dubash retweeted
My very brief opinion on the Indian left is that it would be better served 100x by learning Vietnamese and reading the works of Vietnamese scholars and party ideologues than further engagement with the Anglophone left, including Indian anglophones such as Arundhati Roy etc
dubash retweeted
Heartbreaking audio. This is what airline Industry does. Total transparency. Within hours, the audio is out.
Now think about the Air India Ahmedabad crash. Zero transparency. It is a coverup. By the TATAs, with the help of Modi Govt
“Holy f*ck, we’re out of time” Heart crushing ATC audio captures the moments before a Learjet 60 crashed in Palm Beach County, Florida, killing all 9 souls on board.
VIA: @thenewarea51
dubash retweeted
#WATCH | INDIA bloc mega rally | Delhi: Lok Sabha LoP Rahul Gandhi says, "Fifteen per cent of India's voters were removed from the voter list after the 2024 elections. This means the 2024 election was an illegal election. It was a stolen election. I am not the one saying this, the Election Commission is saying this."
(Source: ANI/Congress)
dubash retweeted
A college kid built a drone in his dorm room that flies 491 mph. That's close to how fast the Southwest flight you took last Thanksgiving was cruising.
Russia and Ukraine have spent the last two years racing to build faster drones, and he just passed every single one of them for about $13,000.
Here's why speed matters so much over there. Russia's original Shahed attack drone putters along at about 115 mph, with an engine loud enough that Ukrainians nicknamed it the moped. Firing a $4 million Patriot missile at one makes zero sense, so Ukraine started building cheap little hunter drones to chase them down. The Sting costs around $2,500. By February it had taken out more than 3,900 Shaheds by itself, and in January hunter drones made about 70% of Ukraine's Shahed kills.
The catch is you can only hunt what you can catch.
So Russia started putting jet engines on them. The Geran-3 does around 185 to 230 mph. The Geran-4, flying since May, cruises at 250 to 310. The Geran-5 tops out near 375 mph and is pretty much a mini cruise missile. Ukrainian reporting says Russia wants half its Shahed production to be jets, and every bump in speed knocks more of Ukraine's cheap hunters out of the game.
Ukraine's drone makers have been scrambling to keep up ever since. One showed off a 258 mph interceptor in September. A German-Ukrainian joint venture is quoting 298. This month a German defense startup worth over a billion dollars got an experimental drone to 483 mph for a fraction of a second, and they still can't call it a record because the return run broke.
Then there's Tomas. He found a broken jet turbine at Georgia Tech that had been sitting in pieces for five years, got it running, then cold-emailed his way into sponsors for a new engine. What he built is an 11-pound carbon-fiber delta wing he laid up by hand in molds he cut himself, with a JetCat turbojet in the back. He says it hit 491 mph carrying 2.6 pounds, can hold that speed for 4 minutes, and covers 31 miles at full throttle.
The Guinness record for a jet-powered RC plane has been 465 mph since 2017. If his numbers hold up under official timing, a college student beat it by 26 mph with cargo on board.
Russia and Ukraine have been pushing this number up a few dozen mph at a time for two years. The fastest one I can find right now got launched off a rail bolted behind a silver hatchback.
My college dorm project just broke the world speed record.
Reaper hit 790 km/h (491 mph) carrying a 1.2 kg (2.6 lb) payload.
These 3 Reapers are now the world’s fastest small jet-powered drones.
Each of them can hold that speed for 4 minutes on a full tank.
Reaper can be rail- or truck-launched, climb to 2,000 m (6,600 ft) in under 20 seconds, then fly for 50 km (31 mi) at full speed.
This is now a reliable and repeatable system. Future testing and small optimizations should push the top speed past 800 km/h (500 mph).
dubash retweeted
A maid who used to work for my parents recently bought a 12 Lakh Rupees 1RK flat with husband
It's in a ultra low income neighbourhood in West Delhi, but it's hers
She ran away from village 20 years back after her father had beaten her black and blue for eating leftover Maadh Bhaat (Water Rice) as she was hungry
Her husband is a daily wage labour and the couple earns close to 50k together, celebrates birthday of kids with cake and decorations, orders stuff online
When we say absolute poverty in India has reached 0%, we are talking about people like this maid
dubash retweeted
Something almost no one has brought up in this discussion of pre 2014 India was the tacit understanding by Al Jazeera and other foreign outlets that Indians weren't entitled to dignity and that it was ok to film people answering nature's call on account of them not having access to sanitation facilities.
