HIt and run - What about the victims?

I seem to have become more conscious of the plight of victims after watching documentaries on this topic on TV5 Monde. This line stared at me: "the family of one of the injured children may have to sell their hut in a slum to raise money for their daughter's surgery" in a story about hit and run.

I wish the focus would change from "whom to punish" to "how to help".

Shouldn't the society mandate free immediate treatment for victims. The hospitals should recover money from insurance companies or the government in case no insurance claim is possible.

Government being the default payer would appear to be fair as it is an obvious failure of governance if the car cannot be located or was being driven without insurance.

Poor weak men - mannequins are the cause

What can one add to this piece of remarkable wisdom -

Tawade said the display of inadequately clothed mannequins was indecent and could lead to "wrong acts" by men.

Update: See this talk  Jackson Katz: Violence against women—it's a men's issue instead for a far discussion of far greater relevance on this serious social problem.

Why not less charity and more taxes?

I wasn't exactly convinced by Peter Singer. I still donate to a charity for children as a personal 'goal' and to another one for old people as my father liked to do. I probably give more than I used to simply because I am now better off. However, I do it to avoid the guilt of not giving to road side beggars. I lost the comfort of giving after this incident in a crematorium.

The idea of even the need for 'effective altruism' bothers me. Why are NGO's preferable to government? I prefer the views expressed here. I would like to pay more taxes and see that the government works. Some corruption or pilferage of funds is probably no worse than overheads of charities. Obviously not in moral terms but in the quantum of money which is actually spent on the desired objectives.

It isn't that NGO's or Charities are irrelevant. Rather, I am bothered by the perception that government is not relevant.

'We’re coming after you' - taxman warn

Reading 'We’re coming after you' - taxman warn, I started to wonder what drives human motivation.

What if the Forbes list of Richest People was based on the quantum of direct taxes paid by an individual?  Wouldn't people want to be on it?

Delhi University Changes - Contentless Discussions

Reading "Delhi University VC makes his case for shift to four-year undergraduate courses" led to the same uncomfortable feeling I have had for several weeks now. Here was still another issue which seems important to me and, yet, I cannot understand the discussions around it. I had switched out of a discussion on even Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha TV (which have a much higher signal to noise ration than the private channels) as it seemed irrelevant to the concern of how to ensure that students learn and are well equipped to deal with the current world. The changes suggested now might have been meaningful if done at least 3 decades ago. (See An Indian education? for an view of the current state.)

There is no discussion around ideas like MOOC, learning from each other students as explored by Sugata Mitra or learning from failures as explored by various speakers at TED Talks.

How do you prepare students for employment if you have no idea of what skills the jobs will need. Possibly by encouraging each college to try its own strategy and never forgetting that failures are great for learning.

The other current issue which makes me feel very stupid is that I can't understand the 'scam' in coal scam. Incompetent governance yes but ?

Ironic: Garbage - those who don't need it, want it!

Today's news: "Oslo has a problem: Shortage of garbage to generate power"

Norway has oil and gas as well. We have very little oil and gas but a lot of garbage and few plants to process the garbage! On warm days, I can smell the garbage in Chandigarh when we go for a walk. The odour is definitely stronger than that of roses in Rose Garden :(

I suppose no one wants a garbage disposal plant in their neighbourhood just as they don't want a nuclear plant in their neighbourhood. I wouldn't want to live downstream a hydroelectric dam either.

So, until we have fewer people so that we have space, we may need to find a way to send the garbage to Oslo in exchange for some barrels of oil :)

Some more news of robots making the rich in US richer! A big emotional advantage will be that the consumers won't have to feel guilty about cheap clothes from Bangladesh where people have to work in high risk environment.

Hope Danes do not dismantle their welfare state but others learn from it

I read this news about the welfare state of Denmark with a lot of interest. The tone of the report was distinctly negative. It implies that something is wrong - the state is discouraging people from working.

It seems to me that the Danes are well off because they have hit upon the solution for the modern predicament - jobless growth! I may agree with Erik Brynjolfsson: The key to growth? Race with the machines; however, I find it hard to believe that all or even most human beings can be productively employed in a robotic future.

People may be able to spend their time, exactly as I am doing - writing a blog, reading and sharing news, spending some time on Google+ and, even, Facebook. But I am not earning anything from these activities. I have earned this 'right' to do nothing by 'retiring'. Society may have to face up to the reality that a fair fraction of the population will never be employed as appears to be happening in Spain.

I have to admit that anyone can do well in the new economy - what else can one say about Honey Boo Boo. Logic, though, tells us that anyone can does not imply everyone will. The best anti-dote for optimism remains A Cool Million!

New industries like Google, Facebook need an audience and content creators - an audience who are in a position to spend money making it worthwhile for advertiser to pay these companies.  We may have trouble doing so in India but the richer countries should be able to pay people to spend time on social media instead of working just like they pay farmers to not grow food. If the option boils down to dying or paying higher corporate taxes, the latter is bound to win.

I was surprised to find that the concept of negative income tax has been around so long and even more surprised that one of its first proponents was Milton Friedman.

Negative income tax may interesting side effects, e.g. better services. People may work in a coffee shop or a bar not to earn money but to interact with people. Many jobs may move from their lowly economic status to a higher socially conscious status. I recall reading that a prominent author worked as a nightwatchman so that he could work on his novel in peace!

For Indians in India, the future does not look rosy. We need to accept that robots are cheaper even in China! This news confirms the absurdity of the idea of demographic dividend. We have a large unemployed and unemployable population, unfit even for blogging or creating YouTube videos. It seems absurd to brag about it rather than working frantically to reduce population growth and move towards Danish style welfare state when each of us becomes a socially conscious rag-picker.