I don’t like how the phrase “commit crime” frames the foreigner as morally bad.
Japanese people all have a long family history of living inside of the same flavor of society they live in now.
Outsiders might on average have a harder time coping with the expectations of Japanese society, because they don’t share this multigenerational experience in the society. The degree to which they will have a hard time likely depends on how similar the society their own multigenerational experience comes from is to Japanese society, along the most relevant behavioral dimensions.
It’s not that they are bad people, they just have a harder time with the system. We can’t really blame them for that, can we? While at the same time, it is a valid reason to not let them in.
I'm not speaking of people failing to navigate local bureaucracy or "having a harder time coping with the expectations of Japanese society". I'm talking about theft, battery, and homicide (for which the stats are hardest to dispute).
Regardless of your feelings about assigning blame, it's very hard to fault people for choosing to decrease the likelihood of themselves and their fellow citizens from suffering harm from more outsiders.
Well, prior to the imposition of colonial rule in various parts of the world, were there formal penalties for theft, battery or homicide?
As far as I’m aware, it very much depended on who you know, who your family or tribe is, and the power dynamics between the various groups in the territory.
It’s not as if laws and enforcement banning these actions are universal today, and they absolutely weren’t universal not that long ago.
PS don’t miss where I said…
> While at the same time, it is a valid reason to not let them in.
Are they committing crimes typical in other nations, like robbery or littering, or are they behaving in ways that would be socially acceptable but are crimes in Japan?
If there aren’t any immigrants to work them, either the pay will increase or the product/service will disappear. Essential services and products won’t disappear, so this seems okay?
If we look at it from the other direction, we are artificially increasing quality of life by taking advantage of foreigners who have no better option than to work for little pay. Getting rid of this seems positive?
Essential services disappear all the time. Look at the increasing rarity of teachers and the effect that has on student/teacher ratios or quality. Same with medical staff, farm labor, and dozens of other industries.
I'm not saying that exploiting immigrants for labor is necessarily good, but the free hand of the labor market doesn't usually achieve policy goals.
Teaching and medicine are both highly regulated, so not great examples of free market behavior producing poor results. Quite the opposite! Also, even the demand for teaching in the first place is drastically increased by a prisoners dilemma induced by the government, where so many kids go to school that the schools have a near monopoly on childhood peer socialization, despite the age-cohorted butts-in-seats environment not being all that great as far as socialization environments go.
Farm labor is not very regulated, but until about 10 minutes ago it was flooded with cheap foreign labor which seriously distorted the pricing mechanism for labor. And, that distortion helped to paper over some serious money supply expansion, i.e. the foreign labor helped food not get as much more expensive over time as it otherwise would have. If we keep things steady for several years we will see the market stabilize and rebalance, albeit now at a higher level (due to past money supply expansion finally being realized in prices).
*Note that I don’t really support the haphazard way this has been done, and I’m not confident that things actually will be held steady given the political environment, I’m just stating what theoretically would happen if they were.
I’ve been puzzled why climate change messaging seems to ignore the emissions of other large countries like China and India. If USA reduces emissions but others don’t, well we all share the same atmosphere so…
But similar to your angle, I’ve wondered if the climate change messaging is secretly targeted towards resource depletion. If USA switches off oil and oil runs out, who cares if others didn’t switch? But people have a hard time processing “going to run out in 50 years” as a crisis, so instead we get an apocalypse angle, I suppose because humans love the apocalypse (see: various religions).
> I’ve been puzzled why climate change messaging seems to ignore the emissions of other large countries like China and India.
It doesn't. The issue is likely more that you don't see or read widely enough.
Even here on HN you'll see mention of China and India's emissions and use of coal on a regular basis.
The US is a significant mention for two main reasons:-
* of all the human lofted additional CO2 of the past century plus (that sourced from formerly deep underground) the US is the single largest sole country contributor (although China is catching up (but may or may not equal the US)), ...
* the US is still a large per capita contributor today (ignoring tiny tiny outlier countries with small populations and near single export fossil fuel extraction countries) - it has an energy intensive economy.
