Same in London. You see large groups of them under bridges sometimes, but then a few days later they're all rounded up and just gone. I'd like to believe that they're under Shelter protection, but the cynic in me k ows that they've just been relocated out of the public eye.
>Can homeless Japanese set up a tent on a sidewalk in the heart of Tokyo?
I don't know, but I seriously doubt it.
I generally only see them in certain public parks. There's one weird encampment in some woods next to one of the rivers, in a large park that's on a flood plain; not exactly easy to find or heavily trafficked.
>Can homeless Japanese set up a tent on a sidewalk in the heart of Tokyo?
Yes. I encountered a homeless person in the CBD of Tokyo, sleeping in the bushes of a (very small) divider between a main road. Almost totally hidden, by those bushes. With enough items to look like they'd been there a while.
To be honest, I don't know much about homelessness in Japan besides what little I've read online, and what I actually see in public (and considering how much I walk around different places, I do see a lot of places). Anyway, I suspect this is probably another case where America spends a ton of money on stuff, but does so poorly and with bad effect. Just look at healthcare: the US spends far more per person than any other country, but outcomes are pretty lousy on average because it's so unequal and because treatment costs a fortune compared to anyplace else. I'm sure many other spending comparisons between the US and other nations are similar. How much money has the US spent on high-speed rail in California without getting much done?
I don't know what your point is, but the USA also spends tenfold on infrastructure per km with vastly worse results, and has the highest spend on healthcare per capita, with one of the worst outcomes in the developed world. So just spending more doesn't mean much.
Don't forget that our paradise-like living standards require cheap labor and blood & sweat from other, not so well-off countries. To me, a paradise would be self-sustainable without exploiting others.
I love Japan, I just wouldn't characterize it as a paradise. Though I admit your criticism is apt if we're purely speaking about pubic spaces.
I think most people are now aware of the yearly dolphin drive hunt in Taiji and how the whaling industry continues to harpoon hundreds of whales every year under the guise of studying their migrations, even with demand for the meat dropping every year.
Yeah, I'm American, but I never said this was paradise. On the contrary, I could give much better reasons why it's not than your example of open carry laws. But let's not play "whatabout", as your public spaces argument is legit.
I'm not going to defend the whaling and dolphin or censorhip stuff, I'm just pointing out that when we're talking about people mistreating public spaces/property, public behavior, etc., these things really aren't relevant and every country has its policy flaws. Women in Japan don't have any trouble getting an abortion if they need one, and don't have to worry about one part of the country trying to prosecute them for going to another part of the country for a medical service that some religious politician has banned. And no one in Japan has to worry much about people with automatic weapons going on shooting rampages.
To your primary point, public spaces in Japan, or the ones I see portrayed in the media, are very very cute (for lack of a better word and I don't mean that in a condescending manner. I think the term is kawaii?). That would never fly here. Even with fences and guards that stuff would be covered in graffiti if not just broken.
As for the abortion reference, it wasn't long ago that we too were filled with that same confidence. And we're learned it only takes a single election to undo decades of progress.
>To your primary point, public spaces in Japan, or the ones I see portrayed in the media, are very very cute (for lack of a better word and I don't mean that in a condescending manner. I think the term is kawaii?).
It sounds like you've never been here. Yes, some public spaces are cute ("kawaii!" I'm impressed!), but that's not really the norm. There are places where anime characters are shown, there's a godzilla statue in downtown Tokyo, there's a giant electronic billboard with a cat, etc., But it's not like you'll see anime stuff on every street or shopping area. Many places are quite old-fashioned looking (as in Edo-era, pre-war). Other places are just ultra-modern, like in central business districts: you'll see huge steel-and-glass skyscrapers, but there's nothing cute about them or the interior design.
>That would never fly here. Even with fences and guards that stuff would be covered in graffiti if not just broken.
Yeah, that's the big problem. That kind of thing just doesn't happen here. There is graffiti, but it's rare, and very confined to certain places. I rarely see it; offhand, I know of the underside of an elevated highway that has some (i.e., a rather ugly, out-of-the-way place where people don't often go). You certainly don't see it in any high-pedestrian-traffic area. The most annoying things I've found here as far as delinquent young men are motorcyclists who drive around the highways on late weekend nights revving their engines, and also very rich young men driving customized Lambos and Ferraris in Shibuya and revving their engines (seemingly with no mufflers).
>As for the abortion reference, it wasn't long ago that we too were filled with that same confidence. And we're learned it only takes a single election to undo decades of progress.
