With a mass product we're all at the mercy of the bottom quantile or even vigintile. These are the people who need to hear about checking website, collecting basic information, etc.
Everyone who works with regular consumers, from doctors to shop assistants, knows this. And everyone who manages these first lines knows how much it costs. Hence the queue, the reminders, the redirection to self-service.
Also, this is how you can instantly establish your own competence and be treated seriously. Just go into the basic context and what you need straight from the hello, have documents at hand, even just loaded on your phone, etc.
There's usually also a second queue. Various "premium" offers (like higher inflows bank account) or just having someone's direct phone number.
Just as you get used to something crazy after two decades, have kids, and are about to unleash it on them, it gets fixed. Will there be no boomer pleasures left for us millennials?
Is this really the thing we're complaining about though? There's a lot more annoying things in Linux, rather than whether or not I see dots when I login...
How about all the daemons that double log or double timestamp on systemd machines?
I agree with the concept. I should not be liable for the actions of others. If someone does something nefarious using my exit node (or the free wifi at my coffee shop) then that shouldn't be my responsibility.
After all, I have no way of knowing what they're up to. It may be good or it may be bad; I can't know. (I suppose I can set up a router to discard packets with the RFC 3514 evil bit set, as a show of good faith, but...)
So I think the risk should be low, but that's just, like, my opinion, man. My opinion doesn't mean that the risk is in fact low.
Has the risk of running an exit node ever been tested in court? Many people, myself included, simply can't afford to have that kind of experience even if we're reasonably sure that it will end up OK.
I appreciate the correction. It's been so long since I've looked at tor that I guess I forgot that relay nodes were a thing and conflated the two terms. Or maybe the coffee hadn't started working yet.
So with the correction, I agree completely: Running relay node (a thing that deals only with indecipherably-encrypted anonymized data) is not a meaningful risk.
IP addresses of relays are still known in the network, and IP reputation firms may flag your IP as potentially suspicious. This may or may not cause issues when dealing with orgs that filter based on "known bad IP address" lists. I've had it happen before, where everything was fine until a few days after running a tor relay (not an exit node, just a relay) everything suddenly wanted more verifications I was not a bot, some paid video services started blocking me, and a few other issues. Stopped running the node and later things cleared up.
It doesn't matter if you or I know it, the problem is when a vendor I'm wanting/needing to use is ignorant to the quality of their list they're using to block stuff.
Yes, many times. Once you explain what a Tor exit node is, you can't be convicted of downloading CP or whatever the anonymous user did, because you quite plausibly didn't do it. However, a verdict of innocence only happens after your life was already ruined by the process of getting to that point...
Some countries like Germany have strict liability, where you must pay a fine for any copyright infringement that happens on your connection unless you register yourself as an ISP yourself. If you're not sure, consult a lawyer to make sure you're not in one of those places.
>"If someone does something nefarious using my exit node (or the free wifi at my coffee shop) then that shouldn't be my responsibility.
Without even getting into the intricacies and ethics of pooling and providing Spartacus communal anonimty. Wouldn't lending tools that are used for a crime being an accessory, or an accomplice, or at least aiding and abetting?
It's even a bit ridiculous, "If someone does something nefarious with my gun, that's not my responsibility" Yes? Yes it is? Maybe that line is used for something more borderline, but that's definitely your responsibility, if you are allowed to do that at all it's only because of the difficulties of legal procedures and the pressumption of innocence, but that doesn't mean that it's ok to redistribute CSAM and leaked data.
It's murky AF, which is why I asked about precedent after stating [and justifying] my own opinion.
Intent has a lot to do with liability.
My intent with my hypothetical coffee shop is not to provide a dark corner for people to do illegal things online; it is instead my intent for smiling patrons to have a free slice of Internet to go with their not-free cup of coffee. It's just a service that I provide, along with a restroom and a place for people to gather. My options for monitoring it are limited, but if I do notice someone doing stuff that's NFG (whether on the internet or in person), then I'll turn off the taps and tell them to leave. They won't be my customer anymore.
