nocoder's comments

nocoder | 2 years ago

Yeah, just saying suffering is bad without any context is not helpful. Apart from being unavoidable, certain kinds of suffering produces happiness for people down the road. For example, running & training for a marathon was suffering but the reward and experience of doing it was life changing, taught me so much about myself.

nocoder | 5 years ago

How do you feel about this situation?

What has been your personal experience living in Myanmar all this while?

How do you see this situation playing out?

nocoder | 5 years ago

I wonder how does this feel in practice? what does it feel like to be without striving? to surrender? I understand this intellectually but I struggle to understand this in practical terms. What does it mean to have no desire?

nocoder | 5 years ago

Aren't the countries banning TikTok becoming more like China by doing this? Plus Trump comments about US gov needs to get money from this sale sounds like plain bribe.

I have not seen a convincing proof that TikTok is more of a national security threat versus FB or Twitter. What am I missing? I am also more suspicious because along with TikTok, Wechat was banned while other investments in US by Tencent where not touched supposedly because it would impact American companies. Wechat is definitely insignificant to be a security threat.

nocoder | 5 years ago

You are right in your analysis. Jio is using a different accounting approach to show that they are profitable. One - Their depreciation model is non-standard vs. what is used by other telecom companies & Two - They are booking the sales of subsidized devices under their retail subsidy - Reliance retail. If there is someone who understand this better, I would like to get more insight.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/teleco...

nocoder | 5 years ago

Thanks. I am actually fine with a specific point of view as long as it is spelled out. I understand that people have different value systems leading to different outlooks on topics and in most things there is no one right answer, what I dislike are the ones which are sly.

nocoder | 5 years ago

Slightly off topic - I have not heard of this website, what is the general sense in the community about the quality of the content here? It looked interesting but I am always skeptical of trying new places because a lot of times they are just fronts for certain ideologies and tend to spin the content to suit them. And there is only so much time one has to critically evaluate everything and sift through the nonsense, this is the main reason I have stopped following news.

nocoder | 5 years ago

Disclaimer: I assume by impact you mean "case fatality rate" (CFR)

This is my hypothesis of lower impact. Both India & Germany have low CFR and we find that in Germany 49% of cases are under the age of 50, while in India 70% of cases are under the age of 50 years. On the contrary, in Italy 70% of Covid infected individuals are above the age of 50, with 39% above the age of 70 and Spain has 69% of cases above the age of 50 with 37% above the age of 70. US case data by age is grouped somewhat differently by CDC but my guess is that close to 40% of infections are in the age-group below 50 years and about 20% are above the age of 70 years, this might partially explain the relatively lower CFR because CFR for ages under 50 is ~0.4% if you are in the age-group of 40-49 & lower below. Median age of the population for these countries are India - 28, Italy - 46, Spain - 44, Germany - 48 & US - 38. Germany seems to have either done something differently here.

This can only partially explain the differences but would be an important factor when looking at overall fatalities.

nocoder | 5 years ago

This is really interesting. Are there any good tutorials for someone starting out? I would be interested in playing around with it.

nocoder | 6 years ago

What is the main reason that make these devices so expensive? Is it low demand? complex technology? or something to do with patents?

nocoder | 6 years ago

Reminds me of Tilly from Paper Menagerie!!

nocoder | 7 years ago

They are beautiful outside me. When they were inside me they were very painful. The feeling of passing them via urine is crazy pain worse then getting kicked in the nuts.

nocoder | 7 years ago

This is pretty interesting. I am from India & you can observe something similar in India with a lot of people not all. We are not the most anal about being on time & most meetings never start on time. Parties or group dinners will never ever start on time. There is this thing called "Indian Stretchable Time", a funny variation on IST. I always wonder how much of this has to do with our cultural concept of time. As per Indian mythology, time is not linear but circular, there is a cycle of birth & death till you attain moksh (salvation). The other thing I notice vs. west is that people in Indian offices chat with coworkers a lot more.

nocoder | 7 years ago

I have worked with e-commerce related companies so I can offer some perspective here.

The battle in india is far from settled, it is important to look category wise. Moreover in context e-commerce one should not ignore alibaba backed paytm which seems to be working on a super app strategy and big basket which is into grocery.

Website visits- Amazon seems to be ahead. From Jeff's shareholder letter - "Amazon.in is the fastest growing marketplace in India, and the most visited site on both desktop and mobile, according to comScore and SimilarWeb. The Amazon.in mobile shopping app was also the most downloaded shopping app in India in 2017, according to App Annie. " This does not include numbers for Flipkart owned myntra I think adding that might take Flipkart ahead since myntra is the biggest in fashion. Moreover play store might not give a complete picture since many devices come pre-installed with apps in India, my phone had Amazon app pre-installed which will not count towards play store download.

Mobiles - This currently the biggest category in e-commerce. Accounting for 60-70% of sales. Here they are neck to neck but it is hard to make out clearly since e-commerce is heavily driven by exclusives and brands like Lenovo and Xiaomi are playing them against each other.

Fashion - Myntra owned by Flipkart is ahead here. Amazon is catching up but is challenging to match a vertical player in user experience.

Electronics - I don't think there is a clear leader here. Due to logistical challenges for major brands it is still convenient to buy offline apart from some sales period when discounts can be really high in e-commerce. Of late though lot of offline stores are ready to match the ecom players, I saw this while buying TV plus they had faster delivery and installation. This might play out like mobiles with lot of Chinese brands who don't have offline networks competing on pricing and using e-commerce for distribution.

Grocery - Amazon has a lead over Flipkart. It has multiple plays like Amazon now, Pantry etc. Flipkart is piloting a model similar to now in bangalore. The competition comes here from alibaba backed big basket which also has perishables and in my personal experience provides better service vs Amazon. Walmart might give a boost to flipkart here with its expertise in grocery. However unit economics are worst in this category. High weight low average selling price means shipping cost eat up a lot of revenue.

Video - Amazon has more users than Netflix. The challengers here are Jio with it huge base, cheap data and good library and hotstar with its biggest strength being Indian TV shows and live cricket and football. This is extremely nascent in India so every network has their own app but these two + Netflix seem the most likely to be around for long. Netflixs pricing in India is pretty high so will be mostly used by the affluent sections and not mass.

This deal was unusually public. I think Amazon was never seriously into it. The valuation is insane plus Amazon would have run into some antitrust issue plus this being an election year in India, government might act tough against such acquisition. The good thing with Walmart is that there might be more sanity in the market since it is a listed company and can't just burn VC money.

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