pigsty

At my previous job, I made the robots that Toyota, Suzuki, etc use in their manufacturing lines and directly installed them inside their factories. My experience is, for the most part, first hand.

The vehicles Japanese companies make for the American and US markets have no overlap. Nothing sold in America is made in Japan, and nothing sold in Japan is made in America. A lot of those vehicles are loaded up into tractor trailers and hauled off to their destination—Japanese tractor trailers that those manufacturers use aren’t large enough to haul American vehicles in Japan. Furthermore, the economics for manufacturing huge vehicles in a tiny country that can barely build for its own needs and shipping across the world wouldn’t make sense. The raw materials, energy, and real estate needed for the factories are simply far cheaper in the US.

The interesting thing is Japanese companies generally manufacture cars they sell in America entirely in America, while “American” car companies manufacture their huge polluting machines in Mexico and maybe add one final part in the US so they can claim some work is done in the US. Japanese cars in the US aren’t imported while US cars are.

In countries with state controlled healthcare, service is rationed.

Americans really love eating up this meme. I can get scans any time in Japan and I never wait. If doctors think it’s an emergency, they’ll do whatever scan is necessary then and there. If not, they’ll pull out a calendar and ask me to pick any day that’s convenient for me.

Meanwhile my friends in the US are waiting months for basic shit. My dad visited me in Japan in December and had to visit a dentist for emergency care and was offered to do surgery on the spot. He decided to delay it until he returned to the US. The earliest available appointment in his area is next month.

It’s insanity seeing Americans parrot this stuff. It’s North Korea-level propaganda. Hell, it’s worse. North Koreans have no access to the outside world so you can’t blame them. Americans just actively turn away anything in favor of “well a guy who knows a guy said he saw a guy on tv who heard about a guy who once heard a story about a guy from a guy in another country said those people wait a long time for health care!”

But the strangest thing is countless Americans, including myself, will pop into any thread to talk about how they have endless bad experiences with health care in the US (I’ve been forced to wait forever and then still charged out the ass because my health insurance was randomly rejected), while most bad experiences with other countries is seventh hand info. Americans complaining about health care in countries they’ve never been to far outnumbers people with first hand info—usually the ones with firsthand info are saying “it’s pretty good out there”

I’d say ask find out why they’re saying they don’t want to read and address all those causes.

There are plenty of kids with great parents who are surrounded by awful peers at school and media that glorifies being uneducated. Then you leave 2 bad kids in a class of good kids, and you’ll get endless distractions that cause the others to give up and resent school. You address just one cause and you have countless others. You need to go after a load of issues and it’s honestly more complicated than we want to admit.

Yeah, being a criminal safe haven right next to a country that has no problem supporting terrorists and dropping bombs on civilian targets is a wonderful idea. Can’t imagine why they never tried it.

The kid is the one in class choosing not to read. Parents can be destructive influences on kids, but kids also do have free will and destructive influences amongst their peers who they choose to associate with.

It’s a compounding problem and each time we assign blame to one (1) thing, we’re leaving other causes untreated and not making the problem better at all.

English has one word answers for those questions.

It’s just conversationally dry and people will assume you’re not interested.

Probably because every powerful economy of the past 6 centuries got there due to strong trade, which the US has gone out of its way to prevent Cuba from doing.

No country with a strong economy got there by being forcibly isolated from the world.

Japan doesn’t have a nearby superpower that makes sabotaging your entire economy a yearly campaign point in order to prove your country sucks. Cuba’s had that for well over half a century.

My parents were straight D/F students and never helped me with classes at all. I would’ve appreciated help that would’ve let me go farther, but that’s at a point well past algebra.

Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.

I was in Borneo last month and saw round lamps in a rainforest covered in swarms of ants at night, all standing equidistant and with their jaws wide open and raised. I picked up a leaf and poked one in the mouth and it immediately clamped shut and other nearby ants rushed over to assist the ant in pulling in the leaf.

It seems like the ants stand on the lamps and wait to catch other insects that fly by then strike in unison. It was an incredible strategy.

