mikeylikesit comments

Most plastics in the sea can be traced to five rivers. Do any of the 90 countries calling for a plastics treaty include any of these five rivers?

Basically, if it’s another environmental treaty that China and India are free to ignore, there is no point to it. Plastics in the environment are a huge problem, but treaties that hobble cleaner nations while letting the two biggest offenders walk free are a waste of breath and paper.

Traffic lights? No.

How Japanese drivers frequently react to traffic lights? Baffling.

At least once a day, I encounter some driver who treats a red light as a loose suggestion rather than a command. Gee, it’s been red only 5 seconds? Drive on!

Less frequent, but oddly more alarming, are the drivers who stop at green lights. The crosswalk signal is flashing, which apparently is a signal to stop, even though the actual traffic light will stay green another 10-20 seconds. The dozens of cars slamming on brakes and honking behind this one car say to me that Japanese drivers are mostly baffled, too, but I see this once or twice a year.

Is Toyota going to sell U.S.-made Toyotas in Japan or actual U.S. cars like Ford and GM?

If it’s the former, it’s a laughable concession. But, hey, if it gets a better tariff deal, so be it.

If it’s the latter, ditto. It’s still laughable simply because there is such a small market for American cars. Farmers aren’t going to switch to massive Ford pickups because roads and everything in their operations are gauged for k-trucks. There are market reasons why Audi, Benz, BMW, Renault, and Alfa Romeo have presences in Japan, while Ford and GM mostly don’t. Putting one or two American models on the showroom floor isn’t likely to change this.

Cameras and lenses, including consumer brands and medical imaging. Consumer cameras, however, are a dying industry due to smartphones.

Anime, although the next generation will see more and more foreign talent and AI involvement, which will weaken Japanese studios.

Automobiles, although Japan is slipping (or China is rapidly catching up) in this field.

Hospitality, although with more and more foreign workers taking over restaurant and hotel staffing roles, this will inevitably change.

If they measure in yen, a 40% nominal increase in 16 years should be easy enough.

What Ishiba is committing to here is not economic growth. Japan’s economy is likely to contract at least slightly over the next two decades. To hit a nominal 1,000 trillion yen GDP, even with slight economic contraction, all that’s needed is 2-3% inflation per year.

Fire up the printing presses, dilute the currency, rob Japan’s people of their savings, and voilà! The nominal GDP is 1,000 trillion yen.

(We, of course, won’t talk about what the actual, inflation-adjusted GDP will be! Or look at how the yen will trade against the dollar or other reserve currencies!)

Unless Japan were stupid enough to get involved in Taiwan, what other reason would China have to attack Japan? Takeover of expensive rice fields and the anime industry?

So long as America occupies tens of thousands of troops in Japan, the proper question is not whether China poses a military threat to Japan, but whether China poses a military threat to America and to American hegemony.

China may have a historical axe to grind with Japan, but the political present is that China and America are facing a clash over which will exert more influence in East Asia and other parts of the globe. Should this conflict escalate to military action, Japan will find itself a target by virtue of having the American military bases most proximate to China.

And the cost of not having kids at all? Let’s put a monetary figure on that!

¥10 million is a drop in the bucket. That same child will earn far more in less than five years in the workforce.

This prevalent pessimism toward the future is Japan’s undoing.

Twisted people and AI can produce content faster than anyone can stop it. If the content is shared on overseas servers, the most that Japan could do would be to go the China route—block access to big swaths of the internet. Domestically, they can aim for a couple high-profile cases to scare people away from deep fakes, but authorities are not able to stay ahead of the technology short of very draconian measures.

So what about lessons? Can new people now never learn the art?

The police cannot point to a single incident or problem with these supervised events. They’ve run for years with police approval. Some bureaucrat high up in the National Police Agency needs to be fired.

As opposed to other countries where there are trash bins scattered around in public, and the public manages to litter much of their trash on the streets?

So it's responsibility of conbinis now?

Yes, partly. The convenience store sold the wrapper. The customer purchased it.

There is a healthy element to this cultural mentality—don’t purchase something unless you’ve thought about the trash it will produce and how you will dispose of it.

Japan has the convenience of purchasing but the inconvenience of trash. Many Japanese people comment, “I’m not going to buy that. I don’t have a place to throw away the trash.” It’s refreshing to see people consciously consume less because they consider the trash.

