[HN Gopher] Japan's lost generation is still jobless and living ...
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Japan's lost generation is still jobless and living with their
parents
Author : ucha
Score : 197 points
Date : 2020-10-02 09:41 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| gfxgirl wrote:
| A friend of mine works at Amazon Japan. She's working 10-12 hrs a
| day, 6 days week. She gets paid no overtime. AFAIK that's illegal
| in Japan but here Amazon is doing it.
| bobloblaw45 wrote:
| Isn't it like a cultural thing over there where you're expected
| to work overtime and essentially kill yourself for your
| company? Might be dated info but I remember someone saying
| nobody even thinks about going home before the boss regardless
| of when they got in so the boss never has the chance to see
| them leave.
| justicezyx wrote:
| No that's the government deliberately practice no oversight
| on corporations.
| falcolas wrote:
| Companies demanding unpaid overtime and long workweeks is
| common enough that Japanese literature has a term for them:
| Black Companies.
| tasogare wrote:
| Not a big news, Amazon is a crap company exploiting its workers
| worldwide and creating a lot of externalities. If the practice
| is illegal, an employee could sue (and win) but that personal
| choice.
|
| On the 10-12 hours, the concept of "work" in Japan is a big
| different than in the West, in particular because there seems
| to have almost no notion of productivity. I often see 4 people
| on a task that would be allocated to one worker in Europe, or
| 12 person cleaning the same square meter. That combined with
| perfectionism (again, with no notion of productivity) that if
| 1% improvement can be done with 300% effort they try to do it,
| is a perfect cocktail to raise the total "worked" hours.
|
| And finally there is the bureaucracy. Today I spoke with
| someone about implementing an idea, where the implementation of
| the idea is literally sending an email. I spend 10 minutes
| explaining it. But that could not be done directly! No, that
| person need to consult her boss. How long this will take?
| Probably at least half an hour... 2 or 3 times more if there is
| back and forth with me through the intermediate person. How
| many "worked" hours does this represent in total? I plan on a
| least one man/hour. In my country: doing the task directly,
| which represents at least a 120 times better productivity...
| yorwba wrote:
| I wonder how much the stories about Japanese unemployment are
| just driven the the need for a good story vs. looking at actual
| figures. The Japanese labor force participation rate for 15-64
| year-olds rose from about 70% in 1990 to 79% in 2020, as
| estimated by the International Labour Organization. In that time
| frame, it overtook China and the US (both have falling labor
| force participation rates) and the only other country with a
| similar trajectory I could find is Germany. Most other countries
| I tried have much lower rates.
|
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?location...
| brazzy wrote:
| The participation rate is a really coarse measure.
|
| In Japan, it has increased mainly because among the younger
| generation, far more women stay in the workforce after their
| 20s. But as the article describes, their career prospects are
| very limited and few of them ever get a chance at stable
| lifetime employment that used to be the norm (but is also
| becoming less and less available) for men.
| yorwba wrote:
| The male labor force participation rate grew from 83% to 86%.
| So although the increase was greater for women (from 57% to
| 72%), that hasn't reduced male employment.
|
| Male https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.MA.ZS?l
| ocat...
|
| Female https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.FE.ZS
| ?locat...
|
| By "stable lifetime employment" do you mean staying at a
| single company for one's whole working life? Do you have any
| statistics showing that this is decreasing? (Even if it does,
| I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.)
| agd wrote:
| Does Japan really have a 'lost generation of jobless' if their
| unemployment rate is only 2.29%? That seems incredibly low to me.
|
| Source:
| https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/unemployment...
| baud147258 wrote:
| Do they count people as unemployed only if they are actively
| looking for work? If it was the case, there could be many
| people without a job and not looking for one, which could
| explain the discrepancy
| sirspacey wrote:
| The article clearly identifies the source of this challenge:
|
| HR culture
|
| I've worked in HR in the US. To say it is unbearably broken
| doesn't begin to cover it.
|
| Japan's rigid hiring rituals are specific but I've encountered
| quite a bit of rigidity in HR culture in the US as well.
|
| As we see nearly daily here on HN, the "filter process" HR uses
| is highly resistant to change and based on traditions that are
| objectively useless and horribly biased.
|
| Somehow we seem to miss that economists are not the best experts
| to consult with here. Put another way - fix HR and suddenly
| economists wouldn't need to "explain" so much when it comes to
| labor market dislocations.
|
| So why haven't we fixed these issues?
|
| I know hundreds of people in HR trying to address these
| challenges. They invariably run into the fact that executives and
| hiring managers are the source of the misconceptions driving
| these systemic problems. That's not a category of people who get
| overridden in companies.
|
| I encountered this even in my own startups. Board members and
| company leaders believed they had near clairvoyance on how to
| hire - despite rarely being correct in practice.
|
| tl;dr; The people (execs, hiring managers) who set the
| expectations around hiring have an unreasonable and inflexible
| dedication to their assumptions about how hiring should be done,
| leading those given the job of managing the hiring process (HR)
| to design woefully inefficient and biased hiring processes,
| leading to endemic dislocation in the job market that destroys
| the lives of people who didn't pass the first check-point in
| their careers.
|
| Checkout "DIY University" for more history on this issue. This is
| a problem that can, and has, destroyed nations.
| csense wrote:
| If a lot of companies have rigid hiring processes where a lot
| of talented people through the cracks, why aren't those people
| snapped up by competitors who are more flexible?
| [deleted]
| marrianeKK wrote:
| >The article clearly identifies the source of this challenge:
| HR culture
|
| I don't think so. I don't think the problem here is companies
| struggling to find the right people. It seems to me that
| companies have slashed hiring. There are too few regular job
| positions and too many people seeking them.
| [deleted]
| roenxi wrote:
| The things that stand out to me about Japan:
|
| * 3rd largest economy.
|
| * 11th largest population (top 10 until recently, they basically
| tie with Mexico).
|
| * If you look at a table of countries by area, they are there.
| Even in the top half, thanks to places like Tuvalu.
|
| I think there is a very strong on-the-face-of-it argument that
| they just have too many people and not enough for them to do,
| economically speaking. If they could drop their population and
| keep the economy about the same (and if they have so many dead-
| end jobs and so few opportunities, they could) then they would be
| both a wealthy country and absurdly wealthy on a personal level.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| I watch NHK US a bit. Every night they have some show with a
| westerner riding some train line or riding a bike around and
| the landscape - which is pretty thin on people. Train lines
| manned by retired workers just to keep them going. Cyclist
| stops at at famous peach or strawberry orchards and there is
| some 90 year old on their knees weeding, kids are all in the
| city. Of course, it will all become industrial agro-farming
| once they're gone, but is that the best cultural, social,
| economic solution?
|
| It reminds me of western Ireland. Hiking around for hours
| through the country and not seeing a living soul. Expensive
| (holiday I assume) houses with slate roofs on a couple of
| hectares and empty.
| Animats wrote:
| Western Ireland has been like that since the Great Potato
| Famine in 1840. Beautiful country; I've ridden from Carna to
| Galway on horseback. Not good farmland, though.
| cco wrote:
| This sounds interesting, I'd love to watch it, could you link
| to one of those videos? I see lots of video results for NHK
| US, but a lot don't seem to be of the type that you're
| talking about.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| YT has mostly clips, not the full shows. These are
| broadcast on HDTV and probably some cable markets.
|
| Cycling shows: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/cycle/
| Train: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/japanrailway/
|
| The best series is Document 72 Hours:
| https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/72hours/
|
| Some can be seen on demand, others, they'll give a repeat
| date. These are fascinating, and be warned, they can swing
| from happy to gut wrenching. There's one episode where
| they're in a Home Center talking to kids about their
| projects and the next they're talking to a guy about
| kitchen tiles. He talks about his wife always wanting a new
| kitchen, but he was always too busy... and now she's dead.
| So he's working on the kitchen in her memory.
|
| It's an introspection on a society that is fraying at the
| edges. The producers seem to be trying to communicate that.
| As Krugman says, if you want to know our future, look to
| Japan.
| legerdemain wrote:
| NHK is just a national broadcaster, like NBC in the US. I
| assume the grandparent means semi-promotional documentaries
| about the Japanese countryside, like this.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6yhndEdqrI
| seniorivn wrote:
| what a ridiculous assumption that there could be too many
| people and not enough for them to do.
|
| in the last decade japanees workforce grew despite overall
| population decline/getting old. mainly due to women
| participation increase. If there was not enough to do it
| wouldn't be possible.
|
| almost all on-the-face-of-it arguments are oversimplification
| of largely complex issues. Sadly most(all of them?) government
| interventions are done by politicians on the basis of such
| arguments...
| LatteLazy wrote:
| People here are disagreeing with you, but I actually think
| you're exactly right about most modern economies: too many
| people and too few jobs leads to all sorts of social issues
| from wealth inequality to excessive hours to crazy house
| prices.
| acatton wrote:
| I also agree with you. I feel that if there were a real
| shortage of labour (as opposed to our current shortage of
| cheap labour), a lot of bullshit jobs[1] would become a huge
| waste of resources.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o
| paganel wrote:
| So Malthus was in a sense right, as the "too many people"
| issue has showed up constantly since he wrote his stuff. And
| before anyone comes and tells me that "he was wrong because
| the Earth can sustain 8-9 billion humans, like it does right
| now", I'll say that there's no way Earth's actual ecosystem
| can sustain a major part of that population regularly eating
| beef, or regularly flying, or having scattered individual
| houses instead of buildings with tens or more flats each etc.
| oblio wrote:
| You're awfully pessimistic and ignoring human creativity.
| And also human capacity for accepting compromises.
|
| When Malthus lived, there were about 1 billion people. It's
| hard to estimate, but I'd guess at most 10% of those were
| living non-miserable lives, so about 100 million people at
| most.
|
| Now the world middle class is 4 billion (40x) and the world
| upper class is probably around half a billion people (5x).
| I'm willing to bet that each and every one of those middle
| class individuals live better lives than the upper class of
| his time. We've been able to scale that 40x in 200 years.
| Despite wars, natural disasters, social strife, etc.
|
| We're pretty resilient.
| ginko wrote:
| > You're awfully pessimistic and ignoring human
| creativity. And also human capacity for accepting
| compromises.
|
| Sure we might manage to live with 10 billion people on
| the planet, maybe even more. But why would we want to? I
| see no value in having more people on the planet. If
| anything it only reduces the value of each individual.
| oblio wrote:
| I'm not saying that I want more people (or fewer people)
| on the planet.
|
| It's just a fact. We're 8 billion and we'll probably be
| 11 billion when we reach peak population.
