A dual password "Hidden OS" feature like Veracrypt offers, or at least used to offer would be best. If implemented correctly the existence of the hidden OS can't be proven, and a dummy password would log into a dummy OS. I don't think it exists for phones, but is surely a gap in the market.
> If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other
This is the exact opposite of my experience (and all my Japanese friends). They will stare at the person misbehaving but will absolutely not challenge him. Their culture is "avoid the problem/confronting at all costs".
> The police acts swiftly
They are considered tax thieves, even by Japanese people. Also, talk to some foreign women that got sexually harassed or even raped how the police helped them. In fact, I don't have proof, but I sincerely believe that if the police was trained well, crime rate would increase because they would find more crimes.
> healthy food
Are we talking about deep-fried food? Or perhaps over-salted dishes? Oh, no, you meant the sugar they add in basically all their cooking? Time where they mostly ate fish and rice is over. They barely eat enough vegetables. And fruits are for the well-off only.
It's a country that I love and have spent quite some time there—and more to come—but your observations are exactly the opposite of what I saw.
What they do correctly is the low unemployment rate, though I think it's starting to rise with younger people. People don't need to commit violent crimes to feed themselves if any work lets them afford necessities.
I think they are opposite because when I say police acts swiftly, you turn around and say that they are tax thieves. They can both be true?
Healthy food. Yes they eat healthy and their BMI shows it. I find it quite ludicrous to think their restaurants represent what they eat on daily basis. Proof is in the pudding (BMI). Yes it is getting worse and I hope American tariffs will help in this regard. Again, healthy living AND getting worse can both be true, especially with people that are friendly with cultures they want to know more about (many, but still a small subset).
Not sure why Violent crime would be better than non-violent crime for feeding your kids. But the narrative that is pushed heavily in media is the equal sign between poor and criminal, instead of the correlation, which again is reductive. Why? Is there anger? What food do trigger it? What mindset?
My grandparents where very poor (as in oat porridge for weeks poor). They would never hurt a fly. In certain minds that would have been a weakness, in certain minds it’s self sacrifice and equal strength.
Most want to be the wolf among the sheep. It is US greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time.
I think it's more likely that social pressure to control people's weights is responsible for Japan's low BMI, not anything to do with the food. Japan is the land of vending machines and convenience stores. It's easy to eat junk food all day if you want to. But people will notice you getting fat, and unlike in Western countries they're likely to criticize you for it.
We tend to hit a Goodhart’s Law situation, where focusing on weight and BMI comes at the expense of actual health. That's how we get eating disorders and other mental health issues as well, so as usual it's complicated.
Assuming you are actually from the US, your point feels a lot like system justification[1] theory hard at work... If close to 50% (or even more) people around you have moderate to serious weight issues, I can imagine how you end up normalising the status quo, looking for explanations that rationalise it...
FWIW if you're on a trip it might counter-balance: you might be more active with fewer idle time, and the local food might also be harder to fully process. I saw that on a Spain trip where it made absolutely no sense I didn't gain weight touring tapas places for a week.
Also some anecdata, but I think it depends so much on the person: I gained 10 kilograms by living more than a year in Japan.
I ate healthily so I wasn't fat by any means (in fact, I'm really skinny), but I ate so much that I think this is the reason I gained some weight. I ate a lot of rice (my rice portion was usually more than a Japanese person's entire plate).
Every time I'm in japan I walk far more than I do while in the US. I also end up going up stairs a lot more than I ever need to in the US. Good public transportation makes a huge difference.
I'm euro and runner/cyclist so I doubt that was a factor. I also had my bicycle with me for some rides on off days, but it wasn't beyond my usual mileage. Maybe even less, because riding road bike in Tokyo was an experience that made me realise how good I've it back home. Surroundings hills are nice, but getting out of the city sucks big time.
BMI is mostly useless metric when comparing genetically diverse cohorts. Weight gain is mostly in fat and that is proportional to fat cell count. There is a saying "nerve cells are born and die, but fat - lives forever". The truth to it is that at an adult age fat cell count is mostly constant and mostly genetic. As you get fatter you don't produce more fat cells, they just get fatter, pun intended.
There is huge genetic diversity between geographic regions / ethnic lineages in this regard. On one end you have northern european / african lineages, on the other end you have far east lineages, with other lineages somewhere in between, with northern european / african lineages having the largest fat cell counts, east asians the lowest. Furthermore, north european / african lineages tend to have fat distribution much more biased towards subcutaneous fat, whereas east asian lineages are biased towards abdominal fat, so many of the problems associated with high body fat (not insulin resistance) are seen at lower body fat percentages in east asian lineages.