NATO is an expression of the post-WW2 Pax Americana. NATO has existed essentially behind the might of the American dollar and U.S. military. Without the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers parked in Europe for most of the past century, Europe would likely have continued on the pattern of new major wars every 20-30 years. Every other nation in NATO is essentially a vassal state in all but name. Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere have felt the brunt of NATO’s force, but the alliance has been powerfully effective at keeping internal peace.

America’s and Europe’s interests today steadily diverge. Europe wanted the Euro to compete with the dollar. They got it, with the independence of having their own reserve currency, and now they find themselves potentially facing a divorce from America.

Ultimately, however, any break by America from NATO will be less about Europe’s actions and more about America’s ability to project power. Europe is likely to face a “look to your own defenses” moment from the empire as America repositions globally and militarily. America is broke and can’t keep exerting power over every corner of the globe.

American universities are addicted to foreign cash. The addiction has put them in a lot of questionable situations. They’ve opened centers that are sponsored by foreign intelligence agencies and regimes. Their labs leak sensitive and classified research back to hostile governments. They’ve made themselves hotbeds for activism against America and American allies.

American universities decided to play a political game. It’s no surprise that they get politically burned eventually.

Will Japanese universities benefit from going down the same path of chasing foreign cash? No. Short-term, they will enjoy the money. Long-term, they will come to depend on it, at which point universities will warp and contort themselves in all manners to keep the money flowing.

Egads…if significant elements of Japanese history and culture cannot even be practiced in controlled environments, there is something wrong with the law.

Next up: Public cooking classes, which could also technically be found in violation of Japan’s knife laws. It is legal to own a kitchen knife, but walk out your front door with it, and it’s more or less up to the police to judge if you have a “good” reason.

Ukraine’s politicians refuse to accept demands, and so Russia will take militarily what politicians refuse to cede diplomatically. The cost will be a lot of Ukrainian lives.

Ukraine’s problem is not merely a shortage of arms and munitions. It’s a shortage of manpower. The military is depleted and increasingly demoralized. They have lost, and they know it. Russia advances and gains hundreds of square kilometers of ground quickly now. No one, not even with European and American intervention, can stop this.

Flashy, desperate acts like Operation Spider’s Web change nothing at the strategic level. That attack was akin to Germany’s V2 rocket attacks—expensive and complicated, but to no effect in the outcome of the war. Russia will continue to grind away Ukraine’s forces on the ground. With longer military action, Russia stands to lose little and gain more. If Russian troops can take the land by summer’s end, why settle for anything less now?

Those foreign universities need you. More properly, they need your money.

Many study-abroad experiences are mainly vanity play time. If that’s all you want, you can have your fun and gain stories to brag about in almost any country.

If there are specific skills that you hope to gain while studying abroad, think carefully about what those skills are. Is an expensive American university the best place to gain these skills? Where else can you get them? Perhaps the reward is still worth the risk, but you may find alternatives to gain the same payoff.

Very likely, America will treat Japanese students with a soft hand. Japanese students tend to go back to Japan. They do not tend to behave like terrorists or dissidents when overseas. Still, there is a risk of getting swept up in blanket policies. Consider what you actually want and weigh alternatives.

Japan is already getting raked over the coals on imports because of the weak yen vs. dollar.

Offer gas at a cheaper price than Russia charges, and I’m sure that Japan will accept.

“Buy our more expensive gas because we are in conflict with that other guy. It’s for your own good!” sounds like little more than mob tactics. Especially when Europe still buys tons of Russian gas, despite being much more directly involved in Ukraine than Japan is, a demand like this from the U.S. is clownish.

This is one where the birth rate excuse isn’t going to fly. Japanese people have lost at least 20% of their purchasing power in the last four or five years. Whatever small wage increases have happened, they’re not remotely enough to keep up with inflation. Food takes priority over trips to Disney and onsen hotels.

How come Japanese people that belong to one economy superpower now need to line up for rice and even not high quality rice, rice that already 4 years old?

Spend any meaningful time in the countryside, and you will know answers to this question:

1) In many rural, rice-producing areas, the number of children in the past 20 or 30 years has more than halved. Young people move away. Those that stay can’t remotely produce enough kids to keep the population stable.

2) The average age is farmers is well past 60. Many farmers are dying off. With no one to replace them, rice fields go fallow.

3) Most rice is produced on small-scale family farms. There have been almost no moves toward consolidation or large-scale, industrial farming. Such a move could work more land with fewer people, but it would require trillions of yen in capital and infrastructure investments (i.e., no more k-trucks, k-truck-size tractors and harvesters, or small roads that go with them).

Of course Google wants to keep Chrome and Google Search. Having billions of users allows Google to vacuum up data on billions of people, with Google then sells to advertisers.

