It's mind blowing how much land the US has. I live in India and here finding farmland is not easy to say least, while I see lot of cheap land available in the US all time with much more facilities than a small city in India would have.
I've always wondered why America has not built many more cities with all that available land.
Most of that cheap land you are seeing available in the US is not close to what you'd consider farmland.
Consider the location of the 100th meridian as it somewhat bisects the continent. West of that line, you cannot really grow anything without irrigation. East of that line, and to some extent there's enough rainfall that stuff will grow on its own, albeit not optimally.
Most the cheap available land you will find in the US is west of the 100th meridian, and is dry largely inorganic dirt.
As for the cities, you may not be aware of this, but the southwest (and perhaps western) US is in year 21 of a drought that rivals the worst of the last 1200 years, and there is no sign that the situation is likely to improve in the next century or so.
This. The western half of the US is going to become useless for farming in the next 50 years because all the aquifers are drying up and they take tens of thousands of years to recharge. Which is another way of saying that farming in the western US has only been possible because it harvested fossil water that's now almost gone.
This is not quite true. Most western US (well, say CA central valley back to the plains) agriculture has been made possible by large scale irrigation systems backed by the construction of substantial reservoirs. From time to time, it has been necessary to pull from groundwater, and from time to time, some farmers have done so even when it wasn't necessary. But in general, most of the agricultural expansion has been based on collected rainwater, distributed via huge systems. This system has worked "well" as long as the snow and the rain has kept coming (and flowing, rather than being absorbed into warm-weather baked soil). But the rain & snow are not making it into the rivers and reservoirs, and so this system has serious problems now.
By contrast, plains and some midwestern ag. has been drawing down the Ogallala aquifer at an insane rate, and that really is "fossil water".
Correct. I overgeneralized; the coastal western states might be able to continue some farming. Assuming cities like LA don't continue to appropriate more and more water that fell to the ground hundreds of miles away.
This is the basis of the plot of The Sea of Grass, a classic Spencer Tracy / Katherine Hepburn movie. Tracy is a rancher trying to make this argument to some optimistic farmers. They see it as self-serving, which they are right about, but so is Tracy. Tragedy ensues.
Probably because America has only about a quarter of the population that India has? Also, the ideal of the American homestead or even suburban home is one that doesn't place a high value on sharing space or being close to your neighbors.
The path to building a city involves first building a small town with some kind of economic activity. Because of a lack of people (especially young people), it's hard to create a brand new city with a vibrant economy. Most of the existing young people in America move to existing big cities. Small cities are becoming bigger.
This is unlike China where cities were built en masse to house migrants from rural areas. America just doesn't have the same volume of workers.
As someone who comes from India which is a country with lots of corruption when these people are caught red-handed often they say they did it for their kids.
Screwed everyone's life to ensure better life for your kids, a masterstroke in India.
It was all justified by someone who goes by name Krishna in ancient text. Krishna origin is questionable as he's not one person throughout his history but fusion of multiple personalities which existed in past.
Krishna could as well be a master manipulator who convinced other's that God and him are actually just one. Many Kings of that time actually did try to become God the prime example was Pondrak who believed he's the real Vasudev. His version couldn't survive because he lost the battle against Krishna.
Mahabharata is not useful to for an average person, reading it will not enlighten you or anything. It's not a guide on how to live your life, it has many flaws, questionable ethics and morality defined in the text, bringing God into it to make beyond contest.
If it had anything of use, India where this religious text is most popular would be epicenter of good behavior, technological advancements, ethics and morality. Is it? No it's far away from it.
Before anyone questions my religion, I am Hindu from north India (Uttarakhand Purohit clan to be specific)
1. In the first sentence you talk about the Mahabharata war as it was real.
2. Then you discount Krishna being not real.
Do you see the obvious logical contradiction? Btw, unlike Christianity, Hinduism doesn't rely on Mahabharta being real. So this angle is a common attack from Christians.
Your previous comment:
> 666 is number of the beast. I wonder how many thiest scientists would have refused to work on it if they were to use 666
Why would a non-Christian believe that?
You are probably new to the site and don't know that people can see your past comments.
Your language perfectly mirrors the one used by missionaries in India (studied at one such school but didn't get baptized).
India always had one of the biggest economies in the world before Industrial Revolution in the Europe.
Expecting anything to be "epicentre of good behavior" is wrong to begin with because every person is different no matter what any text/information/knowledge the person has access to and ancient India (as that is what we're talking about here) did have stable economies as well as kingdoms. Was it perfect? No, because nothing is.
India had pretty significant technological advancements and all you have to do is Google Search for it.
You have absurd definition of "anything of use". If you want everything to be perfect, then bad luck, there isn't such place to go for you.