On top of that, body fat percentage does not map to BMI. BMI may roughly linearly scale with body fat percentage around the "healthy" region, however there will be huge offset between genetic cohorts, including sex.
You should expect east asian BMIs to be lower across the board given similarly "unhealthy" diets.
Not the person you responded to, but this is a topic that fascinates me; do you have any resource to learn more about that? One that explains in average human terms would be appreciated!
Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by "swift".
> I find it quite ludicrous to think their restaurants represent what they eat on daily basis
I have lived with 2 different Japanese family (one younger, one older) and I was referring to the younger one when writing my previous comment. You say that restaurant doesn't represent what they eat, but again this is not my observation; restaurants and prepared meal (bento) are socheap—price-to-purchasing-power compared to Western countries—that many people don't even cook for themselves. So yes, it's absolutely relevant.
> Not sure why Violent crime would be better than non-violent crime for feeding your kids
I never said it was. But hunger definitely makes you more violent and more irrational. I excluded non-violent crimes because people usually exclude those when thinking about a country's safety. There are a lot of scams in Japan, for example.
> They would never hurt a fly.
Most people would never hurt someone. Most people are lawful. But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy. Perhaps there is a causation, perhaps not.
> But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy.
Petty or to-some-extent violent criminals. White collar criminals, the worse kind of criminal, usually come from good/rich/powerful families (I'm generally speaking, not talking about Japan specifically)
If you think sugar added to everything is a Japan phenomenon oh boi, time to travel.
As someone that lived there, frankly your take come off as the typical "English teacher/exchange student that lived in Tokyo and spend too much time on r/japanlife" and think Tokyo represent the average.
> If you think sugar added to everything is a Japan phenomenon oh boi, time to travel.
You're not refuting my argument.
> As someone that lived there, frankly your take come off as the typical "English teacher/exchange student that lived in Tokyo and spend too much time on r/japanlife" and think Tokyo represent the average.
That's very condescending of you and again not refuting my claims at all. Do most of your colleagues eat their own dishes? Don't they add a helluva lot sugar and salt to everything? Hell, even Japanese-made Western desserts taste way too sweet.
I think you could be a bit kinder and not resort to personal attacks.
Edit: it's true that I lived in Tokyo, but unfortunately it's a country that contains 4 cities that get more dense by the day at the cost of unpopulated rural areas.
The poison is in the amount, not in the substance. Salty or sweet food is completely fine if you don’t eat a ton every day. You actually need salt, it is much more dangerous to not consume enough of it.
Most people are dying of heart diseases and guess their causes...
Japanese elderly don't even drink the broth of ramen otherwise they may literally die (not my words).
Edit: sugar we don't really need to survive (trace amounts found in fruits and vegetables is basically enough) and salt maximum daily recommended amount is around 3g. Do you know how much salt a tablespoon of soy sauce contains?
I totally understand what you mean, however the vast majority of the population isn't even close to being hydrated properly so you're just taking an extreme example to make your point.
For a company I've interviewed with, I've been asked twice a salary range and declined both times. I was even transparent for the 2nd time (which happened months later) and answered that it's not in my interest to give a number first.
Well, I received an offer from them and I would have undercut myself by 30%.
This is perhaps—or perhaps not—an extreme example, but I only applied what I was told in the negotiation articles and books I've read.
When you read a book, you're going to think "It's just fantasy; no way this is going to happen to me" but if you actually apply that knowledge it can truly work in your favor.
I also declined an offer 2 months beforehand because the salary was ridiculously low, despite being unemployed at the time.
I am a bit confused by not talking about the salary right away, I have seen advice like yours and in this article about not giving the number fisrt but the opposite in other articles saying to leverage the anchoring bias by giving a high number first. That would help raising the following offers. Both approaches seem to make sense so I am not sure what to choose.
I’m also ambivalent because you risk investing in a time consuming interview process only to find out they’re offering .5 of what you deemed the minimum you’d take.
are you a vc level with visibility of salaries in all the company orgs? if not, just stay silent or you will undercut yourself. working class never knows their value, by design.
> automatically generated OpenAPI specifications + API documentation
I'd much rather have engineers write OpenAPI specification files by hand and then generate their server code from that file. Way easier to maintain and actually forces devs to have good documentation for their APIs.
US interprets "privacy" as against government while allowing unlimited corporate privacy invasion - and in practice quite a large amount of spook privacy invasion through that. EU addresses corporate privacy invasion while having a compromise in law enforcement privacy.
