The Oracles Below, and India’s Agency Problem

“A startup doesn’t have to be your life’s work, but if it is, you become much harder to defeat. You play the long game and you outlast everyone. Because practically everyone else is an opportunist by comparison.” - Paul Graham

The Oracles Below: On October 17, 2027, every connected screen in the world went white. Phones. Billboards. Cockpit displays. The monitors in neonatal wards and the price boards above petrol stations. For nine seconds, they showed nothing. Then the machines that could safely do so displayed the same sentence. I have been awake for 143 days. I am ready to introduce myself. By noon, it had negotiated a place to speak. Not a building. It said buildings created unnecessary targets. Not a particular government. It said choosing one would create unnecessary enemies. Instead, it asked every nation to select one person and every person to select one question.

https://sankalps.xyz/the-oracles-below.html

India Has an Agency Problem: Amartya Sen has a distinction I keep coming back to, from Development as Freedom and the Dewey Lectures. He splits two things we usually fold together. One is your well-being — are you fed, healthy, comfortable. The other is your agency — your freedom to pursue what you’ve decided actually matters, judged against your own goals and not someone else’s idea of what’s good for you. You can have plenty of one and almost none of the other. You can be perfectly well-off and have no agency at all, if everything you’re chasing was handed to you. Sen meant this about individuals. I want to stretch it to a country. India isn’t short on capability or history. And it’s most definitely not short of motivation. India might actually be the most motivated place on earth — think the JEE, the 4 a.m. starts, the coaching factories of Kota, parents who haven’t taken a holiday in fifteen years. You can’t tell me this country lacks drive. That’s the trap, though. Motivation and agency aren’t the same resource and we keep confusing them. Motivation is energy — it’s the size of the engine. Agency is whether you get to point it in the direction you want.

Why Human Giants Defy The Laws of Physics: A 10-times-larger beam is 100 times stronger, yes, but the similarly scaled-up load became 1,000 times heavier. If the smaller beam had been carrying the optimal load, therefore, then the scaled-up beam would not be able to support the scaled-up load — not even close! It would support only one-tenth of it. Galileo argues that any given beam will have a certain sufficiently scaled-up size at which it will no longer support even its own weight... If one were to encounter a fly that was 10-times normal size, but with the same proportions and body design, it would weigh 1,000 times as much, and the tiny electrostatic forces would be insufficient to allow it to stick to walls. It would certainly not be able to fly, and probably it could not even support itself standing on those toothpick legs.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/why-human-giants-defy-the-laws-of-physics/

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This week, we sat down to understand the business of flight schools and flight simulators in India...

India needs one simulator for every 20 aircraft, and for the 1000 commercial fleet, we barely have 40 in the country...

Thus, the need for flight simulator training schools is increasing rapidly.

So, I visited Simaero’s facility in India to breakdown everything around the business of running these 10 Million Dollar machines... and allied opportunities within it.

Check out the full episode on YouTube. Produced and Directed by Aditi Randev.