I completely disagree here. It wasn't a single election; the GOP was trying to undo Roe v Wade for decades; it was long a campaign issue for them. It's been a constant struggle for ages; various states passed laws banning it long ago, even though Roe v Wade overruled those laws, just because they knew if the decision was overturned, those laws would come back into effect. Republican Presidents have tried to install SCOTUS justices for decades to overturn RvW, with varying success. Trump just got lucky by getting to install 3 justices at once, but that wasn't enough; pre-existing justices also voted with them, remember, and they were installed by previous Republican presidents. This fight has been going on for a long time.
By contrast, there's is NO such thing going on over here (or most other developed nations that aren't heavily Catholic). It's not a political issue here at all, so there's really no risk of anyone passing such a law. (Plus, law here isn't made by the courts, it's made by the legislature, since the system isn't based on English Common Law.) Similarly, there's no constant political struggle over gun legality. No one wants the laws to become less strict than they already are. The politicians here just argue about things like how to deal with population decline, labor shortage, the weak yen, etc., i.e., important issues that face the country and its citizens today, rather than ideological wedge issues.
I really appreciate that you've taken my comments in good faith, but more than that, I appreciate that you've taken your time to inform my perspective in detail.
It's a very refreshing and positive start to my day!
The politics is extremely different. As sibling points out, the only thing holding back an abortion ban was waiting for members of the Supreme Court, the permanent unelected legislature who legalized it in the first place, to die.
US politics is hyper-polarized. Japan is the extreme opposite, it's practically a voluntary one party state with free elections.
(It probably helps that a lot of what you might call "far right Japan" either got killed in the war, executed by the victors, or committed suicide in defeat, and then that tendency was suppressed by the US occupiers)
You do you know that one of Obama's campaign promises was to pass a law explicitly allowing abortions? At which point it wouldn't matter what Roe vs Wade decided because there's an actual law on the books now.
This would be like Clark Kent was telling some kid not to play on the guard rails on a bridge and then the kid fell off. Except that now Superman was too slow to react and didn't save the kid. Don't be blaming Superman (Supreme Court); the problem should've be nipped in the bud earlier (Congress).
The same political pressures that go into appointing people to the Supreme Court, also apply to congress, the senate, and to the presidency.
I don't think that comes out like your Superman scenario. Possibly Kafka, but like most people making such a comparison, I've not actually read The Trial.
> The same political pressures that go into appointing people to the Supreme Court, also apply to congress, the senate, and to the presidency.
Sure but he got elected with that promise and then immediately reneged and explicitly said he wasn't going to try.
To say the other only thing allowing abortions was the Supreme Court is _only_ correct because the Legislature and Executive branches intentionally didn't add any other blockers. To solely be upset with the Supreme Court is silly, this exact scenario was intentionally created by the other two branches.
There was no way Obama could have gotten abortion legalized in Congress; he didn't have the power, and there just wasn't enough consensus on the issue to get such a law passed. Abortion has long been a huge wedge issue in America; there's simply not enough political will to legalize it at the federal level, and it doesn't look like there will be in our lifetimes. Too many voters adamantly oppose it for this to happen. Even if you somehow got a slim Democratic majority to pass such a law, as soon as the GOP has a slim majority, they'll repeal the law, or shut down the government to try to force it.
Yes, and that's why tens of thousands of Americans are killed by them every year, including in daily mass shootings.
We don't have that problem in Japan, or any civilized country for that matter. I can walk around in public any time and not worry about someone going on a shooting rampage here.
I mean you can do that in USA too, take a look at a map of them and how much blank space there is between them [1].
Keep in mind that gang violence counts as mass shootings so if you're not in a gang or in gang area the risk goes off a cliff. When excluding mass killings that happen as part of Robbery / Gang Violence it drops down to 10 incidents in 2023 [3] which is pretty good compared to Europe's 8 [2].
To be fair, I think the bit about pixelated porn was actually a complaint about censorship, not that porn is everywhere. Non-pixelated porn is illegal and sometimes prosecuted apparently, but it's really not that hard to find on sites outside of Japan.
However, there is a LOT of porn in Japan; the JAV industry is huge. However, here too we're talking about public spaces, and while you can certainly find porn if you want to and know where to look, it's not forced on you anywhere and you could easily not see any. (In offline spaces, it's confined to seedy little "DVD" shops that aren't in main shopping areas. I imagine online stuff is slowly putting these old-fashioned places out of business.)
> Bigmotor allegedly inflated insurance claims after employees intentionally damaged vehicles, in some cases with screwdrivers or golf balls. Japan's three major nonlife insurance companies stopped doing business with Bigmotor in June 2022 in response to the allegations.
Imagine if wealthy Bay Area denizens would focus their resources to take care of those around them. Instead they occupy their time with the endless pursuit of vanity, wealth without purpose, and decadence.
