the scariest thing about this past year wasn’t the market.
it was watching $SNDK go from $32 to $996, $INTC go from $21 to $81, $AMD go from $94 to $348
while your money sat in a savings account feeling responsible
In a low-trust society, most people are openly selfish, habitual rule-breakers, short-term opportunists, and largely devoid of civic responsibility.
Even a minor national crisis brings these qualities out in them even more glaringly.
Once, in college, I texted this girl in my class that I thought she was cute.
She replied "aw tysm"
I never spoke to her again cause that was rude. Also, how did she know I had that??
Last one on this topic, and I have been holding this in myself for a while.
For centuries, class divides kept the labor of the poor invisible to the rich. Factory workers toiled behind walls, farmers in distant fields, domestic help in backrooms. The wealthy consumed the fruits of that labor without ever seeing the faces or the fatigue behind it. No direct encounter, no personal guilt.
The gig economy shattered that invisibility, at unprecedented scale.
Suddenly, the poor aren't hidden away. They're at your doorstep: the delivery partner handing over your ₹1000+ biryani, late-night groceries, or quick-commerce essentials. You see them in the rain, heat, traffic, often on borrowed bikes, working 8–10 hours for earnings that give them sustenance. You see their exhaustion, their polite smile masking frustration with life in general.
This is the first time in history at this scale that the working class and consuming class interact face-to-face, transaction after transaction. And that discomfort with our own selves is why we are uncomfortable about the gig economy. We want these people to look our part, so that the guilt we feel while taking orders from them feels less.
We aren't just debating economics. We are confronting guilt. That ₹800 order might equal their entire day's earnings after fuel, bike rent, and app cuts. We tip awkwardly, or avoid eye contact, because the inequality is no longer abstract. It's personal.
Pre-gig era, the rich could enjoy luxury without moral discomfort. Labor was out of sight. Now, every doorbell ring is a reminder of systemic inequality. That's why debates explode. It's not just policy. It's emotional reckoning. Some defend the system (“they choose it”), others demand change (“this isn't progress, its exploitation”).
And here’s the uncomfortable twist: the unsaid ask of clumsy ‘solutions’ isn’t dignity. It is about returning to invisibility.
Ban gig work and you don’t solve inequality. You remove livelihoods. These jobs don’t magically reappear as formal, protected employment the next day. They disappear, or they get pushed back into the informal economy where there are even fewer protections and even less accountability. Over-regulate it until the model breaks, and you achieve the same outcome through paperwork instead of slogans: the work evaporates, prices rise, demand collapses, and the people we claim to protect are the first to lose income.
And then what happens?
The rich get their old comfort back. Convenience returns without faces. Guilt dissolves. We go back to clean abstractions and moral posturing from a distance. The poor don’t become safer, they become invisible again: back in cash economies, back in backrooms, back in shadows where regulation rarely reaches and dignity isn’t even debated.
The gig economy just exposed the reality of inequality to the people who previously had the luxury of not seeing it. The doorbell is not the problem. The question is what we do after opening the door.
Visibility is the price of progress. We can either use this discomfort to build something better (which we keep doing continuously as delivery partners are our backbone), or we can ban and over-regulate our way back into ignorance. One of those choices improves lives. The other simply helps the consuming class feel virtuous in the dark.
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Every time you open Google Maps, your phone is talking to at least four satellites orbiting 20,000 km above Earth.
Each one beams down ultra-precise timestamps basically saying, “It was 12:00:00.000001 when I sent this.”
Your phone measures how long each signal takes to arrive, then triangulates your exact position. Simple, right?
Here’s the twist by Einstein.
As those satellites are moving fast (about 14,000 km/h), time slows down for them, a prediction of special relativity.
But because they’re also far from Earth’s gravity, time speeds up … a prediction of general relativity.
Put the two effects together, and their onboard clocks tick about 38 microseconds faster per day than clocks on Earth.
That sounds tiny but if engineers didn’t correct for it, your GPS location would drift by roughly 10 km every single day.
So every step you take, every Uber you call, every “turn left” you follow… all depends on Einstein’s equations quietly running behind the scenes.
Mind bending
@imacuriosguy@curiouswavefn