Delhi

Here's what you need to know about Delhi: skip it. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's true for most major cities in India. After spending 3 days there, I can't see any reason to visit unless you're there on business (like I was) or you're a diplomat (which I guess means you'd be there on business anyway).

Delhi is bigger and "nicer" than Bangalore. By that I mean less trash in the streets, fewer stray dogs and cows, better roads, a metro/subway system, a spectacular airport. These things are all nice, but they don't make for anything particularly impressive in the sight-seeing department. I was able to go see "India Gate" which is apparently a major tourist attraction. It celebrates India's independence. It looks like the Arc du Triomphe in Paris, but it's smaller, less ornate, and surrounded by beggars and a SWAT team who expects a terrorist attack at any moment. They spend so much time posing for photos with tourists, they'd probably miss one if it did happen anyway. India Gate seems to largely be of relevance to Indian citizens, as most of the tourist buses there were full of people from other parts of India.

As a city for business, it's very nice. Many office parks, great hotels, relatively easy to get around town and all that. I met with 5 customers here and participated in a CIO panel discussion one morning for breakfast. All were very interesting, if you're a cloud computing strategist. Rush hour is still terrible, it's still got the extreme contrasts between rich and poor, and I got to watch a guy take a dump in the middle of the street, which was a neat first. Once the initial excitement and curiosity associated with the sensory overload subsides, you're left with just plain sensory overload.  I'm referring to the city, not the turd of course.

Thoughts on Bangalore

After spending 3 days there, I decided it's time for some reflection. Bangalore is a city of contrasts. I'm told that's quite common in India, but it's new to me. The airport is 40km from the city center, so it's a haul just to get into town. There's one road, and it's awful, even by Indian standards. I say that as a former resident of New Orleans, mind you. This road had so many "diversions" (detours) around pockets of construction that our route was probably twice as long due to all the zig zagging. I suppose the construction is a positive sign, but let's talk about that for a moment.

Construction is everywhere in Bangalore. Every block, every street, downtown, the suburbs. There seems to be 6,394 buildings going up, all of this are 20% complete. I'm no structural engineer, but it appears to me that none of them are being worked on. At all. It's like they lay a foundation and stack some cinder blocks for walls, then leave. Same is true of the roads. They're building a "flyover" to the airport, what we'd call a elevated, limited access interstate, but it's also 20% done. Massive concrete pylons reach to the sky where eventually they'll support a road deck, but there's no road deck to be found on 35 of those 40km. Only when you get to the city have they actually started putting it in place.

The closest thing I've experienced to Bangalore is Panama City, but it's important to distinguish the difference in scale. Panama is not a big city, even by US standards. It's got 800,000 people which makes it roughly the size of Indianapolis. Panama city is more dense than Indy of course, but you get the idea. Bangalore has 8.4 MILLION people. That makes it the size of New York city, kids. And they DO have the same density, it's just that Bangalore has about 20% of the number of sky-scrapers. So imagine Manhattan with a much smaller skyline and 6,000,000 of its residents living in Central park. And cut all the taxi cabs in THIRDS, give them three wheels and a scooter engine. And some cows walking through times square. And no traffic signals or lane markers, at all. The horn honking is 24/7 relentless. Now you're getting the idea.

Bangalore is effectively the tech city of India. It's where many of the IT services firms are based, so HP has 3 offices there and lots of customers. The office buildings are nice enough, but typically gated off. There's a small army of private security people, building maintenance staff, and high-rate taxis that make-up a sort of micro-economy that lives off all this foreign direct investment. FYI a high-rate taxi has doors, A/C, and you can hire him for $50/day to be your personal chauffeur, in fact that's the most common arrangement. The 3-wheel auto-rickshaws are open air (a terrible idea for both safety and comfort reasons) and you could hire one of them for $5/day, but why the hell would you? Even the locals who can, don't.

So you've got some nice buildings where foreign companies have offices, and some nice hotels to support the foreigners when they come visit. This represents probably 20% of the buildings in the city. Another 10% or so is occupied by military installations. Bangalore was a big base for parts of the British military when this was a colony, so the Indians have kept it that way. The air force, military police, army rangers and border security all have training bases around the city.

This leaves about 66% of the city to what I'd call "normal" Bangalore. This component is everything you've ever stereotyped about a 3rd world country and then some. Tin shacks. 3rd hand tire stores for your scooter. Stray dogs sifting through trash piles on the side of the road, along with cows, pigs, and people doing the same thing.  Power outages. Buildings falling apart to the point you can't tell whether they're occupied, abandoned, or under construction. Pretty much a whole lot of poverty with a small (but growing) middle class.