|
| > I see no value in having more people on the planet.
|
| I have to point out that you say this as a person on this
| planet :-)
| mac01021 wrote:
| > I see no value in having more people on the planet. If
| anything it only reduces the value of each individual.
|
| Does it? A group of people who just know how to raise and
| care for nerfs may not be worth anything to me. But add a
| bunch more people who know how to turn nerf wool into a
| high-quality textile and I start to value the nerf
| herders a lot more.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| We have also incurred some ecological debt.
| ben_w wrote:
| Malthus' argument fits your later points, but not why a
| sub-population is experiencing unemployment. Unlike food,
| jobs don't grow on trees.
| primroot wrote:
| I'd say this is effectively the opposite of Malthus,
| since too much food (or rather too many products in
| general) kills jobs, and more fundamentally, kills the
| ability to earn rent from investments.
| ben_w wrote:
| I don't think that's how economies work, but I accept I
| am likely to have a very flawed understanding of the
| field.
|
| More people means more potential consumers, surely? So
| the only way there could be "too many people" is if the
| market is dominated by goods which have a high one-off
| cost _and_ trivial per-unit costs, such as software or
| other digital goods?
| tuatoru wrote:
| > too many people and too few jobs leads to all sorts of
| social issues from wealth inequality ...
|
| You have causation exactly backwards.
|
| If poor people had higher incomes they would spend them. (In
| the jargon: "marginal propensity to consume declines with
| income".) That spending would create jobs and sustain incomes
| for other people like them. I know in my own case, if I had
| more money I would hire a personal shopper to buy my clothes,
| a cleaner, a personal trainer,...
|
| Wealth and income inequality lead to stagnant societies where
| nobody is happy and most people are miserable.
| op03 wrote:
| Have you head of the Plant Kingdom?
|
| They just stand around doing nothing the whole day.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| But not just quantity of work, but also quality; the US is
| infamous for having millions of bullshit jobs with bad pay,
| poor working conditions, and no future prospects.
|
| This was pretty bad with sub-minimum wage pay jobs
| (restaurant / bar industry, tipping culture) and people
| having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, but it's
| gotten worse with the race-to-the-bottom gig economy, 0-hour
| contracts, prison labor/slavery, no changes in minimum wage
| or worker rights, de-unionization / union discouragement,
| etc.
| mathattack wrote:
| Their population will drop. Each couple only has something like
| 1.2 kids. Lack of people to pay down their debts will be the
| long term problem.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Most of the debt is held by the Japanese themselves. They
| control their own currency. It isn't likely to be a problem
| for them.
| mathattack wrote:
| Even still, the debt is held by people who eventually
| expect to use it to find their retirements. They can avoid
| external driven shocks, but at some point a smaller
| population can't produce enough care for a larger one. That
| will play out in the debt markets, either with defaults or
| inflation.
| smabie wrote:
| The BOJ has been trying to raise inflation for like 30
| years now and has epically failed. Inflation will not be
| the problem. The velocity of money in Japan is criminally
| low.
| cryptica wrote:
| It is going to be a problem because in an inflationary
| monetary system, you need to give out loans at a constantly
| increasing rate in order to pay off the debt of the
| previous generation. If the new generation is not growing
| fast enough, they will not be able to afford to take out
| enough new debt to buy assets from the previous generation
| (thus allowing the previous generation to pay of their
| debts from the sale or lease of real estate), then prices
| could crash quickly when the previous generation starts
| defaulting on their loans.
|
| It's also why real estate prices are so high in Japan. The
| older generation needs to squeeze out as much as they can
| from each member of the younger generation since there are
| so few of them in numbers.
| kazinator wrote:
| You can buy a detached house in the Tokyo Metropolitan
| area for less than a 1 bedroom condo in Vancouver,
| Canada. An old house for significantly less. This broad
| observation is easily confirmed by browsing real estate
| listings.
|
| E.g. random hit: small 3LDK house in Kashiwa built in
| 1981:
|
| https://house.goo.ne.jp/buy/uh/detail/4/12217/37091100002
| 300...
|
| 6000000 yen ~= $60K USD.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I'm wondering what you mean by "real estate prices are so
| high in Japan"? Relative to other countries? Or some
| point in the past in Japan?
|
| My assumption is that declining population is leading to
| surplus housing and declining real-estate prices in most
| of the country.
|
| And even in the Tokyo area where demand is still strong,
| homes are still more affordable than in other large
| cities like New York and London.
| prichino wrote:
| I love how you are exposing the cognitive dissonance between
| too many people for the economy/world and immigrants do not
| depress wages. How can someone hold these two views
| simultaneously are they not the same, just at a different
| scale?
| Animats wrote:
| The population of Japan is shrinking. A lot. The population
| peaked in 2011 and is down about 2 million since then. Outside
| of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, Japan is emptying out. Japan does
| not have too many people.
|
| India, though...
| brazzy wrote:
| That's not how economy works.
|
| There is no such thing in general as "too many people for the
| economy".
|
| "The economy" is the sum of goods and services produced and
| consumed. Everyone who lives consumes, and could easily consume
| more. The economy is generally limited by the ability to
| produce, and is generally limited by the number of working-age
| people to do the producing. Unemployment can be result of
| production being bottlenecked by something else:
| * raw materials - but Japan never had an abundance of those
| even when their economy looked like it would dominate the world
| in the 80s * education - but the people the article talks
| about have university degrees * capital - again not
| something Japan lacks
|
| So it's not one of those. I submit that it's _organization_ -
| the Japanese society and economy is extremely rigid and
| maintains some egregious inefficiencies in the labor market,
| simply because it 's always been done that way.
|
| Companies would rather hire a new 22 year old graduate at full
| pay than give a 30 year old with an even better degree a chance
| at a 30% discount, not out of concerns over the 30 year old's
| skills being outdated but simply because hiring new graduates
| is what you do. They'll hire non-graduates only on temporary
| contracts when short of workers, but never in a million years
| consider promoting them and converting them to regular
| employees, no matter how good they are.
| dustingetz wrote:
| Economies not only produce, they also take. For example, two
| free people could engage in free trade where one is holding a
| gun and the other voluntarily gives up their wallet. At scale
| we call that a Trade Agreement.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I'm unsure where you're going with this comment?
| dustingetz wrote:
| I'm saying an empire's wealth in large part is a function
| of it's military - in modern times, that would be the USA
| aircraft carriers parked off the persian gulf and china
| https://news.usni.org/category/fleet-tracker
| sprash wrote:
| That is exactly how the economy works.
|
| Demand and supply. Oversupply in labor results directly in
| diminishing incomes and the ability of employers to be
| extremely picky about who to hire (e.g. like you said nobody
| over 30).
| brazzy wrote:
| Wrong because every person who supplies labor also
| generates demand for goods and services, which generates
| demand for labor. Simply "removing" unemployed people would
| _not_ in fact fix the oversupply of labor.
|
| I also explained that the problem is not just that
| employers are picky because of an oversupply, they are
| picky in ways that are actually not really in their own
| interest and which _contribute_ to the oversupply problem.
| sprash wrote:
| Wrong. Additional demand beyond bare necessities is only
| generated if there is disposable income available which
| is not the case when there is a oversupply of labor
| driving down wages.
|
| If employers would act systematically against their own
| interest by hiring only young people it would be easy for
| investors to come in eliminate them in the market. But
| they won't because they can't. Employers prefer young
| people because they are cheap and they hire them because
| they can.
| brazzy wrote:
| Oh boy. The bare necessities of someone _is_ already
| "additional demand" over that person not being present.
| Disposable income is a completely irrelevant factor here.
| In fact, disposable income is the part that _doesn 't_
| generate the same level of economic demand because it can
| be saved rather than spent.
|
| And no, it is _not_ easy for investors to outcompete
| incumbents simply by being more efficient with their
| employment policies, _especially_ not in a society like
| Japan. And my point is that employers are not hiring
| older people even though they could pay them _less_.
| roenxi wrote:
| > There is no such thing in general as "too many people for
| the economy".
|
| Sure there is. If nothing else, at some point you have more
| people than can be physically fed with the available land.
|
| Each additional person uses up a certain amount of resources.
| If the marginal resource gain of adding another worker is
| smaller than that; then economically there are too many
| people. There is no principle saying that cannot happen.
| brazzy wrote:
| I did explicitly explain that the economy can be
| bottlenecked on other things (which is where that "in
| general" comes from) and why the one that seems to apply in
| the case of Japan has nothing to do with there being too
| many people.
| chii wrote:
| > If nothing else, at some point you have more people than
| can be physically fed with the available land.
|
| The malthusian argument has been used since the old ages to
| argue for fewer people because of resource shortages (https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Modern_Malthusia...)
| . It has not eventuated.
|
| The more people there are, the more minds there are at
| looking for solutions to problems, the more able the human
| race will be. But of course, these people need investment
| to obtain benefit - they can't just be empty mouths to
| feed.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Well, water shortages in some places are coming
| dangerously close to the Malthusian problem eventuating.
|
| Drought has contributed to the Syrian civil war and Egypt
| threatened Ethiopia with war over their megadamming
| project on the Blue Nile. Places like Yemen have an order
| of magnitude more people than in 1950 while relying on
| the same water resources.
|
| This is not an easy problem to solve, water is too heavy
| to transport in significant amounts to places like Sanaa
| (elevation 7000 ft, over a million people, mild desert
| climate).
| roenxi wrote:
| What is the argument there, that I can't point to Japan
| as an example of Malthusianism because you don't believe
| in Malthusianism?
|
| There is a physical limit somewhere. Just because we
| didn't find it in the last hundred years doesn't mean we
| won't in the future. Real growth in % terms eventually
| stops because it hits a physical limit; that isn't a
| controversial idea. It is almost too obvious to state.
| Humanity can't maintain 1% Year-on-year growth in crop
| yield indefinitely. At some point; the improvements stop.
| The longer the improvements have been going on for the
| _more likely_ it is they will stop.
| brazzy wrote:
| Yes (and you can take that argument to deliciously absurd
| levels by pointing out that eventually humanity would
| have to form a sphere whose radius expands faster than
| light speed).
|
| But concerning the actual topic at hand, Japan's labor
| market problems have nothing whatsoever to do with a
| resource or land shortage.
| roenxi wrote:
| They probably have something to do with that. At the
| moment, for Japan has a tiny handful of iron mines [0].
| So if they want to produce a steel widget, they have to
| justify someone transporting the iron either through the
| Chinese mainland or up the coast, past a lot of people
| who are learning to do wonderful things with steel. They
| import a lot of coal from Australia but China has
| relatively easy access overland from provinces like Inner
| Mongolia.