You are the product, and Google sells personal data that they gather about you to companies who want your money.Google’s entire business model is built upon dangling “free” services to people, while mining data from those people and reselling it. Take away Chrome and Search, and Google’s advertising is suddenly less than half as valuable.

The problem, if there is one, seems quite simple to resolve. On a tourist visa? No, you can’t get a driver’s license.

Anyone lacking a visa that allows them to work or study long-term (a year or longer) has no need for a Japanese license. Get licensed in your home country and use an international driving permit, which is good up to a year.

Those same Hollywood movies are, by and large, suffering pretty dismal box office returns in the U.S., too.

Except that Japanese-made cars untariffed would bankrupt U.S.-made automobiles.

Likewise, untariffed U.S. rice would bankrupt Japanese farmers.

If the U.S. and Japan want to keep alive their respective auto and rice industries, which they do, they will keep tariffs on these products. Short-term, consumers would get some great deals. Long-term, the gutted domestic production would be far more costly in terms of local wages and national security.

Governments could stop printing money at a breakneck pace. That’s what has largely caused the inflation in the last five years.

But those same governments are broke and want to keep the gravy trains running. Inflation makes governments’ debts vastly cheaper to finance. So governments obviously won’t curb spending to flatten inflation. For governments, inflation is an easy, silent tax on working people.

The government pays the rest by issuing bonds, which will be refinanced by simply issuing new bonds.. So the system can never run out of money regardless of demographic changes.

Do you not grasp how bonds work? Someone uses their own money to buy those bonds at an agreed interest rate. “Can never run out of money” is economic ignorance. When no one is willing or able to purchase the bonds anymore, the bond issuer very quickly runs out of money.

And this is exactly the scenario that Japan faces. The “demographic cliff” is not merely the problem that there are more elderly people and not enough young people. It’s also that today’s youth earn and save less. Japan’s government has borrowed shamelessly from people’s postal savings accounts, but this pool of savings shrinks every year in Japan. The government will not be able to keep issuing bonds that Japan Post will just buy. The money available to buy bonds will run out.

Politics and healthcare should be kept as far away as possible from each other.

This is to claim essentially that government should have no role in providing, paying for, or regulating health care. Whenever the government taxes, decides how to spend those taxes, or makes rules about what people can and cannot do, these are fundamentally political actions.

With health care, as with all things, resources are finite. Society must decide how to apply those resources. Politics is the process for making these decisions.

“Facing politicization” is a fancy way of saying “facing economic reality,” which in turn is a fancy way of saying “is going broke.”

Systems that funnel a high percentage of resources to the elderly inevitably fail over time. The elderly need care, but when elder care depresses savings and economic opportunities for young families, society has sacrificed its future.

Gee…the reasons:

1) American cars are too big. They don’t fit in many Japanese parking spaces and roads.

2) American manufacturers won’t produce steering wheels on the right side.

3) Tariffs, but opposite the direction Trump complains about. The same model Japanese car in the U.S. is 30-50% more expensive than one sold in Japan. American auto manufacturing survived only because the U.S. implemented heavy tariffs to protect Detroit. Now, because of decades of high tariffs, most “Japanese” cars sold in America are manufactured in America.

4) Quality and reliability. Toyota and others have run into some quality-control issues in recent years, but Japanese cars are, on the whole, still far better in terms of quality.

5) Trucks and SUVs. America mostly manufactures these oversized behemoths, not the kinds of mid-sized and small-sized cars popular in Japan.

Don't like children/No interest in children being the top answer was a suprise.

Why so? Much of the current generation who are early child-bearing age were raised in homes as only children or at most with one sibling. Societally, this produces people who are uncomfortable with the idea of families and child-rearing. Those with larger families gain experience with child-rearing in their home environments. Only-child and two-children families don’t provide this as well.

Combine this with home environments where the father was largely absent for work, and the survey result is entirely to be expected.

Animals that are stressed and outside their natural environments, such as those in zoos, often struggle to reproduce.

Japan, Europe, Korea, China, America…industrialized nations have created stress-ridden environments that collapse the natural relationships among people. These nations will steadily decline because their societal structure offers no social or spiritual nourishment that humans need.

This article predictably lands on the “more money” solution, when it had been this kind of planned spending that heavily contributed to the current decline. The richest countries in the world tend to have the lowest birth rates. More money isn’t the solution.

No more inexplicable than that other languages differ country to country. The cultural associations and outlooks are entirely different, so the language will be different, too.