I don’t care what economic system Russia uses. That’s their internal matter. What matters to me is that they’re the only country with 6,000 nukes, and therefore the only country the US fears. So for my country to be independent, we need Russia to act as a counterweight to the US. (This is also true for many other countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa.)

since that has the longest track record in failure

Failure in achieving what?

A natural disaster would be handled by regional or national disaster response agencies.

How would there be a national disaster response agency without central planning? Who would fund it? Who would run it?

Since after the industrial revolution, the high productivity of cities has been subsidizing the wealth of the suburbs and rural areas to the significant detriment of overall productivity.

Are cities actually more productive, or is their higher productivity subsidised by rural areas?

you will find that the wealth and productive density per person will balance according to the inherit environmental factors to a much larger degree.

Perhaps, but is that what you want? The resource-poor societies of Central Asia lie between theresource-rich China and Europe. Would a theoretical Eurasian government not want to subsidise people living in these regions, so that they can service the trade routes between China and Europe?

a lack of central control and planning does not prevent collaboration and coordination from occuring between entities.

Who mediates disputes, and who enforces their decisions?

State ownership has both advantages and disadvantages; I just wanted to point out that it was a deliberate choice.

The state at national level should be limited to providing facilitation, infrastructure, defence and foreign policy. Independent Local governments should provide the bulk of public services.

What do you do when some regions are poorer than others, or one gets hit by a natural disaster? Again, it isn’t black and white. There are advantages to both centralisation and devolution.

A failure of Israel’s defensive weapons would require them to go on the offensive.

Yes, but it will also require them to use alternative forces on defence, and it will also induce many Israelis to leave. This will create financial and manpower shortages. This might induce even more depraved behaviour in the short term, but I guess that’s a risk Iran & Co. are willing to take to ensure long-term peace.

The state ownership of production is deliberate, and aimed at improving efficiency and allowing forward planning. One (or a few, if you want competition) large factory is more efficient than a bunch of smaller workshops. State ownership can lead to corruption, as you pointed out, but it is a conscious choice and not happenstance.

Neither capitalism nor communism assume that their proponents are immune to greed. Capitalism was developed as an improvement over (European) feudalism and mercantilism. The idea is that division of labour expands the quantity and diversity of goods that can be produced. Communism is similarly supposed to be an improvement on capitalism. Here, the idea is that centralised planning can improve the distribution of the produced goods (and further improve the quantity and diversity of goods).

Only if you have really low latency.

Yeah, it’s a political compromise. Not what’s best for the students. At most the school could have offered you Urdu instead of Hindi, since it uses a modified Arabic script and has a few Arabic words.

It’s still ‘Hyderabad’, by the way! Thankfully the religious nutcases haven’t won elections in that state.

Lol I wish we had the poverty rate and quality of life the Chinese have. Maybe we should have thrown more corrupt politicias and businessmen in jail.

Excellent article, and the article is quite right that an India-Russia partnership can yield great benefits to both sides. However, Russia needs to market itself much more to Indian students and workers. This includes both making the application / visa / travel process smoother, and getting Indians to consider Russia as an attractive work destination. This could also balance the current trade imbalance - Russia could pay Indian workers in rubles, and India can then use those rubles to buy oil directly, without worrying about US sanctions.

India - local language, English and Hindi

(Language is a controversial issue in India, and the present situation is more a political compromise than what’s most useful, with many rules and exceptions, and some states / schools simply ignoring the whole compromise altogether.)

In the short-term, you are right. In the long-term, this is pretty much the end for fossil fuels. Not only is solar cheaper, it’s also more reliable now.

Yes, I pointed this out only because people often think that Facebook and Twitter are the biggest social media everywhere in the world.

That’s normal, Mr Putin seems to be living rent-free in the heads of quite a lot of Americans and Europeans.

While I agree with the overall statement, WhatsApp, Youtube and Instagram have more users, and a bigger impact on politics in India, than Facebook.

But can the Gulf countries actually say no to the US? They don’t have Iran’s drone fleet or tunnel network, and are much more dependent financially on the dollar. I get the feeling that they’re caught between a rock and a hard place here. And at least some of those ‘accidents’ and ‘friendly fire’ could be them doing what they can get away with.

The system in my country is that the QR code is meant to be public, and contains either your mobile number, or if you want to hide that, a UPI ID (which you can set and can be a random alphanumeric string). But having access to a person’s QR only lets you send money to them. The payment verification happens between the sender and the central database, on behalf of the sender’s bank, and can be done using a PIN / OTP.

For example, I go to a shop and buy sweets. The shopkeeper would have their QR code displayed prominently throughout the shop. I scan it to get their phone number / UPI ID, and then tell the app to send them so many rupees. The central database asks me to verify the payment. Once I verify, both I and the shopkeeper get an SMS saying x rupees was debited / credited. The app can also store transaction history in case there is any confusion later.

If I’m sending money to a friend, I already know their mobile number, so I can bypass the whole QR business and tell the app to just send money to their number.

See my reply to [email protected].

Thank you, but I’m from India and we’re mostly QR now. Cards exist and a few people use them, but most shops are phasing them out since they have to pay a transaction fee (QR payments are free). SEA and parts of West Asia also use QR, but the systems aren’t interconnected.

But isn’t there an annual service fee?