That's not so dissimilar to my ISP's intent when they sell me a month of internet access at home. Their monitoring options are very similar: Observation is difficult (brought to you by NordVPN and https), but if they notice something that is definitely nefarious then I'm likely to be getting a sternly-written letter and/or disconnected.
Most people are generally good -- and most coffee shops (around me, anyway) have free wifi.
The precedent here is that it seems to work, and that we don't have a long and storied history of imprisoning owners of coffee shops and ISP networks.
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Now, if a person were to hang up a sign on the front their coffee shop that says "FREE WIFI! GET YOUR CSAM HERE!" then that's... that's a rather different kind of intent, and in a fair and just world it wouldn't be too long before the person who hung up that sign would behind bars.
most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans
Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.
Lifelong monogamy as a default and an almost universal ban on kin marriage seem to be solid contributors here.
Also, I don't think the current remnants of hunter gatherers are all that informative about our past. These are different people who live in marginal lands. Hunter gatherers of Europe would have had access to prime real estate and extremely food dense coastal areas, made long voyages at least occasionally. Quite simply, successful societies look different.
>> most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans
> Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.
The revealed preference is that they want to continue to live the same way, but to do it in European countries as they are nicer places to live.
The problem is that they are nicer places to live because "living like a European" is what produces these nicer places to live.
More like a century of no cousin marriage / late marriage / nuclear families via bipartite manorialism has produced a high trust people. Everything you attribute to magic dirt or oppression is really this.
This feels like a false dichotomy to me, and if anything, it might invert cause and effect. Europeans pillaged most of the countries that you're contrasting to, and under intense economic pressure, traditional values (especially misogynistic ones) usually emerge as a coping mechanism. Such as child marriage. Liberties are typically the result of relaxed economic conditions, like what Europe achieved after plundering the textiles of South Asia. As economic conditions worsen, we now see conservativism rising in the west.
Europe used to be a lot like other places a millennia ago (I typo'd century above): low-trust, dominated by extended kinship networks, different marriage patterns, etc. The transformation largely happened between the years 300-1500, before colonialism existed. The Church was responsible for much of this transformation. I guess you think Europe just robbed the world and suddenly they had liberal democracies?
You must be very insecure of your claims, completely sidestepping the actual content of my reply and managing to double yours as ad-hominem and straw-man sophistry, not to even bother pointing out the flimsiness of your "European lifestyle" construct itself — sure, the UK can't live without their baguettes — when Europe is rather more representative of postpostmodernist ideologies than of whatever golden-age historical kool-aid you've been drinking to ignore how prevalent the invective "eurocuck" is outside utopia.
These societies are the failed people we left behind.
They’re like the PHP developers of humankind. They limp on, but everyone else moved on a long time ago. If they were successful, they wouldn’t still be doing it.
I think the fix was reversing the idiotic tax cuts that Liz Truss promised. It doesn't fix every single problem ever for England but nothing ever does.
I think the solution is also obvious for the United States — higher taxes and lower government spending. We need to do both. However, you can't get elected if you promise both those things.
Sure, the modern Twitter/X feed is not like the original reverse chronological timeline but the latter is still available right next to it. Maybe it's the power of the default but I find the algorithmic feed much better.
The chronological timeline is only manageable up to a point. I follow just under 2000 accounts on Twitter. They at least occasionally at least in some period in the past must have been posting interesting stuff or I wouldn't have followed them. But not all of them all the time. Algorithmic feed surfaces the good stuff, or at least popular, but lately it picks some very niche stuff successfully. Same on TikTok.
The modern feed is a clever generalization of the previous age tech. And sometimes you just like the previous gen more but there is a reason the new version got traction.
It is constantly shocking to me that no matter how many times and where in the west people vote against immigration (which is what most of these votes boil down to), they can never get it.
It's truly a crown in the gutter moment where you can be completely off-the-wall nuts (vide AfD) and, if you're just willing to campaign on anti-immigration, your ranks will instantly swell. Yet the establishment is somehow completely incapable or unwilling to capitalize/capture this.
