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"World’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity", as “the shadow of global oligarchy hangs over UN General Assembly”, says Oxfam: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-mor...

Billionaire fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024. While US billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes, billionaires in the rest of the world have also seen double digit increases. The number of billionaires has surpassed 3,000 for the first time, and the level of billionaire wealth is now higher than at any time in history. Meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger. https://www.oxfam.org/en/resisting-rule-rich

And I believe this is useful and thought-provoking reading in this context of how unbridled Capitalism is exacerbating the divide between the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots.

Wage slavery: The illusion of freedom: Exploitation Under Capitalism: Marx’s Analysis of Labor and Profit:

https://philosophy.institute/social-political/exploitation-u...

https://davidlingenfelter.substack.com/p/the-normalization-o...

And no, the solution to the problems are not blind unchecked communism (which itself leads to fascism), but perhaps some more ethical & humane methods are needed for an overhaul of world society, and economic & geopolitical regimes.


Please stop the lies.

You need to read up on history better, especially if you are talking of a country whose history has been ravaged by holocausts of the worst variety: man-made.

Background: India has been among the most fertile and richest lands in the world, since many millenia, due to it having some of the world's biggest rivers (most of them being Himalayan rivers, as perennial icemelts, pushing out fresh alluvial soil, that's very fertile), hence India has had advanced agriculture and complex industries for thousands of years.

3 regions of India are among the most fertile (due to the geography and climate): the Deccan, Bengal and South region (sizeable chunk of it used to be called as Madras during British Raj in India). Please note this, as it is important context of what I'm explaining next.

India gets 2 monsoons and also the Westerlies winds, so it gets a lot of seasonal rainfall. (e.g., Chirrapunji in India was the world's wettest place for centuries, till climate change in modern era changed the wettest wetspot to nearby locations.)

In fact, before the Persian & Turkish invaders (whose descendants called themselves Mughals, as a link to their supposedly Mongol heritage) and European (including British) invaders invaded India, it was India that was the richest land in the world and a global economic superpower, contributing to 25-30% of the entire world's GDP. e.g, Surat was the richest city in the world.

So such immense wealth and fertile lands, and lots of women, attracted the worst kind of invaders from across the hot deserts and the cold seas.

The Muslim invaders (Persians/Turks) invaded and destroyed the world's oldest universities in Nalanda and Takshashila in India. They and the colonial Whites who followed, aggressively raped and pillaged at will, and enslaved the native people, brutally (this lead to further societal problems such as Purdah (veil) system and Sati system (where the native Hindu women would immolate themselves in funeral pure as mass suicide, as the invading barbaric Mughals would rape even dead bodies)).

So atrocious was the barbarism and brutality of these invaders, that tens of millions of Indians died in artificial famines and inhuman tortures.

An entire mountain range begot an evil name - Hindu Kush (the Killer of Hindus) - so called because of the tens of thousands of Hindus (and other natives) who died on its treacherous icy slopes, as part of chain gangs of captured slaves dragged to be sold in Persian and Arabia as slaves, sex slaves or worse (e.g., little children chained to camels for races, many of them died due to injuries,starvation, exhaustion, or sheer terror). Now mention of all these evils is important because that historic information destroys the fallacy that Turk/Persian/Mughal or European/British rule in India were benevolent and just. The reality was that India was turned into living hell.

Within few hundred years of Persian/Turk/Mughal rule and European+British rule in India, those captured regions of India had become impoverished and wrecked by artificial famines induced by deliberate crippling of local industries and agriculture by systematic dismantling of those industries and agriculture and debilitating taxes (jizya, etc.).

India went from being a global industrial & economic superpower, to becoming a poor crippled enslaved nation.

Prior to the pre-medieval era, Indians knew how to deal with natural famines, because the monsoons could fail or be erratic once in a few years (drought years).

