India at cross roads of international diplomacy

India is at crossroads of whether to stick with old friend who himself may not see us as friend or find new friends with similar idealogies on capitalism and democracy. No one is perfect but economy trumps all idealogies. No one is friend or enmery forever in international relations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NU_ezeTk_0

Success with greed will fail

story of enterprenuer who grew strength gradually from real estate, hotel, investment and local leader, and fell due to greed and false prestige with fictional investment from high profile friends and contacts. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-01-21/san-diego-s-400-million-ponzi-scheme-and-the-star-developer-behind-it

Love story movie

Watched only a handful movies this year because of pandemic and personal reasons. Many directors are thoughful in talking a story on some social issue. However only a few are bold in tackling it fully. Rest of them limit themselves to introducde the problem but switch to a different theme halfway. I agree that itself is good attempt but miss the punch and strong message. On caste system, k viswanath did two movies. Protoganists got united only because of some unrelated reason. The groom had to see goddess in hema to cast her away in saptapadi. The story in kalam marindi is better but santhi had to be in disguise to get supported first. Similarly sekar kammula started his love story on caste differences. but had to a resort on another inhuman behavior from another character to unite the lovers and their families. Overall, he should have developed more inspirational characters like raghavendra rao did in trisulam or krish had done in kanche.

Apathy from telugu movie industry

Academy of motion picture arts and sciences is mainly known for oscar awards but they do more than that. They also archive all nominated movies and even some unnominated movies. They digitize them all, and periodically review them to verify quality and update them to fit with new technologies. The world moved from tapes, avds, mpegs, hd to avc. I came to know about this when I worked in youtube. A represenative visited us and gave a talk about their tools and processes and sought feedback. See https://www.oscars.org/film-archive It would not cost much because of current technology compared to earlier days. I wonder why our nandi awards committees would not do the same of preserving old movies. I wonder why filmotagraphy ministry or movie arts assocations would not preserve old tollywood movies. I wonder why bhasha sanghams or telugu universities would not digitize every telugu book ever written. I have fond memories of reading many novels in my childhood though I could not understand fully. I can not find them now. One particular novel I remember is "aakasa deepalu" about a girl named pavani who was blinded by her cousin accidentally. The context is that I am watching popular "Andame Anandam" song. I realized that many people on the internet are looking for movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bratuku_Teruvu as well. The best service to a language or culture is to preserve the history. If there was no C.P. Brown, we would not have known much about works of vemana or tenali ramakrishna. If there is any effort to digitize telugu books or movies, let me know.

A look at various healthcare alternatives

American healthcare is of good quality, but it is expensive and not available to many people. Individuals pay (with premiums, copay and deductions) and governments pay (with tax money or deficit) and 17% of GDP is on healthcare and at least half of that is overhead. Here is the summary of five healthcare alternatives.

It is completely philosophical and ethical stand where you stand on healthcare. Some believe in free market to bring quality, progress in medicine and service innovation. Some believe healthcare is right and every one deserves and government needs to provide it.

Before Obama:

• 15% of the population is people with over age 65 and they get insurance with Medicare. 15% of them are poor and disabled and they get insurance from Medicaid program. Payments for these polices are funded by taxes on income and payroll.
• 60% of the population have employer sponsored or group insurance. 10% of population buy insurance themselves in individual market.
• After considering overlap of some having both medicare/medicaid and private/employ insurance, 85% of the people have some insurance. Many of these people are under insured as insurance companies can have limits and caps on payments.
• Overall 15% of the people have no insurance either because they are poor, they do not want it or they are denied by insurance companies. They do not go to hospitals unless they are really sick. If they can not pay, the system absorbs by raising costs and taxes on every one.
• Insurance companies may also charge women more, sick more, not cover existing diseases, put more premiums, deductibles and copays for trading with quality, or different rules for different hospitals depending on which state they operate.

Obamacare:

Tries to bring more people under insurance without replacing private insurance plans. It brought new 9% of the population under insurance.