I don’t trust that the infrastructure will always work.

I’ve had my cards rejected randomly. Since I travel a lot and mainly use cards abroad, I’ve had my cards rejected more times than not. It’s pretty troublesome to be stranded somewhere and unable to get a hotel or ride a train because your card was rejected.

I always keep a fat wad of cash for that reason. Also that at any time my bank could be shut down, governments or banks could decide I don’t have a right to buy something, power outages could render payments useless, or hackers could easily take down a network if they were motivated (and state-level actors have plenty of motivation now).

I don’t think communist countries have a higher rate of trans people. Blaming random, irrelevant things on communism is a hallmark sign of believing media fear mongering.

What's you explanation then for why literally nobody cared about adult trans people just a few years ago?

Because it’s an invented political scapegoat, just like countless others. Trans people were out and about 10 years ago and nobody gave a shit. I’m from a small town in Appalachia and my grandma had a trans friend that was out and open 30 years ago. They stopped by when I was a kid and we treated her as a normal human. Nobody gave a shit.

Social media told you to be angry about people that’ve been around forever. You chose to only pay attention recently and get angry.

Right wing organizations are making huge buckets of cash from donations and “anti-woke” brand campaigns targeting trans people, getting gullible people to think being trans is some new trend and they need to fight back. Normal people have known trans people for several decades and we are absolutely bewildered that people like you are suddenly outraged about people we’ve known all our lives. Same with how 15 years ago ”the gays” were going to destroy the world.

A person who doesn’t believe in religion being sworn in on a religious book is probably just annoyed. They’re not going to feel loyal to it.

Sworn statements as a whole are just entirely symbolic and don’t really guarantee loyalty or honesty, but if someone who doesn’t believe rejects a religious text that they disbelieve and instead choose something that has meaning and value to them, it’s better in the symbolic sense. A scientist swearing in on a scientific text that’s meaningful to them and that also addresses human morality makes as much sense and symbolically reflects their devotion to their mission as a Bible to a devout Christian.

Every invented moral panic is about “the children.” Rock music, Jewish people “corrupting” the youth, satanists, trans people. It’s sad that people still buy into these stories meant to outrage people and seed divide, anger, and violence. And it’s always pushed by people with clear political and financial agendas picking fringe extreme and uncommon examples pretending it’s everywhere.

Someday you’ll forget this was ever a thing and pretend you never bought into it. It’s what everyone does during every invented outrage. You’ve been told to be angry about some fringe thing and believed it. 10 years from now there’ll be another big thing to be angry about.

You’re not angry “for the children.” Please drop the act.

Belief in mass hysteria is itself the most common form of mass hysteria.

Transgender people have existed throughout history and on every corner of the earth. They’re documented in basically any society with written records.

But for some reason, in 2023, people (mainly Americans) think it’s something new and they demand to be angry about it.

One thing I’ve learned is that unless the option absolutely disappears, people usually won’t search for alternatives when something goes to absolute shit. They’ll just complain and accept it.

It’s more likely that roads will be widened and traffic will grow to meet that supply than it is that cars start to go away. Cars only go away when governments announce near immediate bans.

I’m really not sure if he should be given all the credit.

Comics thrived in other countries, so even if American comics were seen as right behind porn, it was only a matter of time until they eventually made their way into mainstream popularity in the US. Which, as far as I know, comics were already popular—they were just a kids’ thing. Same as how video games were just kids’ things for a solid 2-3 decades until kids who grew up on games became adults and the industry started pivoting towards their adult tastes.

Kind of like how kids who grew up on 1940s and 50s comics and their mainstream media influence started to grow a couple decades after they grew up. Batman was a pretty popular TV show roughly 25 years after being a notably popular comic book. Then 25 years after that, we started getting popular movies and more mature cartoons based on the series.

Mine required participation in at least 3 studies.

I feel like undergrads who are participating in a study only because they’re told to will shift the results a bit.