AFAIK, Krishna was a charioteer in the original mahabharata from 1000BC. Later additions to the story around 400-200BC turned him into a God. The Gita is also a later introduction. How does this gel with Krishna being an amalgamation of multiple personalities, as opposed to a later invention (by Brahmins?) to justify varna vyavastha or other objectives? I have read that Gita was created as a response to Buddhist texts as well.
> It's not a guide on how to live your life, it has many flaws, questionable ethics and morality defined in the text, bringing God into it to make beyond contest.
Can you please elaborate.
>Before anyone questions my religion, I am Hindu from north India (Uttarakhand Purohit clan to be specific)
What Vedanta school of interpretation are you talking about.
That’s the greatness of Bhargava’s Gita and Hinduism. You are absolutely entitled to your own opinion and questions. As did Arjuna who pestered Krishna with continuous questions in Bhargava’s Gita. Hinduism , more specifically Santayana Dharma is not based on commandments , it is based on questions and answers.
I don’t think that is quite accurate - the majority of the German people identified as Christian, and while Himmler did want to replace the church he was forbidden by Hitler because Hitler did not want to risk alienating the Christian populace during the war.
Alternate ideas that were popular at the time were Nazism as a state religion (which is what they depicted in Man In The High Castle), and “Positive Christianity” which basically removed the Old Testament, gave Jesus an Aryan lineage, and might have included Hitler as a sort of saint or contemporary savior.
But that said - the occult stuff has made for some of my favorite movies and video games. If not for the Nazis, Indiana Jones would have ended up battling gangsters and mad scientists with army of zombie Africans and its not the same movie at all.
(If anyone knows the name of that 50s adventure series with the mad scientist that used a machine to turn Africans into his zombie army, I can’t remember to save my life.)
This was then - everyone was far more religious in the first part of the 20th century than today! You can't take current German sensibilities as representative of that time.
I used to work in US and Europe and in last decade work life balance is basically shot there.
As a result I took my savings and move back to India. Now I've a small farm here, since the market is soo inefficient in India specially for farm produce and labor abundant I am able to work only 1 hour a day and enjoy rest of my day on things I like.
In US and Europe proportion of smart people with access to resources is vastly more compared to India where either smart people lack resources or the ones with resources aren't smart enough.
All those masks, gloves, helmets are not cheap in India. Saddest thing is even if it's being made in India the raw material for making this comes from China and taxed by Indian customs.
If you've choice between buying yourself protective gears vs a new welder to weld the rotor which one do you think will be take him one step closer to his dream?
Sure protective gear can give him more time but most have choices to make, if he could fly this helicopter off the ground, highly likely he also knew about the protective gears yet he choose to not have any maybe because he didn't have much money.
Problem is that we do not have many tools, indian made tools cost 3-4x of Chinese tools and have 2x worse quality on average
80% things which exist in West (made in China) does not exist in India on top India doesn't make many things.
Plus we suffer from too many middlemen problem, where the end product is inflated away beyond the affordability of masses.
Not everything is available in India, when I lived in US and Germany, I felt as if I was living in heaven I could order any part and it will be at my desk within a day or two but here in India you can have money yet you'll not find what you need.
India doesn't have any marketplace for makers like Ebay or even McMasterCar.
In small cities getting even the right size bolt, nut and screws is damnn too difficult let alone compression fittings etc.. which are more involved.
Surprisingly no startup has taken this issue seriously.
As the inflation has increased, labor cost has also significantly increased and more Indians are forced to take DIY approach thanks to abundant wealth of knowledge available from youtube and reddit experts (now even homeless people on streets can be seen chatting on WhatsApp with their friends, data has got so cheap)
Material availability still a major problem outside of the big cities with 10 million+ population. Most startup founders (people with resources, knowledge, network) also live in big cities so they don't really know what problems 70% of Indians face who are still living in villages, towns and small cities.
It sucks India does not have a hardware ecosystem similar to Shenzhen. There is no capital available for independent innovators who want to build hardware products. There are few skilled engineers who can develop the tooling required to make parts like screws, fittings etc. at a scale and price that makes sense for the market. Import duties to encourage import substitution have only made parts more expensive and made logistics more complex.
I think the attention given to IT services and software companies and startups has left the hardware industry without talent or capital. If you can make 5-10x as a software engineer than a tooling engineer, it makes zero sense to study mechanical engineering.
Yep, less of a parts and more of a culture issue w.r.t. the lack of safety mechanisms, though the difficulty in sourcing quality parts certainly played its part in this incident.
All the cars have seat belts, so it would’ve been pretty easy to obtain one compared to the rest of the parts involved here.
None of the auto rickshaws have seat belts, for example, and lots of construction workers forgo helmets. No one cares, and furthermore people exacerbate the issue by trying to fit as many people as possible into these vehicles.
