Heartcrossings

 Totally loved reading this story - desi ingenuity at it's best, solving not one but two hard problems at once. The cafe’s concept of bartering food for plastic waste is catching on elsewhere, too. In Siliguri, West Bengal, the alumni of a local school are distributing free food on Saturdays to anyone who deposits half a kilo of plastic waste. At the other end of the country in Mulugu in Telangana state, the town authorities give one kilo of rice in return for one kilo of plastic. Local school children also go around collecting plastic. The district collector of Mulugu has said he wants to make his district the first in India to be free of single use plastic. The enthusiasm is proving infections: one local couple sent out wedding invitations printed on reusable cloth grocery bags. Some form of bartering waste for useful things has been around in India for a long time. We stored newspapers and magazines away in the shed after they had been read. Every few months those would be bart...

 The descent into becoming my mother has accelerated with age it seems. At first I was able to resist the force by sheer will but lately that seems near impossible. There is much that I like and admire about my mother but equal (if not more) that I do not. I was determined not to become that which I really did not like but not so easy as it turns out .  I have always dreamed of a relationship with J that is completely unlike mine with my mother. While my dream may yet come true but I am starting to learn that may not bring me the closure or satisfaction I had hoped for. We will have a relationship quite different from that between my mother and I but it will be fraught with other issues that are unique to J and I, the circumstances of our lives together before she left to college. There will be no perfection, only work in progress to make corrections and improvements all the time. We will get better in some ways and worse in others.  as I get older and throw the world’s m...

A different take on a long commute - three hour round trip every day. This woman's circumstances are such that a long commute brings more benefit that trouble to her. I can map this to map life even had things turned out differently. J lives and works far away from me and she is my only kid. I have no other direct family in America - my parents live in Kolkata. If I had remained single after she left to college, I would have very little to fill my life with, day after day.  I might have chosen to do a three hour roundtrip commute to work to build a stronger structure for me day where I needed to be up at 6 am to catch the early train out. I might have returned later than work needed me to so I would have less alone time. There is a great benefit for someone who is alone to force themselves into a routine where social interactions are inevitable given time. A regular on the early morning train becomes a travel companion who exchange some pleasantries with over time. You get to know...

Learned something new from this  essay on the recent event in midtown Manhattan . As long as the only reliable way to boost revenue quarterly is to cut cost no matter the consequence, this is exactly the kind of decision companies will make:  A new policy from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield also went viral: the company had announced that, in certain states, starting in 2025, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the “extra” anesthesia would be passed from Anthem—whose year-over-year net income was reported, in June, to have increased by more than twenty-four per cent, to $2.3 billion—to the patient. On Thursday, the company withdrew the change in response to the public outrage, if only in Connecticut, for now. There is so many levels of bizarre in this scenario, that I cannot begin to count them. There seems to be the notion that the insurance company can arrive at a pre-allotted time limit for anesthesia. It will not b...

Good read about the intrinsic and external reward models for artists and how it impacts their work and perception of their value as artists. Along the way there is a little diatribe about Shien that I found interesting:  Shein, the fast fashion leviathan. While other fast fashion brands wait for high-end houses to produce designs they can replicate cheaply, Shein has completely eclipsed the runway, using AI to trawl social media for cues on what to produce next. Shein’s site operates like a casino game, using “dark patterns”—a countdown clock puts a timer on an offer, pop-ups say there’s only one item left in stock, and the scroll of outfits never ends—so you buy now, ask if you want it later. Shein’s model is dystopic: countless reports detail how it puts its workers in obscene poverty in order to sell a reprieve to consumers who are also moneyless—a saturated plush world lasting as long as the seams in one of their dresses. Many years ago when Shein was still very new, I tried s...

Watched The Holdovers recently and loved it. There are plenty of details in the story that the viewer could mull over - a lot like looking a crystalline object in light holding up a different facet each time, there is something new and different there.  For me at least at the time I watched it, the big theme was about how each person is defined by their backstory and things are rarely what they seem to be. You get off to a rough start with someone and you struggle to understand what you did wrong and more importantly what you could have done differently. Often you come up short on both questions. The other side that had an instantaneous allergic reaction to you could also be left wondering what about you triggered such a visceral response. They might not know either.  Given time together with no one else around, as happens to the main characters in this movie, there could be understanding and resolution. You might find that you have a lot more in common than you imagined and ...

An AI friend or companion could feel more relevant if not real, if they are available on-demand and without limit. Not everyone is lucky to have someone like that in their lives and those that are may some day lose that special person and the void would be hard to fill. This is talking about a close friend, mentor, trusted advisor type of relationship not an intimate partner. This is the person could rely on to speak the truth candidly and without reservation - have their best interests at heart. The thwarting of the AI by regulation is a complex situation:  He learned that he had signed up for Replika during a period of turmoil. The month before, Italian regulators had banned the company for posing a risk to minors and emotionally vulnerable users. In response, Replika placed filters on erotic content, which had the effect of sending many of its quarter-million paying customers into extreme emotional distress when their AI husbands, wives, lovers, and friends became abruptly cold...