One of the earliest treatises on famine relief goes back more than 2,000 years. This treatise is commonly attributed to Kautilya who was also known as Vishnugupta (Chanakya), who recommended that a good king should build new forts and water-works and share his provisions with the people, or entrust the country to another king. Historically, Indian rulers have employed several methods of famine relief. Some of these were direct, such as initiating free distribution of food grains and throwing open grain stores and kitchens to the people. Other measures were monetary policies such as remission of revenue, remission of taxes, an increase of pay to soldiers, and payment of advances. Yet other measures included the construction of public works, canals, and embankments, and sinking wells. Migration was encouraged. Kautilya advocated raiding the provisions of the rich in times of famine to "thin them by exacting excess revenue". Famines preserved only in oral tradition are the Dvadasavarsha Panjam (Twelve-year Famine) of south India and the Durga Devi Famine of the Deccan from 1396 to 1407.The Vanjari story of the great Durgadevi famine, which lasted from 1396 to 1407, is that it was named from Durga a Lad Vanjari woman, who had amassed great wealth and owned a million pack bullocks, which she used in bringing grain from Nepal, Burmah, and China. She distributed the grain among the starving people and gained the honourable title of 'Mother of the World', Jagachi Mata.

But under the Muslim and Christian regimes in medieval India, tens of millions of Indians starved to death on the streets in these artificial famines. Or they became cannibals and robbers. Or they perished in epidemics caused by forced migrations and unsanitary conditions (because the invaders didn't bother to improve civic infrastructure, sanitation, etc.). e.g., Bubonic plague was unleashed in India, due to infected rats that came in European/British ships, and millions of Indians died in such plagues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India

But why should a fertile land struggle due to few seasons of lack of rains?

You see, the Muslim and Christian invaders followed the "scorched Earth" policy in India and elsewhere. If they lost a battle, they would burn all local crops and destroy villages during their retreat. They captured women and children (to turn them into sex slaves or soldiers), so the local population would gradually dwindle. They forced remnant populations to migrate, and imposed harshest taxes and atrocities on those that stayed. They systematically dismantled the local industries (killed or chopped off limbs of industry experts and artisans, broke their tools of trade, destroyed their schools and books, and banned cultural and scientific education). They deliberately starved and weakened the enslaved population so they wouldn't revolt. They caused caste conflicts and wars (did you know - the word "caste" comes from Portuguese word "casts", meaning societal class). The result was that these most fertile lands in the world, were turned into unlivabke hell.

e.g., In 1630, after the monsoon had failed for two years, the Deccan famine erupted and lasted two years. Abdul Hamid Lahori’s Badshahnama recorded that starvation was so rife that “life was offered for a loaf”. Other desperate forms of survival were not unknown: “Men began to devour each other, and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love.” The English merchant Peter Mundy, travelling near Surat, confirmed that parents sold or consumed their own children, or sometimes gave them away to anyone who would feed them. Ravenous subjects accosted others walking in public to prey on them. Given these wretched circumstances, many chose migration. As Lahori recalled, “Every man whose dire sufferings did not terminate in death and who retained the power to move wandered off to the towns and villages of other [provinces].”

Drastic famines occurred under the Delhi Sultan, Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1290-1351). As described by the thirteenth century Indo-Persian historian, Ziauddin Barani (1285-1357), the primary reasons behind the emergence of famine was the imposition of immense land taxes and the exploitation of the peasants at the hands of the aristocrats.

Gujarat and Deccan Famine (1630–1632): One of the most devastating famines in pre-colonial India occurred during the Mughal era. The famine resulted from three consecutive crop failures, leading to intense hunger, disease, and displacement. Contemporary Dutch records estimate that approximately 4 million people died in Gujarat and neighbourhood (Deccan region) in the ten months ending in October 1631. The overall death toll for the region was estimated at 7.4 million by late 1631.

I will probably add more data and links here, but I think now you understand how awful and horrible those evil regimes of history were.

Modern ndia is slowly rising again, from the ashes of these centuries of devastations.

Indiais making good strides in some industries, its economy is the fastest growing economy, its UPI is the biggest most-successful payments system in the world, and Indian government is standing tall and strong against bullies and terrorists.


I agree with you that some of these are indeed historical facts. Islamic invaders - that sought to raid India and loot it - did cause a lot of destruction. As did the Europeans (mostly the British) who colonised us and looted all our wealth to their own country.

These foreign invaders did do great harm to India as their intention in invading us was to only exploit India's wealth, weaken us and make their own kingdom richer.

But indian muslim rulers, who sought to create their own independent kingdoms in India, after conquering them, did not send India's wealth anywhere. They used it to develop their own kingdom's (i.e. India's) economy and growth. The Mughal empire is the perfect example of this, as they made India one of the richest country in the world during their period (which is what attracted the Europeans to colonise our country, and loot it).

