Sunday, December 29, 2019
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
[ Will FM in 2020 Budget - Raise basic exemption to Rs 10 lakh: G. Pradeepkumar, CEO, UNION AMC . (As suggested by him.) - ]
Reducing the corporate tax rate has increased the profitability of the corporate sector. However, the demand side needs to be addressed as well by increasing the disposable income of consumers. The basic exemption limit should be increased to Rs 10 lakh to spur demand, which in turn can take the economy into a virtuous cycle of higher capacity utilisation, more investments, more jobs and higher consumption. The overall benefits are far more likely to outweigh the short term revenue loss on income...
[ Story of Mexico. 3D Printed Home.First in the world.]
A giant 3D printer is currently squeezing out new homes in rural Mexico. Each one takes 24 hours and lets local families upgrade from a shack to a two-bedroom house. Could this be part of the global housing solution?
The 500-square-foot houses were finished with roofs, windows, and interiors last week. New Story, the nonprofit leading the project, believes that the new construction process could be part of the solution for affordable housing in some of the poorest communities in the world. “We feel like we’ve proved what’s possible by bringing this machine down to a rural area in Mexico, in a seismic zone, and successfully printing these first few houses,” says Brett Hagler, CEO and co-founder of New Story.
The nonprofit, founded five years ago to bring housing to people living in extreme poverty, has already built more than 2,700 homes in Haiti, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Mexico, using traditional construction. In Haiti, where aid groups struggled to rebuild after the 2010 earthquake, New Story honed a process to work more quickly to finish homes. But it recognized that new technology could help it continue to work faster and decrease costs. Two years ago, it partnered with Icon, a construction tech company based in Austin, to begin developing a 3D printer rugged enough to work even in the most challenging conditions.
Icon’s printer, called the Vulcan II, isn’t the first designed to build an entire house. But the new Mexican neighborhood, which will have 50 of the homes, will be the first community to use this type of technology at scale.
There have been some other experiments with 3D-printed homes, but they have all occurred in controlled conditions or in areas with little risk of natural disasters, and haven’t yet been proven in the real world. [All Photos: Joshua Perez/courtesy New Story]
New Story’s first-of-its-kind project, unsurprisingly, has faced challenges. The team initially planned to build in another part of Mexico, but because of delays in the process of working with the government to get the land, decided to start farther south in Tabasco, a state that borders Guatemala; the new location faces a higher risk of earthquakes, so the design went through even more structural engineering tests. (The nonprofit hasn’t named the specific town to protect the privacy of the people who will live in the neighborhood.) After the tests were successful, the machine started the long journey south on a truck, but it got stuck at customs for three months. “[The machine] was just a brand new category that obviously didn’t exist,” says Hagler.
By the time the machine made it to the village, the rainy season had started. At one point, the entry to the site flooded, so no one could access it for a week. But the most important test—whether the printer could print a house on the site—went well. The printer works by squirting a concrete mixture in layers to build floors and walls. The software monitors the weather conditions, and the machine can adjust the mixture. “In the morning it might be drier, and then late in the afternoon, maybe it’s more humid, and then you’ll adjust that mixture a little bit in accordance to that that you get the viscosity that you need in order to have the same print quality throughout the day,” says New Story co-founder Alexandria Lafci.
The team can use an app to make slight adjustments to the blueprint on site, but the printing process is essentially autonomous. To make it even more efficient, it’s possible to print multiple houses simultaneously. The first two homes were printed at the same time, in a total of 24 hours over multiple days, because the team wanted to work only in daylight hours; in the future, they hope to run the machine for longer periods, making it even faster. New Story has partnered with a local nonprofit, Echale a Tu Casa, to finish the parts of the homes that can’t be 3D-printed, providing jobs to local construction workers.
[ All Photos: Joshua Perez/courtesy New Story]
The finished houses have two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bath—a vast difference from the simple shacks common in the area. The families who will live in the homes earn a median income of $76.50 a month. “For a majority of the families, this is the first time ever that they will have indoor restrooms and plumbing and sanitation,” says Lafci. Unlike shacks, the homes are also seismically sound. The nonprofit partnered with the local government—which is providing both the land and infrastructure like new roads and electricity—to identify the 50 families in the area in the greatest need. Once New Story finishes printing the homes, the new residents own them outright.
3 D Printed House.
Before:
Some families toured the first two houses last week, noting how the new homes would stay dry in heavy rain and contrasting it with their current homes. “When it starts to rain, the house starts flooding and it is worse at night,” one future resident, Candelaria Hernández, said of the one-room shack where she currently lives with seven family members. “You have to wake up to put pots around the house so it things don’t get wet.”