Can you imagine a news outlet filming a homeless man in SF or NYC doing the same? People would correctly point out that doing so is insensitive to that person's dignity/humanity. The tacit understanding here was that Indians werent fully human.
dubash retweeted
Bangladesh GDP Growth Rate
2022: 7.1%
2023: 5.8%
2024: 4.2%
2025: 3.5%
2026: 3.6%
The downward trend in growth will create further instability.
2027: 3.2%
2028: 2.2%
2029: 2.8%
2030: 2.9%
It is a spiral. There will be more chaos going forward in the neighborhood.
#WATCH | Dhaka, Bangladesh: Bangladeshi garment workers launch massive violent protests over wages. Vandalism and clashes reported in Dhaka and Gazipur.
A heavy police force and Border Guard Bangladesh have been deployed to restore order in the industrial areas.
dubash retweeted
Panchkula, Haryana: On the alleged assault of his six-year-old daughter by an eight-year-old boy inside a government school, the girl's father Rashid says, "My six-year-old daughter was named Ramsha. She studied at a government school in Sector 20. We were delayed by just a minute or two, and the boy took her and committed such a horrific act. He beat my daughter very brutally. This should not have happened. I appeal to everyone to pay a little more attention to their children. My daughter is currently in the ICU. I request everyone to pray for her recovery. May God bless her with good health..."
dubash retweeted
Everyone's sharing that India just got its own GPS. The real story is better.
We've had NavIC for years. On Friday night, ISRO started bringing it back to full strength. NavIC needs at least 4 working satellites to work on its own. A few older ones had lost their atomic clocks, and NVS 02 couldn't reach its slot last year, so the system had slipped below that minimum. GSLV F18 just put NVS 03 up, which puts us on track to get back to 4.
This matters more than it sounds. GPS belongs to the US military, and during Kargil India was denied GPS data when it needed it most. Today our maps, shipping, fishermen's alerts, power grids, bank timestamps and defence systems all depend on satellite timing. NavIC means India controls that for itself.
NVS-03 also carries an atomic clock made in India. Not long ago, we imported every one. Next, the satellite climbs to its parking spot, with NVS-04 and NVS-05 lined up after that.
Steady progress, lessons learnt from setbacks, and a system getting stronger with every launch.
Well done, Team ISRO 🇮🇳
dubash retweeted
Sweet. It's a 1 megawatt nuclear microreactor that fits in a shipping container.
Gas-cooled, first by helium, then air.
Runs for five years, then you ship it back to the factory, where they take care of the spent fuel and refuel it.
dubash retweeted
Why Indian hate is particularly virulent and crude.
When there are legitimate grievances people can point to, racists police their own.
In the case of Indians, since there is no rational basis for the hate, there's nothing but the crude bigotry. richardhanania.com/p/conserv…
dubash retweeted
What a snowflake 😂
My biggest concern is that if there is a clean sweep by Democrats of the House, Senate and Presidency in 2028, they will:
1. Make DC and Puerto Rico states to gain a strong majority in the Senate.
2. Open the borders and legalize everyone living in America illegally to cement a permanent majority.
3. Increase the size of the Supreme Court to gain an immediate majority.
This would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.
All that is needed to ensure this doesn’t happen is 51 Republican senators in 2029. That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election. Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.
dubash retweeted
When Bihar set out to spend Rs 500 crore on a new museum, an academic went to court to stop it. A state this poor, he argued, couldn't afford it.
This week, that museum was ranked ninth in the world, above New York’s Met and the Louvre.
Swarajya walked through it last year.🧵
dubash retweeted
An American company’s cruise stopped in Cambodia because of financial trouble. Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand were still ahead. India was a month away.
Yet Indian Express chose “Ahead of India visit…”
Was India the next stop? No.
Did India cause the problem? No.
Then why lead with India?
The ship couldn’t reach India, so the headline did. 😂
@IndianExpress @rajkamaljha @anantgoenka @nandu79 @saurabhtop
dubash retweeted
today, we introduce a little mischief to the world.
for four years, we’ve been brewing real brain cells on electrodes to understand how they compute. now, we’ve turned those discoveries into a video model anyone can use.
from 0.5¢ a second, mischief 1 is at least 5x faster than its base and the cheapest image-to-video model on @fal and @OpenRouter. soon to be on @awscloud marketplace.
it’s not a delusion anymore. biocompute is real, commercial and this is just the beginning.
happy halloween.
dubash retweeted
97% of Indians in their 20s are literate (this number for 15-24 age group is from five years ago.) That is a dramatic change from just two decades ago.