Most of the politics comes down to tribalism. And within this tribalism nothing works better than Us vs Them. Immigration is one of the best "us vs them" debates. It rallies lot of support.
But then often immigration isn't the problem. It is a solution preying on the fear of people that "outsiders" are harming their opportunities, housing, way of life etc. The real problem is that people are not making living wages and wages are not catching up to cost of living.
As politicians pushing anti-immigration come to power they also realize this problem. They'd rather not solve immigration because then they need to face up to the actual living wage crisis issue. It also helps keeping the immigration talking point open so that it can be used in next election.
There has never been a successful multiracial democracy in history. There are many books on this - one was even on Obamas summer reading list awhile back.
> The real problem is that people are not making living wages and wages are not catching up to cost of living
Importing labor devalues native labor. This is outside of the cultural change, etc. These are real problems.
> They'd rather not solve immigration
Because they serve the rich and the rich benefit from immigration at the expense of natives. Immigration is a solved problem. Do it only when needed or when it benefits the people, not a select few.
Because the establishment knows how integral to the economy immigration is and because it isn't that easy to stop even for an island. Unless you want to shut down tourism and trade.
Let me fix that for you: because the establishment is owned by the corporations who want to suppress wages, rise demand, pump gross GDP, and pump real estate.
And because governments running on deficits are slaves to the banking cartel, too.
The immigration we're talking about, the one of Africans etc. immigrants flooding west, is destructive to the economies based on pretty much every statistic I've seen.
Those immigrants are on welfare in disproportional numbers compared to native population.
E.g. in US 72% Somalis are on welfare and the same stats are in West Europe.
They cost the state gigantic amount of money.
And per-capita crime stats are so bad that governments are hiding them from public.
This is all documented by government's own statistics and reasonably well reported.
Immigration COULD be a net positive to the economy IF it was managed properly but it isn't and it isn't.
Tourism isn't immigration and I don't see what trade has to do with it.
> 72% Somalis are on welfare and the same stats are in West Europe.
This is bullshit. Donald Trump isn't a credible source on statistics about immigration. The highest percentage I can find for food stamps is 54% and a high percentage of food stamps recipients are employed.
54 is lower than 72 and only a fraction of people receiving food benefits receive additional benefits that would qualify them as being on "welfare"
2/3 of natural born US citizens will live in a household that receives food assistance at some point in their lives. 60-75% of Somolis are working. So there's a good percentage there that are working and paying taxes, but need some extra assistance.
I don't see a lot of fake news/statistics going around about white immigrants to the US. Funny how it's all Somolis and Hatians that are stuck being smeared by misinformation. What could that be about.
Stopping is a long way from "actively encouraging it and calling racist everybody who disagree" (and actively hide horrific stuff like the rape gangs).
I think the problem is creating an effective anti-immigration movement which does not have racial feelings running through the movement. It might just be impossible to do. When you wish to corral the votes you may have to accept the feelings of those who help you win.
The real problem is that for >10 years the a green-left coalition was in power, at least in most of Europe and immigration was greatly encouraged because it would provide clear economic benefits for everyone.
There's many stories, but let's call this the average story: "Immigration brings growth, growth advances everyone".
Well, it doesn't, at least not at the moment. Oops.
Now we can argue why, of course, but a certain amount of backlash was to be expected. It was clear for 20 years or more exactly what would happen when "the alternative" to the prevailing "left+green" coalitions gains power. To an extent I don't understand how anybody can claim to be surprised.
Also, in a democracy I would think that arguing that "the uneducated masses" are wrong is a quick path to irrelevancy. That, by the way, is exactly how we want the system to work. The system needs to work well for the uneducated masses. Figure it out, or accept that the other guys are going to win the election.
> Maybe, but the uneducated masses shouldn't be making these decisions, which is why democracy is the real problem here.
