Apparently many American and European consumer products have pricing that tends to be indexed to USD. According to my wife, the Japanese women on her handbag forums are quite salty about the price of Chanel and such these days.
Sure. As we are salty about the price of Apple products. But how often do you buy this stuff?
Day in and day out, my bowl of Ramen is still 600 JPY.
My veggies come from Aomori and my Milk from Hokkaido. It's fine.
I work in a company that has 95% export and my salary is paid in EUR/JPY and USD (don't ask). So I actually benefit quite a bit. But your average Japanese citizen is just not that much affected. (Unless she buys a lot of imported goods).
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.
Did you move here three years ago? 2020-2021 was the heart of COVID deflation. I remember paying 110yen per litre for gasoline at Costco. Nic Hotels were 1万 a night for our family of three.
Any anchoring off late 2020 is super misleading. Milk at 130yen is not a reasonable price before COVID. Wheat to consumers at gyomu super or Costco has not moved in price, which is reasonable consider it has always cost several multiples over wholesale.
Worst has perhaps been sushi. The selection of 110yen sushi had gotten slightly smaller.
Overall, Japan has a lot less inflation than you'd expect considering the exchange rate.
Had you bought 1L milk for 130JPY? It's too cheap even in 2019 so I suspect that it's loss leader on your supermarket. In my area, price jumped from 190 to 230.
One of a big reason why Japanese aren't be hurt so much (compared to Europe?) by inflation is because govt support for raised gas and electricity price. Some foods are made in local, but gas for production and transportation is 100% imported.
That is super true, and not super common knowledge in Japan. The gasoline subsidy was aging out late last year and news started covering the mysterious persistent increase in gasoline prices.
You'd think kishida-san would want more credit for his vote buying haha.
> As we are salty about the price of Apple products. But how often do you buy this stuff?
Even if you splurge on a foreign luxury product once a year, it can seem like a downgrade in standard of living. Perhaps especially so if your special occasion is impacted and meanwhile you’re not seeing any higher affordability of domestic goods.
I mean, my whole family got a kick out of spending much less than expected for a week while we were in Japan, even though the other 51 weeks this year we will be dealing with US inflation. Psychology around inflation is weird.
I don't run in Channel circles but LV and Prada are much cheaper in Japan rn. Another handbag hack is to purchase in Hawaii because the retailers charge less there than mainland to address the Japanese tourist market.
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'm trying to reverse engineer your thinking. Did you do 150 - 100 = 50, then use 100 as the denominator to get 50%? Because that's not what "losing 50% of value" means.
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.
> Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from.
Do you have a source for that?
As someone that is farm adjacent (not just physically) my intuition tells me that run off from lawns would be a rounding error compared to agricultural and horticultural run off.
> Water pollution is caused in large part by runoff from farms, urban lawns, and even septic tanks. When it rains, excess phosphorus, nitrogen, and other chemicals wash into lakes and rivers.
That does not say that lawn run off out weights anything else. Did _you_ read the article?
I'd think that closer to 100% of farms have run off where a much lower percentage of lawns would have run off. Sure, you have the posh neighborhoods where the lawns are chemically treated monthly, but even then, the amounts being applied are much lower than what a farm would use. You also have a vast amount of "lawns" that do not get treated at all. I'm in the middle, and only do it twice a year.
So I'd be very shocked to see numbers that support lawns having more runoff than farms.
By number of acres cultivated, sure. By number of acres that have produce runoff of fertilizers and other byproducts into a major waterway, I doubt it. Also "lawn" doesn't mean grass. There are many alternatives to grass. For my backyard I discovered so long as I aggressively remove vines, shrubs, and saplings during the spring growth my backyard is otherwise maintenance free. As a bonus I get 9 ft tall sunflowers for part of the year as well.
I think the spectral imaging used to support this does collect all mown grass into turf. I think it can only distinguish tall grasses like wheat and maize from lawn. IIRC, you avoid certain times of year so that all short grass is an effect of landscaping.
I used to work with precision ag and fish ecology depts at univ of Minnesota. In much of the Midwest, it is farm upon farm as far as the eye can see. Both these depts primary focus was on reduction or mitigation of nutrient runoff from farms.
But, in urban areas, it is absolutely correct that a good portion of the lakes have issues due to lawn runoff (summer) and salt runoff (winter). The local lake manager said that winter salt is the single most damaging contribution of people in our one instance. A lake in the next county over was devastated by phosphorous from lawn treatment. One next door was being savaged by carp.