They could easily save a bundle of taxes by moving somewhere else, or at least moving their money.
Some lower-tax (lower than California) destinations are incredible places to live as well - it’s not a choice between anarcho-capitalism and California.
So there’s at least a tiny bit of generosity there.
I do not think “generosity” of any sort plays in here. They’re not considering leaving for personal reasons but deciding to stay to provide tax dollars to the state. They’re staying because they want to. They like it here, or it works well for their business to be here. I don’t see any reason to believe that generosity plays in to it. California, despite high taxes, is simply a nice place to live.
Yes. A choice based on the fact that it’s an extremely nice place to live. I have never met or heard of a person who said “I’d like to leave but I don’t want the state of California to lose out on my tax dollars”.
I don't consider paying your taxes generosity, especially when you're in a tax bracket that used to have a marginal tax rate of 80-90%.
Neither is "donating" your income to your own charitable organization, which is a well-established tax avoidance scheme rather than actual humanitarianism.
I think the parent was referencing fake non profit organization, I don't know for USA but in europe it's a 'classical' tax avoidance trick going from 'having a charity which goal is to allow you to particpace in pricey leisure activities (work for mechanical sports for exemple) to the infamous Ikea tax evasion scheme, here is a random article talking about it but you have lot other if the subject interest you : https://www.fastcompany.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and-.... Take care the worl is a little bit darker after ^^.
Can you imagine how thick each day’s newspaper would be if it mentioned all the nice–or even just neutral–things people do each day? There are billions of people on the planet. Plenty of good and good enough to go around.
One of the only newsletters I subscribe to is a weekly round up of all the good things that were under reported that week. https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews/
This is not typically what is referred to by “unregulated market”. This is just people vandalizing public property who need to be prosecuted for it. There are no market regulations that can prevent this.
Not just people, people hired by the business selling the repairs. Didn't you read the article? Businessmen are not beyond hiring thugs to commit crimes in order to increase their revenue. This is a sign that people cannot be trusted to regulate their own market. People will do anything they can to increase their profits. That's why an unregulated market can never work. Just simple human psychology.
When the only measure of success is cashflow, things are doomed to converge on ugly messes sometimes, because that is what max cashflow randomly happened to produce, and no one has ever promised that max cashflow == peak social development.
> BART filed a $2.16 million civil suit against Hurwitz, which was pending in Alameda County Superior Court as of 1982. It's unclear what became of the case, and searches for news of the suit came up empty.
It wasn't an entirely novel idea. Around the same time, I saw a comic, something like a rock/brick tossed through a house's front window, with a note tied around it, like a stereotypical intimidation/threat. Except the note was an ad for a local window glass replacement service.
This was from The Far Side. The image depicts a broken window and a man reading a piece of paper presumably attached to the brick, with the note "Bricks thrown thru your window? Call Al's Glass" and then a phone number.
While searching for it I found the comic appeared as homework in a marketing class, with this wonderful student asking for help explaining the underlying marketing techniques:
Wasn't there a Charlie Chaplin movie with a similar premis? A child walks the street and breaks windows while a glass fixer walks a few minutes later and announces their services.
The 2023 version of a brick-through-the-window, as an aside:
The note reads something like this:
BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING.
The cushions were doomed from the start. It would be obvious to anyone who has ever ridden the BART that the seats should be easily cleaned with a hose.
It's illegal to be intoxicated on the railway (and on the TfL network in London, carrying open alcohol containers and drinking alcohol is banned), but enforcement is very, very low. It would require a huge cultural change to alcohol in this country which nobody seems willing to embrace.
Hilariously we also have "beer trail" services and routes, specifically designed to promote a pub crawl using trains.
We really do have bad relationship with alcohol in the UK.
And I can't believe that NEWLY-DEPLOYED trains in L.A. have CLOTH seats. I saw these on day one and said, WTF, whose idea was this?
And sure enough, today these trains are rolling diapers. No way would I ever sit on one of these things. The level of stupidity here is just unbelievable.
But I don't understand, Paris doesn't have a reputation for cleanliness and the cloth seats of the metro aren't especially disgusting. Trains around the world also have fabric seats obviously, because nobody wants to spend hours sitting on hard plastic.
There are always people doing disgusting things wherever they are but they are such a minority that it doesn't really affect the everyday experience of others in general. Maybe you only had a few bad experiences?
If someone puked on a train in Paris, what would happen? If someone got on the train and started smoking drugs off tinfoil, what would happen?
In many cities in the US, the answer is _nothing_.
I've ridden commuter buses in the US that had cloth seats and commuter trains that had soft plastic-like seats, and they were quite nice -- but they also cost twice or more as much as a regular bus/ train ride. That price cuts down on certain behaviors.
