Sneha Khatri

Co-founder, Alice

[Sneha Khatri @snehakhatri05]

have to add to the: “just look at the degree on that chic” :)

[Arun Ramesh 🇮🇳 @arun10venkat]

👌🏻 strongly worded

[Aravind @aravind]

He's calling all of us "Ambani's army." Nonsense.

I actually wish Ambani, Adani, Airtel, Tata, Mahindra, all funded social media armies for India even if not ran SM platforms. The world of misinformation and propaganda against India would be decimated.

If Indians can do so much organically to fight for India, imagine what state and private backed army of "internet shills", like what the US, China, Pak deploy, would actually do for India.

I urge Indian companies to get together and raise one such army to protect their common interests against online propaganda and attacks. And use its spare capacity to help India's cause.

@AdaniOnline @RIL_Updates @TataCompanies @jeet_adani1 @airtelnews @MahindraRise

[Sneha Khatri @snehakhatri05]

@amitabhk87 @elonmusk Absolutely!

[Amitabh Kant @amitabhk87]

While @elonmusk is a phenomenal innovator and entrepreneur this tweet is in extremely poor taste. To suggest that India is controlled by one industrialist is both absurd and deeply disrespectful. India is a lively, vibrant democracy with a transparent economy and strong institutions.

The United States has consistently protected its own economic and national security interests. Electric vehicles face 100% tariffs, effectively keeping companies like BYD out of the US passenger car market. There are stringent restrictions on telecom equipments on national security grounds. The FCC is now proposing to bar testing laboratories in several countries from certifying electronic devices for the US market.

If the United States can legitimately protect its national security, why should India be denied the same sovereign right?

India welcomes innovation, investment and fair competition. But no global corporation, however influential, can expect India to compromise its national interests or dictate its policies.

What is considered national security in America cannot suddenly become protectionism in India. @PMOIndia @narendramodi @JM_Scindia

[Paula Pant @AffordAnything]

There's no freeze on property tax.

There's no freeze on the wages paid to landscapers, plumbers, electricians, drywallers, flooring installers.

There's no freeze on the cost of lumber, copper, baseboard, quarter rounds, flashing, siding, window treatments.

There's no freeze on the wages paid to janitors or porters.

There's no freeze on utilities -- on electric, gas, water, sewer (building-paid utilities in hallways, lobbies, maintenance corridors; most buildings pay water and sewer for tenants).

There are currently 57,421 units sitting vacant in NYC because it's more cost-effective to leave them empty than it is to rent them out.

If you're wondering: "How that could be possible? Wouldn't making anything be better than making nothing?" -- the answer is no, because of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.

The HSTPA mandated a certain level of renovation for a vacant unit, but did not allow landlords to raise the rent enough to be able to recoup those costs.

If a long-term tenant moves out after decades, the apartment often requires $50,000 to $100,000 in lead abatement, new wiring, plumbing, and structural renovations.

Because the law heavily restricts how much of that cost can be passed to the next tenant.

The HSPTA eliminated the "vacancy bonus" (which allowed automatic 20% rent increases when a tenant left) and heavily capped Individual Apartment Improvements (IAIs).

This means landlords who want a renovation loan would be rejected by a bank, because the landlord would not be able to show that they could repay that loan.

Landlords who pay out-of-pocket would end up losing money, underperforming even what they could get by putting their money in a U.S. Treasury or gov't bond.

Therefore, it's more cost-effective to just leave the unit vacant.

That's why we have 57,421 vacant units across New York right now.

That number is about to get much worse.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Imagine your family worked for a generation to save enough money to buy a brownstone occupied with rent stabilized tenants on the Upper West Side. The family financed the purchase with a mortgage from a bank based on the premise that rents and cash flow would at least keep pace with inflation so you could pay interest and principal on the mortgage and hopefully have some cash flow left as a return on your investment.

While you had rent stabilized tenants, you were led to believe that the NYC Rent Guidelines Board would be required to adjudicate rental increases each year by taking a measure of the inflation of costs to own and operate a building and setting rental increases appropriately.

You believed the RGB would do its job as the board is comprised of two representatives each for landlords and tenants and five independent representatives that represent the general public.

Now, a new mayor @NYCMayor Mamdani is elected on the promise of freezing rents. There are about two million rent stabilized renters that benefit if rents are frozen so by promising frozen rents the new candidate for mayor buys votes and wins the election.