Do you seriously think progressives will come out on top, or even have much of a say at all, in a non-democratic system? I mean, really?
... which suggests that if you can't lift up and convince "lower class" people, racist or otherwise, you should just get out of the way. Because if that's the case the only outcomes are bad, and worse.
> Do you seriously think progressives will come out on top, or even have much of a say at all, in a non-democratic system? I mean, really?
I think a superior system to the one we have now is one where progressive values are embedded in from the start. Objectively, they are superior positions that can be backed up by data.
> which suggests that if you can't lift up and convince "lower class" people, racist or otherwise, you should just get out of the way
These people routinely vote against their own interests. They shouldn't have a say.
Almost every country in the west is tightening it's system. In the UK claiming ILR will take a significantly longer period of lawful residence, and a shorter time will require you to meet a high income threshold. It is nearly impossible to get PR in Canada now unless you are fluent in both English and French and have a PhD or several years of canadian work experience. The bar has also gone up in Australia too.
The reason why this doesn't seem to move the needle on the anti-immigration vote is because the folks on that side can always just move the goalposts and be the "true" anti-immigrant party. I believe these days Reform UK wants cancel all ILRs and start actively deporting long term residents who don't meet an ever raising bar. Its madness.
The only meaningful action would be to stop well fare for immigrants. You don't work, you don't have money.
Madness is for UK government to tax UK citizens to pay for housing and food of immigrants.
Incentives drive behavior. If you're African and see you can live for free in England, of course you'll try to get that deal. And in age of social media, they know.
Denmark did that and saw dramatic drop in number of people trying to immigrate there.
What you desperately try to paint as racism is just immune response from UK citizens.
They can see their taxes are raising, gov services are getting worse but gov finds the money to pay for housing for 110 thousand immigrants.
They connect the dots and that's why Reform UK would win the elections (if the elections were done today).
Because Labour, which won election recently with good majority, is not, in fact, ignoring voters and not doing anything meaningful.
Reform UK promises drastic changes because that's what majority of UK votes are demanding now.
It's how democracy is supposed to work. The politicians are supposed to be responsive to demands of voters.
> According to the most recent polling (Ipsos, 6–10 February 2026), two-thirds (67%) of Britons believe the total number of people coming into the UK is too high
Do you have different data or different definition of majority?
I was taught that 67% is majority + 16% but maybe leftist math is different.
I might take your opinions more seriously if you integrated and learned to write English properly. It's "welfare", for starters. Line breaks go between paragraphs, not after every sentence. If you're going to come here sucking up resources on a Western message board, you have to assimilate.
The transition from Nationalism to Globalism and back to Nationalism (rather, a more broad iteration of it) cannot be achieved with micro revolutions like what we see in the US.
In countries with functional democracy it actually is happening. In Sweden anti-immigration sentiments allowed for right party to gain significant share in the parliament and now immigration rules are changing and immigration rates are lowering. One may argue that this is 20 years too late, but in the past the majority of the population public actually didn’t actively oppose the policies. They do now, the situation is changing. No swexit required.
This is because of massive unchecked corruption. In the UK this has become multibillion per year industry where connected landlords / agencies get lucrative contracts from Home Office for keeping immigrants in their properties and then you have complete supply chains developed around this where each entity skims money.
There are billboards where offers of guaranteed rents are advertised etc.
Please. The establishment is dying to capitalize on it, and puts out one ridiculous anti-immigration measure after the next. And all it does is that it simply boosts far right parties even more.
It’s completely obvious to me (and often supported by exit polls) that people who are voting far right aren’t actually against immigration - only on the surface. Once you dig just a little bit deeper, often socioeconomic struggles surface. The working class has been taking a beating since the what, 1980s now? And it’s not like there’s any sort of legislature on the horizon that would fix their predicament.
So people look for a scapegoat. The far right gives them a scapegoat goat, and the enlightened center doesn’t know how to handle it.
the anti-immigration right in Denmark was successful because they were data-driven and could show that unskilled non-Western immigration was a net negative even by 3rd generation.
the American and German far-right by contrast seem to be the polar opposite of data-driven. No the lazy 'IQ by country' maps don't count.
