for your sake". Admit it, if a bunch of folks from HN join it's great for you.
It was more that I already spent about 6 hours between yesterday and today replying to emails instead of doing the things that I'd prefer to, but you're right, I wouldn't be posting if I didn't want the attention.
I'll remove that line, it was just me sighing and didn't add anything of value.
Having just tried Tilde, I think a bunch of users HN going to Tilde would probably be equivalent to a bunch of Reddit users going to HN. The quality of discussion is going to go down as the forum gets bigger.
Not to mention the fact that the site for some reason performs like shit on mobile. Never underestimate a corporate company's ability to overcomplicate/encumber a simple product to the point where it's barely usable.
I also decided it's as good a time as any to rip reddit out of my daily life, after using it for the better part of the last 10 years.
Between the crushing "download our tracking riddled app" / "switch to our shitty new redesign" push recently and massive amount of engineered sponsored content, instead of paid-for advertisement, there's nothing there keeping me interested. This most recent funding round is just icing on the cake.
It's only a matter of time before they go down the twitter path and outright ban third party apps.
I tried that but I get FOMO. Like I feel like I get to discover so many interesting things (news about niche games etc) because of Reddit but at the same time I also hate it.
It's not Stack Overflow; Reddit is designed to be visited daily and 'engaged' with.
That said, I do go to Reddit first when I'm looking to answer questions like HDD recommendations or things to do in my city. That's because searching Google for it will give me nothing but awful content mill blog posts stuffed with affiliate links and SEO-optimized keywords ("Best USD Hard Drives in 2019"). On Reddit you actually get the feeling that the question is trying to be answered by actual people.
I used to spend hours a week on Reddit, but I've consciously made the effort to avoid it. Unless it comes up in search results, in which case I'm using it as a tool.
Its a tool covered in weird gunk and makes your hand feel dirty every time you use it. The website is slow and bloated and filled with mountains of JS and tracking
I don't have internet time. I only go to the internet when looking for something specific or to kill time waiting for something else. Otherwise it's more important to spend it getting things done or with real people. Sitting on the internet, otherwise, is no different than clicking channels on the TV.
A lot of the replacement sites are trying to do things differently, but honestly at this point a straight clone that does nothing/only the very few most obvious things might just be what's needed, if only because the next company will get a clean(er) slate to work with.
To be fair it is one of the longest-lived of the original dotcom bubble companies. 23 years is multiple lifetimes when you're talking about the internet.
This problem is not confined to India, it’s a problem with humanity. Nature is working on a correction.