The same technology could also help transform the construction of affordable housing in the United States. Earlier this year, Icon printed a welcome centre for a master-planned community in Austin, Texas, designed for people who have been chronically homeless, and the company is beginning to print 400-square-foot homes in the community that will be completed in early 2020. “The home building industry is in need of a paradigm shift,” says Alex Le Roux, co-founder and chief technology officer at Icon. “We shouldn’t have to choose between things such as resiliency and affordability, or design freedom and sustainability.” The company plans to continue to print additional homes and develop the technology. In Latin America,
New Story already has interest from multiple other governments that want to donate land to build similar communities, many of which have already visited the new site in Mexico. “Once people see it in person, it’s no longer a crazy idea,” says Hagler.
The nonprofit plans to continue also exploring other new approaches, acting as a sort of R&D arm for governments that have the resources to build new housing at scale but don’t yet have the best tools to do that quickly, and that are looking for ways to do it more affordably. “I think that, like with most of these big, seemingly intractable social issues, there’s no silver bullet—you need to have a lot of options of how you’re going to solve and target housing,” Laci says. “What we’re really passionate about is developing a toolkit of a variety of options of different technologies—be it hardware, software, processes—that we can rely on in order to build homes and build community faster, better, and less expensively.”
About the author Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world's largest problems, from climate change to homelessness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley, and contributed to the second edition of the bestselling book "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century."
There have been some other experiments with 3D-printed homes, but they have all occurred in controlled conditions or in areas with little risk of natural disasters, and haven’t yet been proven in the real world. [All Photos: Joshua Perez/courtesy New Story]
New Story’s first-of-its-kind project, unsurprisingly, has faced challenges. The team initially planned to build in another part of Mexico, but because of delays in the process of working with the government to get the land, decided to start farther south in Tabasco, a state that borders Guatemala; the new location faces a higher risk of earthquakes, so the design went through even more structural engineering tests. (The nonprofit hasn’t named the specific town to protect the privacy of the people who will live in the neighborhood.) After the tests were successful, the machine started the long journey south on a truck, but it got stuck at customs for three months. “[The machine] was just a brand new category that obviously didn’t exist,” says Hagler.
By the time the machine made it to the village, the rainy season had started. At one point, the entry to the site flooded, so no one could access it for a week. But the most important test—whether the printer could print a house on the site—went well. The printer works by squirting a concrete mixture in layers to build floors and walls. The software monitors the weather conditions, and the machine can adjust the mixture. “In the morning it might be drier, and then late in the afternoon, maybe it’s more humid, and then you’ll adjust that mixture a little bit in accordance to that that you get the viscosity that you need in order to have the same print quality throughout the day,” says New Story co-founder Alexandria Lafci.
The team can use an app to make slight adjustments to the blueprint on site, but the printing process is essentially autonomous. To make it even more efficient, it’s possible to print multiple houses simultaneously. The first two homes were printed at the same time, in a total of 24 hours over multiple days, because the team wanted to work only in daylight hours; in the future, they hope to run the machine for longer periods, making it even faster. New Story has partnered with a local nonprofit, Echale a Tu Casa, to finish the parts of the homes that can’t be 3D-printed, providing jobs to local construction workers.
[ All Photos: Joshua Perez/courtesy New Story]
The finished houses have two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bath—a vast difference from the simple shacks common in the area. The families who will live in the homes earn a median income of $76.50 a month. “For a majority of the families, this is the first time ever that they will have indoor restrooms and plumbing and sanitation,” says Lafci. Unlike shacks, the homes are also seismically sound. The nonprofit partnered with the local government—which is providing both the land and infrastructure like new roads and electricity—to identify the 50 families in the area in the greatest need. Once New Story finishes printing the homes, the new residents own them outright.
3 D Printed House.
Before:
Some families toured the first two houses last week, noting how the new homes would stay dry in heavy rain and contrasting it with their current homes. “When it starts to rain, the house starts flooding and it is worse at night,” one future resident, Candelaria Hernández, said of the one-room shack where she currently lives with seven family members. “You have to wake up to put pots around the house so it things don’t get wet.”
The same technology could also help transform the construction of affordable housing in the United States. Earlier this year, Icon printed a welcome centre for a master-planned community in Austin, Texas, designed for people who have been chronically homeless, and the company is beginning to print 400-square-foot homes in the community that will be completed in early 2020. “The home building industry is in need of a paradigm shift,” says Alex Le Roux, co-founder and chief technology officer at Icon. “We shouldn’t have to choose between things such as resiliency and affordability, or design freedom and sustainability.” The company plans to continue to print additional homes and develop the technology. In Latin America,
New Story already has interest from multiple other governments that want to donate land to build similar communities, many of which have already visited the new site in Mexico. “Once people see it in person, it’s no longer a crazy idea,” says Hagler.
