1
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alephnerd
Joined 12,076 karma
Recovering Policy Wonk. Former SWE, SE, and PM. Now VC
- Are you going to spend a couple hundred dollars a year on a subscription?
Good, freely accessible, and ad-free press. You can only choose 2.
The economics of journalism are tough.
- > they prefer to IPO on another market than Swiss
You can publicly list in exchanges despite not being domiciled in the exchange's host country.
For example, Chinese and EU domiciled companies IPOing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) due to a mix of easier access to liquidity and simplified rules and regulations.
- 5 points
- > NYTimes seemed to have an OK local bureau, but I noticed they seemed to lag on the Sri Lanka story pretty hard, so I'm definitely curious how empowered they are to get close to the stories
They are completely out of the loop.
Their bureau is small (around 10 people covering all of South Asia), their bureau chief is viewed as an out-of-touch Westerner who was shifted to Delhi after the fall of Kabul, and they have been frozen out (along with the BBC) because the PIB disliked their reporting on the 2019 election, Shaheen Bagh, and the CAA protests.
When Indian Policymakers meet with American stakeholders at events like the US-India Business Conference at Stanford [0] or the India Study Tour [1], NYT reporters or affiliates are not invited but WSJ [2], The Economist [3], FT [4], or Nikkei [5] are given the red carpet.
Since you were in India during 2018-21, you must have watched Season 1 of Paatal Lok - their B-story about media consolidation is eerily close to the truth.
There's a reason India's press freedom rankings aren't the greatest.
[0] - https://www.hoover.org/events/usibc-50th-anniversary-bay-are...
[1] - https://indiafoundation.in/event-reports/india-study-tour-of...
[2] - https://www.wsj.com/news/author/walter-russell-mead
[3] - https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/11/27/meet-the-road-buil...
[4] - https://www.ft.com/content/55cd3608-7f2a-485a-be17-37735947d...
[5] - https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/middle-east-crisis/india-in...
- > I used to live in Gurugram
Oh whoa. That's pretty wild! What years out of curiosity?
> I thought it was so strange where the Maruti Suzuki plant was - I've seen the trucks sluggishly trying to get around local (residential) traffic as the area around the plant has developed quite a bit, which is where my above anecdote originated
That's because Manesar didn't have an Inland Container Depot (dryports that provide direct rail access to ports) until recently [0] - the Delhi NCR ones were in the eastern (Palwal/Faridabad, Tughlakabad/Delhi, Dadri/Noida) or western side (Bawal/Rewari).
Also, depending on when you were in Gurgaon, Manesar has now basically become part of Gurgaon, with all the farmland in between now becoming China-style high rises. It reminds of how outer-ring Beijing began to transform 15 years ago.
> Cool to learn about Sanand which _seems_ like it has pretty good road access to the ports?
India tends to use rail freight for most exports. A 1 hour cargo truck drive to an ICD and then a 7 hour freight rail to a major terminal port ends up being more efficient than trying to build capacity near a port in a lot of cases in India.
> more on the ground reporting in ANY country would be wonderful for western news to do, but we have to spend all the reporting budget on white house shenanigans now... we're cooked
It's because of the economics of journalism. The GFC and Jihadi John led to margins falling [1] and insurance rising [2], which means most on-the-ground journalism is done by freelancers. But purchasing news from an aggregator like Reuters or Bloomberg gets very pricey very quickly.
At this point, for English-language India news, I'd recommend following Reuters, Bloomberg, or Nikkei Asia simply because they have the right mix of on-the-ground reporters, relationships with policymakers, and journalistic standards. There is a good ecosystem of policy/wonk oriented reporting in India as well (eg. The Print, The Secretariat, Policy Circle) that is similar in style to "The Wire China" but they can be pretty obtuse if you don't have the domain experience.
Outside of these kinds of sources, reporting about much of Asia is easily 3-5 years behind in most "mainstream" American media
> I was better aware of these types of clusters from Dubais free zones, which I found were marketed in a more understandable way
A lot of that was because back when Dubai was building out it's logistics network, it depended on Western capital. Indian manufacturing and logistics FDI opportunties are primarily marketed to Asian (Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and before 2021 Chinese) or Gulf investors, because in most cases "American" companies like Apple or funds like Blackrock let OEMs or SDFs respectively take the lead.
Outside of R&D/Services FDI, India is fairly disconnected from the West, and the recent push in electronics exports to the US is largely thanks to Asian players slowly shifting to India from China+Vietnam during COVID Zero.
[0] - https://www.thehindu.com/incoming/rail-minister-opens-gati-s...
[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-foreign-correspondents-are-...
[2] - https://theconversation.com/with-foreign-bureaus-slashed-fre...
- > Global EV sales are up 21% in 2025
The issue is, that rate of growth globally is not enough to sustain the capex spent on building EV manufacturing capacity in 2019-24.
Much of that growth was itself due to China, where EV sales growth is starting to taper down making the financials difficult [0].
Growth alone is not enough - what matters is margins. If the rate of growth cannot sustain COGS, then production is right-sized.