|
| I'm not sure how much of an advantage they gain from
| having very easy port access by virtue of being an island
| (probably quite a big one, I assume). But it is hard to
| accept they wouldn't be having a much easier time if they
| had easy access to something like the Saudi oil fields,
| the US oil fields, the Chinese coal fields, etc etc. They
| are a long way away from the good sources of natural
| resources.
|
| And they struggle to be self sufficient in food in the
| first result I found [1]. That is pretty different from
| somewhere like the US. There is a real risk of war in
| East Asia, so I imagine they'd be quite uncomfortable
| with that.
|
| They have completely different resource-use problems than
| the economies that are larger than they are. The idea
| that the US would have to exert itself to be self
| sufficient in food is rather weird, as is the idea that
| China would struggle to justify transporting resources to
| the country from Mongolia, etc. It is obvious to me what
| could be done with more people in the US or China. In
| Japan there is probably something, but it does require
| actual ability to find instead of just "dig more, grow
| more, build more, forge more" that their competitors for
| the best-economy crown can manage.
|
| Japan needs transformative technological improvements to
| grow. The US needs warm bodies. China needed to stop the
| Great Leap Forward and put competent leaders in charge.
| The Japanese challenge is much greater.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mines_in_Japan
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture,_forestry,_
| and_fis...
| brazzy wrote:
| Japan in the 1980 didn't have any better access to
| natural resources than it has today, yet it didn't have
| the labor market problems described in the article. Many,
| many other countries don't have a lot of natural
| resources and are not having these problems.
| nipponese wrote:
| Like others having lived there for a short period of time, I
| agree with this observation. The cultural premium on risk,
| that may merely inconvenience someone, is unreasonably high
| (by my standard, anyway). Ever have to pay a bribe to a
| landlord to rent an apartment as a matter of accepted
| business protocol? Look up "reikin". Then you'll realize why
| some think it's totally reasonable to live out of an internet
| cafe.
| freetime2 wrote:
| Calling it a bribe is seriously misleading. A bribe implies
| illegal or dishonest behavior. But reikin is perfectly
| legal, and is typically fully disclosed up front in the
| rental listing.
|
| It's basically just a one-time fee that is paid up front -
| something which is not at all uncommon in the world of
| commerce.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| It's not a bribe. That's your negative spin. The positive
| spin is it's just 2/26th pre-payment of the rent for 2
| years. You then pay 1/26th every month for 2 years, repeat
| when you renew your contract. Do I like having to pay
| 2/26th up front (2 months rent?) no. But I also would
| prefer not to have to put down payments on cars/houses.
| tasogare wrote:
| You are wrong. Those fees are added to the normal rent,
| they are not part of it. I choose my current appartment
| in part because there was no additional "gift money" to
| pay. Each time one moves place those have to be paid,
| which makes moving quite costly.
| neilparikh wrote:
| I think gfxgirl's point is that you can mentally model
| the gift money as added on the rent, and use that number
| when comparing apartments.
|
| Ex. 50/mo + 240 gift money (for a 2 year lease) == 60/mo
| without gift money.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| I'm not wrong. Different apartments give different offers
| just like everything else in the world.
| brazzy wrote:
| If it truly were a pre-payment, it would be partially
| refunded when the rental contract terminates early.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| No, it wouldn't. It would just be your non-refundable
| downpayment. Plenty of other things have non-refundable
| up front payments in the USA and other countries.
| michaelt wrote:
| Loads of countries have something functionally equivalent
| to reikin - just they call it a "background check fee" or
| "credit check fee" or "administration charge" or "inventory
| fee"
| asdasdasdas5453 wrote:
| On HN when people discuss CS/privacy/programming the
| conversation is very thorough and interesting.
|
| When the discussion is about economics (the topic I have
| studied at uni) most comments are just plain wrong and show a
| complete ignorance about the topic.
|
| If one wants a counter argument to "too many people for the
| economy" one can start here :
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523702?seq=1
|
| "Using data from the Current Population Survey, this paper
| describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the
| Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami
| labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor
| supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even
| greater because most of the immigrants were relatively
| unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have
| had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of
| less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated
| earlier. The author suggests that the ability of Miami's
| labor market to rapidly absorb the Mariel immigrants was
| largely owing to its adjustment to other large waves of
| immigrants in the two decades before the Mariel Boatlift."
|
| There are many causes explaining unemployment some due to
| macroeconomic factors such as the monetary policy, others due
| to regulations of the labor market, others due to the lack of
| innovation, ..... They have been studied in depth. But "too
| many people for the economy" is not one of them.
| paulcole wrote:
| > When the discussion is about economics (the topic I have
| studied at uni) most comments are just plain wrong and show
| a complete ignorance about the topic.
|
| Imagine how little they know about the topics you haven't
| studied.
|
| The overall quality of comments here is the same as every
| other niche discussion forum. OK on the original topic.
| Pretty poor on everything else. The only advantage is that
| this place at least has some moderation.
| squaresmile wrote:
| > When the discussion is about economics (the topic I have
| studied at uni) most comments are just plain wrong and show
| a complete ignorance about the topic.
|
| I think curating a discussion board to have knowledgeable
| discussion about many things is a really hard task. On many
| professional boards, discussions about other subjects are
| put into an OT corner. HN doesn't split discussions into
| topics so I guess expectation of comments' quality carries
| over.
|
| I would just make a mental note: Oh this is not about
| CS/privacy/programming and adjust accordingly.
|
| I suppose it's one of the reasons one should acquaint
| themselves with people from a variety of backgrounds and
| don't run away when others are not as knowledgeable about
| CS/privacy/programming. Actually
| 01100011 wrote:
| > most comments are just plain wrong and show a complete
| ignorance about the topic.
|
| This seems to be a problem inherent to many such forums on
| the internet. When the discussion is controlled by a
| certain subset of that population, usually via comments,
| submissions and voting, that subset tends to self-select
| and alienate alternative viewpoints. Participants are
| rewarded with a sense of validation for things that appeal
| to the group but aren't necessarily true or accurate(or
| humane, fair, respectful, etc).
|
| I think this topic needs a whole lot more analysis and
| public debate as more and more opinions are solidified in
| these balkanized communities. I quit reddit over these
| issues and am hanging on to HN by a thread. At this point
| I'd rather pay to hear opinions and analysis of experts
| than be influenced by, and participate in, internet echo
| chambers.
| eru wrote:
| > If one wants a counter argument to "too many people for
| the economy" one can start here :
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523702?seq=1
|
| Or you can just point out that, well, if there are too many
| people, just (virtually) split the country down the middle:
| voila, fewer people in the country.
|
| A more sophisticated argument brings up density. But it's
| usually the sparsely populated parts of a country that are
| poorer.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Ah the "snap" strategy.
| kwillets wrote:
| see also: Malthus.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I think there is a very strong on-the-face-of-it argument
| that they just have too many people and not enough for them to
| do, economically speaking.
|
| Japan's greatest problem is that they have a geriatric
| population, coupled with low fertility rates, and an
| _extremely_ unhealthy work ethic /culture. But, as usual with
| demographic stuff, the nasty effects won't really appear
| visible for decades - and by then it may very well be too late.
| latch wrote:
| I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've been
| to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better future
| [compared to anywhere else I've been].
|
| Yet there seems to be a fairly constant negative economic
| narrative about Japan (and this narrative seems to be decades
| old). What's the deal? Are my observations superficial, or are
| economists just annoyed that Japan doesn't fit their world-view
| (low growth must equal disaster).
| gfxgirl wrote:
| What about Japan seems like the future? Maybe you should try
| Singapore or many of the big cities in China. Singapore's
| architecture looks far more in the future than anything in
| Japan at this point. So do many other more modern Asian cities.
| China has lots of poverty but the big cities are far further
| along in their switch to digital than Japan.
|
| It was a big deal during lockdown that so much of Japan's
| government runs on paper documents that have to be stamped with
| official personal seals (hanko). The new prime minister has
| claimed it's one of this top priorities because Japan is so far
| behind.
| latch wrote:
| I've lived for multiple years in Singapore, Shanghai and Hong
| Kong. I think they're all great.
|
| For the sake of argument, I'll try to keep this about Tokyo,
| but a key observation of mine is that _all_ of Japan is like
| this.
|
| Objectively, Tokyo has the lowest pollution. Singapore is
| close, on average, but it can have awful week-long spikes.
| Tokyo has the lowest crime rate. Again, Singapore is
| basically the same, but it does have a high incarceration
| rate. Japan has the lowest income inequality gap (couldn't
| find Tokyo-specific statistics). Japan has the highest life
| expectancy and the lowest infant mortality rate (tied with
| Singapore re infant mortality). Japan also has the highest
| rate of people who completed tertiary education.
|
| Pollution and income inequality are, for me, major
| indicators. Income equality benefits everyone; and, as much
| as I love Singapore (I really do), it's hard for me to
| consider it an ideal future city because of this (and the
| inequality has a racial aspect which, I think, is the source
| of its persistence).
|
| The lockdown highlighted the worst in every country. Both
| China and Singapore had clear failings (and successes).
|
| I guess we're measuring "future" differently. Technology vs
| [e]quality of life.
| andi999 wrote:
| What I thought as the most striking difference between
| singapore and tokyo is the noise level feels much less in
| tokyo.
| golemiprague wrote:
| Singapore is boring, the whole place seems like a plastic
| copy of whatever the original is. Tokyo has its own culture
| and vibe and it shows, it is just much more fun. Every day
| in Tokyo you can discover new things, in Singapore the only
| thing you discover is another international food franchise.
| So apart from all the technicalities those are not even
| comparable places.
| asutekku wrote:
| I've lived in japan and believe me, what you see as a tourist
| does not translate into reality. Japan in general is about 10
| years behind the western world and in some places even more.
| Sure, tourist facing areas and central tokyo are pretty nice,
| but that's not the reality in most places.
| asdff wrote:
| Are you currently in the western world? I live in Los
| Angeles, which is a city that feels like it's trapped in the
| 1990s. Our highways were never finished and the city is
| fundamentally crippled as a result. We are building rail
| faster than any other city but it's still far too little and
| much too late, and what we do build is littered with
| compromises and further issues that hobble its utility, such
| as a failure to develop grade separations, until the project
| is redone entirely. The local government is corrupt. The FBI
| is indicting councilmen and city hall officials left and
| right. We are zoned for a smaller population than we were in
| the 1920s, with 4x the population living here today compared
| to the 1920s.
|
| This isn't just LA. Development across the U.S. over the past
| 20 years has been largely stagnant, and this is reflective in
| our huge shortage of housing supply that has come to bite us
| in the rear in recent decades with homes increasingly out of
| reach for working people, not just in California, but
| increasingly in flyover places like Idaho and Ohio too.
|
| Of course, maybe it's the U.S. that is 30 years behind the
| western world.
| everdrive wrote:
| What does it mean to be "10 years behind the western world" ?
| Are they behind in technology, values, policy? Can you give
| some examples? I'm not disagreeing with you, just curious for
| more info. (I don't know much about Japan myself.)
| jhanschoo wrote:
| A partial answer: Googling 'japan fax' would give you many
| articles attesting that faxes are still a stable for
| communication in offices.
|
| e.g.
