You've got some weird teachers. My teachers were all pretty keen to nurture curiosity. When we'd just learned about combustion and how fire needs oxygen, I asked my teacher after the lesson about the sun and how it could be burning without oxygen, and she just explained nuclear fusion and what the sun actually was, and that the words "burning ball of gas" is a bit of a misnomer because that's not what's happening.
I do not trust any stats that come out of Japan in terms of homelessness. If there's a statistic that's embarrassing for Japanese society, you know damn well they're gonna try to cover it up with technicalities.
In Japan, the legal definition for someone who is homeless is: "those who use city parks, riverbanks, roads, train stations and other facilities as their place of stay in order to live their daily lives."
So that doesn't include living in your car, living in insecure housing, living in shelters, or living in internet cafés, of which in 2020 there were about 15,000 'net café refugees' in Tokyo alone.
Sooo yeah, Japan can claim to officially have a super low homeless population, because they've narrowed the definition so much that you have to literally be sleeping on the street for it to count.
I'm not gonna congratulate Canada on not completely shitting the bed. The Canadians were going to vote in a Trump-like conservative until Trump started banging on about Canada being the 51st state. If Trump kept his mouth shut, it would have been curtains for the Liberal party.
Canadians did not vote for the Liberals based on their record or policies, they voted to tell Trump to fuck off. The moment Trump is no longer a threat, the unity dies and everything swings back to the Conservatives, which isn't a good thing.
I've been doing that for years. I've been claiming to be a conservative and supporting things like universal healthcare. I even give it capitalist flair by saying that ensuring everyone has more money means I can then take that money by selling them shit they don't need. How the hell am I supposed to sell my useless crap if everyone's spending their money on rent?!
Ditto with stuff like housing the unhoused. I don't want filthy drug addicts strewn about the streets taking up my park benches and constantly asking me for 'bus money'! Get them houses so I don't have to see them anymore! Also god I hate kids, especially when they're just hanging around on the street being annoying and intimidating. Build some youth centres so they have somewhere to go and get them away from me!
Altruism through selfishness etc etc etc.
I feel like a sloth demon would take it a step further. You'd be enticed to napping, until one day you wake up from a nap, your face is wrinkled, every one of your friends has forgotten you, you're alone with only the sloth demon. Your life has been wasted away lying in bed.
Remember that time you said you were gonna travel? You were gonna go to Japan, you said. Too late now. You're too tired, you don't have any money. All you have is the Sloth Demon.
One day, your girlfriend calls you for your third nap of the day, and little do you know, you won't be awakening from that nap.
Your funeral has no attendees, at most you're a minor headline on a social media post about mental health. Your girlfriend? Gone, gone to find her next victim. Sloth Demons may not go through as many victims as their lustful cousins, but they get every last morsel out of them.