Not sure about Bihar, but talent / labor export isn't just a Kerala thing. Having a network does help - makes it easy to find a job, find people to live with that speak the same language, help in difficult times etc.
That's the same as asking "if Singapore can achieve near-zero levels of crime, why can't Brazil do it too?" i.e. a nonsensical question. The culture is different, the people are different and the mindsets are different.
I find it interesting that GPT-3 was available as an API for more than a year without generating this much excitement.
It wasn't until chatgpt was released that we fully grasped the potential of AI, leading to a surge in innovation every week.
Regardless of any criticisms, it's undeniable that OpenAi played a significant role in accelerating the progress and acceptance of AI in our daily lives.
there are reports that some openai employees initially learned about the release of the chatgpt interface via twitter. this move appears to have been orchestrated from on high by sam altman, who, despite his carefully curated public image, is not a scientist or researcher and holds no academic credentials at all, let alone any in the fields of computer science, machine learning, or linguistics. he is a prep-school educated kid who washed out of a comp sci degree at stanford that managed to pawn that off into being a VC who serves on the board of startups. in short, he is the exact kind of business guy this article is critiquing.
the release and viral adoption of chatgpt drove altman's personal profile and the valuation of the company he runs into the stratosphere, but, to many of the more sober/cynical minded of people who have been doing this kind of research for years (myself included), it appears to be at the cost of dropping a poorly understood (by the general public) technology with a high potential for abuse by multitude of different types of bad actors onto the general public with little or no plan for how to manage/mitigate the repercussions on the rest of society.
so yes, did openai play a "a significant role in accelerating the progress and acceptance of AI in our daily lives"... yes, but to many, that is not a good thing. we are only just beginning to scratch the surface of what this tech's impact will be on society as a whole. my guess is that most people with scientific / engineering backgrounds would have preferred a more incremental and controlled release process into broader adoption. instead, it seems like just another cynical move by another silicon valley pencil pusher relentlessly seeking to enrich themselves while accelerating the pace at which the billions of other people on this planet need to deal with downstream consequences of this action.
It's fascinating how Voyager 1, despite my lack of space knowledge, utilizes a nuclear power source for 40+ years, offering steady and reliable power without any moving parts that could degrade over time.
In contrast, India's decision to rely on solar panels led vikram lander to be dead in just 14 days due to lack of sunlight (afaik).
I'm curious about the rationale behind this choice when nuclear power seems like a far superior option. Can someone shed light on this decision?
First, the nuclear power source is a giant hunk of plutonium. It is expensive to get, dangerous to use, and due to concerns about further refinement, is restricted internationally.
Second, it is toxic inherently — the source is continuously radioactive at a hazardous level to humans, plutonium itself has acute and long-term toxic effects aside from the radioactivity, and if a launch fails, the rtg will disintegrate and poison hundreds of miles (see Kosmos 954, which disintegrated over Canada)
Third, it is HEAVY. They produce 40W per kilogram. Solar panels produce three times that much on Mars, and can be folded compact for launch.
Voyager used an RTG because its planned mission took it far beyond where sunlight can generate power, and it could do so because it had the budget of NASA and plutonium from the Department of Energy.
Solar panels are way cheaper, lighter, easier to procure, easier to launch, and tend not to cause international incidents.
Kosmos-954 didn't poison hundreds of miles, square or otherwise.
They could only find a dozen of radioactive bits, each only dangerous within a very small area around it, and not really leaching anything due to its ceramic nature. Most of the fuel dispersed and became harmless by dilution, probably never even reached the surface.
I wonder if you could do a hybrid approach, where the nuclear device is very small, but able to charge the battery over a longer duration to the point where the solar panels can be repositioned and utilized again.
Lots of missions use radioisotopic heaters, where you don't bother with the thermocouples and just have the material get warm and protect components which are vulnerable to low temperatures.
