Comparing Reservations in Jobs and Academic Seats to Winning Olympic Medals

Written in a response to this post on FB and this one both of which can be sourced from here and from here respectively.

To begin with, as a self appointed Grammar Nazi, I need to get the Anglotoxic errors out of the way. You might ask me  if you are "sitting in a grammar class? 😫😴" to which my reply is that

"Grammatical consistency is usually required to make unambiguous logical statements. I cite the deviation from standard usage as a prelude to the logical fail which I will illustrate below."

So without much further ado ...

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Grammar Fail

This is one of the corrected versions

Because of *the* reservation*s* I couldn't get *a* job
>> use of *the*
>> *any* -> *a*
>>This means he was in a list of people prevented from getting a job.

There isn't any reservation at **the** Olympics. How many **medels -> medals** did you get ?
>>use of *the* and spelling
******************************************************

Now on to the more serious points of view. It is a tragedy that this kind of logic gets mass circulation in many parts of the world especially India. Let me cover some of the errors that I compiled and categorized.

Logic Fail

The skills required to win a medal at the Olympics are very different from those required at most real world jobs. The complainer is prevented from competing where it matters to him.

Also unfairness in one context does not justify unfairness at another.

Social Contract Fail

He is prevented from competing for a vacancy by an establishment whose existence is supported by him in taxes (other than possibly Income Taxes which he might not be paying).

Political Rights Fail

The establishment has a duty to be unbiased (i.e neither favourably nor unfavourably) towards him and other (citizens) competing for government jobs - except on merit.

Statistics Fail

2,102 is the number of gold, silver and bronze medals that will be awarded to the athletes competing in the Olympic Games. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the world is approximately 7,343,760,000. This gives a ratio of 3,493,701 people per medal.

Is it as easy to get an Olympic medal as it is to get a government job in India ? Going by the same ratio and taking the current Indian population as 1,328,686,000 we would have 380 jobs only. At this number even IITians and IAS exam toppers would be jobless.

Economics Fail

Athletes are people with few employable skills. They are usually unemployable without their past or present reputations and make no valuable contribution to society other than the entertainment value of their participation in a sport. Also not every sportsperson (Olympic or otherwise) has a decent career after their participation days are over. Their work experience will be of little use to most employers. This is not so in the case of those who work at productive tasks that are useful to humanity.

However at administrative jobs the skill increases with each year and the populist nepotism committed at entry level vacancies is rarely punished or of a great loss to society. Even in cases where society at large suffers, the market forces have no ameliorating effect  as government organisations usually have a monopoly or at the very least a guaranteed protection from bankruptcy.

Marketing Fail

Reservations at the Olympics would also make people lose interest at the rigged results. Who wants to watch a non-meritocratic contest ?

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Why Cardin is an Idiot !

This post is in response to an article titled

US senator criticises India on human rights, religious freedom

in the Times of India by Indrani Bagchi| TNN | Jun 1, 2016, 09.56 PM IST

Click the title to go to the article at its source (at the time this post is being written). The screenshot is given at the end of this post. It is kept here for posterity sake and avoidance of link decay or page death.

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First the numbers ...

China has 18.6%, India has 17.9% and the USA has 4.4% of the world population. That means India is 4.07 times as big as the US in population.

In Square Kilometres, the USA is 3rd with 9.8 million , China is 4th with 9.6 million and India is 7th with 3.3 million. That means the USA has almost 3 times the landmass as India does.

India has only 3.9 people per 1000 in defense while the USA has 7.3 making the US 1.87 times more militarised per capita than India in relative terms.

India has around 4.8 million defense personnel which is approximately double that of the USA with around 2.3 million. However the US defense budget leads the world with around $569.3 billion per year compared to 6th placed India with $49.7 billion. That's a multiple of 11.45 . The US defense budget is more than double that of China, the 2nd on the list, with $190.9 billion.

The nominal GDP of the USA is 1st at 17.9 Trillion USD and that of India is 7th at 2 Trillion USD. So the US is 9 times richer in absolute terms.

Allowing for minor corrections like disputed territories and various estimates, this means India is a country that is almost 12 times as dense as the US. And per capita wise, the US is 36 times richer than India. But it spends 45.8 times on defense per citizen as does India. And India has never aggressed on another country. All its wars were wars of defense. The USA on the other hand ...

In such a crowded, beleaguered and poor country as India it will not be easy to match the USA on the cherry picked matrices Cardin attempts to pompously lecture India on. It is very hypocritical to lecture India on the Gujarat riots when the US bombed the hell out of Iraq, Laos, Germany and Japan. The number of deaths in India due to mob violence may well be below that of the US if taken on a per capita basis. An extremely multi-cultural India has tremendous amount of religious freedom despite being more than 85% Hindu at Independence. The more ethnically diverse but culturally uniform United States is no comparison. While the US forced the Japanese emperor to renounce his Shinto religion bestowed Divinity, India at tremendous cost to itself gave shelter to the Dalai Lama and his entourage against what was at that time a far superior Chinese Army.

Regarding the treatment of women or minorities, it would be silly to proclaim India as a paragon of virtue but yet again if we fall back on the huge numbers and use it as a denominator, India might well come out on top or at least not appear as bad when its poverty is taken into consideration. Though not as good as some more free market economies, human rights is far better in India today for Indians than it was when it was ruled by the British or by the various invading armies from the North West. As regards the few - but still unforgivable - extra-judicial killings, not that their lives don't matter - they do, #alllivesmatter - India, at least doesn't have a military industrial complex or intelligence agency more powerful than its democratic entities and does not kill its elected rulers. Before spouting sermons, the US should at the very least, first be able to honestly solve the JFK murder. Isn't it odd that the CIA and the FBI still can't seem to solve it ?

Maybe this Cardin asshole should take his head out of his butt before he tells other people how to run their country. 

The US politician and media imperiously deems that one must measure everything by their 'Politically Correct' standards because they are "exceptional". However, like in most countries, the man on the street is usually better than his politician. Most Americans I have met on my travels are one of the nicest people among all expats without 'exception'. This is of course the opposite of the US politician 'which' (who?) is the worst sociopath on the planet , so bad that I have to admit even India's politicians are better in comparison. Anglo-American politicians are definitely the most devious and most subtle in today's world. In emerging nations, when a despot is bad, most people are aware of it. It's much more obvious. The US has career sociopaths are very practiced in their arts and understanding them is a full time job which the average tax slave has scant time to devote to.
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