So here's what astounds me - these are some of the nicest, most optimistic, energetic people I've ever met. They are hard working, and they've latched on to a concept that was once common in America: work hard and your employer will take care of you, you will make a decent living, and you can give your kids the chance at an even better life than what you enjoy. I'm not even sure that's true in America anymore, but it definitely IS true in India. A job at HP India is highly regarded, and highly coveted. It's like Ford and Oldsmobile competing for labor in the early 1900s - benefits are a competitive differentiator. HP takes care of you, your wife & kids, and your parents! The positive attitude of the Indian people amazes me.

More from Delhi later this week.

The little things

Vincent Vega told us in pulp fiction that "they have the same stuff in Europe that they have in the US, it's just the little differences." There are a few things about European airports that I love. #1, they're quiet. No CNN blasting at you from every gate. No PA announcements on the shuttle bus. They're literally quiet. It's lovely.

#2) Proper toilets. For whatever reason, in America we've come to accept bathroom stalls that offer slightly less privacy than standing in the middle of Grand Central Station. Partitions neither reach the floor or the ceiling; doors and corners have gaps wide enough to pass someone a roll of toilet paper. It is in this environment that Americans answer nature's call. Even the worst airports in Europe have stalls with 4 real walls and a proper door. After 8 hours on a plane, one appreciates this difference.

Also, the Air France club lounge was spectacular. It was huge, modern, calm, and the food and drink were amazing. Bottles of Evian all around, whereas Delta lounges back home serve Coca Cola's "Dasani" which is nothing more than bottled tap water. 8 wine choices versus 2 from Delta. 4 espresso machines whirring away. Big, comfy chairs. Free pre-loaded iPods for listening to music while you're there. I was impressed.

If I could tag this post, it'd be "flying over Tehran." 4 hours to go, though of course I can't post this until I land.

Flight 2

Trying this one again. First post failed when I tried to attach the champagne pic.

Breakfast

At the Air France lounge. 8 wines on draft, fresh croissants, and mushroom and onion omelettes. These guys don't mess around.

Cool fountain.

This is my favorite feature at the Detroit airport; a water feature that resembles a 3d airline flight map. Behind it is a 747. The picture doesn't do justice to its scale. I'm flying a KLM 747 home from Delhi to Amsterdam.

Flight #1

As in, 1 of 9.

The adventure begins

On my way to India!

The gun issue

We continue to deal with the topic of gun "control" here in the US, and I think it's a national embarrassment. It's certainly a complicated issue, but at the same time there is a real lack of logic in the arguments offered up on both sides of the issue.

The key driver behind the lack of reasoned debate on the topic is an anachronistic interpretation of the 2nd amendment. This amendment was part of our bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the constitution, in September of 1789. At the time, the weapon of choice was a smooth-bore flint-lock musket, with a rate of fire of 3 rounds per minute (if you were a skilled shooter). Its effective range is 75-100 meters, again, only if you're a good shot.



Just 6 years earlier (1783) we defeated a tyrannical British government to claim our own independence. So there were legitimate concerns about a need for the people to be able to defend themselves from a tyrannical government.

In the 224 years that have passed, the US government has not even remotely bordered on tyranny anywhere near the level to which the British oppressed the colonists. Not even close. There are a few kooks out there today who swear that today's government is tyrannical because it "controls our lives." These kooks cite examples like (local) smoking bans and (local) property ordinances as examples of (Federal) tyranny.

Today's weapon of choice for crazy mass-murderers is the AR-15. It's a spectacular weapon. It's a semi-automatic rife, so you can fire off 50 rounds per minute with decent accuracy, and it's effective to 500 meters. Basically, it's infinitely more powerful and accurate than what the authors of the 2nd amendment expected you might keep around the house. I challenge any reasonable gun rights supporter to hop in a time machine, take an AR-15 to the founding fathers, and ask "is this what you meant by right to bear arms?" Of course it's not. The AR-15 is a killing machine. Sportsmen don't use it to hunt; police departments use it to level the playing field with gangs.



Our founding fathers demonstrated tremendous foresight in many aspects of writing our constitution, but let's cut the bullshit and stop pretending that the 2nd amendment was intended to allow easy access to AR-15s.

