The way this has worked is that the Japanese economy has bifurcated with the graduation-to-retirement employment being available to a ever smaller group of white collar workers called salary-men. To become a salary-man you have to go to college and get hired the year you graduate through campus recruiting. If you miss your "window" then you can't become a salary-man and will be stuck in contingent work for the rest of your life.

The people quitting in this case are not salary-men (a salary-man quitting would be pretty unthinkable) but their bosses probably are, hence the cultural divide.

Sometimes salary-men do lose their jobs due to bankruptcy of the organization for instance. Typically the solution if that happens is to jump in front of a train.

My understanding is that the employer side of this contract quit getting honored religiously during the lost decade and employment in Japan is increasingly contingent and precarious.

Scamming is bad but I gotta admit.. kinda hard to feel sorry for people taking advice from Elon Musk.

Saw an interview with a guy (on Bloomberg actually) who explained that "ability to pay" and "willingness to pay" are two different things and that the pricing system doesn't target people who have a lot of money ("ability to pay") but rather people who have fewer options.

Like, if the app knows that you don't have a car and this is the only grocery store you can walk to, you will pay a higher price.

I shop at Jewel (which is currently under threat of being taken over by Kroger) and they're now doing this thing where there will be, for instance, peaches, under a huge sign showing an incredible deal. Then you look at it and realize that the price isn't discounted at all unless you install a "Jewel App" and use it to "claim" a "digital coupon."

I mean yeah I don't think Chinese companies are going to have crowdstrike installed given that it's essentially a rootkit controlled by an American company. It'd be like American companies installing Kaspersky or Xuexi Qiangguo.

There was a time when America could reliably produce assassins who could kill both presidential candidates and even sitting presidents. What the he'll happened? Deindustralization? Too much porn and video games?

As a friend once said "benzene is what anti-nuclear people think nuclear waste is."

"You know what would be totally sick? What if we made our building's roof into a matrix of inverted metal parabolas?"

There have been solid, foam filled or gell filled bike tires for a long time.

The fundamental problem is that the ring of pressurized air in a pneumatic tire is a shock absorber. When you hit a bump the entire tire (even the part that isn't touching the ground) contributes to the dampening because it turns into a shock wave in the donut of air. When you switch to any sort of tire that doesn't have pressurized air in it, the dampening can only occur by deforming the tire in contact with the ground, and it's not going to be anywhere near as good. Typically you end up with a tradeoff between uncomfortable ride on the one side, and bottoming out on the rim and lots of rolling friction on the other.

In 2004 I was a radical young man protesting for bikes and against the Iraq War. At one of the meetups another kid who had been at the RNC protest in New York showed us this software someone had hacked together overnight to broadcast SMS messages. Basically you could send an SMS to a VOIP phone number and it would echo the SMS to everyone subscribed. They were using it to communicate in the crowd at the protest and avoid police kettles. It was pretty cool but I admit I didn't really see it as being more broadly useful.

Later that night the group went for drinks and I was talking with one of the older radicals and he was telling me that the internet was too good and too powerful and they were going to shut it down. I thought that was absurd. How could they get rid of the internet!? He said they would figure out a way to shut it down, there's just no way they could leave it out there, it's too dangerous for them to do so.

Now I look at the thing we call "the internet" in 2023 and it looks nothing like that internet. The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never "flipped the switch" on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.