That's the main reason why spacecraft don't survive a temporary power outage: terrible environmentals.
But at this point, we don't have a lot of Pu-238, which is one of the only decent candidates.
I don't know the exact reasons why Vikram didn't get a fission reactor. But I can assume from similar missions:
1. Solar is pretty good as far as Mars and it gets worse as it travel further from the Sun. This is why most probes that travel past Mars need a nuclear reactor (Voyager, Pioneer, Cassini, etc). Going closer to the sun they get even better
2. Sending radioactive materials on rockets presents a risk and it is avoided if possible, lunar probes are usually cheaper and can still benefit from solar, so no need for nuclear. Imagine throwing plutonium in the atmosphere in the case of an accident
3. Nuclear reactors in probes are small and rely on decay radiation, they _usually_ have pretty small powet output, solar has a lot
4. And last but not least, price, solar is much cheaper than nuclear
Am I wrong that the plutonium in the Voyagers is not in a fission reactor but in an RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator), which converts the heat from the plutonium into electricity. ?
I suppose the heat is result of fission, but I don't think an RTG is what is meant by a fission reactor. ??
Using plutonium works great but there are two issues. 1) they don’t output that much power. Few hundred watts at most, and they decay at a fixed rate. 2) you need to get your hands on a decent amount of plutonium. Great for dirty bombs, hard to source.
Both Canada and the US have restarted production specifically to produce RTGs for NASA, but the process takes time to scale up and automate. It's gone up 4x in 4 years and continues to increase, so this is a problem that will eventually be "fixed".
Isn't it something like space-reactor plutonium is a waste product from nuclear weapons production, and since we don't really make nuclear weapons at scale anymore, we aren't really making (refining?) plutonium anymore. And NASA has some amount on reserve, but they're rationing it out carefully. So the Clipper probe had to go with a massive solar array (100ft, the length of a basketball court) because they would rather save their plutonium for some future rover mission.
A good reason is the lack of availability of the needed isotope (Pu238).
The Europa Clipper has a huge array of solar panels instead of an RTG due to the last of the available supply going into the New Horizons spacecraft.
Pu238 was a cast-off isotope from nuclear weapons development so it was more readily available during the cold war. We should be happy that it's scarce now.
Also solar panels have gotten a lot better than they were when Voyager was launched, but even today anything going out past Saturn is not going to be able to use solar energy.
RTGs need plutonium 238. I've read even US doesn't have a lot available. The Europa Clipper will be using solar panel for example. India could also use batteries and a standby mode during the 14 days without sunlight. But any extra weight would add to the launch cost. Maybe in future missions as they get confident with successful landing, they will have bigger lander that can survive the lunar night. Even the early Mars rovers from NASA were tiny and solar powered (ie Sojourner in 1997.)
Availability :) a RTG requires Plutonium 238, which needs to ne created almost on purpose in a nucleare reactor. Not all nations have this ability or they are running such expensive programs. Also in the USA they are reserved for programs where there is very little light available
do they ever publish an actual number on this? given the size of HTML documents v.s. images, I imagine its something thats something that can be exceeded very easily without knowing..
e.g. is running a personal photography website OK?
Recently, there have been scam Android apps in India that request access to users’ contact lists. These apps then blackmail users by threatening to send deepfake videos to their contacts, falsely accusing them of heinous acts like rape.
Tragically, some individuals have even committed suicide due to this blackmail(1). So dozens of people have actually killed themselves because they mistakenly gave a permission on their phone.. just let that sink in.
Google is in a difficult position. On one hand, they need to protect user data with strict security measures. On the other hand, these measures can be seen as overly restrictive. It’s a delicate balance, and unfortunately, there’s no easy solution.
Growing up in India about 20 years ago, we often repaired or renewed almost everything because our buying power was low and things were expensive. We used a lot of hacks, known as *jugaads*, to make things work. Even clothes were reused, with tailors doing *rafu* (patchwork) to extend their life. This was especially common in middle-class homes like mine.