> If someone puked on a train in Paris, what would happen?
Probably nothing much to be honest. The train would get cleaned at the end of the line I guess. As to drugs, I don't think anything would happen either (apart from the other passengers leaving the car at the next stop) but people don't do that.
I think the problem is elsewhere, these behaviours just aren't supposed to exist in modern society. I don't know what is with the US society that enables them though.
I'm not mocking you when I say, you're right: You don't understand. No public conveyance in the USA should have anything other than fiberglass bucket seats with a hole in the middle for drainage.
For one thing, hard seats are not uncomfortable. A well-shaped wooden seat on a rocking chair, for example, is comfortable for hours. And most public-transport trips aren't long enough to really tax one's ass anyway.
For another: Public trains in the USA are a haven for homeless and bums. When you've driven past a coffee shop that has picnic tables on the sidewalk and seen a homeless guy with his pants literally filled with shit sitting at one... you understand the problem.
I don't care what country you're in; cloth seats on mass transit are dumb. They just can't be adequately cleaned. In Paris, a city allegedly suffering from a bedbug outbreak, I'd expect most people to question their use.
Maybe this is an ignorant question, but what else would the seats be covered with? In all the public transport I have witnessed in EU and AU the seats have always been covered in some kind of fabric. Though carpet on the ground seems odd and I have never seen that before.
I remember when I was young we would slap the seats on the bus and release big horrible clouds of dust.
Just bare plastic/metal, vinyl, some heavy duty leather mock.
In Buenos Aires in the 2000s they bought some old trains from Japan and they had red velvet seats. They were not as bad as you think considering they were used.
I have a similar story. In my hometown the owner of the Mercedes salon paid money for each emblem that was broken of a car's hood. It was around 2000-2005. I know this from the owner's son.
That is sneaky! That could backfire, too, if someone got a hold of box of those things from somewhere else. “This guy pays $10 for each so we got a box from Ali Express and sold it to him”.
The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income.
French officials wanted a lifestyle more like home, including flush toilets.
So they built a sewer system. It was a perfect breeding ground for rats.
Now, Hanoi had a rat problem.
They hired exterminators, but it wasn't enough. So they offered a bounty to anyone who would kill a rat and bring in the severed tail as proof. It was much easier for them to dispose of a collection of rat tails instead of entire rat carcasses.
The locals quickly figured out that you could remove a rat's tail without killing it, and send it back into the sewers to breed more rats with fresh young tails.
I wonder if, with the proliferation of smartphones, any government will try it again with more rules to maker it harder to game, like limiting the number that will be paid out, and requiring video evidence of the kill. It's harder to
I think you should really just require the corpse; if somebody wants to setup a trap it should be fine for them to bring a bucket of 30 corpses instead of a video where an official has to count to 30.
I suspect if you time-box the reward that'll fix the cobra effect problem. Announce that you'll only pay for dead rats for ~4 months and at least in the final month people should realize that its time to kill the golden goose and provide all the rats they have instead of breeding for more.
> When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
You seemed to use the fact that a car was used as a taxi in Europe as evidence that the car is not luxurious.
My point is that cars used as taxis in Europe are often from upmarket segments, so it's not good evidence that a car is not luxurious (relatively - we're talking MB/BMW class here).
This does not mean I'm saying that a specific Mercedes from the 1960s was or was not luxurious. I find it hard to imagine any car from the 1960s would be luxurious by modern standards, my experience of older cars is they were very much metal tins on wheels.
Let me put it another way. If you want to build a giant company, selling only to the wealthy and powerful isn't going to do it. You're going to have to sell deep into the middle class. Which is what Mercedes-Benz did.
I was thinking of Evangelical Christians actually. Jews generally aren't in a position of power. What other remarks have I made that you think were antisemitic?
The “better” car companies simply design systems that force more labor hours into regular maintenance. For example, BMW’s ingenious battery placement that allows them to bill $700-$900 for 5 hours worth of work. Oh, and changing your own battery will void the warranty. Fortunately for BMW most of their clientele has enough money to not care.
Automakers absolutely know this law and my experiences with warranty coverage (as an exclusive DIYer for literally everything except warranty work, tires, and paint) is that they readily and voluntarily follow it.
A classmate of mine happened to mention once that for some early models of a particular Japanese car manufacturer (1980's I think) the engine would need to be removed in order to change the oil.
I was a professional auto mechanic in the late 80s, and I'd never even heard rumors of such a beast. I'm not going to pull the [citation needed] card, but I think this is one of those tales that got taller with the telling (Nissan 300Z's, for example, are a right PITA such that you'd briefly think that removing the engine would make it easier.)
There isn't an automotive engineer in the world that would keep their job after submitting such a design, let alone get it into production.