My personal beef isn't so much with the US but specifically with US based fossil fuel and resource companies of the 1970s onwards (eg: Koch brothers) who were well aware of the problem with increasing the insulation factor of the atmosphere and doubled down anyway - spending large on "think tanks" to promote confusion via media, over sell the appeal of large cars, destroy any and all grass roots campaigns for public transport, etc. (CO2MaXXing ?).
The US has had influence across the planet post WWII, these campaigns just promoted a bad example for profit and deferred early and timely addressing of the issues.
Okay sure I should be more specific. In actions taken by governments, and in what I can only call “propaganda campaigns”, ie education targeted at young people on the topic. I’m not saying nobody is taking about this, but “mainstream sources” don’t talk about it.
Regarding USA contributing more in the past. Cleaner alternatives had not yet been invented at the time. We are supposed to make up for people of our country in the past, most of whom are not even distantly related to ourselves, using the only mass work saving technology that was available at the time? While people in other places use that same old technology today when they don’t have to? Haha yeah I’m not going to do that, and anyone who bites on that one should not be allowed anywhere near decision making at any level.
On per capita - atmosphere does not speak per capita. Atmosphere speaks in absolutes.
If this is the highest priority issue, which it must be for climate activists who buy the doom scenarios (I’m not saying they are wrong about that), climate activists should be urging we ban trade with nations who aren’t on such and such emissions reduction schedule, which is not to be exceeded by USA along strategically relevant dimensions (for example not to affect the economy negatively beyond how China et al are affected negatively), and to be verified by a UN inspection and analysis team à la nuclear weapons.
I have seen precisely zero climate activists advocate for this, and I’m sure you’re going to throw a laundry list of excuses at me (“well actually economic disentanglement is dangerous, we don’t want war, clearly you don’t understand this if you’re making this argument”, etc). The point isn’t to actually ban trade, the point is to apply sufficient pressure to the others to step down emissions while not harming any party relative to the others.
In the 60s/70s they had the world is going into another ice age scare. Based on historical patterns we are in a cooling phase based on Milankovitch cycles. A long slow cooling phase going into another ice age. You can't blame the Koch brothers.
So the Koch brothers came up with the Milankovitch cycles. Even though it was proposed in 1842 by Joseph Adhémar then in 1860 James Croll added orbital theory in 1911 Milutin Milankovitch came up with the math.
The big event that caused it to come into pop culture in the 70s was a landmark paper by James Hays, John Imbrie and Nicholas Shackleton, published in Science in 1976.
But you think its the Koch brothers. And anyone who actual knows history is playing denialist bingo.
You've won the hacker news Candace Owens conspiracy award for ignoring facts and doubling down on a silly conspiracy theory because it fits some narrative you want to promote today.
> So the Koch brothers came up with the Milankovitch cycles.
No.
> But you think its the Koch brothers
That's your strawman. What is known is the amount of effort put in by Koch and others to muddy the waters and belittle what became accepted internationally in the late 1960s.
> You've won the hacker news Candace Owens conspiracy award
Is that someone I should know of?
> for ignoring facts
What facts have I ignored?
> and doubling down on a silly conspiracy theory
What, that tobacco companies hired PR firms to make their poison look good, and fossil fuel companies hired more or less the exact same firms to upsell CO2 ?
That's on the record for anyone that cares to look.
> because it fits some narrative you want to promote today.
It's been the case for nigh on 50 years now - hardly a flash in pan here today gone tomorrow made up story.
The USA is far wealthier, uses more carbon per-person, and is responsible for more historical emissions than China or India. We have an obligation to reduce our gluttony before asking others to go without.
The USA is not wealthy, some people and corporations are wealthy, most people are not. BIG difference.
I like to think of holidays and work / life balance as a measure of wealth. Rich people can take time away from work because they can afford it. If you need to work lots of hours and barely can have a few days off then you arent wealthy.
Let me ask again, if you need to work 2 - 3 jobs are you wealthy ?
If you can only take a weeks worth of holidays in a good year are you wealthy ?
Messaging over here does not ignore that. A big chunk in Australia is about stopping exports of oil and coal, or at the very least taxing the exports more and making it more expensive. You might have to listen to people and organizations actually concerned though, rather than politicians intent on doing the bare minimum to capture the climate vote.