My dad, who worked in a garment export house, used to tell me stories about how people in the West preferred disposable items and often opted for newer stuff, whether it was cars, gadgets, or clothes. At the time, I didn't understand this mentality. But now, with increased buying power and lower costs (thanks to China), we too tend to just chuck things away and get replacements.
I deeply admire people who don't give up midway and think it's easier to buy new. This type of persistence and resourcefulness is truly commendable.
Cost to repair has grown while cost for new has reduced.
If you can repair things yourself, and you can find the parts you need to repair things, then sure. But if it's something I've got to pay for someone's experience and wisdom, that's pretty expensive these days, at least where I'm living, and it's just plain hard to find people who repair things too; lots of signs for TV repair outside empty shops.
Thankfully I'm semi-retired, and am on a salary for part time work, so my marginal time has no dollar cost, so I can take a day to try to repair a dishwasher, and then another day to install a new one when it rebreaks a couple days later. A professional installer probably would have had the new one installed in an hour instead of my all day, but I didn't have to wait for scheduling, at least.
This was how things went for a long time in my region (western europe) as well, my parents grew up patching clothes and repairing stuff a lot. It's only in the past 50 years or so that consumerism has gone up and the quality and cost of e.g. clothing has gone down.
I've been doing maintenance on my motorcycle myself recently, it does take some small investments in some tools to get started (like a tool to undo the oil filter, although in hindsight a strap and a stick would do the job) and you need to source some parts and replacements (fluids, copper washers, but also replacement screws for the weathered brake fluid reservoir ones), but it's in the region of €100-€150 instead of the €1000 the garage quoted me for.
> It's only in the past 50 years or so that consumerism has gone up and the quality and cost of e.g. clothing has gone down.
The “quality” part is a big factor, cost optimisations and fast turnaround means it’s often not worth repairing things at all e.g. a fast fashion T designed to survive for a season (if it survives even a wash).
An other major issue is scams around price signals and brand degradation. It used to be you got what you paid for and some brands were known for quality, so you could pay a fair amount of money to a reputable brand and you’d get stuff worth maintaining and repairing.
But big groups and P-E have taken to “value extract” from brands, so they take a reputable brand and start white-labelling / cost-optimising, initially keeping prices in order to get maximum money for the moo their start selling instead of milk. Then they drop the price as understanding slowly spreads, until a once reputable brand becomes bargain-bin fare even to the general public.
There’s a similar issue around more bespoke products, which optimise for quality signals (e.g. external design and materials) and sell generic inner parts (or outright garbage) for top-shelf prices.
Then there’s the shuffling of 6 months brands on generic white label goods (amazon is absolutely infested with that, you’ll get the exact same product under half a dozen brands, and 6 months later most of those have disappeared).
It seems to me the real problem is that repairs are, in general, labour intensive. Few products today are sufficiently valuable that a repair is better than a new item.
Cars are worth fixing, a 10$ shirt is not, if you value your time. This only becomes more true as expertise becomes required to effect a repair, since you become less capable of repairing and the time of the repairer becomes more valuable.
Yes Reflecting on it, making things last longer had some great side effects. For instance, almost every woman in my family knew how to *rafu* clothes (1), and people understood how things worked under the hood of a car (like you my father did all the maintenance too). These skills were passed down through generations, becoming a part of our everyday knowledge.
I guess a lot of things aren't that simple or accessible as most of it is often a black box nowadays. But anyway, Skills like these not only saved money but also fostered a sense of self-reliance, resourcefulness and stuff your parents taught you as life skills.
You can avoid the copper washers! The main reason to change them is under compression the copper work hardens to seal up. To get a good seal though you just need to re-anneal the copper so it's soft - heat it to cherry red and let it cool down. Takes about 5-10 seconds with a blowtorch - I've been doing it for oil changes on my car for several years now with no problems.