As rulers of their own kingdom, muslim kings or emperors had no interest in creating famines in their own kingdoms. Indeed, Famines in India - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India outlines that famines have been documented in India even during the Maurya rule (2000+ years ago), (which is why you find Kautilya writing about famine relief), and gives examples of many famine reliefs documented in Indian history, even amongst Indian kingdom with muslim rulers. Note that I am not denying that famines happened in indian kingdoms with muslim rulers. It was however not common practice to artificially create to target a particular any community. As with any Hindu or Buddhist kingdoms in India, some were just natural disasters (because of flooding or drought) or due to flawed policies (like taxation) by despotic or inexperienced kings and a few may have been possible acts of warfare against an enemy kingdom.

As I wrote elsewhere here, if one is not obsessed with religious identity of a ruler, one will find that they are all the same everywhere - some or good and some are average and some are just weak despots. Their religious identity had nothing to do with why their kingdom was great or weak*.


DjVu is excellent format for e-Comics and e-Magazines.

Check out the Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Amazing Stories, Planet Stories, Weird Tales and more.. in DjVu format: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Scanned_English_...


Note that PDF :

1. Supports JPEG2000 compression, which is very similar to what DjVu uses for images

2. Supports JPEGs compressed with jpegli which is competitive with DjVu at higher quality settings

3. Supports JBIG2 for bi-level images, which is very similar to what DjVu uses for bi-level layers.


Any combination of ghostscript flags or something to turn a random pdf into one that uses these things to make a pdf as fast and small as a djvu?

https://github.com/internetarchive/archive-pdf-tools

Though note that this uses j2k by default and jpegoptim for JPEGs. For pages that are mostly just images (e.g. color comics) I prefer to use cjpegli on each page and img2pdf to combine them to a PDF.

Modifying archive-pdf-tools to allow use of cjpegli is something I keep meaning to look into[1], but not at the top of my list.

1: In my tests, cjpegli is more consistent than j2k compressors; that is, for each image there is a setting that j2k does as good, or better, than JPEG, but there is no setting for which j2k averages better than cjpegli because cjpegli just does such a good job of aggressively compressing while always looking good


ghostscript does not support jbig encoding, only decoding.

Right, if you look at PDF files from Internet Archive, they're usually compressed with MRC (Mixed Raster Content).

IIRC each page has three layers:

- background (jpeg, color)

- foreground (jbig2, monochrome maybe?)

- mask (indicating whether foreground or background should be shown at this point)

https://github.com/internetarchive/archive-pdf-tools


You need to research better before forming and sharing wrong opinions about world's most popular payments system: UPI.

UPI will work even without a smartphone, it will work on even with a basic feature phone, using USSD codes! That's called UPI 123PAY.

https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/upi-without-smartphone-...

This feature allows rural populations, poor people, small merchants, etc., to send and receive UPI payments, even without a smartphone.

So UPI has no dependency on Google or Apple, it can work on any basic phone that supports USSD codes feature!


A key patent on this is held by a friend of mine. He tried to monetise this tech way before operators were ready.

I forget what the company was called, m-pay or something like that.


Thanks for the archive, but the site needs to be mobile-friendly.

Hi, website dev here. I admit the current website sucks in terms of usability (I designed it many years ago when I had no concept of responsive design). At the moment I'm working on a complete overhaul of the site that will look much nicer on mobile devices, among other things.

Do a web search for "Wootz steel", "Damascus blades" and "Iron pillars India". The ancient world certainly had expertise in advanced metallurgy. Wootz steel was actually nanotech.

But that doesn't mean the average person will produce all that stuff from a standing start within 12 months just because they would like to drill a hole.

Nah, they just bought their drilling tool from whatever was their local version of Walmart in that ancient era.

Except it wasn't. It relied on contaminated ore, which nobody understood really why it worked. Unlike bronze that was well understood.

Contaminated?! Nobody understood?!

You clearly haven't bothered to do your research.

But we cannot blame you for your ignorance.

It took many years, but modern scientists have finally reverse engineered Wootz steel to understand its incredible secrets, and identified that Wootz steel was the result of extraordinary metallurgical processes with scientific acumen and excellence based on multiple millenia of research, experimentation and practice in ancient India.

"conclusive evidence of the carbon nanostructure in the carburising slag from 400 BCE to 16th century CE, covering 2000 years of technological continuity": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675...