> the anti-immigration right in Denmark was successful because they were data-driven and could show that unskilled non-Western immigration was a net negative even by 3rd generation.
That is very true however you're misunderstanding why the German (where I'm from) and Americans parties aren't publishing this data. It's not because they're lazy, but because they can't.
And before you're now thinking: "aha! So they're not net negative!" ...well, these statistics aren't available either.
The reality is that the data to create these graphs aren't public, or never created. The likely reason for that being labeled 'nazi' for even considering gathering such data.
I personally suspect that they're net negative, in total but net positive on average (so numerically, most immigrants being positive). At least that would reflect my personal experience with with immigrants. However, you only need a very small percentage of immigrants to game the system in order to make the whole sample size negative because of the insane amount of money a bad actor can drain.
Numbers from Denmark and the Netherlands (the only two European countries where it's allowed to gather such statistics) show that non-EU immigration is a net cost to the society (and economy). In the Netherlands a non-western asylumseeker comes to about 800.000 € to 1.300.000 € net cost to the state over the persons lifetime, depending on what you take into account.
And that's purely the financial part, we're not even talking about the increase in crime and the ghettoisation of most western European cities.
It's a tragedy, for everyone involved (because most 2nd and 3rd generation non-western immigrants still live a life of poverty in Belgium/Netherlands).
That Economist stat often gets misunderstood. It is "net contribution to public finances" (= how much taxes do they pay), not "net contribution to the economy". This is because they are overly represented in low wage jobs, or indeed on longterm welfare. People in the lowest tax brackets pay very little of it.
I do agree that there needs to be a honest conversation about what (economic) immigrants offer vs. what they cost, but it needs to be done properly.
We will need immigrants because we are below 2.1 in Total Fertility Rate. But, the EU doesn't need to be the comfy life raft of the world as it has been for the past 2-3 decades.
Yeah, what I am saying is that these votes, regardless of their formal content, are usually an expression of general anti-immigrant sentiment.
Like voting for AfD. I doubt many people look at this organization and its leaders to conclude that "ah, here is the talent I would love to have running my country." They're merely the only available option against. Same with brexit.
UK pays for free housing of 110 thousand immigrants. And that's just one of the many well fare benefits.
But when they face deficit, they raise taxes instead of, crazy idea, not spending billions of money taken from UK citizens to provide free housing and food for foreigners.
UK citizens are rightfully pissed off that their life is getting worse.
That's not the social contract and being pissed off about that is not racism. It's self preservation.
The same happens in Spain, Germany, France, Italy.
That's your big mystery of why AfD or Reform UK are popular: because the parties currently in power are flat out refusing to implement clear desires of their voters.
That's how democracy is supposed to work: AfD and Reform UK and Le Pen are gaining because they are promising to implement the desires of citizens of German, UK or France.
Because Poles and Romanians are "other" enough to be hated... Ironically Britain had then to "import" people from Asia, Africa to e.g. work in the hospitals.
The foreigner-hate is so short-sighted. Your underpaid hospital worker, house cleaner, fruit picker, taxi driver, UberEats delivery is usually foreign, they don't mind working the exploitative conditions because for them the money is much better than home, providing you with affordable fruits, taxis and delivery (until the rent-seeking corporations want even more than 30%...). Get rid of them, and you'll have to pay living wages for your fruits and delivery. Heh, Westerners, still wanting to enjoy the fruits of colonization.
(Yeah the solution shouldn't be to continue allowing the exploitation, probably a better wealth distribution, but hey, why are you looking at my wallet, look at Elon's wallet!)
I'm sure the UK has way more than 41 thousand shitty jobs with shitty pay that no native really wants. I doubt they're not working because they don't want to.
In Canada the standard complaint is that "immigrants take the jobs" not that "immigrants aren't working". It seems like it's a lot easier to get a job at a Tim Hortons if you speak Hindi like the owners and managers. A job at a restaurant if you speak Levantine Arabic.