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-
| ja...
|
| > Japan's health ministry has said it will allow health
| centres to report new coronavirus cases online, instead of
| by handwritten faxes, after a doctor lambasted the legal
| requirement.
|
| Another very externally visible example is that the
| Japanese have taken a long time to transition from
| SHIFT_JIS to Unicode on the web, and on Windows.
| kiliancs wrote:
| I appreciate this is a partial answer, but by those
| standards the US is also similarly behind. For example,
| still commonly use checks and they are nowhere near
| transitioning to the metric system.
| [deleted]
| T-R wrote:
| While I don't think Japan should be judged solely on its
| fax machines (they're ahead in some places and behind in
| others), there is a difference with fax machine usage in
| Japan vs the US - they're a trailing indicator of another
| bottleneck. Fax machines are so widespread in Japan
| largely because they ease the process of physically
| stamping documents with a registered stamp (a hanko),
| which is used instead of a signature. So far they've
| failed to digitize them, and it's often cited as a huge
| cause of bureaucratic slowdown, especially in the
| pandemic. One of the goals of the new prime minister is
| to finally start phasing them out.
| com2kid wrote:
| > So far they've failed to digitize them, and it's often
| cited as a huge cause of bureaucratic slowdown,
| especially in the pandemic.
|
| Compare this to the US where Bill Clinton signed the
| Electronic Signatures Act[1] back in 2000.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Signatures_i
| n_Globa...
| flintomalley wrote:
| I've been working in the computer graphics field for
| 25-years, the last 10 of which (and currently) have been in
| Japan. Before I got here 10-years ago, I had visions of
| Japanese studios having cutting-edge tools, all built in-
| house, created to automate tasks, making production
| efficient.
|
| I was extremely disappointed.
|
| I understand that Japan has a reputation of being at the
| forefront of technology and, while the manufacturing sector
| may have had extreme advances in the 80's and 90's, those
| advances have fallen, with nothing really of note since. No
| longer is Sony the leader in electronic hardware. Toyota is
| no longer the leader of car manufacturing efficiency. When
| was the last time you've heard or read about anything
| innovative coming out of Japan? There's nothing
| "disruptive" coming out of here. They are riding on their
| long-past reputation of being fore-runners of tech. In my
| opinion, it's not so much a lack of intellectual
| availability here, but rather, deep-rooted cultural
| phenomena that has been holding this place hostage for so
| long.
|
| Disclaimer: my experience is in computer graphics, so is
| limited to that industry. Please take my opinions with a
| grain of salt. But when I was jumping around different
| studios back home, before moving to Japan, there was always
| a dedicated technology team present, from small 10-person
| outfits, to huge 400-people studios. CG companies know that
| using software just out-of-the-box was not enough to
| produce animation profitably, so they invested in tech
| teams to create tools and production pipelines that would
| make the production process faster, reduce human error, and
| ultimately, make the company more money. I was blown away
| that this mindset was not present in most of the studios
| here. Most of the studios do not want to invest money into
| a tech team, as the benefits of technology are not exactly
| tangible or visible right away to the executives. There is
| also a deeper issue with taking pride in "doing it by
| hand". There are more issues, but both of the ones
| described above point to a pretty "old school" way of
| thinking.
|
| Of course, not every person I have worked with agrees with
| any of the above, but the mindset is present enough to
| stifle innovation in my field. Where there IS innovation,
| it is created by non-Japanese folks. Much of this
| technology is quickly forgotten after being used briefly.
|
| I live here, so I guess it can't be that bad. But I have to
| say that there is a particular naievety present. Even when
| proposed with new ideas that make sense, there is almost
| always push-back.
|
| Holy cow, I could write a lot more, but I'll just leave it
| at this: Japan is absolutely not the technology utopia one
| may think it is.
| stuxnet79 wrote:
| you should turn this into a blog post. this is a very
| interesting take.
| chrischen wrote:
| I've stayed there for extended periods (months) and while I
| may not live like a poorer or even average income Japanese, I
| can say day to day life quality is pretty ahead in
| Tokyo/Osaka/ surrounding areas at least (but then most people
| live in and around Tokyo or big cities).
| growlist wrote:
| > Japan in general is about 10 years behind the western world
| and in some places even more
|
| Sounds good to me
|
| Edit: because the West is such a utopia in 2020? Please...
| bergstromm466 wrote:
| > Japan in general is about 10 years behind the western world
|
| In which areas is Japan behind? What are some of your
| observations?
| robjan wrote:
| When was the last time you used a fax machine? We maintain
| one specifically for communicating with Japanese companies.
| asdff wrote:
| Last month when I had to fax my social security number to
| HR. Still in full force if you work in any sort of
| bureaucratic organization in the U.S...
| cbzbc wrote:
| It's possible this is for legislative reasons rather than
| anything else.
| andi999 wrote:
| At least until a few years back only fax was considered
| 'in writing', so if like a lawyer wanted to submit an
| appeal to a court it either had to be a letter or a fax,
| no email. Now the government invented a new authenticated
| email system which supposedly is like 'in writing'
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| If that's the case, then a fax isn't too bad (compared to
| some of the bureaucratic contortionism in the west).
| mrob wrote:
| Japanese has the most complicated writing system of any
| language. For a long time handwriting was the easiest
| means of written communication, and faxes can transmit
| handwriting. There are good Japanese IMEs now, but if
| faxes already work why change them?
| gfxgirl wrote:
| Faxes don't work. What are you supposed to do with them?
| Stick them a filing cabinet and then go look them up
| there when needed? Faxes were better than snail mail but
| they suck compared to anything modern. Even the Japanese
| know this.
| morceauxdebois wrote:
| Really, what's makes Kanji so complex compared to
| Mandarin that it originated from?
| mrob wrote:
| Chinese is second most complicated. Japanese has all the
| Chinese characters, and hiragana and katakana in
| addition.
| gsk22 wrote:
| This is not true at all. Japanese Kanji comprise only a
| few thousand characters (~2000 being considered
| sufficient for functional literacy). Chinese has well
| over 50000 characters.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I just realize something. Upon encountering kanji one
| doesn't know, how does one find out the meaning?
|
| How would you "look it up?"
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I just realized something. I have no idea how one deals
| with the rest of the kanji one doesn't know.
|
| Upon encountering kanji one doesn't know, how does one
| find out the meaning?
|
| How would you "look it up?"
| prewett wrote:
| Characters have a defined way of writing the strokes, so
| you look them up by number of strokes and radical.
| ("Radical" being, usually, the bit on the left or the
| top)
|
| You can see a web-based example at [2]. Click on the
| "Radicals" button in the upper right. You'll see a list
| of radicals (sorted by stroke order), and
| clicking/unclicking on them will cause the list of kanji
| below to change.
|
| [0] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kanji-stroke-order/
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_by_stroke
| _count [2] https://tangorin.com/kanji
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I truly appreciate this answer. Thank you very much.
| coolgod wrote:
| Do Chinese people even have dictionaries???
| muffinman26 wrote:
| Of course they do. In fact, there are two main types of
| Chinese dictionaries: phonetic dictionaries organized by
| pronunciation and character dictionaries organized by
| radical.
| T-R wrote:
| Kanji are composed from a much smaller set of radicals,
| so you look it up by the radicals that compose it. Some
| dictionaries also divide characters up by stroke count.
| For the past 15+ years, electronic dictionaries with
| handwriting recognition have been popular, and now you
| can just use your phone keyboard.
|
| In practice, sometimes you can also kind of guess at the
| pronunciation (since characters with the same main
| radical often have a similar pronunciation) and see what
| autocomplete lists; maybe that's less true outside of the
| joyo kanji, though.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Thank you so much for this answer.
| mrob wrote:
| All Traditional Chinese characters are valid in Japanese
| even if they're only used for names. Japanese also has
| kanji invented in Japan which are not valid in Chinese.
| There are currently 2136 joyo (general use) kanji, which
| are the bare minimum you need to known to be considered
| literate, but if that's all you know you're going to
| spend a lot of time with a dictionary. In practice you
| need at least 3000 characters, which is about the same as
| you need in Chinese.
| phonon wrote:
| JIS X 0213 has 11,233 characters across multiple
| alphabets that gets mixed together in the same sentence,
| plus the issue of horizontal and vertical typesetting,
| ruby text, and having to use Unicode Ideographic
| Variation Sequences to handle things like writing
| people's names correctly.
| ginko wrote:
| Japanese also having commonly used phonetic writing
| systems makes it easier than Chinese in my book.
| mrob wrote:
| But Japanese has fewer phonemes than Chinese, and no real
| tones, which results in a large number of homophones,
| which makes phonetic writing harder to read. It's not
| appropriate for business communications.
| nipponese wrote:
| Recently I have began to wish we still used them, and I
| say that as a consumer and a UI designer, as I think
| about all the designs I have made and discarded that
| could have easily been solved with pen and paper. It may
| not scale for an Amazon-sized business, but it totally
| works for small restaurant.
| giantDinosaur wrote:
| What do you mean? You can still print at the other end if
| you really needed certain designs to be somewhere on
| paper, no?
| nipponese wrote:
| I mean, the design never needed to be designed in the
| first place. We should have created some manual process
| until it it becomes so cumbersome to process the requests
| that it needs to be someone's full time job.
| eru wrote:
| > I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've
| been to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better
| future [compared to anywhere else I've been].
|
| Have you been to Singapore?
| latch wrote:
| Yes, lived there for 4 years.
| eru wrote:
| Do you think Japan is a decade ahead of Singapore as well?
|
| If anything, I always have the impression Singapore is
| ahead of the rest of the world in many respects.
|
| (Not in all respect. Not in cycling or craft beer.)
| latch wrote:
| Yes. And I love Singapore.
|
| I'd like to think that cities / countries of the future
| have lower inequality and are more self sustainable (not
| too much Singapore can do here, but it might become
| increasingly important).
