This, plus yearly mandated healthchecks with huge pressure and shame on excessive weight.

Are you speaking from experience? Because this sounds like the typical sensationalization of all things Japanese which permeates even this website. Compared to western culture, people in Japan may be more forward about commenting on your weight (as is also common in some other East Asian cultures), but I wouldn't call it "huge pressure and shame".

As to the health exam, you may get some consultation and recommendations if your measurements show you are overweight, but it doesn't turn into some draconian process shaming you into losing the weight. I'm Japanese and never heard about such thing.

If you never heard about the weight maintenance company wide competitions (let's fitness!), the labor doctor telling you that it might be difficult for you to handle stressful management work with high blood pressure, the kids saying that they were laughed at because their dad is fat...

You're blessed.

None of these are even remotely unique or attributable to Japan. You can find them anywhere in the developed world.

I can't tell if you are speaking from experience or not. I tried googling about this company wide competition and cant find any hits about this, searched "lets fitness" in english and Japanese, cant find anything.

High blood pressure is a medical condition, and you are telling me that a suggestion from the doctor regarding stress levels at work is bad?

And kids, cmon. Kids will make fun of anything. I did some schooling in the US and I was made fun of purely for being of a particular race.

applause fantastic conclusion

Is that true?

I live in Japan and maybe my company is different, because we don't get that pressure and shame. My health check reports show a warning sign in the weight/BMI area, and that's it. Plenty of chubby and overweight people in my office too, and nobody shames them.

Do you have any references?

This argument keeps popping up as if every engineer was exactly the same, which is simply not true.

High quality talent is expensive, hard to recruit, hard to keep. High salary is one of many perks a company offers to capture high quality talent. A work visa to live in a first world country is another one.

> and leadership asks why you weren't logging everything in full fidelity?

I haven't been asked this question ever. In a way, I wish I was. I wish leadership was engaged in the details of the capabilities of the systems they lead.

But I don't anyone asking me this question any time soon either.

Have you ever been asked “why didn’t we catch this sooner?”. I feel like it’s the same question worded differently

Its really two questions:

1. Why didn't we catch this sooner

2. Why did it take so long to mitigate

Without the debug logging #2 can be really tricky sometimes as well as you can be flying blind to some deep internal conditional branch firing off.

It's also not clear that allowing factories that underpay exploited workers to ship stuff over is a net win

I think with all economic policy it's good to weigh the pros and cons and have a serious discussion of them.

What I object to is that in practice people just side with their politics "team" like in sports and create post-hoc justifications for policy created for unrelated reasons.

I'm in favor of evidence-based trade policy, but this isn't that unfortunately. The closest thing we have to evidence-based policy is the economic consensus, and the current administration is making a big show of disagreeing with the consensus for non-evidence-based reasons.

It is impossible to establish causality in complex economic systems to be able to have evidence based decisions.

The current economic direction is not a consensus. The Western democracies are increasingly politically polarized and economically volatile.

Between the many different crises (unaffordable real estate, populational collapse, unsustainable environmental practices and global warming, increasing inequality, hollowing out of small and medium sized cities, and the list goes on), it is very difficult to justify the status quo.

There's also not really an objective outcome for a given policy, because you don't have a single grouping with aligned preferences.

You can estimate the impact objectively, but not whether that impact is good or bad.

If you don't like democracies or science then what is your proposed solution?

That's an unfortunate and charged statement that misrepresents what I said.

A fundamental aspect of science is rigor. And a fundamental aspect of democracy is opposition.

But your position is that you're opposed to evidence based policy. Which means you can't realistically hope to be in favor of an informed populace or democracy.

And you don't understand what the economic consensus is so you don't know what you don't know and aren't in a position to assess the level of rigor.

Plus your other comments, e.g. calling drug users zombies and criminals, make it clear that the anti-democratic impulses shown in this thread aren't just a one-off accident.

The alternative here is the exploited worker will no longer have any job. Doesn't seem like that is a legitimate concern for their well-being.

Your right, it's obviously much better to give money to bezos' warehouses that underpay exploited workers instead.

But it's not like as if ending de minimis would mean those goods will stop coming over. It still will, just through brick and mortar retailers and amazon FBA.

De minimis also impacts all goods, including those made by well-paid laborers and from countries that meet our exceed American labor standards.

I'm sure those workers that you genuinely care about can't wait to put down their soldering irons and get back to sustenance farming.

Thankfully nothing along the lines of this suggested wild speculation to try to get a rage bait headline.

Dishonest trolling is not a challenge or pushback. Nothing constructive comes out of this.

If the failure was not a failure, but instead an amazing success, then it would have been more successful than this exceptional success.

Evil is a moral concept, which is less tied to religion these days.

Drugs are an anti-social drain on society, that sickens its buyers, turning them into zombies or criminals, and turns the sellers into greedy, violent people who corrupt law enforcement.

Your edge case of an angel doesn't translate to the actual realities of drug trafficking and addiction.

Dunning Kruger is a cognitive bias in overconfident individuals, not a general characteristic found in every person.

There’s a little Dunning-Krueger in all of us. Well, everyone else, but not me, or you, dear reader.

That’s the appeal of Dunning-Krueger. It’s become a blanket label for every moment of ignorance or confident stupidity someone sees in others.

> If you move you still need to notify them, although perhaps in Japan big brother already knows you've moved.

When we move, we need to register our address change at the city hall. In terms of Big Brother, that's a given.

The problem is that we also need to change all bank, bills, etc. too. So this replaces the need for mail forwarding, for example.