Is consular processing prioritizing adjustment of status applications? Here in India, as of now, a consular appointment for a B1/B2 non-immigrant visa application is about eight months away. The COVID pandemic was mostly over about three years ago and there’s still not enough processing capacity.
Apple’s focus under Tim Cook to extract every penny possible from services while making them worse has been antithetical to its past promises of innovation or extraordinary experiences. If I wanted an ad infested experience everywhere, why would I choose Apple? This is the exact manifestation of enshittification.
It’s only US and Canada that are getting the maps ads, as of now. This means Apple is confident that Apple Maps is good enough and is used widely in those places. Apple is once again trying to squeeze more money out of services as the days pass. The App Store ads and experience are on the same lines. [1]
In India, Apple Maps just shows whatever TomTom or MapmyIndia or another provider has, and data availability and quality are extremely poor. The maps app cannot even find addresses or show transit directions in major metropolitan cities.
Tim Cook famously said in May 2016, when inaugurating a new office in India, that Apple is investing in accelerating Maps development. [2] These ads seem to a result of this investment.
Tangentially, it’s now a decade and Apple has almost nothing to show in maps improvements in India. It’s the same bad experience as it was then.
> The correct analogy would be a foreign country requiring U.S. banks to send them data on their own citizens abroad. Which, I think, e.g. India could probably do.
India does get information from the US and other countries about Indian residents having accounts (bank, brokerage, etc.) in other countries.
There are agreements across several countries that use CRS (Common Reporting Standard) to report such information to other countries for tax purposes. This is not India or US specific.
> The problem with that plan is that no one wants to trade hard commodities for a currency that can’t be spent. One part of the dollars appeal is that it spends the world over.
> So no one is going to take up a lot of yuan trade unless that changes or they are forced to.
Related on the “forced to”point, this is where Russia is stuck with its crude oil sales to India where the payments have been made to it in Indian Rupees. There’s almost nothing that Russia can do with the Indian Rupee. This is a huge and growing problem because India’s imports from Russia eclipse its exports to Russia by more than 10 times. [1]
Unlike China, a country whose exports to other countries dwarfs their exports. The yuan is much more valuable than the rupee (which is turning to trash with each passing month as a net effect of trade wars and oil crises).
Meanwhile in India, people are queuing up to get LPG cylinders (cooking gas) and the government is making similar statements as quoted in this article that there are no shortages.
Pump prices of petrol and diesel in India are being kept the same by reducing taxes since there are some key state elections next month and the ruling party of the union government doesn’t want to hurt its chances.
Expect fuel prices in India to go up in May and the following months, even though procurement from Russia is increasing.
With a fertilizer shortage, the consequences of this war are making things tougher and tougher for common people everywhere.
I’ve known the difference in corruption at different levels between a country like India and a country like the US.
India hasn’t had a very long authoritarian regime since its independence. Yet, corruption has existed at every touch point with the government and shows no signs of reduction. In India, getting a driver’s license or getting a passport (for which there’s a “police verification” step) or buying/selling real estate or filing a police complaint or getting some work done in a court of law or even getting the final rites of a deceased person (burial or cremation) done require bribes in most places.
Also, paying a bribe means standing in line with the rest of the people who paid bribes. Things don’t move fast just because money exchanged hands.
All this is to say that I don’t know what to make of your statement on authoritarian vs. democratic regimes (though you mentioned “western”). The main factor seems to be the culture and what others here have described as low trust vs high trust.
Transferring eSIM from one iPhone to another can be restricted by the carrier. Here in India, the second largest carrier (Airtel), does not support the native iOS eSIM transfer process. It’s a separate set of steps (the ones published on Airtel’s website won’t work, despite customer care claiming that it does). What works is almost like applying for a new or replacement eSIM.
Same here, KPN, NL. You have to install the KPN app on the new phone and log in. Then you request an eSIM on the new phone. You get an SMS auth code on the old phone. You fill the auth code on the new phone. Then you have to remove the eSIM from the old phone (with the new one not provisioned yet). Then confirm on the new phone and cross your fingers that provisioning works. Presumably (according to the docs) when it fails, you can reprovision the old phone again.