The nonprofit plans to continue also exploring other new approaches, acting as a sort of R&D arm for governments that have the resources to build new housing at scale but don’t yet have the best tools to do that quickly, and that are looking for ways to do it more affordably. “I think that, like with most of these big, seemingly intractable social issues, there’s no silver bullet—you need to have a lot of options of how you’re going to solve and target housing,” Laci says. “What we’re really passionate about is developing a toolkit of a variety of options of different technologies—be it hardware, software, processes—that we can rely on in order to build homes and build community faster, better, and less expensively.”
About the author Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world's largest problems, from climate change to homelessness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley, and contributed to the second edition of the bestselling book "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century."
Sunday, December 15, 2019
[ Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. By Daniel Cox and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux. Filed under Religion.]
John Greim / LightRocket via Getty Images.
Millennials have earned a reputation for reshaping industries and institutions — shaking up the workplace, transforming dating culture, and rethinking parenthood. They’ve also had a dramatic impact on American religious life. Four in ten millennial's now say they are religiously unaffiliated, according to the Pew Research Center. In fact, millennial's (those between the ages of 23 and 38) are now almost as likely to say they have no religion as they are to identify as Christian.
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For a long time, though, it wasn’t clear whether this youthful defection from religion would be temporary or permanent. It seemed possible that as millennial's grew older, at least some would return to a more traditional religious life. But there’s mounting evidence that today’s younger generations may be leaving religion for good.
Social science research has long suggested that Americans’ relationship with religion has a tidal quality — people who were raised religious find themselves drifting away as young adults, only to be drawn back in when they find spouses and begin to raise their own families. Some argued that young adults just hadn’t yet been pulled back into the fold of organized religion, especially since they were hitting major milestones like marriage and parenthood later on.
But now many millennial's have spouses, children and mortgages — and there’s little evidence of a corresponding surge in religious interest. A new national survey from the American Enterprise Institute of more than 2,500 Americans found a few reasons why millennial's may not return to the religious fold. (One of the authors of this article helped conduct the survey).
For one thing, many millennial's never had strong ties to religion to begin with, which means they were less likely to develop habits or associations that make it easier to return to a religious community.
Young adults are also increasingly likely to have a spouse who is nonreligious, which may help reinforce their secular worldview.
Changing views about the relationship between morality and religion also appear to have convinced many young parents that religious institutions are simply irrelevant or unnecessary for their children.
Millennial's may be the symbols of a broader societal shift away from religion, but they didn’t start it on their own. Their parents are at least partly responsible for a widening generational gap in religious identity and beliefs; they were more likely than previous generations to raise their children without any connection to organized religion. According to the AEI survey, 17 per cent of millennial's said that they were not raised in any particular religion compared with only five percent of Baby Boomers. And fewer than one in three (32 percent) millennial's say they attended weekly religious services with their family when they were young, compared with about half (49 per cent) of Baby Boomers.
A parent’s religious identity (or lack thereof) can do a lot to shape a child’s religious habits and beliefs later in life. A 2016 Pew Research Center study found that regardless of the religion, those raised in households in which both parents shared the same religion still identified with that faith in adulthood. For instance, 84 percent of people raised by Protestant parents are still Protestant as adults. Similarly, people raised without religion are less apt to look for it as they grow older — that same Pew study found that 63 percent of people who grew up with two religiously unaffiliated parents were still nonreligious as adults.
But one finding in the survey signals that even millennial's who grew up religious may be increasingly unlikely to return to religion. In the 1970s, most nonreligious Americans had a religious spouse and often, that partner would draw them back into regular religious practice. But now, a growing number of unaffiliated Americans are settling down with someone who isn’t religious — a process that may have been accelerated by the sheer number of secular romantic partners available, and the rise of online dating. Today, 74 per cent of unaffiliated millennial's have a nonreligious partner or spouse, while only 26 percent have a partner who is religious.
Luke Olliff, a 30-year-old man living in Atlanta, says that he and his wife gradually shed their religious affiliations together. “My family thinks she convinced me to stop going to church and her family thinks I was the one who convinced her,” he said. “But really it was mutual. We moved to a city and talked a lot about how we came to see all of this negativity from people who were highly religious and increasingly didn’t want a part in it.” This view is common among young people. A majority (57 per cent) of millennial's agree that religious people are generally less tolerant of others, compared to only 37 per cent of Baby Boomers.
Young adults like Olliff are also less likely to be drawn back to religion by another important life event — having children. For much of the country’s history, religion was seen as an obvious resource for children’s moral and ethical development. But many young adults no longer see religion as a necessary or even desirable component of parenting. Less than half (46 per cent) of millennials believe it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. They’re also much less likely than Baby Boomers to say that it’s important for children to be brought up in religion so they can learn good values (57 per cent vs. 75 per cent).
These attitudes are reflected in decisions about how young adults are raising their children. 45 per cent of millennial parents say they take them to religious services and 39 per cent say they send them to Sunday school or a religious education program. Baby Boomers, by contrast, were significantly more likely to send their children to Sunday school (61 per cent) and to take them to church regularly (58 per cent).
