Japan is going pretty well last I checked. It's one of the few places that is successfully transitioning to a lower birth rate via population shrinkage rather than mass immigration, enabling them to maintain their own culture and people.
Serious question... do you or have you recently lived in Japan?
Japanese people don't think things are going so well.
Many knowledgeable non-Japanese don't think that things are going so well.
My personal take is that Japan is taking a huge gamble by taking on a massive amount of debt relative to their GDP. The piper will need to be paid at some point.
John Mauldin had described the Japanese economy as a bug in search of a windshield. Based on what my Japanese friends in the financial sector say, they agree. Everyone is just crossing their fingers now and hoping that something... anything... happens to force a redirect. No one is quite sure what this will look like (I personally think yen will take a big hit, but that's just a guess).
That's partially true but I think it's partially a recasting of right-wing thought into a left-wing mould.
The main driving factor is third-world immigration, and in particular the perception that mass immigration from the third world has had deleterious effects on the West, both economically and culturally.
What we're seeing right now is, I think, a preference cascade. For years people have been told that opposition to mass immigration is "racist" and have kept quiet about it, but now it's become more socially acceptable to talk about it.
If you tried to start the Amish now it'd never last, it's too large a leap. But the Amish society evolved slowly over time much like others. If you went back to the early days then the Amish wouldn't be that different to others around them. It's just that there was a bit of a split and our societies have evolved in parallel since then under the influence of different values.
A good book on this theme is Matt Ridley's "The Evolution of Everything", which argues that social institutions are generally a lot more evolved and a lot less designed than people realise, and that we forget this at our peril.
Came here to say this. They better be very careful going down this road. If they have a tool for this purpose, and somebody can claim it is debatable help, my guess is they can be in trouble.
I built an old-style chatbot (this Ask Eliza) and put in a slight recognition pattern if certain key phrases are entered that takes the user down a certain decision-tree of question/responses. It's loosely based on CBT only as a choice of reasonable conversation/interaction. I would never claim it was a suicide prevention tool or a depression therapy tool, even if it was pretty good at it.
I'd say it matters a great deal what it is -- for instance if your cause is the pro-life movement or the expulsion of illegal aliens then you might have difficulties getting social approval in San Francisco.
I find it a hilarious instance of California insularity that the grandparent post thinks it "doesn't matter what it is" -- I'm guessing that he'd failed to consider the fact that non-left causes even exist.
> I'm guessing that he'd failed to consider the fact that non-left causes even exist.
In this case, you would be guessing wrong. My omission is not evidence of insularity but of walking on eggshells. I've made this point to many up here and found they are more willing to discuss and agree if I omit the narrow scope of "any cause".
There are two very valid points here: activism and alignment. I intentionally chose not to bring up alignment because it's tiring in circles like HN and/or SF. Additionally, bubbles like this aren't unique to the bay area. The focus on causes and activism is much more unique.
Not at all. I can work or read on a train. I can't do that in a car. Nor does the car take me to London in 1hr15, at up to 125mph, like the public transport from our town[1] does.
Motion sickness. If I read in a car (whether paper or screen) then I feel like crap for the rest of the day, basically. It's not at all uncommon.
Plus the train has tables, 240V sockets, wifi (which selects the best from several different providers, so better coverage than my phone), all of that. There are seats available from our station on pretty much every train, and the journey time is more reliable than the car.
I'm a huge fan of trains and hate cars, but the motion sickness bifurcation you describe is unusual, so I would avoid trying to use motion sickness to carry water in pro-train arguments.
The vast majority of people who experience motion sickness in cars will also experience motion sickness in trains.
It took years for me to really understand why so many people don't love trains like I do: motion sickness makes the freedom, relaxation, and ability to focus on work I experience not universally shared.
Sure. In this particular thread I'm just answering two generalised statements ("Public transport is intrinsically worse", "Why can't you work in a car?") rather than making a universal case.
I'd be genuinely interested to know stats for car and train motion sickness, though: I haven't found any on a quick Google. Motion sickness in general appears to be ~30% of the population. Obviously it's not a simple scale: my wife, for example, will get car-sick (without reading) on a fast, bendy journey more easily than I will; neither of us get train-sick; I get sea-sick much worse than she does.
I dunno. Go anywhere in the world and look at how billionaires and Presidents get around. Do they catch buses or do they choose to get around in private, possibly chauffeured, vehicles?
(Let me just pre-empt someone's example of some billionaire somewhere who loves catching buses, I'm sure there's one out there somewhere.)
Frankly who cares how Presidents and billionaires get around? It's entirely irrelevant to your unsubstantiated claim that "public transport is intrinsically a worse and less convenient experience than having a private driver."
For what it's worth, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte cycles to work just like most everyone else in the Netherlands.
Netherlands, of course, being an example of a place having public transport which is exceptionally good and quite often more convenient and more practical than having a private chauffer.
Huge transfer of wealth from low-margin businesses to high-margin businesses.
Supermarkets, for instance, have margins of about 3%. With a revenue tax they'd be completely boned. They could raise their prices, of course. But the bigger supermarket chains would be better off buying out their own supply chain.