Heck, even back in China a major reason BYD has been so successful is because it was able to subsidize it's initial foray into EV vehicles by becoming the primary smartphone battery vendor for Apple, Samsung, and other vendors in the 2000s.
Traditional automotive majors lacked similarly high margins businesses to help cushion the upfront cost of building out capacity.
This isn't to say EVs are "dead", but the transition will not happen overnight. It took Hybrid cars 10-15 years to go mainstream, and imo EVs today are in the same position where Hybrid cars were in the 2013-16 period.
A lot of shifts are happening in battery chemistry (eg. solid state battery manufacturing capex becoming mainstream) along with component manufacturing (eg. Capex for mass producing EESMs). I remain optimistic, but the histrionics some EV fanatics make is equally as grating/annoying as ICE fanatics.
- That's how it's already done, and has been done since 2014.
Most Indian states have multiple dedicated manufacturing clusters and SEZs for specific industries ranging from the megaclusters like NOIDA and Hosur to smaller ones like Kashipur IIE in Uttarakhand for electronic components or Baddi SEZ in Himachal Pradesh for generic pharma.
The OSAT that is being considered is part of an electronics+automotive SEZ that Micron, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, and Tata are members of (Sanand SEZ).
Most manufacturing in India has shifted to Tier 2/3/4 towns because of land availability and single-window policies, and in my opinion this is a better strategy as it helps build out regional economies. Heck, my ancestral village has had a wind turbine and battery storage factory for a decade now.
The development of this industrial strategy is underreported in non-Asian media (imo due to a lack of on-the-ground reporting in India), but is starting to be analyzed in the NatSec space [0]. I remember seeing a similar blindness to "Make in China" during it's early years.
[0] - https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/08/indias-semico...
- I mean, the reduction of industrial subsidizes for EVs globally [0] along with recent supply chain scares [1] have made the economics for EVs much more difficult recently [2].
This should not be construed as "EVs are dying" but as I keep saying, EVs are going thru the same cycle that Hybrid ICE went thru 15 years ago.
Assuming a 0 to 100% EV transition would happen globally in a handful of years is dumb. Heck, even Chinese automotive manufacturers primarily export ICE vehicles globally [3]. The transition will happen both slower than EV fundamentalists and faster than ICE fundamentalists assume.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-tightens-rare-eart...
[2] - https://www.spglobal.com/automotive-insights/en/blogs/2025/1...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-floods-world-wi...
- 8 points
- > heck, even Kunming has better drivers and traffic than you'll see in Beijing.
But, conversely, a poor farmer in Yunnan was less likely to choose to become a migrant worker in Kunming instead of a Tier 1 metro.
IMO, Beijing's craziness can be attributed to the fact that it is the economic center for much of Northern China - and a number of migrants from large neighboring laggard states like Hebei, Shanxi, Henan, and others ended up gravitating to Beijing.
> Shanghai usually gets the CPC members running it who will lead the country in the future
Not anymore. That was more of a Jiang- and Hu-era bias.
> a party secretary of Shanghai at some point (like Xi in 2007)
Xi's tenure in Shanghai was transitory (less than a year from what I remember) and imo was due to his previous role in Zhejiang.
> Hangzhou, Suzhou, Nanjing, Wenzhou...
Those are all closely connected with Shanghai economically speaking, and all part of Zhejiang or Jiangsu.
- Delhi's issues are severe due to the coordination problem - you have 6 state governments, 1 municipal government, the central government, and SOEs all with overlapping or competing responsibilities.
Hanoi has the exact same coordination problem as Delhi for the exact same reasons as well - 8 tinhs and 2 TPTTTWs all with overlapping and competing governments.
Beijing had a similar problem both Delhi and Hanoi, but because it was just surrounded by Hebei and Tianjin (a fellow 直辖市) it made coordination easier.
- It's a broad statement but the fact that Shanghai is a 直辖市 (and imo Tokyo is in a similar position) is a major difference from other megacities in Asia.
It gives Shanghai (and Tokyo) a munucipal budget and fiscal autonomy that most other megacities in Asia tend to lack.
- > One model is Shanghai, which is run by the central government as a province rather than a city
> The Tokyo Metropolitan Government (tmg) is responsible for big-ticket public services such as water, sewage and public hospitals. Beneath it sit 23 wards and a host of peripheral cities and towns. Each municipality has its own elected mayor and assembly, responsible for services such as schools, waste management and community planning. The tmg co-ordinates between them. It is a sensible split that clearly delineates authority while also making sure that decision-making is joined up.
- 4 points
- Did you even read the second sentence?
- My teachers called it British and I kept with it. BC back then was also much more "British" than much of Eastern Canada tbh - most of my classmates either had grandparents or parents who immigrated from the UK or UK dependencies (eg. the Hong Kong exodus after 1998).
Also, imo the "Ivy" advantage is moreso a "family background" advantage - traditionally high social prestige and high entry barrier vocations were gatekept by Ivy and Ivy-adjacent membership.
The rise of competitive salary and low barrier of entry vocations like Software and Accounting helped dampen the value of that "Ivy" premium.