That's hilarious. Mercedes had a checkered repair history, especially US models that don't have a German equivalent or are post-merger frankensteins.
Mostly, mascot or emblem theft was a 90's media-generated gangster thing limited primarily to higher-crime areas to wear car emblems on a chain, so maybe they were gopniks but 15 years too late. Also why Rolls Royce invented the retracting bonnet mascot. They early ones were silver plated and later ones were optionally gold plated. (Of course like Porsches, Rolls Royce can and are customized, so I wouldn't at all be surprised if a solid platinum or palladium Spirit of Ecstasy exists.)
80's BMWs, Cadillacs, and Jaguars were big money makers for my dad. His dad and him bemoaned that they could've made more money if only they were dishonest. They both had experience working at dealerships as mechanics. They saw more tactics than these:
- Charging for parts not replaced (which is why you always ask to see the old parts)
- Magically finding other things wrong that need expensive, unnecessary parts (which is why you always get a written estimate before leaving, and appear to have a somewhat understanding of what constitutes the vehicle)
- Eyewash: overselling standard procedures or aspirational steps not performed, usually with the purpose of justifying higher prices and/or increasing customer satisfaction (if there's too much marketing, then you're the mark)
Also: In the US, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) is 99.8% a confidence scam: it's a for-profit marketing company that sells a false appearance of authority and credibility with negligible actual due-diligence or accountability.
"BART filed a $2.16 million civil suit against Hurwitz, which was pending in Alameda County Superior Court as of 1982. It's unclear what became of the case, and searches for news of the suit came up empty."
Otherwise known as a “perverse incentive”, or “the cobra effect”, for when a bounty was created to get rid of the snakes, causing people to breed them instead of hunt them.
So the mistake was in outsourcing the crime. Had they kept a tighter circle of perpetrators, probably could have kept the scam going for significantly longer.
No they needed more anonymity and serparation in their out sourcing, so it couldn't be traced back to anyone wanting to slash seats for a particular reason.
My parents lived in an apartment, several apartments in our house got broken into. My dad went to a reinforced door company to get a quote. It was almost 10.000€, a ridiculous amount! We didn‘t get it.
A month later we had a break in while I was home alone. He took off when he saw me. We got the door. Now we got a bulletproof 10.000€ door.
To this day I am convinced the door company sent the burglar.
Alternately, there are some burglars that happen to have an informant inside the company giving them tips.
It seems like a great way to identify potential marks, by looking for victims who (A) believe they have enough portable wealth that they are considering expensive security measures and (B) don't yet have any of those security measures already in place.
I assume this is the division between people that consider apartment living the default versus those that consider living in houses with outside-accessible windows the default.
I wonder, grafitti aside[0], how much of the social panic around "vandalism" can be tied to similar dynamics. Not necessarily outright rackets like this one but perverse incentives at least.
Also it's easy to see how slashing a seat or breaking a window is vandalism but somehow we've decided anti-homeless architecture and literring pedestrian spaces with subsidized rental e-scooters isn't even if it also drastically reduces quality of life by modifying shared public spaces.
[0]: I dislike how grafitti and defacement is lumped in with functional damage as "vandalism" except for rare cases like road signs. I like to think that there is a tangible difference between changing the appearance of something and damaging it in such a way that it is no longer fully fit for purpose. Even if one believes that "maintaining property value" is a primary purpose of a building's wall or "providing ad space" is a primary purpose of a train exterior, I'd argue that there is a clear moral difference.
Such rampant pillaging of taxpayer dollars should have been more severely punished. If I was on a jury I would have sent them to jail for 20 years and slept well that night.
The ol' thumbtacks on the street near the tire-shop routine... but actually doing it.
BART should've just stopped replacing them because it was already depressing and created a feeling of unease even when it was just a few years old. BART is a symptom of the dysfunctional, lower-classing of American mass-transit in contrast to masses of unyielding cultural exaltation of the single occupant vehicle in gridlock. Hurray that they dug a tunnel under the Bay, but scant few actually want to board a tram that seems perpetually foreshadowing of an escape room or serial killer scene.
I’m not sure what enforcement would even look like. There aren’t enough jail cells and mental health treatment. And nobody wants to pay what it would cost.
I'm not sure if it's still the case since we moved away a few years ago, but the 24th St BART escalator used to be in a constant repair loop. It would get fixed for a short period, operate for about a month, and then go back to being out of service. Made me question if a similar scheme was in operation.
If it was the Glen park station I would also question it, but 24th station is a pretty rough place, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually being messed with.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadhttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hsDQDDrL9Yo
Japan actually has social services to help homeless people and provide them shelter; the ones you see are people who refuse help.