The best tool I have bought in the last 3 years was a 3d-printer... It lets me make other tools - even if they aren't as durable as steel, I can design them chunkier, or print a new one if they break.
This is how it was for me growing up blue collar in the northeastern USA in the 80s. My father fixed everything in the house and the vehicles. I inherited my older siblings clothes, and my younger siblings inherited mine. My mother would hem pant legs shorter when we were young, and then let them back out as we grew older. If you wore a knee or an elbow out of clothes, it was getting patched.
This instilled some good and bad tendencies in me. I do almost all of the repairs around the house myself. I work too much though, so I don't always have enough time or energy. Even though I can easily afford it, I have a hard time paying someone else to do them. This means I live with broken stuff longer than I should.
I'd probably have more money if I spent that time working on side projects instead of doing maintenance and repairs.
> This is how it was for me growing up blue collar in the northeastern USA in the 80s. My father fixed everything in the house and the vehicles. I inherited my older siblings clothes, and my younger siblings inherited mine. My mother would hem pant legs shorter when we were young, and then let them back out as we grew older. If you wore a knee or an elbow out of clothes, it was getting patched.
Thing is, they were able to in the first place.
Forget about fixing a modern car. The electronics side is a mixture of "a datacenter on wheels", DRM and anti-tamper technology (sometimes enforced or heavily suggested by law such as in emissions control, sometimes by reality, e.g. "Kia Boys") and high-speed protocols instead of early age wires and relays that you could troubleshoot with a decent multimeter. The physical side is a ton of plastics designed to absorb crash energy and finely tuned metal alloy stuff (with the form also having crash safety implication) that your average DIY person cannot reasonably weld instead of plain old steel sheets. You can't buy a "reasonably repairable" new car any more because of the legal mandates and because you don't want it to be stolen by some kid having watched a YouTube or Tiktok video showing how to bypass the locks.
And clothing... patching a 1980s piece was possible, the fabrics had weight and structural integrity of their own. Nowadays it's extremely thin fabric everywhere that shreds itself after a few washing machine cycles. Try to patch it and you'll more likely than not find out that your very act of pushing a needle through it to apply the patch just causes the next rip to appear. You are still able to purchase better quality clothing technically but you end up paying like 4x the amount and it's still made in some Bangladeshi or Chinese sweatshop under horrible safety and employee rights standards.
If one has the proclivity, then: One can get into rather far into troubleshooting and (and ultimately repairing) common modern automotive electronics with an Autel rig that, adjusted for inflation, costs less than an Atari 2600 did.
I feel like it’s giving good money away when you hire someone to do work for you that you know you can do. You look at the markups for things and it gives you pause. Things like a valve or whatever. You can go to the Home Depot and get it for cheaper even when you include the cost of whatever tools you need to get.
But at some point you have to say, let’s just get someone to to it (the deck, the fence, the gutters, etc.) still it’s like zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. There is some personal satisfaction in being self reliant.
In our past, this seems a community thing: Someone in your neighbourhood had advanced knowledge in welding, someone else advanced electricity, masonwork, clothes repair, ... They could coach other people to a basic enough level and help if unexpected troubles popped up. The community as a whole had knowledge and basic apprenticeships built in.
Today, repair is something you do on your own. Things like youtube are a great help, but the community aspect is lost.
The "consumerism" mindset is a luxury created by a strong economy and high upward mobility. An unfortunate side effect is that as repair & reuse became less desireable, so too did repairability and logevity as features. Now that economic growth in the US has stagnated (particularly for the 99%), it's becoming aparent what we lost as nothing is made to last and companies are unwilling or unable to offer repairable, long lasting products. So even those who go out of their way to repair their property encounter a myriad of roadblocks.