|
| I don't want to speak too much subjectively. Because I've
| lived in Singapore and I've only visited Japan. So maybe
| I just haven't seen Japan's dirty side - which was kind
| of what I was asking in my original post. I've heard (and
| seen (maid cafe)) that Japan has a sexism issue, but so
| does Singapore, and I wouldn't know how to quantify them.
| x87678r wrote:
| Doesn't Singapore run on $1/hr workers from other
| countries? It has much higher inequality than Japan.
| andi999 wrote:
| Fron when to when? I lived there between 2004 and 2009 and
| I thought there were a a lot of transitions (like the era
| matters a lot).
| netcan wrote:
| It's partly related to economics: 2 generations of extremely
| rapid growth followed by a generation of stagnation. It's
| partly demographic. An aging population. It's partly cultural
| phenomenons that seem pathological, particularly among youth.
| These seem to be connected to the earlier two.
| ginko wrote:
| >I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've
| been to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better
| future
|
| That's strange. To me traveling Japan feels like entering an
| alternative history where the 80s never ended.
| contingencies wrote:
| Japan seemed to me a case study in hiding sociocultural
| problems with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition and
| specifically some sort of perverse derivative of
| Confucianism. Korea has the same problem. It's a dead-end
| culture: China and Vietnam finally threw off the shackles in
| the 20th century at great cost, but Northeast Asia's
| sociocultural and political economies are apparently still
| largely running on ideas generated by a 5th century upwardly
| mobile accountant.
| baud147258 wrote:
| China's behavior in their Western provinces doesn't
| convince me they have really dropped their shackles last
| century
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Uh, they just shackled someone else. This is depressingly
| common across human history.
| giantDinosaur wrote:
| I think you'll have to be a lot more concrete to make this
| claim particularly strong. What is a 'dead end' culture?
| How does that contrast with the problems in the West (and
| yes, especially those in the US)? How did China 'throw off'
| their shackles in a way different to Japan post WW2? What
| are the actual 5th century ideas in play?
| contingencies wrote:
| Confucianism promotes a centralized and hierarchical
| sociopolitical system, fundamentally conservative in
| nature, and deeply misogynistic. Being therefore limited
| in its adaptive capacity, it is necessarily being phased
| out even in its homeland. I think you can educate
| yourself as to national histories in the 20th century. I
| am not going to get in to comparisons with the west.
| prewett wrote:
| Japan seems fairly adaptive. Unlike China in the 1800s,
| they recognized that they had to open up to the West and
| did so, taking the West at their own game. They were pretty
| successful at that for about 100 years, going from
| feudalism to a modern colonial power faster than anyone
| else, until the people in charge decided to bomb Pearl
| Harbor. Contrast with China, which refused to open up, got
| invaded several times, and then embraced Communism which
| destroyed their economy, and they are still lagging behind
| Japan in many areas (fashion, literature, manufacturing
| quality, building quality, general living standard, etc.)
| It's hard to say that living in Beijing/Shanghai is a
| better quality of life than Japan, and outside those two
| cities Japan is definitely better.
|
| China hasn't thrown off Confucianism, either, just pieces
| of it, and not really so much in the rural areas. The
| Confucian solution to conflict by avoidance and/or top-down
| control is still there, and women still have it pretty
| rough.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| If they forced all the folks working sixty-hour weeks down to
| thirty, and hired the unemployed to fill the gaps, the country
| would be healthier.
| jjnoakes wrote:
| What would that do to wages?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Presuming this will undermine birth rates (read: low or no
| population growth) Japan might be stuck in the cycle for years to
| come.
|
| That said, many First World economies have leaded on immigration
| to back fill the gap of low birth-rates.
|
| For examples:
|
| In the USA, that's been a noticeable growth in Spanish-speaking
| residents.
|
| In Germany and France, there's been growth in the Middle Eastern
| (mainly Muslim) residents. Needless to say, these shifts -
| economically necessary - have sociopolitical implications. It's
| possible these disconnects amplify as robotics and AI take over
| more and more jobs.
|
| Japan? What would be Japan's source of new immigrants? How easily
| or not can they assimilate into that culture? Or is a relative
| lack of diversity a positive as the socio-political fabric in the
| West gets more and more frayed, and not just at the edges.
| baud147258 wrote:
| In France it's more North and Sub-Saharan Africa than
| Middle/Near-East
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I feel like the "Jobless and living with parents" pejorative is
| missing the mark.
|
| Jobless -- So what? If a country has figured out how to provide
| for its people w/o jobs, so what? For example if we had perfect
| AI-robot slaves we'd all be jobless. Would it be a problem? Maybe
| we should ask people why they want a job, maybe what they want to
| do doesnt require one?
|
| "Living with their parents" - Again, so what? Much of the world
| and across much of history this was just how it was. No one
| denigrates someone 0-20 for living with their parents, why should
| a 30 yr old be denigrated for the same. Plus, for many of us so
| lucky the same scenario, with opposite take, will occur-- our
| parents will move in with us later in their life and we'll "live
| with our parents" again. Plus when you add that median sq foot of
| homes (at least in USA) is rising, you can comfortably live with
| more people in "home". With double master bedrooms more common
| and more square feet we're blurring the lines of what a single
| home means. Some houses are so big that you could just put a
| dividing wall and a separate entrance and you'd have 2 homes...
| Chyzwar wrote:
| Problem is not that these people are not working. They never
| enter into adulthood. They do not have purpose/responsibility
| in theirs life. No spouse, children or anything to care. They
| will quickly develop mental problems and become homeless once
| parents die. They will become bigger problem than NEET
| generation in UK.
| acituan wrote:
| > If a country has figured out how to provide for its people
| w/o jobs, so what?
|
| Except no country has done that yet. We are far from full
| automation and most of the structural unemployment is due to
| emerging differential between labor demand and existing labor
| supply, not because we are in a state to provide everyone
| everything they want.
|
| Also I want you to consider that a _vocation_ is not only about
| covering one 's needs, but also about _our need_ to do
| something that matters for other people, with other people, to
| feel useful (vocation = calling). There is only so much need
| for every unemployed person doing arts and crafts, or another
| youtube channel to watch gadgets shredded in blenders or mentos
| put into a swimming pool full of coke. We deep down desire to
| do things that _really_ matter, _really_ meaningful.
|
| > "Living with their parents" - Again, so what?
|
| There is "living with parents because I value kin work and kin
| relationships" and there is "living with parents because I need
| to financially and psychologically". Meaningful participation
| in society requires having a degree of autonomy, individuation
| and agency. I would push even further; freedom from serious
| mental health problems, societally and individually, requires
| those. This is not an advocacy of hyperindividualism, it is
| about healthy ego-separation and self-actualization, which
| counter-intuitively also helps with social cohesion because it
| prevents _ressentiment_.
| krrishd wrote:
| > For example if we had perfect AI-robot slaves we'd all be
| jobless. Would it be a problem?
|
| i mean, it almost certainly would be, right? feel like we very
| instinctively/subconsciously derive our self-worth from what
| we're worth to our society (which tautologically comes from the
| share of responsibilities we take on).
|
| maybe the jobs wouldn't resemble anything like those of today,
| but i have no doubt we have an innate need to be doing things
| that
|
| 1) are necessary/valuable to other people
|
| 2) visibly satisfy 1)
| mgolawala wrote:
| The "So What" comes into play here in that this may not be the
| situation that this generation wants to be in. It is one thing,
| if this generation is choosing to not seek employment and
| cohabit with their parents, it is quite another if they have no
| choice and are being forced into this situation.
|
| It is a bit like saying, people are living in tents on the
| sidewalk. "So what?". Plenty of people live with less than a
| tent and some even choose to do so. We have to go one step
| further and ask ourselves if this is a life that these people
| are choosing to lead, or if it is one that has been thrust upon
| them through a lack of options.
| saagarjha wrote:
| That's because the scenario you've mentioned does not describe
| these households. The problem here is that there are adults who
| are partially or wholly supported by their parents in a house
| where they are not living with (nor was it designed for them to
| live with) a spouse or children.
| mc32 wrote:
| And what happens when their parents die and they cannot
| provide for themselves housing?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Yeah, that's really the crux of the problem: an inadequate
| safety net for these folks.
| Chyzwar wrote:
| Problem is Japan culture that make difficult to re-enter
| workspace and find partner unless employed for life.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Again. We're failing to address the "so what?" What does this
| scenario represent that is _the actual problem_ of the
| matter?
| tasogare wrote:
| I agreed with you about the fact living at parents' home is
| not that much of an issue if we compare it to previous
| history, however staying there without spouse is indeed a
| very different matter than having a three generations
| family (even 4 for some people I know) under the same roof.
| New enough babies is a big issue here. Actually, I know two
| people in this situation and I feel a bit bad for them:
| it's hard to find a job and hard to find a partner and even
| when they have one living together and supporting children
| would be difficult money wise.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > What does this scenario represent that is _the actual
| problem_ of the matter?
|
| Among others:
|
| - Crippling depression for many of those who are jobless
| and living with their parents in a culture that is not
| exactly friendly to them.
|
| - An increased incidence of health issues that are
| correlated with depression and loneliness.
|
| - Decreased quality of life for elderly parents who need to
| support their children within the confines of a difficult,
| stressful job market and a pension system that sees
| increasing pressure from an aging population.
|
| - An aging working population that has difficulties filling
| positions around a particular range of experience, which --
| in turn -- can make it harder to sustain the social
| programs required to help people cope.
|
| - Increased pressure on social spending in the long term,
| since people who are struggling to find jobs in their
| fourties are unlikely to be in a super well-paid position
| by the time they're sixty.
|
| It's not like these people are basking in a Russell-esque
| life of idyllic idleness, like they're taking a perpetual
| sabbatical year. Many of them don't _want_ to be in the
| position they 're in.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| >Many of them don't want to be in the position they're
| in.
|
| I wonder what proportion. In some online circles, being a
| NEET is actually a bit of a badge of honor. In others (in
| fact, on both sides of the political spectrum), those
| working regular jobs (in particular low-paid jobs) are
| prejoratively referred to as wageslaves (or "wagie").
| What's more, many hikikomori in Japan have developed pop-
| culture interests and spend their time consuming media. I
| can imagine someone in that state of mind finding it hard
| to get bored, but I can also imagine many who would get
| bored after a month or two. It may just come down to
| personal disposition.
| walshemj wrote:
| NEET is an acronym that stands for "Not in Education,
| Employment, or Training - for those not familiar with the
| anacronym
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Crippling depression
|
| I wonder how much of this is due to societal pressure vs
| actualization ?