Mandie, a 32-year-old woman living in southern California and who asked that her last name not be used, grew up going to church regularly but is no longer religious. She told us she’s not convinced a religious upbringing is what she’ll choose for her one-year-old child. “My own upbringing was religious, but I’ve come to believe you can get important moral teachings outside religion,” she said. “And in some ways I think many religious organizations are not good models for those teachings.”
Why does it matter if millennials’ rupture with religion turns out to be permanent? For one thing, religious involvement is associated with a wide variety of positive social outcomes like increased interpersonal trust and civic engagement that are hard to reproduce in other ways. And this trend has obvious political implications. As we wrote a few months ago, whether people are religious is increasingly tied to — and even driven by — their political identities. For years, the Christian conservative movement has warned about a tide of rising secularism, but research has suggested that the strong association between religion and the Republican Party may actually be fueling this divide. And if even more Democrats lose their faith, that will only exacerbate the acrimonious rift between secular liberals and religious conservatives.
“At that critical moment when people are getting married and having kids and their religious identity is becoming more stable, Republicans mostly do still return to religion — it’s Democrats that aren’t coming back,” said Michele Margolis, author of “From the Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity.” in an interview for our September story.
Of course, millennials’ religious trajectory isn’t set in stone — they may yet become more religious as they age. But it’s easier to return to something familiar later in life than to try something completely new. And if millennials don’t return to religion and instead begin raising a new generation with no religious background, the gulf between religious and secular America may grow even deeper.
Daniel Cox a research fellow for polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. @dcoxpolls.
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux is a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight.@ameliatd.
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Saturday, December 14, 2019
Saturday, December 07, 2019
Sunday, December 01, 2019
[ When to go to Kashmir. Part 1.]
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We in south India wish that in our lifetime one wish will be to visit Kashmir. Before 2014 it will be done was our permanent plan after plan. Now at the rate at which it's going on, it looks hard to even think of even planning to go to see the land of our dreams shattered by the people of Kashmir's brother's opposition not to be Indians and only Kashmir.
The politicians who ruled Kashmir for 70 years took it for granted that their families can rule the state forever fooling the people of Kashmir by keeping them in fear by making it appear that the special status that was given to them was permanent. The people who ruled India never had the courage to remove the special status. The innocent people went on with their day to day life not knowing what was going on for 70 years.
Everything changed in 2014 and 2019 which was unexpected by anyone. People had changed the young turned old. The next generation took over and another generation made India just by being born they got power and that power was the right to vote. 3rd generation with their parent generation was restless. They had the knowledge, education and young age, high ambition but no skill. graduates were bus conductors, drivers and waiters. Few went to politics, few were hoping ad waiting to get in to learn skills in engineering. Kashmir had no future and many left to other states for a living. The young who remained were victims of unlawful activities which they had taken care of bread and shelter.
Kashmir was in a mess and people close to the border started visiting because they were also in a similar situation.
it will be hard to get people who have something organized by choice or otherwise in yo such trade that they could work or take up any job that they could do. Being young they were not highly educated not because they had financial issues or anything else, they saw educated friends who were well of in other states in education but they were not getting jobs. They could not get jobs as their college education was perhaps was not upgraded to the level of colleges of other states. Another major drawback was students and teachers discipline was not satisfactorily maintained.
For 70 years no major industry was set up. How can anyone come to set up any industry when no land is given. All and every activity was controlled by the family of 4 0r 5 persons and they that, they thought they were sitting on a diamond mine besides they thought J & K was a forbidden place for any industry and others won't come to build any industry. Having a cosy life with money being sent from Delhi. They looted all development funds and merrily went on in politics and political activities which were not planned and the govt also turn the other way looking for their better choice and forgetting KASHMIR was their baby.
On the other side is Pakistan our neighbourhood nation which is constantly sending terrorists disturbing peace in addition to the ruling government a permanent (by temporary article 370 & 35 of our constitution) headache demanding talks.
Pakistan does not deny sending terrorists to India, Foreign Minister S Jaishankar told French daily Le Monde this week, adding that if Islamabad is serious about establishing friendlier relations with New Delhi it must hand over wanted criminals.
The Chief of Pakistan Army is on an extended period of service by the Supreme Court of Pakistan for the fear of tensions with on the border of Pakistan occupied Kashmir. Since India has abrogated article 370 & 35 of the constitution which says that these are temporary in the Indian constitution. India has now kept Kashmir & Jammu status as their union territory and the political leaders are kept under protection making it hard for tourists to come as usual by any transport besides their stay in Kashmir. and my wife now do not know when we can visit J & K. ( We hope it will be possible by March 2020 as this is the period for tourists to their DREAM of visiting their (Ours too) Paradise in India.]
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