When I bought my phone, it was on sale and so I got it new for $94. I dropped it and broke the screen. The replacement screen cost $106, more than the entire phone (just for the part, I do the work myself). I still did it anyway, for environmental/e-waste reasons and because repairing electronics is a fun hobby but the sad reality is, it often makes more financial sense to replace than to repair. That's not even going into the time lost and the money sunk on tools.
I grew up lower-middle class in America and to and extent I understand this.
Disposability is especially offensive when it comes to ~computers.
To have perfectly functional (from a hardware perspective) 10> year old smartphones become "e-waste" is absurd to me.
Even a cheap smartphone is a remarkable achievement in manufacturing and engineering. Its wild to think of something like that as "junk" even though it effectively is.
My mom repurposed old pants as bags (I used it to carry my books at college - did get a lot of odd looks, but that's what I could afford at that time). Even now, I cut pieces of old clothing to be used for cleaning purposes. Those habits die hard.
The quality of workmanship and repair has gone down drastically in India now. People have figured out how to make money by keeping things locked. Repair is just swapping out parts and cleaning or go for the next model. The mentality of people has also changed drastically with them changing products in short years. Consumerism has gone through the roof and there is an active disdain of people who preserve and get the product to function for a long time.
This was my attitude towards cars when younger. Always bought cheap used ones and fixed them. It frustrated me to no end seeing people fail at basic maintenance and cut the lives of their vehicles by half or more compared to a maintained one. (Stuff like not changing fluids or driving with the fluids leaking out, driving with slipping belts or broken suspensions, etc.)
This is fascinating. How were these usually jugaads obtained - did you more commonly get them from friends, family, shop owners, the Internet, or just (re)discover most of them yourself?
I agree that repairing is vastly preferable - I grew up in a poor communist country, where repairing and self-resourcesfullness was the norm.
However it's not the consumerist mentality driven by increased buying power - it's sheer economic sense - the time and effort is way better spent, economically speaking - by simply replacing. It's the lower price of goods that drive this thing.
My fridge broke the other week. I called the repairman who quoted a repair bill that was 10% MORE EXPENSIVE then buying a new fridge. Simply the time of the repair shop and the transportation from home to shop and back was more expensive them just buying a new fridge, chucking out the older one, and calling it a day.
My grandparents, nah, my parents would be horrified by throwing up a "nearly" good fridge. To me, it makes economic sense.
This is often due to the total costs being externalised (pushed off to others) and therefore not reflecting the true cost of the replacement nor the costs of (safe) disposal of the old unit.
Externalised costs such as emissions from manufacturing of new raw materials (metals, plastics, gases, etc.), transportation, disposal, and more.
Obviously it depends on what exactly fails. I've kept 'white goods' going for over 20 years despite:
1) known defect where Hotpoint Fridge/Freezer evaporator thermistor fails due to freeze/defrost thermal cycle. Replaced more than 10 times; cost of new thermistor is pennies; time to replace (after initial explore) 10 minutes.
2) Freezer control PCB misreading thermistor; replace PCB: UK£35.
3) LG Washing machine bearing failures; replaced about 6 times; time to replace (after initial explore): 45 minutes.
I think sometimes repair-or-replace depends on one's state of mind. Figuring out what is wrong and how to fix can be frustrating but, equally, it can be extremely satisfying to realise you can do it and are no longer reliant on some mystical "expert" !
Society as a whole in many countries is losing (or has already lost) the ability to be self-reliant and that lack makes people and communities generally more fragile.
Self-reliance is one of the drivers of hackers and tinkerers.
I often develop feelings for the products I use (I know...). When I look at dishwasher I reminisce how many moments I had whilst standing next to it tirelessly working through my dirty dishes. I'll give it a tap. Sometimes I talk to it when loading like "Hey there, I got you some new stuff. Don't worry I'll feed you salt at the end of the week. Now I'll do your favourite program". Then once it finishes I say like "Oh what a great work you did there!" and so on.