The new mayor achieves his objective by stacking the RGB with directors who do not follow their obligations and simply vote for a rent freeze as a preordained conclusion as evidenced by the statements of an RGB director who resigned in protest for this very reason.

Meanwhile, inflation in NYC is rampant in utilities, real estate taxes, insurance, repairs and maintenance, etc. and now your rents are frozen. Real estate is a high operating leverage business which means that frozen rents and inflating expenses will cause property cash flows to plummet and your after debt service cash flow to go negative.

I expect therefore there will be hundreds if not thousands of small NYC property owners who are now or will shortly be underwater on their mortgages, and without any cash flow to maintain their assets.

If you remember the images of the South Bronx burning in the mid 1970s, you can viscerally understand what is happening to small NYC real estate owners.

While the rent freeze appears to be short-term good news (long term it will lead to poorly maintained apartments) for 2 million NYC renters, it is bad news for the 2 million or more renters in the 1 million market rate apartments in the City because a landlord-hostile market is not likely to add meaningfully more supply and market rents will likely continue to escalate at a high rate.

All of this seems quite unfair and wrong unless I missing something?

Why am I wrong?

For disclosure: I do not own any NYC rental apartments.

[Mustafa @Sufi495]

فتاة من أفغانستان تُصوّر لمتابعيها كيف تشاهد العالم من خلال الخـرقة التي تُسمّى البرقع الأفغاني ، والتي تُجبر على ارتدائها

[@levelsio @levelsio]

They found out the most far left newspaper of France, which is by the way most radically against air conditioning

Has their entire roof covered in AC units

Rules for thee, not for me 😂

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches.

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Lee Kuan Yew:

“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."

[jay plemons @jayplemons]

David Sacks just delivered an economics masterclass on Elon becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

@davidsacks: “People see the headline and imagine Elon suddenly has a trillion dollars in the bank. That’s not how it works. His balance sheet didn’t change overnight.”

Why?

The real point is deeper. Wealth isn’t in the “stuff” we consume. Food, shelter, clothes. Things that depreciate and disappear. It’s in the machines that create stuff for decades: tools, workflows, and corporations.
These are the true engines of human progress.

“If you create a machine that makes more stuff, then there’s a discounted present value for all the stuff in the future that machine might create. That’s where the wealth comes from.”

Elon started with nothing. An immigrant who slept on the floor building Zip2. He created these machines from vision and relentless effort. Thousands joined him, including a SpaceX welder who turned his labor into a million dollars in stock.

That’s the magic of tech and free markets: labor can become capital. It’s fluid.

The outrage misses this entirely. The people building machines that deliver medicines, energy, and abundance are creating lasting prosperity for everyone.

What do you think? Does viewing wealth as future productivity change how you see stories like this?

[𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ @NiohBerg]

The total amount since January is 137 kilos.

It’s Auschwitz level amounts of hair from just two days of slaughtering innocent Iranian women.

This is why we never saw piles of female bodies in the morgues. They were harvested.

[Samuel Hume @DrSamuelBHume]

One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: a standing ovation for the full Daraxonrasib results

I feel inspired and energised, to put it mildly — we have a targeted therapy for pancreatic cancer now, and nothing is undruggable anymore

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

I've never been at a medical conference where the results have been greeted with a standing ovation

Tremendous breakthrough in pancreatic cancer treatment

Through science

Hard work, rigorous research, clinical trials.

Science

Not the quack pseudoscience of social media

[Patrick Hsu @pdhsu]

people aren’t celebrating this pancreatic cancer breakthrough enough. it should be international news

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Based Bezos is awesome

[CNBC @CNBC]

Jeff Bezos: "If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving."

[Jedi @dhe3g]

Meanwhile people in 3000 BC were out here carving porn into their bowls and silverware like it was casual home decor.

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

A joyous moment for every Indian!

Chola Copper Plates dating back to the 11th Century will be repatriated to India from the Netherlands. Took part in the ceremony for the same in the presence of Prime Minister Rob Jetten.

The Chola Copper Plates are a set of 21 large plates and 3 small plates and largely contain texts in Tamil, one of the most beautiful languages of the world. They relate to the great Rajendra Chola I formalising an oral commitment made by his father, King Rajaraja I. They also showcase the greatness of the Cholas. We in India are immensely proud of the Cholas, their culture and their maritime prowess.

I thank the Government of the Netherlands and Leiden University in particular, where the Copper Plates were kept since the mid-19th century.

@MinPres

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Boring fact : it's not