What I’ve seen in other countries is that there certainly are homeless, but the attitude is “you go to a shelter or you go to jail”.
Does wonders for keeping visible homeless to a minimum.
I don't know, but I seriously doubt it.
I generally only see them in certain public parks. There's one weird encampment in some woods next to one of the rivers, in a large park that's on a flood plain; not exactly easy to find or heavily trafficked.
Yes. I encountered a homeless person in the CBD of Tokyo, sleeping in the bushes of a (very small) divider between a main road. Almost totally hidden, by those bushes. With enough items to look like they'd been there a while.
Same can be said about other western countries.
But back in America I saw people carrying guns around in public all the time; it wasn't just some stupid internet meme or some ultra-rare thing.
I think most people are now aware of the yearly dolphin drive hunt in Taiji and how the whaling industry continues to harpoon hundreds of whales every year under the guise of studying their migrations, even with demand for the meat dropping every year.
Scroll down to the "pornographic censorship" section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Japan
Yeah, I'm American, but I never said this was paradise. On the contrary, I could give much better reasons why it's not than your example of open carry laws. But let's not play "whatabout", as your public spaces argument is legit.
As for the abortion reference, it wasn't long ago that we too were filled with that same confidence. And we're learned it only takes a single election to undo decades of progress.
It sounds like you've never been here. Yes, some public spaces are cute ("kawaii!" I'm impressed!), but that's not really the norm. There are places where anime characters are shown, there's a godzilla statue in downtown Tokyo, there's a giant electronic billboard with a cat, etc., But it's not like you'll see anime stuff on every street or shopping area. Many places are quite old-fashioned looking (as in Edo-era, pre-war). Other places are just ultra-modern, like in central business districts: you'll see huge steel-and-glass skyscrapers, but there's nothing cute about them or the interior design.
>That would never fly here. Even with fences and guards that stuff would be covered in graffiti if not just broken.
Yeah, that's the big problem. That kind of thing just doesn't happen here. There is graffiti, but it's rare, and very confined to certain places. I rarely see it; offhand, I know of the underside of an elevated highway that has some (i.e., a rather ugly, out-of-the-way place where people don't often go). You certainly don't see it in any high-pedestrian-traffic area. The most annoying things I've found here as far as delinquent young men are motorcyclists who drive around the highways on late weekend nights revving their engines, and also very rich young men driving customized Lambos and Ferraris in Shibuya and revving their engines (seemingly with no mufflers).
>As for the abortion reference, it wasn't long ago that we too were filled with that same confidence. And we're learned it only takes a single election to undo decades of progress.
I completely disagree here. It wasn't a single election; the GOP was trying to undo Roe v Wade for decades; it was long a campaign issue for them. It's been a constant struggle for ages; various states passed laws banning it long ago, even though Roe v Wade overruled those laws, just because they knew if the decision was overturned, those laws would come back into effect. Republican Presidents have tried to install SCOTUS justices for decades to overturn RvW, with varying success. Trump just got lucky by getting to install 3 justices at once, but that wasn't enough; pre-existing justices also voted with them, remember, and they were installed by previous Republican presidents. This fight has been going on for a long time.
By contrast, there's is NO such thing going on over here (or most other developed nations that aren't heavily Catholic). It's not a political issue here at all, so there's really no risk of anyone passing such a law. (Plus, law here isn't made by the courts, it's made by the legislature, since the system isn't based on English Common Law.) Similarly, there's no constant political struggle over gun legality. No one wants the laws to become less strict than they already are. The politicians here just argue about things like how to deal with population decline, labor shortage, the weak yen, etc., i.e., important issues that face the country and its citizens today, rather than ideological wedge issues.
It's a very refreshing and positive start to my day!
US politics is hyper-polarized. Japan is the extreme opposite, it's practically a voluntary one party state with free elections.
(It probably helps that a lot of what you might call "far right Japan" either got killed in the war, executed by the victors, or committed suicide in defeat, and then that tendency was suppressed by the US occupiers)
This would be like Clark Kent was telling some kid not to play on the guard rails on a bridge and then the kid fell off. Except that now Superman was too slow to react and didn't save the kid. Don't be blaming Superman (Supreme Court); the problem should've be nipped in the bud earlier (Congress).
I don't think that comes out like your Superman scenario. Possibly Kafka, but like most people making such a comparison, I've not actually read The Trial.
Sure but he got elected with that promise and then immediately reneged and explicitly said he wasn't going to try.
To say the other only thing allowing abortions was the Supreme Court is _only_ correct because the Legislature and Executive branches intentionally didn't add any other blockers. To solely be upset with the Supreme Court is silly, this exact scenario was intentionally created by the other two branches.