Then when it broke (the motor seized) I just wouldn't have heart to simply dispose of it. I sourced the motor and called in repair guy who installed it. It did cost me in total as much as I would pay for a new dishwasher, but I would never get the sense of feeling that I saved a friend.
I am so glad that I'm not the only one. Every time I shut the hood of a car after working on it, I give it a little loving pat-pat.
I have this inexplicable feeling, contrary to my usually rational self, that machines have a sort of soul and "feel better" when they're taken care of, and I feel like I'm letting it down when I extend an oil change/put off maintenance/don't take care of a problem I'm aware of yet. I don't really believe they have souls or anything; it's just a feeling I get.
Come to think of it, I do the exact same things with my plants too.
My economic theory is that the price reflects ecological costs fairly well.
At first glance it might appear that fixing would have a lower environmental cost. But the money spent will be spent by the repairman on things like international travel or whatever - and each of the things the money is spent on have environmental costs and externalities.
I don’t quite think so. I think we’re in a status quo that prevents/obfuscates a more efficient economic activity because it inflates GDP which makes the politicians and economists happy.
The magic number won’t go up much if you call somebody and they tell you what you need to do change the PCB and ship you the part(for a small markup price).
I live in Sweden, coming from the Netherlands, both countries somewhere in the global top yet I still repair hardware, mend my clothes, repair the tractors and car, restored the 17th century farm we live on and extended it, built a barn and more. I intentionally do not make myself lust after the 'latest and greatest' of anything since I realise that such a lifestyle puts you on a treadmill, always running for the next treat. Hence I'm typing this on a computer from 2009 I got for free because the video card was 'broken' (27" iMac, a short stay in the oven later fixed the video card) connected to a second monitor I got for free because of a broken power supply (two capacitors later it worked again) which sits on a stand-up desk I got for free because of some trivial electrical defect (quickly fixed). In a way I still partake of the 'fruits' of that latest-and-greatest lifestyle, only with a decade or so of delay and without the compulsion to 'upgrade'.
Why do I do this? For a few reasons, most of them quite basic. I like fixing things. I get far more satisfaction out of using abandoned hardware which I have fixed myself than I get out of using whatever new gizmo I happen to lay my hands on because I know I can keep the former working (or find an alternative which I can get to work) while I do not know that for the latter. I like being self-reliant. With a soldering iron, a BGA rework station, a few old oscilloscopes and meters and a few decades worth of experience and scavenged parts I can keep things working for the most, design and build circuits to extend whatever is needed, etc. The advent of cheap and relatively open microcontrollers - the ESP series, Arduino, Raspberry Pi pico etc - has given a boost to the DIY electronics sphere which adds to the appeal of keeping older stuff working, e.g. I'm currently looking in to replacing the worn out control circuit and assorted switches of our 35 year old oven with something totally different and more functional, not because I can't get a new oven but because the current one works quite well apart from those switches. The same goes for the tractors and car, motorbikes (Russian Ural and Ukrainian Dneprs with sidecars), etc. There are no electronics in my tractors, they are purely mechanical. They can be repaired by anyone who knows how without the need for proprietary tools, dealer-only computer terminals and such.
Of course I could save a lot of time if I abandoned this 'life style' and just went with the flow, buying new clothes as soon as the old ones needed mending, buying a new computer every 3 years, a new car every 5 years, a new tractor every 10 years, a new dishwasher every 7-12 years, a new washing machine every 10 years, etcetera. I could stop cycling to the village and just take the motorbike, that would be much quicker after all. Think what I could do with all that time saved:
- instead of cycling to the village I could spend time at a sports school for exercise
- instead of fixing that computer (and learning a bit more every time I fix one) I could watch some series on some streaming service
- instead of mending that hole in my trousers (using the Elna sewing machine I got for free because it was 'jammed', took me all of 5 minutes to unjam it) I could browse the web looking for some new trousers - something I'd have to do every few weeks since my clothes somehow seem to acquire holes quite easily, why would that be?
