Food prices have shot up an insane amount. I was getting milk for 130 yen a carton 3 years ago and now it's 230 and up. Wheat is virtually all imported and prices for that are incredibly high. Even when food is produced locally (only about 38% self-sufficiency rate--most are exports[1]), it depends on foreign materials. e.g. Animals are fed imported grains, plants use imported fertilizers, manufacturing depends on imported materials.
The biggest complaint from Japanese Japanese (not expats paid in USD) is that food prices have blown up tremendously. It's literally daily headline news. But yeah yeah, the underclass is only complaining about their Apple hardware prices.
Japan is an import-dependent company. Fuel and food are mostly imports, so that hurts everyone.
And export oriented companies are making money. But trickle down economics is a myth, so it's not benefitting the workers. The executives are doing nicely so good for them I suppose.
I couldn't even get Google Gemini to generate a picture of, verbatim, "a man eating". It gave me a long winded lecture about how it's offensive and I should consider changing my views on the world. It does this with virtually any topic.
The first paragraph of the article is about doing this to harvest flowers for economic reasons, so a significant amount of the nutrients are being removed from the waterways and wrapped in plastic to be sold. (unfortunately, this experiment was also done on top of beds of floating plastic)
Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from.
My biggest worry is the direction Valve will take post-Gabe. I really hope he's got his Tim Cook-equivalent lined up. Someone who won't try to shake up the company too much and just keep things going how they are. All it takes is one (1) MBA to come in and do what they do and destroy everything Valve has built up for short term gains.
Lord of the Rings had a budget in the high millions and took years to make with a massive advertising campaign.
Riots happen due to out of context video clips. Violence happens due to people seeing grainy phone videos and acting on it immediately. We're reaching a point where these videos can be automatically generated instantly by anyone. If you can't see the difference between anyone with a grudge generating a video that looks realistic enough, and something that requires hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of employees to attain similar quality, then you're simply lying.
I think a lot of these issues could be "solved" by lowering the resolution, using a low quality compression algorithm, and trimming clips down to under 10 seconds.
And by solved, I mean they'll create convincing clips that'll be hard for people to dismiss unless they're really looking closely. I think it's only a matter of time until fake video clips lead to real life outrage and violence. This tech is going to be militarized before we know it.
I find paper to be the best way to keep track of checklists and information that I'm actively working on, or long term continuous work. Digital is best for information I'll need to search through quickly or access large amounts of at any time.
Sketching out ideas for something I'll build over the weekend: paper.
A list of things I need to get done and chip away at over the next 2 months: paper.
A complicated web of info that I might need just a part of at some indeterminate point in the future: digital.
One thing I miss about high school was being around guys like this. There was always some dude who said he secretly had a top secret mission to Afghanistan over the summer and the military was begging him to officially join when he turned 18. It's interesting how no matter where you are in the US, there's a guy with a similar backstory of being a total badass who chooses to be humble and normal because the world couldn't handle his true power.
Home ownership and prices have no effect on people having kids. Income does. You'll find loads of kids in low income areas but far fewer in middle income areas.
Everyone online complains about wealth being the reason they won't have kids, but it's not the case. Once people make one step up in their career, they want to make another and kids become an impediment. No matter the country, you'll find higher numbers of kids when people (and especially women) are deprived of education and work opportunities. Then you also have eccentric billionaires that have a dozen kids, but they're statistically irrelevant.
If you want families to have kids, cut wages, don't let women work, cram them into undesirable homes, and most importantly, ignore people who say they'd have kids if only they made a little more money. They won't stop once they get a taste of better living. They'll be very stressed out people, but they'll have kids.
You're correct. The other poster is thinking being one of the safest forms of transportation in terms of disastrous accidents == safest state of existence, which is a big misunderstanding.
Sorry for overestimating. It was only 10 months. :)