|
| If the world's message is "you should feel bad because X"
| it seems unlikely to me that people would feel good about
| X.
|
| Having a job is a second order attempt to solve many of
| these things rather than solving the root issues. A job
| is a technology for solving an issue, I think it's time
| for a better technology.
| kiba wrote:
| The problem isn't job or jobless, it's the lack of social
| validation and self actualization.
|
| People don't want to stay home and play video games all
| day. They want to be able to create, or master some sort
| of skills.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > People don't want to stay home and play video games all
| day.
|
| I totally get the sentiment and I agree.
|
| I knew a girl once who really wanted to be a teacher. She
| had a hard time finding a job as a teacher though. I was
| discussing this situation with her and asked "What is it
| you want to do?" and she was like "Get a job as a
| teacher?" and so I probed further, "So you just want to
| get the job with title teacher, regardless of the
| duties?" And she was like "I dont care about the job and
| the title, I want to teach kids and see them grow" . To
| which i pondered with her, "so go volunteer as a tutor?"
| . Yes, she did want to earn an income, but her real goal
| and actualization was by doing the thing... She was able
| to do some tutoring in the meantime and it really really
| improved her outlook and was a great outcome for the kids
| too!
|
| So often the things we want to do only have the barriers
| we've constructed/adopted.
| NewOrderNow wrote:
| This comment seems to be the antithesis of what this
| community is trying to accomplish, which is asking the what
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's just not sustainable if everyone did this. The economy
| needs people who are gainfully employed and not single and
| living with their parents. I say this as someone who is
| single and currently living with my parents.
| chc wrote:
| That is actually not a problem. It's not sustainable if
| everyone is a full-time chef -- that doesn't mean being a
| full-time chef is bad. The problem here is that these
| people are in a disadvantaged and unsatisfying position
| in society with no clear way out.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The problem then is an economy which simultaneously
| denies opportunity to those in need of it _and_ needs
| their contribution.
|
| Such a society would be pathologically deranged.
| hmmokidk wrote:
| People feeling left out, alienated and powerless. According
| to me... at least.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| When the parents die, the dependant, now in their middle
| age, will be left with no income and no life skills.
| function_seven wrote:
| I suppose if you polled people in this situation, and just
| asked them, "Is this the life you want to live?", that
| would answer the your question.
|
| I don't know what the results would be, but I can guess
| that a large percentage of unemployed 30- and 40-somethings
| living with their parents would very much rather not be. Is
| it 10%, 35%, 65%? I'm guessing over 50% to be sure.
|
| You can argue that the society is set up wrong. But there
| it is, with this large cohort of people isolated and shut
| in. In an economy that still relies on a younger population
| to take care of its elders.
|
| Robots might one day deal with all productive work, but
| we're nowhere near that yet.
| benrbray wrote:
| Playing devil's advocate, how many Americans would
| truthfully respond "yes" to the same question, "Is this
| the life you want to live?".
| function_seven wrote:
| That's a really good point.
|
| I guess I should have sharpened the question a bit:
| "Would you prefer to have a job and family of your own?"
|
| And, to those who have those things: "Would you prefer to
| be single and live with your parents?"
|
| I suspect the answers to #1 would be mostly "yes", and
| the answers to #2 mostly "no".
| yourapostasy wrote:
| _> "Living with their parents" - Again, so what?_
|
| Interesting advocacy both for [1] and against [2] nuclear
| families. Many more such studies and articles on both sides. As
| long as the median demographic for family formation continues
| to bleed usable income with each passing decade, the advocacy
| for either way won't matter if there simply is insufficient
| economic incentive to have children and raise them, and we'll
| see continued patterns like extended family or high-trust non-
| familial clans grouping together for sheer survival. We can
| handwave the trends away by hiding in median compensation
| figures, but societies with big and durable bifurcations aren't
| fun to live in for most people on the wrong end of that
| bifurcation.
|
| [1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-real-roots-of-the-nuclear-
| fam...
|
| [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-
| nuc...
| tejtm wrote:
| I wonder if it does not go back a bit further than that. An
| internal bias towards not living with your parents could be the
| foundation of modern humans dispersing into every marginally
| habitable corner the planet in not many generations.
| (disclaimer; source unfounded speculation by me)
| saiojd wrote:
| Of course it's perjorative. The issue isn't with staying at
| home, it's with staying at home and doing nothing. If you have
| all your needs provided for you should seek out to do something
| meaningful.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| You appear to be replying to an entirely different article than
| the one in this submission.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > Jobless -- So what? If a country has figured out how to
| provide for its people w/o jobs, so what?
|
| This is a fair point, but the problem in this case is that the
| country _hasn 't_ figured out how to provide for them.
| 627467 wrote:
| I guess if you remove all other data points/context and only
| stick with the words "jobless" and "living with parents" I
| guess "so what" is a valid question. It would be a valid
| question for most issues where ones has barely any other
| information.
|
| But if you read a little about the price that japan (and this
| demographic in particular) has been paying and what they think
| about it, I'm pretty sure you won't find anyone asking "so
| what".
|
| Your point on how USA (and other countries) should be making
| better use of their living arrangements is valid. I don't think
| it compares to the situation Japan or most deeply densed
| urbanized countries in Asia.
| paulpan wrote:
| Right, and I think it's the negative stigma of the former
| ("jobless") than the latter ("living with parents").
|
| Multi-generational family cohabitation is nothing new and
| still the norm in many parts of the world. There's many
| advantages of it, though also carries risks (example is
| Italy's seniors exposure to COVID19).
|
| The "jobless" part is more cross-cultural in its negative
| stigma, on the expectation that adults are contributing
| members of their respective societies. But as this article
| goes into detail, the quality of the job matters as much as
| having one. "Gainfully employed" > "employed", especially for
| the person in question.
|
| I think another aspect of this is the age of the individual.
| When one is in their early 20s, then being "jobless" and
| "living with parents" is much more acceptable (both by the
| self and the society). But as one gets older, such as in the
| article's 40+ year old norm, then it becomes much harder. Add
| on top the Japanese/Asian emphasis on image and honor, then
| the resulting perceived sense of shame/failure can be very
| burdensome.
| rexpop wrote:
| I agree. These terms are common, euphemistic allusions to other
| problems. They should state plainly the issue: lack of buying
| power, economic leverage among the working class, lack of
| choice, and inadequately available housing. These are of what
| we're actually suffering.
| nullsense wrote:
| What about when your parents die and your jobless and
| parentless?
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| I went to university in the same city I grew up in, and made the
| mistake of living with my with my parents for the first two
| years. Let me tell you, you don't really become an adult until
| you move out.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Is there anything to this comment except No True Scotsman
| arbitrary gatekeeping? The internet is full of "you don't
| become a REAL xyz until" followed by a gatekeeping filter which
| the commenter just made up, something they have passed and
| people they look down on have not passed.
|
| What about being able to vote and drive and join the military,
| those are predicated on a legal value of "being an adult" which
| is a cutoff at age 18. Well we can guess that Saint_Genet
| really means something about independence and self-reliance, so
| exclude them. What about a trust-fund child who moves out but
| still gets money and support from their parents? Preumably the
| gate moves slightly to exclude those people because having to
| take responsibility is the REAL filter? And what about people
| who had awful parents and had to "grow up early" or take care
| of their parents? Shift the gate around them, too because
| they're respectable people who should be on the superior side
| of the gate. What about people who move out, have children, and
| rely on the grandparents for childcare and support - well
| they're adults because that's expected and an approved kind of
| parental support in US culture, no worries. People who moved
| out, had children, and want the state to fund childcare in some
| way? Adults? Not adults? Depends on how ruggedly independent
| and scared of socialism you are. Someone who lives with their
| parents but is self-employed and employs others whose income
| depends on the company being well-run, adult or not adult?
| Judge it based on where they sleep at night, because that makes
| sense. Someone who lives with their parents and compromises on
| a shared living situation vs someone who lives alone and has
| nobody to please or think about but themselves, and pays for a
| cleaner, and eats out every day? More or less adult?
|
| Draw the gate wherever it makes you feel superior and able to
| look down on people you just put on the other side. Empty
| internet status-grab comment.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I agree. Could perhaps even take it a step farther and amend
| that to, "You don't really become an adult until you move out
| _and there 's no longer an option for you to move back home_"
| scarmig wrote:
| You don't really become an adult until your parents move in.
| hinkley wrote:
| I went to a high school commencement shortly before I graduated
| college and the speeches were all about how high school
| prepared them for life and I kept thinking, "buddy/lady, talk
| to me again after you forget a load of laundry in the washing
| machine"
|
| My friend wants her kids to stay in town. I've been reminding
| the kids there are several good college options less than 90
| minutes away, which means if you really get into trouble your
| parents can bail you out, but you still get to figure your life
| out.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Just because that's how it worked out for you doesn't mean it's
| the same for everybody.
| glouwbug wrote:
| The stresses of university already propels you into adult hood,
| and by living with your parents, the extra money you save on
| housing will set you up better for when you do move out. Living
| with your parents is not the definition of childhood. The
| definition of childhood is not realizing rent and food cost
| large sums of money, or that credit systems allow you to
| purchase rent and food without money, or that houses can be
| bought with the bank's money. I'd go one step further to say
| childhood ends when one realizes the fictional settings in
| books and video games are just linearly connected thoughts
| etched into their respective paper or magnetic mediums, but
| that's another topic.
| creata wrote:
| What stresses do you have in mind?
|
| (I'm a third-year right now and I've had nothing to stress
| about and nothing to do. I just read HN and developer blogs
| all day. I'd definitely hesitate to say I'm an adult.)
| com2kid wrote:
| Planning your own meals, fixing things around the apartment
| when they break[1], unclogging the toilet, planning your
| own schedule.
|
| That said college is much less stressful, success criteria
| are well defined (homework, tests, internships, graduate,
| job) and a lot of things are taken care of for you.
|
| But it is a huge step up compared to high school.
|
| [1] Assuming you don't live in a dorm and you are renting
| from some semi-shady place that is slow to respond to
| maintenance requests because they don't figure students
| will complain.
| [deleted]
| watwut wrote:
| When I moved out it was not much difference. I kept living same
| lifestyle as when I lived with parents. The only real
| difference is that now partner done all the vacuum cleaning and
| I done laundry that I have not done before.
|
| I mean, diffences were pretty minor and mostly in partner being
| with me all the time now.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| This is true, and to latch onto your comment, you won't become
| an adult until you've lived _on your own_ for at least a year.