Hmm one of the major relevant cultural values seems to be nepotism, though. Which is common across many cultures and I personally believe it's human nature so I'm not knocking it, per se. I wish I could nepotism too!
So are you recommending that, for example, protestants of German descent begin preferentially funding or buying from people in their in-group? People of anglo descent should start preferring other anglos? Catholics should buy from catholics?
I think the issue is that it's considered okay for some groups to do it while simultaneously being considered EXTREMELY EVIL for other groups to do it.
We can't really recommend that other groups do it with a straight face, they would be instantly shunned and vilified.
EDIT: When I say BUY I mean B2B deals, not consumer level, hence "funding or buying". Sorry for the confusion.
So if USA hadn’t interfered in the middle east or supported Israel, ever, the oil supply coming from the Middle East would be significantly less stable? How…?
Is anyone else getting regulatory capture play vibes from the media coverage of AI and data centers?
It would be awfully convenient for the current big players if friction was added to bringing additional large scale compute resources online. Existing data centers would be grandfathered of course…
I'm not even sure I'd point to "media coverage" when it is Anthropic's own employees stating plainly on Twitter that they think there is a >10% chance AI kills all humans within the next decade.
Given that “this is just like skynet!!!” narrative seems to drive sales and not impede them, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Nonsense. Of course. But for all non-tech-savvy this is a “bad” narrative in a good way. If it can kill humans in the future then it surely can make me a “what I would like in the 80s” photo, right?
I think that media coverage simply reflects the growing anxiety among the public about the capabilities of new models and what future awaits us. Personally, I think that this anxiety is justified.
If this leads to tough regulations about AGI/ASI (e.g., a permanent ban), I doubt that AI companies would benefit financially.
I don't picture new data centers being banned outright. I picture a lot more regulatory friction driven by public reaction which is in large part driven by media (which then also amplifies the perception of the public reaction).
Regulatory friction is generally considered beneficial to established companies, because it makes it harder for new companies to enter the market and for smaller companies to expand.
For example if in the 1960s computers became regulated because they will replace a lot of jobs or enable the building of advanced weapons or whatever, IBM would probably be in a very different position today.
Maybe I’m confused, but I thought whataboutism was more like “you are saying I am doing X bad thing? What about Y bad thing you’re doing, let’s discuss that instead”.
It’s a deflection technique, not a check on logical consistency.
> “you are saying I am doing X bad thing? What about Y bad thing you’re doing, let’s discuss that instead”.
no one is generally expecting or even asking for "let’s discuss that instead". what they are doing is trying to point out that your lack of of care about Y implies that you never actually cared about X in the first place but rather you only care about me doing X.
often times X is actually bad but human nature is such that no one actually cares about it while wanting to appear to when locked down on it. for this reason arguing about X directly is bad optics.
whataboustism is basically an effort to draw attention to the selective enforcement of norms, laws, morality, whatever. hypocrisy is implied.
It can also be used to derail a conversation. I.e. "I find subject X unpleasant, so I am going to imply that you don't care enough about subject Y, which has a passing similarity to it, so that the subject of the conversation turns to Y rather than X. I do not actually care about subject Y, but I won't say that out loud". See also "concern trolling".
I feel like most projects like this must be run by people who are independently wealthy(ish) already and are in it for the long run? Like if this style took off enough to mass produce they could eventually make a lot of money, but if they keep it niche they are never going to make significant money no matter how much they charge.
I could definitely imagine a smaller cheap plasticky version of this being pitched as a more intuitive way for kids to learn piano, maybe that's where they're aiming?
Japanese people all have a long family history of living inside of the same flavor of society they live in now.
Outsiders might on average have a harder time coping with the expectations of Japanese society, because they don’t share this multigenerational experience in the society. The degree to which they will have a hard time likely depends on how similar the society their own multigenerational experience comes from is to Japanese society, along the most relevant behavioral dimensions.
It’s not that they are bad people, they just have a harder time with the system. We can’t really blame them for that, can we? While at the same time, it is a valid reason to not let them in.
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