It’s a miracle that people wear helmets from time to time, though it’s still quite rare for pillion riders and whole families try to sit on two wheelers.
>Yep, less of a parts and more of a culture issue w.r.t. the lack of safety mechanisms, though the difficulty in sourcing quality parts certainly played its part in this incident
Who doesn't want to live longer? I even know a local welder who went to local welding supply store and all they had was shade 11 lens, through which he couldn't see a damn thing and now he welds without any shade. That's the state of affair in India.
Sure in factories, boss doesn't pay for protective gears so the people who need the job have to do without it.
Most autorikshaws are not driver owned, they are owned by some guy who probably owns a bunch of them and rents it out to drivers. Drivers get penalty left right on road from traffic police and lose a lot of money to repairs, rickshaw owner, fuel theft etc. At the end not much is left for the driver let alone for safety installs.
As people become richer they stop using rickshaw and drive their own cars.
Lot of people don't wear helmet because it's hot and humid in India and its really hard to wear it in 38*C in bright sun on 70% RH.
An average person in India has so many problems, the general mood is agitated and forgetful as a result. Most look for escapes and might not even be paying attention to things on road.
> Lot of people don't wear helmet because it's hot and humid in India and its really hard to wear it in 38*C in bright sun on 70% RH.
and here:
> Most look for escapes and might not even be paying attention to things on road.
This culture is not amenable to valuing lives very highly.
I've noticed that a lot of comments here echo the sentiment above and you're the only person defending this attitude as being borne out of the lack of convenience (which no one is arguing with, however, that's no excuse in places where human life is actually valued).
Sorry to hear that. It’s definitely a tragic story. I ordered some things from McMaster Carr just the other day and it arrived within a few days. I get frustrated sometimes when the parts I need have to ship from China and take a month. But they are cheap and they’ll arrive eventually.
It’s definitely sad to see genius wasted because the tools just sometimes aren’t available in places like India.
Thanks for this information, it’s easy living in the US to forget just how easy our lives are in so many different ways.
>I get frustrated sometimes when the parts I need have to ship from China and take a month. But they are cheap and they’ll arrive eventually.
This remind me of the time when some local makers were ordering parts from aliexpress it was talking on average 30-40 days to arrive at their door and they were only ordering the parts that could not be substituted easily.
Then one day government of India decided to ban aliexpress.
Even in Europe we don’t have an equivalent to McMaster Carr. We can certainly procure the materials we need, but as far as I know there’s nothing quite practical like that US shop.
Moreover, India as a country has a lax attitude towards safety. When you are fighting to get the basic stuff, the safety aspect does not even cross most people's minds. This can be observed pretty much everywhere. In most construction sites here we don't see the workers wearing hard hats, which are seen as a bare necessity in developed countries.
As someone pointed out, in this case the accident could have been prevented by forming a makeshift seat-belt out of cloth, but the inventor probably wasn't thinking about safety at all.
>In most construction sites here we don't see the workers wearing hard hats
Well they do it mostly because laws are not strict in India even if they are its easy to bribe off the enforcer and this saves the contractor money while he maximize the profit.
It's not that average Indian is more greedy than average European it's just the enforcement system in India is easy to bribe away, so risk for not following proper safety guidelines is less in India and an open opportunity to save money on protective gears.
The true failure comes from average Indian not being able to demand better standards from those in power like Europeans have managed to.
Yes, this is a very good point. Access to good tools is essential to do this kind of work safely, you can have all the knowledge in the world, if you can't measure accurately, test your welds non-destructively, machine things without adding stresses that the material is ill equipped to handle and assemble properly then it is very easy to mess things up in a critical way. Miss an inclusion in a weld (which could very easily happen), have some vibration due to imbalance, a hairline fracture from metal fatigue and with a helicopter as your project it can only end in one way.
One would assume that if you have the resources to attempt to build something that resembles a helicopter, you would have a way to source a cloth strip to tie yourself to the seat.
Not trying to diminish the magnitude of the disaster, but I think your argument does not apply in this case
sorry, i think you don't get it - the point is that you don't have all the necessary things. Which things out of the missing things were really necessary - that is rearview 20/20. This time it was strip of cloth, other time it may be something else.
I think there’s a counterpoint which is “while you may not have everything, it seems wise to use those things you do have.”
I cannot fathom that a person with the skills, resources, and tenacity to DIY a helicopter could not lay their hands on at least a car seatbelt and a scooter helmet during the course of the project. I wouldn’t be surprised if the crash scene was within sight of both of those items.
“Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.”
If you don't have all the necessary parts for your helicopter, you shouldn't be trying to fly it. Maybe there are things that you don't truly need, but this is a terrible way to figure which.
When I visited India, I drove by this area where there were there were stalls with Indians breaking up old rusty equipment back into parts. Much respect. I think people in the west, don't have a clue how hard some people work for so little return.