|
| Too many people who seem to move from their parents to live
| with their SO and expect everything to be taken care of by said
| SO.
| hikerclimber wrote:
| good. hope this happens in the U.S.
| watwut wrote:
| The American obsession over living or not with parents sounds
| almost pathological to me. Being jobless is issue. Long term
| inability to find partner is issue. But, if you don't have
| partner, what exactly is the reason for moving to live alone and
| why is focus specifically on "omg someone lives with parents"?
|
| I mean, multigenerational households were historical norm. It is
| not something super special that happened just now nor
| catastrophy. It does have disadvantages, especially when
| relationships are bad. But, if you get along then it is a good
| thing and pretty often makes living together rational decision.
|
| Also, every time topic of loneliness comes out, hacker news is
| full of lonely people talking about how it sux. One way to be
| less lonely is to live with other people and keep close contact
| with family - assuming no one is narcissist or overly controlling
| or something like that.
| brazzy wrote:
| Living with their parents is a symptom of not being able to
| _afford_ living on their own.
| decafninja wrote:
| Outside of Western society, or maybe just outside of American
| society, this is completely untrue.
|
| In parts of Asia, and even in Asian enclaves in the US, you
| can even see high earning people (say...hedge fundies, or
| FAANG SWEs) living with their parents. In these cultures,
| marriage is typically the point where you move out, not
| graduating college.
| seehafer wrote:
| Small nuclear family domiciles (as opposed to
| multigenerational family domiciles) are a particular
| feature of Anglo-Saxon-influenced cultures. So it's more
| common to see this in Mediterranean Europe (e.g. the
| Italian 'mammone') https://www.thelocal.it/20180619/italy-
| mammone-living-at-hom... as well.
| wahern wrote:
| Not just Anglo-Saxon but Northwest Europe, and the
| pattern goes back at least 400 years. I haven't seen any
| maps but I think it probably very roughly corresponds
| with the Hajnal line:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line
|
| Of course, modern American notions of the nuclear family
| are a little different from the historical norm as wealth
| and health put limits on its expression. Modern, middle-
| class East Asian norms are probably closer to the pattern
| hundreds of years ago in Northwest Europe.[1] But in
| terms of _comparative_ culture the distinctions are
| crystal clear across time.
|
| [1] Of course, hundreds of years ago (or just 100 years
| ago), many East Asian cultures had uber multigenerational
| clan households and even entire villages. I heard a story
| over dinner once from an elderly Chinese-Singaporean. His
| parents were migrants from China. His father died when he
| was a baby, and his mother died when he was about 8.
| Every night his mother had him sing and memorize a song
| that described his [paternal] family's village. Fast-
| forward to his late 60s, he finally has the urge to
| travel to China to find his roots. All he had to go on
| was the general region and the song, which described some
| kind of confluence of mountains and rivers. He got close
| enough that a local was able to recognize the details and
| tell him the precise village. When he got there the
| villagers--mostly cousins, and even an uncle, IIRC--
| already knew all about him and his parents. Both his
| parents' death as well as his birth were recorded in the
| clan books, even though they happened in Malaysia and he
| has no idea how news traveled back to the village. They
| even showed him the shrine to his father, which was
| tended to by the new occupant (presumably a distant
| cousin) of the house his father had previously lived in.
| watwut wrote:
| I could afford to move out sooner, but it would be waste of
| money. Instead I gave parents something out of what I earned
| to cover what I eat and some. It just was not an issue in any
| way. What exactly would I gained if I moved elsewhere to live
| alone or with roommate?
| abellerose wrote:
| Not everyone has parents that are normal people. Some
| people have parents that are abusive. Unsure if you're
| looking for why some people do want to move out as soon as
| possible but that's a main one for a lot of people. I know
| a lot of college adults cannot afford to go to university
| while having a part time job and living alone. Sucks for
| them if their parents are abusive. Not so much if parents
| are okay.
| refurb wrote:
| _What exactly would I gained if I moved elsewhere to live
| alone or with roommate?_
|
| Independence. A sense of self-reliance. Freedom to make
| your own decisions (good or bad) and learn from them.
| Freedom to live your life as you want, even if your parents
| disagree with it.
| asdff wrote:
| You can do all of that while living with your parents,
| depending on if they treat you as an adult or not.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > But, if you don't have partner, what exactly is the reason
| for moving to live alone and why is focus specifically on "omg
| someone lives with parents"?
|
| Freedom, independence, personal autonomy. Even having good
| relations with my parents i prefer to have some distance and
| meet them on equal terms.
|
| And i do not know about 'American'. Preference for independent
| living seems common also here in Europe.
|
| > I mean, multigenerational households were historical norm.
|
| Yes, because people cannot afford independent home from young
| age. Once society became wealthier, norms changed.
| refurb wrote:
| _i prefer to have some distance and meet them on equal terms_
|
| This is an interesting observation. I know several cultures
| typically have children living with parents until they are
| married, but I've (anecdotally) noticed they tend to have
| very different relationships with their parents. Parents are
| much more involved in their children's lives and decisions
| they make, sometimes to the detriment of the children.
| decafninja wrote:
| Completely agree. I'm a Korean American in my thirties, and
| most of my East Asian American friends lived with their parents
| until they got married, or they had to move a very long
| distance away for work. Several of my friends who are now
| entering their early 40s and are still unmarried continue to
| live with their parents. All are doing at least above average
| financially and could easily afford to move out, but they
| (myself included) don't see the point.
|
| In contrast, my non Asian friends are shocked when the hear
| about stuff like this. It's like they cannot possibly imagine
| living with your parents beyond college. It's tantamount to
| admitting you are a failure at life.
|
| I once lived on my own for two years in my twenties just to see
| what it was like. My apartment was barely 15 minutes away from
| my parents home. After two years, I came to the conclusion it
| was pointless because all I did at my place was sleep, so I
| moved back in. I didn't move back out until I got married many
| years later.
|
| I will admit, I was not exactly a big hit with women and at
| least part of the reason I chose to move out back then was to
| see if it would improve my love life. It did not. YMMV, but
| many of my aforementioned Asian friends who are happily living
| with their parents today at an "advanced age" are also happily
| dating. For that matter, I was completely dateless/loveless
| when I was living on my own, but it ironically improved
| significantly after I had moved back in with my parents,
| culminating in my marriage.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| You need to help spread the idea that the reason people don't
| live with their parents is corporations brainwashed them into
| wanting to move out so they'd buy cars, rent apartments, and
| fill those apartments with things.
|
| No idea if it's true
|
| Of course corporations brainwashed us into believing smoking is
| cool and wedding rings are required and no amount of try to
| point that out as made a single % dent in getting people to
| stop wanting either.
|
| Maybe sponsor a few movies a year showing happy families living
| under the same roof caring for each other.
| astura wrote:
| So, there's a huge difference between these two situations:
|
| 1) Being roommates with your parents when everyone is adults,
| have appropriate adult relationships, and everyone contributes
| to the household
|
| 2) Perpetually staying a child and never moving out because you
| don't have the skills to live without being taken care of by
| your parents. (Think about the movie "Stepbrothers")
|
| It just ends up being that in the US most people who don't move
| out are part of the second group. So that's why it has negative
| connotations, because it's more likely than not someone who is
| living at home is doing so because they haven't grown up, not
| because they want a roommate who is also a close family member.
| It's been my experience that the adults who have adult
| relationships with their parents and are living with their
| parents actually get praised for being "financially smart."
|
| People always throw out "but... multigenerational households in
| {culture}" I guess don't realize "multigenerational households"
| are not the same as "living in your parents basement."
|
| Beyond that, moving out of your parents house doesn't mean
| living by yourself, you can live with roommates or a spouse, a
| dorm, rent a room, etc., So you are not necessarily giving up
| something financially.
|
| As an aside, I know someone who dated a guy who was living in
| his parents basement (in his late 20s) and it felt to her like
| she was dating his parents just as much as she was dating him,
| his parents were still treating him like he was 12 years old.
| Needless to say, the relationship didn't really work out.
| offtop5 wrote:
| >Under Katsube's direction, Junko also enrolled in a program that
| helps shut-ins learn social skills by engaging in activities such
| as gardening, music, sports, and volunteering.
|
| America desperately needs this. I fear the rise of social media
| has caused more and more people to stay inside all day without
| interacting with any real humans. I've found Meetup to work very
| well for getting out of the house.
|
| I did find it interesting how closely moving out and getting
| married was linked here. I've seen members of my family have
| children, without moving out and I definitely moved out while
| single.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > I've found Meetup to work very well for getting out of the
| house.
|
| Except a lot of the meetups where I live either haven't come
| back or they are "virtual". :(
| offtop5 wrote:
| I was thinking before Corona, last year was very good for me.
|
| Once you realize social media is mostly fake validation
| seeking behavior you can decide if that's what you want .
| Ends up being tons of stress and mental anguish for nothing
| at all. I'll say without a doubt people are absolutely meaner
| via social media vs real life. I recall when I lived in
| Chicago how everyone in certain areas knew each other. Act
| like a jerk and word travels fast. Thus this keeps people
| friendly. On Reddit, which I had to step back from , it take
| 10 seconds to create a username. Then you can throw out all
| types of vitriol at people you'll never meet. Why be apart of
| that ? I do find Reddit to be very helpful if you have a
| specific technical question, but the moment you venture out
| of tech people get really nasty really fast. I'm still
| debating if it's worth returning to.
|
| It's at the point where I might hire someone to run the
| social media accounts for a product I may be releasing. I
| have absolutely no interest in using social media myself.
|
| I have a sort of live now list for once Corona ends
| aapppwe wrote:
| what are some good meetup for young folks? i find it hard
| to meet new people when i move to new city like seattle or
| sf
| JCharante wrote:
| I found English meetups to be an incredible source for
| meeting younger people around my age pursuing varying
| careers and interests, especially when the culture
| prevents you from talking to strangers in most
| situations.
|
| You're in the US so there's probably not English meetups,
| but there's probably an Esperanto interest group or you
| could try to find a group for another language you're
| learning.
|
| I haven't personal been to SF but I figure you there's
| SIGs for a tech stack you like.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Anything you want to do.
|
| Generic going out meetups tend to be very strange, and
| socially awkward.
|
| Before Corona hit I would go to tech meetups and board
| gaming meetups. I'd specifically warn against going to a
| Meetup thinking that you're going to get anything out of
| it aside from just enjoying the Meetup itself.
|
| With that in mind, I happen to meet a nice girl last year
| after asking if she was there for the meetup. She wasn't
| , but she took my number down and we enjoyed each other's
| company.