- instead of building that barn I could be working a few more months to pay someone else to build me a barn
- instead of gaining self-reliance I could make myself become more and more dependent on outside sources and 'experts'
Well, thanks but no thanks, I'll just keep on mending my own stuff simply because I can and I like it that way. Here, in Sweden, in the land of plenty.
If you're interested in extending the service life of that old iMac, I recommend OpenCore Legacy Patcher. It lets you run newer versions of macOS on old hardware.
I did install a more recent version of MacOS on the thing but only to see if I could since I do not use MacOS, preferring Linux or, to be more specific, 'Debian' on all my systems. Performance is much better with Linux, I do not need to fight the vendor who wishes for me to buy new hardware. With Linux the thing does what I want, when I want it without telling any third party about my activities. I also have a Macbook Air ('keyboard broken and display problems' which were quickly fixed) on which I run Debian, the same is true there.
Wow, the irony is Pinboard, the very service that championed the idea of "Don't be a free user" (1) is now shutting down (edit: sorry, ok not shutting down officially but apparently it's in a free fall for quite some time and nobody gives a damn (2)). Their article argued that free services often turn into pump-and-dump schemes, while paid services promise sustainability and better support. Yet here we are, witnessing the demise of a paid service that couldn't sustain itself.
It's a stark reminder that even paid models aren't immune to market forces and operational challenges.
Maybe the real takeaway is that no business model is foolproof, and unless you can self host something you can never know when and how it will end.
It could also be that maciej has enough paying users that he can afford to coast and be unresponsive, losing some users in the process, in order to do whatever else he's doing these days.
The about page says 30,000 active users; most must be paying since there is no free service it seems (though there used to be way back in the day; I used it myself). If half of those are paying, that's $330K a year. Not bad.
nice screed, but it's hard for me to make sense of it as a paying and satisfied user.
similarly it's hard for me to make sense of "this paid service failed, so it's a proof of a failing concept.", given the sheer amount of successful paid services out there.
I mean.. we would be here all day if we were listing the past failures of free services on the net -- what's the point?
Could success perhaps be a bit more complex than whether or not you charge a monthly fee alone?
my takeaway : running a low/no-staff service is hard, and people will perceive any possible gap in customer service as "in freefall", even though everyone is well aware of the human condition.
This is impressive! I've frequently encountered challenges with Algolia search not locating specific items, but this appears to offer a much more detailed search capability.
I've bookmarked this site and hope it remains available when I need it, unlike many great Show HN posts that vanish after six months or so.
Glad you found it useful! Fulltext search will almost certainly be up in perpetuity, however, we may drop the semantic index if it doesn't get much usage as that's significantly more expensive to host.
Same here in India. A lot of people hate Uber but speaking for me personally it's been a godsend upgrade over the black yellow taxis we had here before.
I believe they are the #1 reason why foreigner tourists are scared of coming to India. The amount of scam and harrasment done by these old taxi drivers is just another level. The luxury and straightforwardness of app taxis is unparalleled to what we used to have before.
I loved getting taxis in India for exactly these reasons, I used to get taken to random shops way out of the way of where I needed to go ... I'd just go along along with it, total adventure time! But I can see how it could grate after the novelty wore off. Or if you were maybe being a bit cautious as a traveller.
You are 100% right. Though this problem isn't unique to India by any means. In fact you often hear of sexual assault cases re. taxis and ride share going through the courts in Australia.
That said I've personally witnessed things "nearly" happen, and heard some harrowing tales besides, to / from lone women travelers in a number of countries throughout Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
The world is not a safe place for women.
As an aside, Singapore seems to be one of the outliers here. We saw a woman exercising at about midnight one night coming from the airport. Taxi driver told us it wasn't unusual, ostensibly thanks to capital punishment. No way you'd feel comfortable doing that in Australia.
From what I see from the article the major gains were from investment in health and education which should be a no brainer.