• Insurance offerings should not deny based on health, gender or age and should cover all preexisting conditions. They should not have caps on total payment.
• Improve coverage by extending medicaid up to 138% of the poverty line, allowing people to stay on parents' plan till age 25, forcing all companies with 50 people to sponsor insurance or pay additional tax, providing exchanges/government run websites where insurance companies compete for individual buyers, providing subsides on those websites who are below 400% of poverty line. Subsides and medicaid grants are funded from more taxes on rich and federal deficit.
• Reducing costs - Keeping people healthy by forcing insurance companies to not charge copay for preventive care, incentives to keep elderly people healthy, paying for health care based on output per person instead of per treatment or per test or per visit in medicare, regulating insurance companies to not have more than 20% overhead on healthcare or send rebate back to clients.
• All of the above fairness and coverage ideas cause loses or reduce profits for insurance companies. Solution is to mandate every one including young and healthy to have insurance or pay small tax.

Why it became infamous despite having so many good things?

• Some are philosophically against mandate and think it is against freedom.
• Supreme court allowed states to reject extensions to medicaid and twenty states rejected.
• It is gradual roll out and some are phased out.
• Insurance premiums increased because more payments need to be done and insurance companies are mainly business oriented and tried to extract more or retain profits.

Clintoncare:

It tried to extend Obamacare more.

• Reduce out of pocket expenses by allowing three doctors visits without copay, limiting max responsibility of individual to 250$ for medicines per year, tax credit 2500$ per year for out of pocket expense is more than 5% of income
• Increasing competition by offering public insurance in addition to allowing private insurance companies in exchange. Payment is from federal deficit and indirectly from federal taxes.

Sanderscare:

It tries to replace Obamacare with single payer or government insurance. Payment is from additional 2% income tax and capital gains tax and additional 6% payroll tax and the rest is from federal deficit.

Trumpcare:

Though it is claimed as repealing Obamacare, it may end up like some additions and some removals.

• Keep preexisting conditions coverage and young adults coverage under parents.
• Reducing premiums by giving more medicaid grants to states, removing regulations for cross state business for insurance companies. Funding for grants is minor federal deficit.
• Reducing taxes by allowing premiums as tax deductions.
• Remove the individual mandate as it is disliked philosophy for some people.
• Possibly removing many regulations Obamacare got and give freedom to insurance companies again on policies and offerings. This may cause increase in out of pocket expenses for some clients.

Repechage

Repechage is practice of giving more opportunities to players who are capable but lost early because of unlucky draw in single elimination game tournaments.  It addresses the situation where the top players meet in a blood round, also known as early elimination round or knockout round. Such unlucky draw will matter less in round robin game tournaments. The word is derived from french word repecher that means

In martial arts tournaments of Judo, Karate and wrestling, single elimination events will determine the top two players. All the losers to a topper in the first, second, third and quarter final elimination rounds in a group will enter repechage. The first round loser will compete with second round loser to decide the one who will compete with next round loser and so on. The two winners from each group will be given the third position. Indian wrestler Sakshi Malik won the medal in repechage round.

Other games have different methods like limiting only to quarter final losers instead of to all rounds. Some games extend it to even semifinalists and not just finalists and a semifinal loser will play with winner from other group to avoid repeated play with same semifinalist.

References

• Repechage
• Wrestling tournament structure
• Wrestling repechage rule
• Olympics 2016 women's freestyle 58kg schedule

Putnam Competition

Putnam competition is annual math test across the schools in United States. It is organized on the first Saturday in December in two three hour sittings with a lunch break in between.

The test consists of 12 questions that requires basic college mathematics and creative thinking. One can only participate at most four times. The top five scorers are named Putnam Fellows.

References
William Lowell Putnam Competition at wikipedia
Additional information about Putnam competition
Archive of putnam problems and solutions
Good collection of putnam problems and solutions cataloged by year
Putnam and beyond problem book and study guide