|
| But if you're looking at meetups in your area, and you're
| imagining which one's going to be the best, to meet
| someone you're not going to have a good time . You'll be
| so focused on that, you won't enjoy yourself.
| skim_milk wrote:
| >America desperately needs this
|
| So why the finger pointing like all the other commenters on HN?
| Go out and fix it! If this problem could be solved with some
| NOSQL, a Raspberry PI, and soldering, this forum would
| collectively rally behind the solution. But suddenly when a
| problem is deemed "social" our hands go in the air and it's not
| in my backyard?
|
| We're both techies, myself I'm pivoting my career into
| psychology 5 years after I thought I was done with college. We
| need more techies fixing this, and you clearly have some
| interest this problem, why not join the solution?
| dang wrote:
| I'm sure you were just intended to be encouraging, but posts
| like this, telling other people what to do with a tinge of
| moralizing, are crossing into personal attack. Please err on
| the side of avoiding that here.
|
| The problem is that there's usually a 1000x discrepancy
| between how a comment appears to the person making it vs. the
| person receiving it. Comments in the rear-view mirror are
| much larger than they appear!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| offtop5 wrote:
| From my comment >I've found Meetup to work very well for
| getting out of the house.
|
| That's already a technical solution to this problem.
|
| I've seen startups which appear to be meetup alternatives as
| well.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| The illusion of control and the ability to make a difference.
| It's why tech-minded people are notorious for trying to find
| clean technical solutions for messy social/political
| problems. It's comforting to feel you can reduce a vast
| societal problem to something you can tinker with in your
| living room and solve, and doing so also gives you a feeling
| of power and control.
| skim_milk wrote:
| Yes, I agree we should collectively work on real solutions
| to real problems. Clearly you understand that we need to
| encourage more tech workers to think deeper about it. Why
| not do this more positively? Being negative about how this
| forum can work hard to improve social tech is unproductive.
| plutonorm wrote:
| They'll also get a burst of creativity. I know that whenever I am
| unemployed my creativity just gets diverted into the nearest
| interesting endeavour. One of those might have paid off and
| become a business. Quite likely in fact, if I hadn't had to work.
| I've often considered going on benefits so that I can work on my
| own ideas unhindered by work life. But I wanted a family more
| than I wanted time to pursue my other dreams. I am very sure
| there are a great many others who are taking the opportunity to
| follow their dreams now that they have been forced to stay at
| home, out of work.
| brazzy wrote:
| Please actually read the article. You couldn't be further from
| the truth.
|
| This isn't about people temporarily out of a job for whom
| having a lot of free time is a breath of fresh air.
|
| This is about people who have spent _decades_ without a job or
| on-and-off underpaid jobs because they missed a critical,
| narrow window in their lives where full-time employment with
| actual career prospects was available. They feel stifled and
| useless, not creative.
| t0mbstone wrote:
| I read the article and all I could think was, "wow, what a
| load of excuses".
|
| The idea that you can only get a job if you take advantage of
| a critical window in your life is nonsense.
|
| There is plenty of work for people who are willing to work.
| For example, you could go door to door in your apartment
| complex and offer to take people's trash out to the dumpster.
| You could offer to clean their house, wash their dishes, do
| their laundry, walk their dogs, whatever. Mow people's lawns,
| weed their flowers, whatever.
|
| If you are trustworthy and reliable and even slightly
| entrepreneurial, you will have more work than you know what
| to do with. It might not pay well (or hardly at all) at
| first, but it will build over time.
|
| But instead, these losers are sitting at home watching anime
| and listening to K-Pop and moaning about how they missed
| their window of opportunity, while they live off their
| parents for years.
|
| Gimme a friggin break.
|
| I could definitely see this as being an issue with culture
| and depression, though. If the culture represses and shames
| entrepreneurs or people doing menial labor, for example, that
| would be a big issue. And if you are depressed, it's hard to
| find motivation to get out there and work and be rejected by
| all of the people who turn you down as you go door to door.
| [deleted]
| plutonorm wrote:
| I have understood the article. I am saying for a minority
| this will be a liberation from duty and will allow for their
| natural creativity to express itself. Many will feel stifled,
| useless and un creative - but a few will have an opportunity
| to create that a normal life would not have afforded them.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| What sorts of dreams can you follow when you are broke? I mean,
| realistically? And creative endeavors - how are your affording
| these things? Are your hobbies cheap? Does the stress of non-
| work bother you? Were you lucky enough to have decent
| compensation when you were unemployed or have someone else to
| support you?
|
| How in the world do you "go on benefits" if you are able-
| bodied? Are you in a country where benefits mean you get more
| than poverty money?
| plutonorm wrote:
| Poverty would be fine if I had the chance to work on what I
| want to work on. All I need is a computer for my work. I
| could work on mathematics, physics, I could write a novel. I
| could read academic papers day in day out, gorge on
| information. It would be wonderful.
| andi999 wrote:
| Who buys you food?
| kyuudou wrote:
| And shelter? Sewer? You could conceivably be a nomad but
| that takes some effort and still has baseline costs.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| In other words: Yes, your hobby is cheap. You only have to
| buy a computer every once in a while, though you'll run
| into trouble the moment it gets too out of date or breaks.
| Poverty doesn't allow you to replace such things.
|
| Lots of hobbies require investment. I do art: more
| specifically, draw and paint, both of which require
| supplies. My mother sews, but that requires material and
| making a shirt is more expensive than buying it unless you
| get material, thread, and things for free. Spouse makes
| music: Some guitars eat strings and synths take space and
| electricity (not to mention the cost: Used synths are still
| expensive).
| adultSwim wrote:
| Sounds like America
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/dyEN7
| cryptica wrote:
| I don't think it's a coincidence that Japan has the highest debt-
| to-GDP ratio and also the largest number of jobless youth living
| with their parents.
|
| Debt fueled by inflationary government money-printing drives
| wealth inequality between asset owners and salary earners. Newly
| printed currency boosts asset prices and inflates away salaries.
|
| As Milton Friedman pointed out, it also increases the tax burden
| on citizens two-fold because inflation causes salary earners to
| be pushed into higher tax brackets over time as some of their
| salaries are eventually negotiated upwards to offset inflation.
|
| My guess is that it has something to do with what happened in
| 1971 when the US dollar (and all currencies which were pegged to
| it) moved off of the gold standard. This was the time when asset
| values started inflating. This is why it only affected
| millennials and they could not afford their own house.
|
| Japan took on more public debt than any other country which is
| why they felt this effect more strongly since they ended up
| having to print their national currency at a higher rate (thus
| resulting in worse asset-inflation) in order to pay off the
| interest on their debt.
| ivalm wrote:
| That's a lot of words but your facts are false.
|
| 1. Japan has _low_ wealth inequality
|
| 2. Japan does NOT have high inflation
|
| 3. Japan has both low unemployment and high labor participation
|
| [1]
| https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rank...
|
| [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi
|
| [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_market_of_Japan
| mshumi wrote:
| This is probably closer to the truth. It's not a coincidence
| that Japan was the first developed country to experience
| stagflation and is experiencing these problems.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Japan has the problems now we, Western society will be facing in
| 20 years. This has been true since the 80s, so it's be nice to
| learn from it, and not follow it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This has been true since the 80s, so it's be nice to learn
| from it, and not follow it.
|
| Unfortunately, history has a tendency to repeat itself. And,
| even when it's _recent_ history, people are unlike to enact
| drastic change. Just look at the climate change "debate" :'(
| maddyboo wrote:
| I agree with you but I think we are already starting to face
| the same problems now.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| In my opinion, the end of cheap fossil fuels necessitates we'll
| look like either Japan or Africa, and I know which of those I'd
| prefer. Shrinking GDP or shrinking GDP per person may seem like
| a difficult call for a country's leader, but as a citizen it's
| a rather obvious choice.
| langitbiru wrote:
| > not follow it.
|
| How? Any idea?
| [deleted]
| ensiferum wrote:
| A hard reset through a conflict aka war (and war preparation)
| on some scale has historically been used to reboot economies.
| Should Things get bad enough economically it'll happen again.
| netcan wrote:
| The obvious method would be to have more children.
| pmlnr wrote:
| You obviously didn't read the starting article.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Biology puts some limits on that. Fertility of women goes
| down in the fourth decade of life. The # of aneuploid ova
| rises sharply.
|
| It is possible that there will be scientific development
| solving that, but so far, we do not have enough young
| fertile people to practice your obvious method, unless they
| were ready to have 4+ kids each.
| asdff wrote:
| in vitro fertilization is the development you are looking
| for, and exists for those who can afford it.
| growlist wrote:
| I don't understand why Western countries are not incentivising
| people to have children.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| At the moment (speaking for myself), cost of living is a
| negative pressure on having children; in a lot of places you
| can no longer own a house without a double income.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Some do.
|
| One common tactic is to have very cheap daycare, which solves
| a huge issue for many. Quebec is the most notable example:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/05/quebec-
| ch...
| netsharc wrote:
| Most European countries give parents monthly stipends for
| children and even one-off payments for births, so that's.. a
| little incentive.
| Balgair wrote:
| Where I am in the US the average cost of first birth without
| c-section is ~$8k to the patient. With c-section it's ~$20k
| to the patient. ~30% of all births where I am are c-sections.
| These prices do not include _any_ other treatment to the
| mother or child, only the delivery fee. I assume these prices
| include medicaid /VA patients as well, but I cannot confirm.
| _Likely_ that means people not under government insurance are
| paying more than what I stated, but I 'd go with those
| numbers with a gun to my head.
|
| So, the simple act of having children in my part of the US is
| quite expensive.
| mantas wrote:
| It'd take a lot of propaganda to turn the ship around. Too
| many people are focused on short-term returns to collectively
| sign off on that.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Because we don't want to overpopulate as well.
| alexashka wrote:
| You'd need to make a compelling reason _for_ incentivizing it
| if anything.
|
| Western countries are incentivized by corporate interests.
| Corporate interests don't care for children because they get
| in the way of profits. You'd need someone who can rise above
| corporate interests to do things like health care, children,
| human rights, etc.
| pembrook wrote:
| > Corporate interests don't care for children because they
| get in the way of profits.
|
| Baloney. People having more children is the dream scenario
| for all business--more children = more consumers = more
| economic growth.
|
| This has nothing to do with some evil corporate boogeyman.
|
| Just look at the data. There's a direct correlation between
| rising standards of living and having less children. This
| is because, if you give humans education and birth control,
| it turns out most of them don't actually want to have 8
| kids.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It won't make much difference, people aren't having children
| because they don't want them.
| growlist wrote:
| source?
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