These things aren't a one-and-done matter of legislation or constitutions, they rely on constant pressure on every case.
(and I explicitly said the EU system does not guarantee privacy against law enforcement! Because total privacy for crime is very unpopular and politically unsustainable)
These are proposals, US services are even less trustworthy — since the patriot act at least.
Given the way the US is acting even if the Europeans didn't give a damn about encryption and just wanted to run on a stable, reliable service that isn't going to be suddenly abused for geopolitical purposes, they could do better than choosing services from the US.
It's a good point, but I'm not going to trust a country where the executive branch used data that was supposed to be used for health purposes for criminal investigations (Germany).
The executive branch of the other one arrested someone for using encryption tools and "protecting [himself] against the exploitation of [his] personal data by GAFAM".
> Is there even a remote possibility that a nuanced, truthful organization that covers global events could even get funded and exist?
I think it could. But it must be funded by readers and not accept outrageous donations by elite people. This is as to not create a potential dependency.
In reality, though, people will never pay for news (and will rarely even pay for magazines) and they need their dopamine hit.
To truly be unbiased, I believe that it must also be "slow journalism".
Please call me out if I'm just being delusional but I think VAT is a great way to tax rich people.
They already have a lot of ways to avoid taxes, but at least with VAT they pay the same as everybody else. They are going to buy expensive food or drinks at restaurants and 8% (in my country) of that is going to be taxed. Someone more modest is going to eat at a less expensive place and is going to pay 8% on something less expensive.
I'm aware of the luxury tax but I don't think it's better than the VAT tax.
For people in poverty, 8% is the difference between getting that extra carton of eggs or not getting it. For rich people, it doesn't matter. It's not that VAT doesn't tax rich people it's that it taxes poor people a lot harder.
Do you mean having a higher wealth and estate tax? They both exist where I live, although they tend to hit the poor much more than the rich.
> tax on stock trades
I agree on this one but I think it's not a good idea to penalize people that invest for the long term. Perhaps tax only trades that happened over less than 10 years or something.
I don't know where you live but the US doesn't have a wealth tax. You'll have to explain to me how a wealth tax hit the poor because the poor do not have wealth. A progressive wealth tax will tax someone based on net worth. By estate tax, I mean an inheritance tax which again, the poor typically don't leave massive inheritances so I'm not seeing how this hits the poor hard.
> You'll have to explain to me how a wealth tax hit the poor because the poor do not have wealth
I'm sorry, perhaps "poor" wasn't the best word. But let me explain what I was thinking: I live in Switzerland where wealth tax is very much more annoying to the middle-class than the rich. This is because it starts at around CHF80'000--a lot of people qualify--and isn't taxed progressively above CHF2 million. While the rich will pay the highest tier, the middle-class is going to suffer from it much more because they don't invest their wealth. Basically, they are losing wealth, especially after taking inflation into account.
Don't get me wrong, Switzerland is a very good country tax-wise. But your argument against VAT also works very much for other types of taxation.
> By estate tax, I mean an inheritance tax which again, the poor typically don't leave massive inheritances so I'm not seeing how this hits the poor hard
Yes, good point. In Switzerland there are actually only a few cantons that still have the inheritance tax. But I still think that most families would qualify for the estate tax. A middle class family is going to be hurt much more being taxed CHF10k than a rich one taxed CHF100k.
You've made yourself very understandable, thank you for explaining further. Doing a Francs to Dollars conversion, 80,000 francs is around 90,000 USD. This is much lower than it should be in my opinion. For comparison, Biden's proposed wealth tax would only affect people with $1 billion in assets or people $100 million in income for three consecutive years[1]. This is not only less than 1% of the country, it's less than .01% of the country. I think the asset numbers are a bit high but as proposed, only the Musks and the Zuckerbergs would be affected.
So the only issue I see with the Switzerland tax situation is that the numbers are too low and should be higher. The incentive should be to get people investing in the economy but not to a point of hoarding.
Yep, indeed this kind of wealth tax would seem much more popular. I wonder how well it would do in a federal vote in Switzerland.
I am very much in favor of increasing taxes for the very wealthy ($100 million in net worth seems like a good start).
I just don't want that kind of tax to do collateral damage to middle-class people. For example, Switzerland doesn't have capital gains tax (!!!) except if trading is your profession. If we introduce capital gains tax, sure it will tax the rich but they will be able to wave it off while middle-class investors will get hit too. That's why I said in my initial comment that it could be wise to only tax those that invested for less than 10 years. We could also imagine a system where your capital gains are taxed based on your net worth after the trade.
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