And those are just the public tip of the iceberg. Construction crews are mostly foreign. Our roofers were Indian. Our landscapers were Lebanese / Syrian. The people we interacted with spoke great English, but their workers didn't.
The big difference is that Canada had constant immigration. They came over 40 years ago and since they had trouble finding employment became entrepreneurs and restaurants and construction and other blue collar services are the most fertile areas for entrepreneurs. Now they have a huge advantage in hiring low cost labor.
She wrote:
> Civilised people don’t ask for resumes when answering calls from the edge of a grave. It shouldn’t matter what I did after I cleaned myself off and threw away the last of my asylum-seeking clothes. My accomplishments should belong only to me. There should be no question of earning my place, of showing that I was a good bet. My family and I were once humans in danger, and we knocked on the doors of every embassy we came across: the UK, America, Australia, Italy. America answered and so, decades later, I still feel a need to bow down to airport immigration officers simply for saying “Welcome home”.
> But what America did was a basic human obligation. It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don’t give you sugary success stories.
But heck, "civilised people", I'm beginning to doubt very much that Western Europeans deserve that moniker.
You write:
> Poland has hospitals staffed 100% by Polish people. What prevents UK from doing the same?
Maybe because UK kids don't want the underpaid overwork conditions? Why not pay them better and give more of the taxpayer's money for the NHS, oh some of you will moan about that as well? Maybe the NHS will be forced to spend the money for outsourcing, ensuring the Tory-run outsourcing companies earn those nice bucks - hey why not direct your anger at them?
> And they don't work so you now have mostly young males loitering in neighborhoods.
Yeah, perversely refugees applying for permit aren't allowed to earn income, so again it's the government preventing them to work. Allow them to pick those fruits for some income and you'll moan about the government making the country even more attractive for people to run away from bullets and bombs...
Moaning about irregular migration but "forgetting" UK has no legal routes and can't reject them back or France since UK left the EU.
Moaning about UK hosting them (often in dangerous conditions) while forgetting they're forbidden from renting, and finally complaining about UK feeding them while pretending that giving them work is not an offence.
Right Reform kook. Or maybe from their Konfederation party seeing he seems to be from Poland.
That’s funny in light of one of our Canadian governments (Alberta) recently calling for a referendum on immigration levels, with the government claiming immigration levels are too high to support the housing, economic and social needs of the sheer quantity of people coming in. Seems like the government is trying to be responsible by making sure the social welfare system can still support people as it was designed
Bingo. Just like wanting to leave the EU was self destructive cutting off immigration is as well. The US is in the process of trying to hobble its own economy right now.
Poland has almost zero immigration and is one of the fastest European economies.
Do explain the miracle of Poland. What kind of economics work for Poland but couldn't possibly work for England.
Do explain how 41 thousand unskilled young man landing in UK shores via small boats are good for economy. Majority of them do no work, not even the low skill jobs. They cost UK citizens a lot of money because UK gov took upon themselves to pay for their housing and food.
The same stats are in every country that allowed massive immigration: the immigrants are a massive drain on resources of the country. And those resources are 100% come from taxing labor of citizens.
Currently UK pays for housing 100 thousand immigrants.
It's pretty obvious that if they stopped paying for housing them, they would save a lot of money.
Properly managed immigration could, in theory, be a net positive for countries.
But as it stands now if you combine immigration with well fare, you get a net drain.
Poland was an ramshackle post-communist economy that has grown rapidly (with the help of generous EU handouts) over the past three decades to catch up to the Western side of the Iron Curtain.
If Brits are willing to impoverish themselves to <2,000 USD per capita[0] and then are lucky enough to find a willing benefactor who will pay to rebuild their crumbling infrastructure for ideological reasons, I'm sure the UK could experience similar growth.