The process made me so anxious the last few times, that I went to the carrier shop and asked for a nano SIM. Now life is bliss again.
It seems that eSIM is primarily an advantage when you need to get a new SIM, but other than that I don't really see much of an advantage for me as a customer.
I had to _call_ my German provider to get a new eSIM.
Meanwhile, my carrier in Japan not only migrates eSIMs between phones with no issues; it even offered to migrate my wife's physical SIM to an eSIM when setting up a new phone; and it worked flawlessly.
The way my original eSIM here was provisioned was also surprising to me, in a "I didn't even know this is possible" way.
When signing up for a contract, I just put in my eSIM EID, and then a couple of hours later an eSIM was _pushed to my phone by the carrier_; without me having to do anything (other than confirming that I do want to install it). Lots of customer-facing telecom infra here is pretty bad; but the eSIM experience was as good as it gets.
There’s an interesting Malayalam (one of the official languages in India) movie titled “Virus” [1] from 2019, which is set during the time of the 2018 Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala (a state in South India). The disease is deadly and can have longer incubation periods (as stated in other comments here). Wikipedia says the mortality rate is 40-75%.
> In India, every tax imposed on a business goes straight to consumer. The consumer receipt even mentions all those taxes item-wise.
As someone in India, this statement is incorrect. There are no consumer receipts in India that show the import duties (which is what tariffs are) as an amount or as a percentage. There are plenty of goods sold in India that are imported, duty paid, and the costs are passed on to the consumers (with no explicit mention of that in the invoice or receipt).
You may be confusing these US tariffs with local taxes in India like GST. In the US, sales tax is shown in the consumer receipts (if or as applicable in the state, county, city, etc.).
In India and in the US, import duties are not shown in consumer receipts, except in the case where an individual is importing something and is liable to pay the duties and levies directly. Indians would probably revolt if they actually knew how much customs duty they’re paying for all the goods they buy individually.
I was looking at GST and other state taxes etc, that are simply passed to customer. Anyway, the whole point of tax on sales is that, the business would pay the tax out of its pocket without burdening the consumer. But that is blatantly and openly violated.
Sorry to hear this. From where I am (India), there’s hardly anything that you can do because it’s likely that the ones with power won’t do anything. As an individual, you can only focus on yourself and those you know and try to educate them as much as is possible.
These kind of scams have become a huge problem in India (look up “digital arrest” scams). People of all backgrounds and age groups have lost a lot of money (to put it in US dollar equivalent amounts, imagine a person losing few hundred thousand dollars to a couple of million dollars). There is nothing like “digital arrest” in Indian laws. The government has tried to warn people about this.
The larger problem seems to be a combination of factors across disinterested entities:
1. The police aren’t interested in solving these (there’s a separate division for cybercrime). Filing a formal report is usually thwarted and avoided by the police. Even if they show some interest, it always involves paying them fat sums of money. There’s no guarantee that they can recover the money.
2. The banks aren’t interested in solving this. It seems like specific bank branch managers are involved and just stand by allowing large transactions (like cash withdrawals) to just be approved without raising any questions or concerns. All the talk by banks about “risk management” (alongside compliance matters) goes out the window just for the victims of these scams.
3. With SMS OTPs being common and the scammers recruiting some locals to run SIM farms/phone farms, the telecom companies aren’t interested in solving issues within themselves either. Though there is a limit of nine phone numbers (total) per person in India, and though there is on paper a KYC process (including a live video) to get a phone number, the telecom companies have systems and employees who can provide numerous numbers based on stolen or fake IDs.
4. The government is a bystander and appears helpless. Instead of creating laws and enforcing existing laws, it focuses on some awareness that these scams are not genuine.
5. The Supreme Court finally ordered CBI (the Indian equivalent of FBI) to investigate these scams.
So there you have it: none of the entities involved has any interest or will to do something about the problem. There will always be excuses that the scammers are in another country.
