... and don't call me Shirley!

The original quote goes like this: "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel." by Rashid bin Said Al Maktum, who was the Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Emir of Dubai

If you're talking about 'cost-plus' pricing where the seller adds a fixed margin on top of the costs that go into producing something, this is only one of a number of pricing strategies. Even in cost plus, there's no (and has never been) any arbitrary figure of 10% set based on morality or respectability. The price of a product or service is always what the market will bear. Profit margin in the diamond industry is as high as 30%. The airline industry on the other hand considers 5% cause for celebration.

I think the Danes might disagree with you on that!

And yet millions of people step into self-driving trains every day without giving it a second thought. This has been happening for years now. Just because you wouldn't do something doesn't mean everyone else won't.

Ha ha I'd like that on a T-shirt!

The B-level people are busy pretending to be A-level people I guess.

QF32 by Richard de Crespigny - The book is about an air accident involving an A380 flight from Singapore to Sydney. Fascinating stuff.

You're missing the point here. There were no guns for the government to "take away" in the first place. Lets take a look at the number of firearm related fatalities in India vs. the US*:

India: 0.28
US: 10.54

*Firearm-related death rate per 100,000 population per year (2014). Source: wikipedia.org

Which is why some countries ban or restrict the use of satellite phones. If these guys are already in trouble for clicking pictures think what they'd be down for if caught with contraband equipment as well.

Fair point, but I think you massively underestimate the scale of corruption in almost every sphere of life in India. Any additional time allowed to ease people's inconvenience would also have meant higher chances of leaks and reduced the effectiveness of the exercise as a whole. It's really a choice between the lesser of two evils here. By the way, I live in India and the on-ground situation is not been quite so cataclysmic as the media would have you believe. Sure, there are minor inconveniences but that's pretty much the norm here. Just means you need to plan a little better.

What's horrible about it? Consider that 250,000 rupees represents some 6 years worth of median annual household income in India. In the U.S. that would be equivalent to someone showing up with 300,000 dollars in cash. The IRS is definitely interested in significantly lower amounts than this.

The fear of government "Taking away your guns" is uniquely American. The rest of the world has solved the problem far upstream by not making firearms and ammunition freely available to the general public. Ethnic profiling is done anyway, through various other means. They're not depending on cashless payment systems for this. And finally, very few people are worried about being deported FROM India.