As a noob robotics learner I ran into tools challenges very early on. There are some online places but as you pointed out the quality is outright bad. I just gave up that hobby as i didn’t find it worth all the frustration.
During a business trip to Berlin I visited a typical departmental store and was absolutely blown away by all sorts of tools being sold. I was like a kid in a candy store. I mean it wasn’t even a specialized store but a Walmart kind of generic store. Imagine how it’d be in a dedicated hardware store!
> Surprisingly no startup has taken this issue seriously.
There are few tiny startups catering to small niche e.g. https://diy-india.com sells tiny screws, shafts etc. for reasonable price. But they hardly get the support needed to scale up to something like McMaster-Carr, Which the startups emulating western startups or EdTech startups get in India.
With Chinese eCommerce sites banned, The time for entering this market has never been more lucrative.
While there's some truth to this, I think there's often too much regard for 'jugaad' in many parts of India which sometimes just manifests as 'penny wise pound foolish' behaviour.
Has there ever been an attempt at solving the problem with a cooperatively owned retailer? They're a little old school but useful for changing markets that are dysfunctional, and overcoming a lack of capital by allowing members to combine their (individually too small) means.
Similarly, are there groups where people with these interests communicate about how frustrated they are?
I read somewhere about the postal network in India and how it suffered from a widespread lack of organized addresses. If it's still true, perhaps this is a contributing factor to why it might be hard to keep up and achieve scale for eBay clones?
No logistics is no longer the issue. Arrival of amazon and Flipkart fueled lots of logistics companies, now it's all sorted and amazon delivers to even the remotest villages in India.
Where you can't find anything including anyone to help you?
I have to source various hardware for building projects and with five big box stores within a few minutes of my house it is always an absolute pain, if not impossible, to find what I need. I walked into Menards the other day and couldn't get 2" cabinetry screws...a commonly stocked basic fastener. Our big box hardware stores have turned into seasonal home goods stores.
In India also they build solar vehicle, the students. Most of the material is Chinese, government imposes duties on these things and Indian students are not able to afford the raw material needed to build these as a result.
Weird thing is indian government imposes duties on products that India doesn't even make.
Adani has been making and selling solar panels in india for the last 2+ years, the duties are a late step to stop Chinese dumping that wiped out solar panel manufacturing being done by companies like moserbear in Greater Noida a decade ago.
Sure, but how you become independent if your tariffs hinder your own r&d? China seems to do it smarter by importing what needs to be imported until they can do it on their own
It's certainly something that countries should have seen coming a long time ago and have a better plan than just tariffs once it's too late. Sometimes feels like China was the only societal model that didn't allow itself to be captured by fossil fuel interests from within their own or other countries and so could react correctly to this obvious development.
China is being captured by the largest force of them all: the communist party. The party's influence has to be kept at all cost, even the economy. The current crackdown of tech companies -- Alibaba, crypto, e-tutoring -- shows that the party will not tolerate forces veering off their control.
As for fossil fuel interest, China import oil, so that's the necessary evil, and they will be happy to get rid of it the moment they can.
I don't get it. Why is the crackdown on e-tutoring bad?
I am not saying you are wrong. I do t know enough to say that. However, it is clear that we can't have a "free market" in many things, perhaps anything at all if you ask me. Too much information asymettry.
Look at India and white hat jr. There are some terrible people in this world.
Edit: you are trying to profit off of gullible parents' fear of missing out. Ed 'tech' ought to be nonprofit. You guys who are in for profit ed tech are worse than facebook.
The crackdown is not to reduce prices, the free market does that. The crackdown is to discourage/control learning western language and culture, as well as keep money from leaving the country for a service that reduces it's grip.
I wonder what a thorough comparison between the fossil fuel industry and the chinese communist party would reveal.
I can imagine a few surpises in stats around number of political opponents or inconvenient civilians killed, democratic accountability, propaganda, human rights abuses, wars started, deaths due to negligence, etc.
Why would they not use old solar panels. Certainly in a country as big as India, there must be a tonne of them for students. I understand you wanted to complain about the tariffs. It's still a valid question.
India does not have good industrial waste disposal so a lot of toxic stuff ends up in the food supply from vegetables and fruits and other produce.
Infact there was a recent study in India which provided evidence for this claim
People can shill as much as for their country as possible but please do not put others life in jeopardy to make a quick buck and fame for your country.
One thing being overlooked is that in market most honey is Chinese engineered suger syrup and countless honey blending operations running around the world
Lot of people bee keep for themselves, I also do it for getting beewax and honey that I use for my self consumption and sometimes I'll take a jar of honey and give it to some friend when I am seeing them.
I've always wondered why America has not built many more cities with all that available land.