They do not work because they're forbidden by law. It's a criminal offence to give work to any of these unregulated migrants. They're also housed by the UK government because it's a criminal offence to rent or sell them a property. Also they are often housed in the criminally unsafe (yes, that's also a thing) conditions and sometimes fed the mouldy food.
Imagine complaining about that (audible eyeroll).
So you want the UK to stop feeding and housing them but I guess keeping the laws forbidding them from working and renting? Why don't you and your mates don't do something about that already? Oh I know, last time they tried some ended up in prison for trying to kill the immigrants.
Mugrants arriving by boats because increasingly unhinged and rightwing governments paid off by dark money linked to Kremlin (we remember the suppressed intelligence report on Russian interference in voting) cut the country from the EU and closed down ALL the legal routes of immigration. Arriving "illegally" is the only way for them to claim for asylum.
And the funny thing is, the vast majority of these applying for asylum get their claims approved because they genuinely qualify, it's that UK is not offering any legal routes to anyone except Ukrainians (white Christians, I bet that had no impact) and a very few Afghans (these pesky translators, working for our troops risking their life now have a gall to ask for help once we let the Taliban back).
Did you see the graph showing illegal migration numbers before and after the Brexit vote? I bet you wouldn't like that. Because previous UK could just hand them back to the French.
All in all this is a self inflicted wound on all levels.
With the additional cherry on top of the utter lie in your last sentence. Immigration is not a net drain. Immigrant taxpayers are a net GAIN, and a very significant one, while the British citizens are a net LOSS to the treasury.
If we deported all the Brits the country would be much better off
If that’s indeed the case, how do you explain the lack of catastrophe in Japans economy ?
Japans big catastrophe happened in 1990 with the bubble bursting, but that was years before the peak in working age population. Since then, the economy has not improved much but also has remained somehow stable.
All the jobs in Japan are hard work and low wage. If you're relatively poor and moving from south east Asia, it may make sense to immigrate to Japan. If you're a developer you typically will make half or less than half the salary, for longer hours on some old stack.
When discussing where to live my wife realized that she would potentially triple her salary as a nurse with 10+ years of experience.
Tourists like Japan because it is clean, safe and relatively cheap, but given the option it really does not make sense to work there.
Thanks for mentioning this. I have activated a one-month LinkedIn Premium free trial, hopefully as another layer of protection while I re-establish myself and fortify my profile.
In general "being a person who", that is projecting identity, is boring. This is why you need polarization as a crutch. Being someone who's into competitive puzzle-solving, pop punk, or birdwatching is exactly the focus group tested "say something about yourself" no one really needs.
Now, having gone to a pop punk concert and sharing some observation about the crowd or surprising opening act might be interesting. Noticing that a lot of induction puzzles are based on simple features like even/odd is less interesting but still might interest someone.
Reading the room itself is generally considered interesting. If you go for a minute or two about the induction puzzles and your colleague/date/whoever shows no interest, you can turn mid-sentence and imputing "so... no interest in induction puzzles, the last one you saw was in third grade and even then it wasn't your first choice." It's just good conversation.
I am skeptical of hypotheses like this when the deterioration has begun before its supposed cause. This is how I look at social media or tinder being blamed for loneliness or low fertility. While they may have exacerbated the issues, trends have been unfavorable for decades if not centuries before.
Similarly, it seems to me like the rule of law (and the separation of powers), prestige press, and universities are social technologies that have been showing more and more vulnerabilities which are actively exploited in the wild with increasing frequency.
For example, it used to be that rulings like Wickard v. Filburn were rare. Nowadays, various parties, not just in the US, seem to be running all out assaults in their favoured direction through the court system.
Everyone who works with regular consumers, from doctors to shop assistants, knows this. And everyone who manages these first lines knows how much it costs. Hence the queue, the reminders, the redirection to self-service.
Also, this is how you can instantly establish your own competence and be treated seriously. Just go into the basic context and what you need straight from the hello, have documents at hand, even just loaded on your phone, etc.
There's usually also a second queue. Various "premium" offers (like higher inflows bank account) or just having someone's direct phone number.
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