You know guns are legal in the US, right?
We don't have that problem in Japan, or any civilized country for that matter. I can walk around in public any time and not worry about someone going on a shooting rampage here.
Keep in mind that gang violence counts as mass shootings so if you're not in a gang or in gang area the risk goes off a cliff. When excluding mass killings that happen as part of Robbery / Gang Violence it drops down to 10 incidents in 2023 [3] which is pretty good compared to Europe's 8 [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2023_mass_shootings_i...
[3]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-...
However, there is a LOT of porn in Japan; the JAV industry is huge. However, here too we're talking about public spaces, and while you can certainly find porn if you want to and know where to look, it's not forced on you anywhere and you could easily not see any. (In offline spaces, it's confined to seedy little "DVD" shops that aren't in main shopping areas. I imagine online stuff is slowly putting these old-fashioned places out of business.)
Ikizukuri is fucking cruel anyway you look at it.
Mutilating a live creature without anaesthetic but keeping it alive just so that it can watch you eat its severed body parts is nasty.
Octopuses are as sentient as humans. To do this to them is vile.
> Bigmotor allegedly inflated insurance claims after employees intentionally damaged vehicles, in some cases with screwdrivers or golf balls. Japan's three major nonlife insurance companies stopped doing business with Bigmotor in June 2022 in response to the allegations.
Some lower-tax (lower than California) destinations are incredible places to live as well - it’s not a choice between anarcho-capitalism and California.
So there’s at least a tiny bit of generosity there.
Neither is "donating" your income to your own charitable organization, which is a well-established tax avoidance scheme rather than actual humanitarianism.
Don’t forget that the news only reports deviations from the norm. If it’s normal, it isn’t news.
People will chase money and power by any means.
While searching for it I found the comic appeared as homework in a marketing class, with this wonderful student asking for help explaining the underlying marketing techniques:
https://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/2-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izqhtBPd4VQ
The note reads something like this:
BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING.
Carpet gets immediately ruined with beer and vomit, as most trains turn in to parties on wheels a lot of the time.
Even the brand new Elizabeth Line in London has fabric seats. We just can’t shake our traditions in the face of obvious hygiene sense.
It's illegal to be intoxicated on the railway (and on the TfL network in London, carrying open alcohol containers and drinking alcohol is banned), but enforcement is very, very low. It would require a huge cultural change to alcohol in this country which nobody seems willing to embrace.
Hilariously we also have "beer trail" services and routes, specifically designed to promote a pub crawl using trains.
We really do have bad relationship with alcohol in the UK.
You protest too much.
And sure enough, today these trains are rolling diapers. No way would I ever sit on one of these things. The level of stupidity here is just unbelievable.
There are always people doing disgusting things wherever they are but they are such a minority that it doesn't really affect the everyday experience of others in general. Maybe you only had a few bad experiences?
In many cities in the US, the answer is _nothing_.
I've ridden commuter buses in the US that had cloth seats and commuter trains that had soft plastic-like seats, and they were quite nice -- but they also cost twice or more as much as a regular bus/ train ride. That price cuts down on certain behaviors.
Probably nothing much to be honest. The train would get cleaned at the end of the line I guess. As to drugs, I don't think anything would happen either (apart from the other passengers leaving the car at the next stop) but people don't do that.
I think the problem is elsewhere, these behaviours just aren't supposed to exist in modern society. I don't know what is with the US society that enables them though.
For one thing, hard seats are not uncomfortable. A well-shaped wooden seat on a rocking chair, for example, is comfortable for hours. And most public-transport trips aren't long enough to really tax one's ass anyway.
For another: Public trains in the USA are a haven for homeless and bums. When you've driven past a coffee shop that has picnic tables on the sidewalk and seen a homeless guy with his pants literally filled with shit sitting at one... you understand the problem.
I don't care what country you're in; cloth seats on mass transit are dumb. They just can't be adequately cleaned. In Paris, a city allegedly suffering from a bedbug outbreak, I'd expect most people to question their use.
I remember when I was young we would slap the seats on the bus and release big horrible clouds of dust.
In Buenos Aires in the 2000s they bought some old trains from Japan and they had red velvet seats. They were not as bad as you think considering they were used.
The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
French officials wanted a lifestyle more like home, including flush toilets.
So they built a sewer system. It was a perfect breeding ground for rats.
Now, Hanoi had a rat problem.
They hired exterminators, but it wasn't enough. So they offered a bounty to anyone who would kill a rat and bring in the severed tail as proof. It was much easier for them to dispose of a collection of rat tails instead of entire rat carcasses.