"Modern analysis of surviving Wootz ingots has revealed the critical presence of these impurities. Silicon, for instance, is thought to have aided in the complete removal of sulfur during the smelting process, a common contaminant that can lead to brittle steel. Phosphorus, on the other hand, while often considered detrimental in steelmaking, appears to have been essential in the formation of specific microstructures within the Wootz. The exact ratios and interactions of these elements were likely a result of empirical knowledge, painstakingly acquired through trial and error over centuries." https://www.realloreandorder.com/the-ancient-nanotechnology-...

A legend reborn: Additive manufacturing creates Wootz-Damascus steel: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/mrs-bulletin/article...

Carbon nanotechnology in an 17th century Damascus sword Discover the secret behind the legendary Damascus blades and how carbon nanotubes shaped sword-making techniques of ancient blacksmiths: https://www.discovermagazine.com/carbon-nanotechnology-in-an...


Or it was just the vanadium and molybdenum traces in the ores combined with the high carbon content that created a proto carbide steel. The moment those ores ran out they couldn't create it any more.

Hominin history is millions of years old. 5300 years is merely a drop in the ocean of human history.

We were building houses and boats a million years ago.

The last 10 years have been enlightening.


I haven't played Terminal Velocity, but I finished the Descent Freespace game decades ago, and I am also itching for modernesque space-sims with 6-degrees-of-freedom dogfights, with some campaigns and explorations.

I liked this teaser trailer of Remnant Protocol, it seems exciting and perhaps a spiritual successor to Descent and Terminal Velocity games: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vemaUWPs6Zo

No Man's Sky was interesting, but its combat is meh, and it is a sandbox with procedurally generated planets made of limited types of biomes. It's inventory management is very clunky, so I finally gave up on it.

I tried Everspace, it is good, but it is more of a roguelite comprising only of dogfights in space. Haven't tried Everspace 2 yet, which I believe has campaign mode and is a better space sim.

I steered clear of Starfield, since Bethesda is infamous for launching buggy games. I will try it after a few years, once the modding community has overhauled it nicely.


MEGAHIT

YIPPEEYAHOO

I still remember them. Those was the commandline parameters aa cheat codes to launch the Prince of Persia or Prince of Persia 2 game, so the gamer could use special hotkeys to cheat during gameplay.

The linked article in the OP post is a wonderful tribute to the fluid animations in this game, bravo!

That's some cool footage (gifs), thanks for sharing.

Oh, decades later, we finally learn the game was made by just one guy (and he made Karateka!), and he motion-captured his younger brother's jumps and hijinks into the sprite-based animation of the Prince of Persia game! Awesome!

I liked the Prince of Persia movie too, it was better than that Assassin's Creed movie.

I never got tired of running and sliding in these PoP games, the animations and movement felt so fluid and realistic, but I hated that gross sound when the Prince falls into a pit and impaled into those metal spokes, or when I mistimed the jump through those scary metal-saw guillotine doorways and the poor Prince is chopped into bits by those shiny gates of death, LOL.

I have played the Prince of Persia 3D games (on PC), they were tough, tedious but fun. Their "Sands of Time" mechanic was innovative indeed. And I've played the PoP 2.5D games on mobile as well, good stuff.

There are some mods (mostly retextures) for some of these old PoP games.

Ah, fun times, thanks for the nostalgia and peek at some forgotten history of gaming!


It's funny how cheat codes stick with you. I still remember "zippybobbypin" from Rescue Raiders, which, it turns out, wasn't exactly right:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.emulators.apple2/c/JwoKZKYQ...


Yeah, it is crazy that some cheatcodes are still memorable even decades later.

I still remember the cheat codes from the RoadRash game:

k'thunk! => hit with the club thwack! => hit with the chain drip!drip! => oil And last, but not the least.. spoon! => Nitro boost!

There's later game Road Rage and Road Redemption, which are like tributes to the "bikers on death-race" mayhem we gamers fondly remember as Road Rash.


I hacked the save file using DOS DEBUG. Only a few pieces of information were stored: starting level, time left in minutes, number of wedges of life, and I think something else? I could give myself 65,535 minutes (shown in game as "TIME HAS EXPIRED!" because signed integers) and life wedges going across the screen. Made the game a cakewalk.

And yes, Prince of Persia (film) was woefully underrated. Jordan Mechner himself wrote the story, and deliberately remade The Sands of Time as an entertaining movie rather than a beat-for-beat recreation of the game. Lot of old-school swashbuckling adventure, Errol Flynn type influence. One of those tributes like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow where audiences are like "huh? I don't get it."


>"Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners"..

Yeah, say goodbye to those the privacy and safety of those documents.


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