There are loads of societies that eat rice and bugs together and have for centuries. It’s a well-rounded meal.

But there are still countless lines in use where you’ll see one person get off every 3 stops.

It’s sometimes insane how lines are kept running in Japan.

Gaming as a whole is almost entirely multi platform these days, aside from a few first party published titles.

Anything playable on MacOS also works on windows. Most mid budget indie games on Windows also have switch ports. Bigger budget ones have PS5 versions. We’re at a point where you just buy what suits your budget and if there’s one exclusive that you want.

It’s not like the Genesis vs the SNES where the libraries were almost entirely different and games were designed with that hardware’s unique strengths in mind.

Linux’s main path to gaming success is being a cheaper, less annoying version of Windows.

And the average person buying a Deck is a little more technologically inclined and thinks “But the Deck does have Nintendo’s entire back catalog.”

Valve even showed off Nintendo emulators in press material “accidentally”. Basically every Steam Deck owner I know uses it as an emulation powerhouse.

There’s a non-zero chance Russia pulls a Crimea and needs to defend Russian speakers in some remote region of Hokkaido, or starts seizing Japanese waters as their own. And that’s ignoring the islands Japan claims but Russia has controlled for decades.

This also sets a precedent for other neighbors. Korea claims random islands and politicians sometimes call for extreme actions to defend them from Japan (Japan does absolutely nothing and Japanese people, for the most part, do not know of the existence of these islands). China claims random islands that Japan controls with some of the more extreme factions saying Okinawa in its entirety isn’t legitimately Japanese, so it should be independent. But also Okinawa used to be somewhat subservient to China, so eventually independence would mean being a province of China, just like Russia is claiming with eastern Ukraine (or even all of Ukraine, depending on the day).

And there’s also Taiwan, which if China sees people get burnt out with the Ukraine war and go back to normal trade in a year, gives them pretty good odds to rain down missiles then rush in and seize the land with minimum international backfire. And if Taiwan is easily claimed, there’s no reason not to pursue Okinawa and South China Sea territories. And South Sea conflicts would screw over Japan as well, since there’s loads of trade with Vietnam and other countries in the region, and Japan is heavily dependent on food imports from China and elsewhere.

Japan has a lot of reasons to care. If Russia’s strategy pays off (and it’s unfortunately seeming like it will, since people outside of the region are getting burnt out on it and Russian mothers will happily fight until their last son is getting picked apart by dogs), those same methods will be used in East Asia.

The dollar is insanely strong right now and global Mac prices raised in accordance with that. In places that don’t use USD, prices shot up by tens of percent overnight while the US prices are the same as ever. Japan, for example, got a price increase of about 40% on all items.

Unsurprisingly, sales declined.

Flights are cheap. Hotels in Europe in tourist areas are insanely priced because they’re reliably booked.

So 72 cities got burnt down meaning no place is safe. That doesn’t seem like a fair warning and they could’ve avoided the bombing if they want to—that means civilians are being actively targeted and will be massacred no matter where they are.

Japan is a very, very narrow country. “Cities” are basically just a naming convention. Everything from Nagasaki to Tokyo is, frankly, one continuous urban and industrial area. There’s no place that’s more than a brief drive from a dense populated area along that entire corridor.

The museum in Hiroshima specifically notes that the claim that America notified people in Hiroshima before dropping the bomb was 100% fiction. Nobody expected the United States to specifically target tens of thousands of innocent civilians instead of military targets in a single sweep.

Papers were dropped across the entire country warning Japan to give up. But that’s like Russia warning the entirety of Ukraine that they’re going to destroy them then acting like nuking Kiev is justified because civilians had fair warning.

It’s not hard to even find the papers online that were dropped, but there’s a lot of revisionism online that actively defends nuking civilian targets these days. Mentioning the fact the warning claim isn’t accurate gets immediate downvotes and angry comments everywhere online. Even Wikipedia specifically mentions Hiroshima wasn’t listed, and the papers are publicly available and mention only cities that aren’t Hiroshima, so I’m not sure why people get outraged.