The locals quickly figured out that you could remove a rat's tail without killing it, and send it back into the sewers to breed more rats with fresh young tails.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre
Here is an article that ties together the rat massacre, the cobra effect, factory workers' gloves, overtime pay, and heat-based bonuses:
https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/leaders-rules
Note that I'm not saying they won't, just that it's a bad idea in a new and exciting way.
I suspect if you time-box the reward that'll fix the cobra effect problem. Announce that you'll only pay for dead rats for ~4 months and at least in the final month people should realize that its time to kill the golden goose and provide all the rats they have instead of breeding for more.
> When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
You seemed to use the fact that a car was used as a taxi in Europe as evidence that the car is not luxurious.
My point is that cars used as taxis in Europe are often from upmarket segments, so it's not good evidence that a car is not luxurious (relatively - we're talking MB/BMW class here).
This does not mean I'm saying that a specific Mercedes from the 1960s was or was not luxurious. I find it hard to imagine any car from the 1960s would be luxurious by modern standards, my experience of older cars is they were very much metal tins on wheels.
The “better” car companies simply design systems that force more labor hours into regular maintenance. For example, BMW’s ingenious battery placement that allows them to bill $700-$900 for 5 hours worth of work. Oh, and changing your own battery will void the warranty. Fortunately for BMW most of their clientele has enough money to not care.
Not in the US it won’t.
See Magnusson Moss:
2302.c here: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid%3AUSC-prel...
You'd have to be a lawyer to make that act work for you.
There isn't an automotive engineer in the world that would keep their job after submitting such a design, let alone get it into production.
Mostly, mascot or emblem theft was a 90's media-generated gangster thing limited primarily to higher-crime areas to wear car emblems on a chain, so maybe they were gopniks but 15 years too late. Also why Rolls Royce invented the retracting bonnet mascot. They early ones were silver plated and later ones were optionally gold plated. (Of course like Porsches, Rolls Royce can and are customized, so I wouldn't at all be surprised if a solid platinum or palladium Spirit of Ecstasy exists.)
80's BMWs, Cadillacs, and Jaguars were big money makers for my dad. His dad and him bemoaned that they could've made more money if only they were dishonest. They both had experience working at dealerships as mechanics. They saw more tactics than these:
- Charging for parts not replaced (which is why you always ask to see the old parts)
- Magically finding other things wrong that need expensive, unnecessary parts (which is why you always get a written estimate before leaving, and appear to have a somewhat understanding of what constitutes the vehicle)
- Eyewash: overselling standard procedures or aspirational steps not performed, usually with the purpose of justifying higher prices and/or increasing customer satisfaction (if there's too much marketing, then you're the mark)
Also: In the US, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) is 99.8% a confidence scam: it's a for-profit marketing company that sells a false appearance of authority and credibility with negligible actual due-diligence or accountability.
And herein began the second scam...
Note that someone can sue(state/county/etc), and still have criminal charges.
A month later we had a break in while I was home alone. He took off when he saw me. We got the door. Now we got a bulletproof 10.000€ door.
To this day I am convinced the door company sent the burglar.
It seems like a great way to identify potential marks, by looking for victims who (A) believe they have enough portable wealth that they are considering expensive security measures and (B) don't yet have any of those security measures already in place.
Most of the apartments are in multi-story buildings.
Also it's easy to see how slashing a seat or breaking a window is vandalism but somehow we've decided anti-homeless architecture and literring pedestrian spaces with subsidized rental e-scooters isn't even if it also drastically reduces quality of life by modifying shared public spaces.
[0]: I dislike how grafitti and defacement is lumped in with functional damage as "vandalism" except for rare cases like road signs. I like to think that there is a tangible difference between changing the appearance of something and damaging it in such a way that it is no longer fully fit for purpose. Even if one believes that "maintaining property value" is a primary purpose of a building's wall or "providing ad space" is a primary purpose of a train exterior, I'd argue that there is a clear moral difference.
BART should've just stopped replacing them because it was already depressing and created a feeling of unease even when it was just a few years old. BART is a symptom of the dysfunctional, lower-classing of American mass-transit in contrast to masses of unyielding cultural exaltation of the single occupant vehicle in gridlock. Hurray that they dug a tunnel under the Bay, but scant few actually want to board a tram that seems perpetually foreshadowing of an escape room or serial killer scene.
Also, 172k is a 75% of Brampton's bus system - from suburban Toronto: https://www.blogto.com/city/2023/07/brampton-beats-out-major...
Enforce anti-social/QoL laws, allow construction, and prosecute crime and I bet BART would see double it's 2019 ridership.
Muni, SF'S bus (well, and intracity rail) system (with roughly the same population as Brampton) is 440k+ weekday average ridership.
Not sure why you are comparing completely unrelated things here.