The ATF is a joke, thanks to the NRA. They inserted language into the Patriot act that requires the Senate to confirm the head of the ATF, so it hasn't had a director since 2006. Anytime an ATF director is nominated that the NRA doesn't like, the NRA pressures the Senate to NOT hold the confirmation hearings. The NRA can do this because they own most Senators.  The ATF is prohibited from creating a database of gun transactions. They're not allowed to require gun stores to keep an inventory, so most don't. As a result, when a gun is used in a crime and the cops want to trace its purchase history, they have to use a MANUAL process of phone calls and reviewing hand-written documents to do so. It's 2013 people! They're only allowed to inspect gun stores once a year, and they don't have enough agents to even do that. On average, a gun shop gets inspected once every 17 years. 40% of gun sales in the US occur outside of gun stores anyway, so no background check is required. The NRA supported closing that loophole in 1999, but reversed it's position in 2012. So any NRA member who tells you it's a gun rights group is an idiot. It's a firearms industry lobby, period. They care about gun makers and gun sellers, and the ability of gun enthusiasts to buy guns. Gun safety and avoiding crime are PR campaigns, nothing more. It's like when Wal-Mart tells you they care about the community, yeah right.

The NRA argues that we should not have more gun laws because criminals will get around them anyway. This is easily the most absurd argument out there. If we follow that logic, we shouldn't have speed limits or laws against theft, because the criminals are just going to speed and steal anyway. Brilliant logic. Let's just have no laws, because good people will always do good and bad people will always be bad. That way we can get rid of those pesky jails and the court system - no need for either once there are no laws to break! Limited government! Personal liberty!

Somehow in all this, based on absolutely zero evidence and zero historical precedent, the NRA has succeeded in convincing some percentage of gun owners that the government is coming to take their guns, literally. It's never happened in US history, no one is proposing it, but yet this guy is going to come take your guns. Because he hates America. And he's a socialist from Kenya. And this picture was staged. And photoshopped. The NRA told people he was coming to get their guns in 2008. Between 2008 and 2012 the US government took exactly ZERO guns away from lawful gun owners; ZERO "re-posession" of assault weapons. Rather than admit that it's full of crap, the NRA's messaging for the 2012 campaign was that "Obama is waiting for his 2nd term to come get your guns, when he doesn't have to face the electorate again." I knew it all along! Surely they're right THIS time. They wouldn't drum up baseless paranoia to further their own interests, right?

Putting drone strikes in perspective

An Instagram Account Chillingly Documents The Sites Of U.S. Drone Strikes http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671238/an-instagram-account-chillingly-documents-the-sites-of-us-drone-strikes

The changing electorate

Not sure why Mitt lost? Can't believe that a majority of Americans are stupid enough to vote for a deficit spending, big government, socialist ultra-liberal agenda? Well in that case you've been brainwashed by the CEC - the conservative entertainment complex. Remember, the primary interest of people like Fox News and Rush Wind-bag is to promote themselves and make money, not inform the electorate about reality. The truth is much less titillating than "Obama is a socialist from Kenya who wants to ruin America!" but you bought it hook line and sinker. He's a mediocre Senator from Illinois who saved us from a depression, hasn't started WWIII and is generally more palatable than Willard Mitt Moneybags III who thinks 47% of the country are a bunch of leeches.

There are some real reasons that explain Romney's loss though, if you're interested. Deep down, Karl Rove knows these to be true, though he'd never admit it. The electorate is changing, considerably, and the "classic" GOP strategy of let's appeal to old white bible beaters is no longer viable:

1. Women are voting more, and paying more attention to details. Contraception matters to them. Equal pay matters to them. Abortion rights matter to them. Obama won women by 11% margin, and single women by a 2:1 margin (36%). That's huge. Guess what GOP, marriage is statistically on the decline, so that single women demographic is pretty important. 
2. Shockingly, there are some Hispanic immigrants who have become actual US citizens, they vote, and they find the term "self-deportation" offensive. Who knew?
3. There are a ton of people in this country who have been screwed by health insurance companies; denied claims, coverage, and/or treatments. The AARP supports Obamacare, yet the GOP continues its ongoing campaign to vilify it. This campaign is also ridiculous in light of the fact that 90% of Obamacare hasn't been implemented yet, so we don't really know WHAT it will look like. 
4. Educated, middle-class voters know damn well that tax cuts for the rich DON'T HELP THE MIDDLE CLASS. They know that the GOP leadership in Congress is holding up tax cuts for the other 98% of us to protect tax cuts for the richest 2%, and they recognize that is a bad deal. 

And then there's this graph:

Note the scale on the left side - this is only a 20% drop, but still that's huge. Romney won by big margins among whites, especially white men, but that demographic doesn't carry the weight it did in 1980.