Peter Cherian

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@India_Progress Hyderabad. Many office and residential buildings have come up over the last decade, especially in the western side of the city(Gachibowli,Hitec city,etc.)

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@ducati_dada https://t.co/Q9yKugrdRu
It wasn't anything like that

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[Mahmoouud @Mahhmooud]

البيزو الارجنتيني vs الجنيه المصري
اللي هيكسب هياخد قرض من صندوق النقد

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@bvlldhist_alt He hasn't disclosed whether he is married or not, but he did say that he became a father last year.

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@bvlldhist_alt Fewest number of children enrolled in school in several years
https://t.co/gAfLvyEH6T

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@gym_manic 10+ for 3 sets? That's elite.

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@Absolutemadlado The land isn't as much of a problem as water is. There isn't enough water to satisfy the needs of 1.5 billion at the moment.
From Grok: "Land-use regulations are fixable with policy. Water requires massive infrastructure, behavioral change, and technology..."

[Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger]

In the ancient world, the way many people gained great wealth was by forming gangs of strong men, beating up their neighbors, and taking their stuff.

People still speak with admiration of men like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, but they were little better than gangsters who enriched themselves through armed robbery.

This was a negative sum game, and assured that people remained poor and unhappy for thousands of years.

Eventually, however, we figured out that respecting each other’s rights, building things, and trading meant that we could play positive sum games instead. We could increase the amount of wealth, and all would benefit. As a result, we moved from living in unheated shacks to living in what our ancestors would’ve thought of as paradise in only a few hundred years.

However, there are still people out there who think that beating someone up and taking their stuff is a really great idea.

It is the great task of our civilization to shun such people, as they are not fit to be part of society.

[Upamanyu Acharya @upamanyuacharya]

"India is overcrowded" is the most successful gaslighting campaign Indian babus ever ran on their own citizens. They underbuilt the country for forty years and convinced 1.4B Indians to blame themselves for it.

Every overcrowded space you've ever queued in is a supply failure the state engineered, not a demographic accident. Five lifts in a hospital, one working. Seven railway counters, one ticketer. Toll plazas, water boards, municipal offices: built once in 1972, patched once in 1996, abandoned ever since. The only exception is airports, and even those lounges are gigafried at peak.

Why did this happen? 4 reasons, none of them are "too many people."

1. Cost of capital. Rupee down 60% against the dollar in two decades. Inflation 5-7% on paper, 8-10% in reality. Risk-free rates above 7%. No rational allocator underwrites a hospital with a 30-year payback under those conditions. Capital flows into software and consumer brands; anything with a 3-5 year ROI window. Parks, ports, metros, dams, schools need multi-decade underwriting that India's macro structurally cannot support.

2. The regulatory stack is engineered to prevent construction. 50+ clearances across municipal, state, and central bodies for any large project, each with its IAS gatekeeper extracting rent. Real builders give up. The only construction happening at scale is therefore illegal, which is exactly why slums mushroom while sanctioned housing projects sit at 15% completion for a decade.

3. The corruption tax. Budget 15-20% of project cost in bakshish before pouring a single slab. Stacked on top of GST, stamp duty, capital gains, property tax, labour cess. Software shops escape it; they ship from a laptop. Anyone touching cement, steel, or land pays the surcharge in cash, off the books, with zero recourse and zero deductibility.

4. State capacity has collapsed into pure friction. GST portal crashes on filing deadlines. MCA21 is a relic. Every regulator (SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, FSSAI, BIS) optimises for CYA, never throughput. Babus paid 1990s salaries to administer 2026 complexity respond rationally by doing nothing.

India's perpetual undercapacity is a capital allocation story the political class would rather you never learn. The 1.4B is a feature. The people running the country are the bug. Until cost of capital drops, the regulatory fat gets gutted, and the corruption surcharge gets squeezed out, the lifts and the counters and the hospitals will stay exactly as broken as they were when your grandfather first complained about them in 1987.

[ai waifu @waif0000]

Babe wake up, the 22-year C-section follow up data just dropped, and it’s *much* worse than the public was led to believe.

1 in 3 American babies are born this way.

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@justkevooo While the overall agreement is for four world cups, the dollar value for this year's world cup is $60 million, as said in the article. The value of the other three has not been disclosed.

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@thegrimscalper @KumarXclusive Is this how the "DO NOT REDEEM THE CARD" meme came about?😄

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@CurtisScoon Congrats, Curtis. I think I remember you talking about wanting more sometime in the past and it is great to see you make it happen.

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@apinions_ I don't believe that Thailand's weak economic performance has to do with a worsening connection to the Thai identity. It has to do with other factors such as political instability, industrial policy, educational policy, things of that nature. (x/x)

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@apinions_ That is one of the signs that assimilation has been successful. Also, during election campaigns here in Thailand, i have never heard of a politician attacking another Thai about their ethnicity. This happens all the time in India where identity politics is very widespread.(3/x)

[Peter Cherian @peter_cherian]

@UTXOghost One thing for certain is money printer go brrrrrrr😆