Water is a precious resource and has multi vector threats. Where you live it may have a bunch of different problems, but for much of my state, and surrounding Midwest states where farms are widespread, farm runoff dominates simply because on a per acre sampling, farms dominate.
> All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.
If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article but did find this:
“Even conservatively,” Milesi says, “I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.”
Irrigated. Most crops are not irrigated. From the article:
"This means lawns—including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc --could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all."
128,000 square kilometers is about 32 million acres. A lot for sure. One acre for about 10 people in the US.
But the total cultivated cropland (not counting tree farms) is about 650 million acres. 20 times the lawn total. Corn alone is 93 million acres.
Yeah for the purposes of runoff, we're prioritizing irrigated area over non-irrigated because of the potential for control. There are plenty of problems in areas where irrigation is not necessary; arsenic in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, etc.
I should have linked to the research rather than NASA, where author Milesi was interviewed:
>> All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.
> If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article
That's very interesting. It should be pointed out that all of NASAs data is open (by law - source I used to work there, subject to a short embargo for phds to be written). So anyone could have the same data underneath. But this analysis is cool.
So, the questions that remain:
1. Are lawns more or less likely to be treated with chemicals that harm waterways
2. Are lawns more or less likely to produce runoff of those treatments
3. Given answers to above is the net effect more or less than agriculture on our water.
I'm not seeing much that answers those questions specifically. It does appear there's regulations against phosphorous lawn fertilizer nowadays. But that's all I can find on a cursory search. I'm happy to believe they both are equally important nowadays.
Those would be valuable to know, but I bet separating the non-point-sources is unachievable. I mean, we may be detecting latent (> 1 year old) hydrological concentrations from the combination of lawn, ag, failing septic tanks, and point sources that conveniently become non-point.
On that last source: the design is to concentrate liquid manure, which as a point source is a liability, and spray it over an area. I believe this makes it a non-point-source for the purposes of carveouts in the clean water act.
If you have your own compost system then it can help your own garden. Or alternatively hopefully your council has a green waste collection and it can go there.
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.
Being an entirely private company makes that much less likely, especially with every other employee heavily invested in the way that valve operates now.
I have to hope that if someone is in a position to ruin the company, they can see how much of a money-printing machine it currently is and not mess with their golden goose. I think the first sign of enshittification would be if they started selling ad space for games. (rather than doing an algorithmic discovery-queue, and promoting sales like they currently do)
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.
Yeah, we are very close to losing video as a source of truth.
I showed these demos to my partner yesterday and she was upset about how real AI has become, how little we will be able to trust what we see in the future. Authoritative sources will be more valuable, but they themselves may struggle to publish only the facts and none of the fiction.
Russian authorities refute his death and have released proof of life footage, which may be doctored or taken before his death. Authoritative source Wikipedia is not much help in establishing truth here, because without proof of death they must default to toeing the official line.
I predict that in the coming months Sokolov (who just yesterday was removed from his post) will re-emerge in the video realm, and go on to have a glorious career. Resurrecting dead heroes is a perfect use of this tech, for states where feeding people lies is preferable to arming them with the truth.
Sokolov may even go on to be the next Russian President.
> Yeah, we are very close to losing video as a source of truth.
I think this way of thinking is distracted. No type of media has ever been a source of truth in itself. Videos have been edited convincingly for a long time, and people can lie about their context or cut them in a way that flips their meaning.
Text is the easiest media to lie on, you can freely just make stuff up as you go, yet we don't say "we cannot trust written text anymore".
Well yeah duh, you can trust no type of media just because it is formatted in a certain way. We arrive at the truth by using multiple sources and judging the sources' track records of the past. AI is not going to change how sourcing works. It might be easier to fool people who have no media literacy, but those people have always been a problem for society.
Text was never looked at a source of truth like video was. If you messaged someone something, they wouldn't necessarily believe it. But if you sent them a video of that something, they would feel that they would have no choice but to believe that something.
> Well yeah duh, you can trust no type of media just because it is formatted in a certain way
Maybe you wouldn't, but the layperson probably would.
> We arrive at the truth by using multiple sources and judging the sources' track records of the past
Again, this is something that the ideal person would, not the average layperson. Almost nobody would go through all that to decide if they want to believe something or not. Presenting them a video of this sometjing would've been a surefire way to force them to believe it though, at least before Sora.
> people have always been a problem for society
Unrelated, but I think this attitude is by far the bigger "problem for society". It encourages us to look down on some people even when we do not know their circumstances or reasons, all for an extremely trivial matter. It encourages gatekeeping and hostility, and I think that kind of attitude is at least as detrimental to society as people with no media literacy.
During a significant part of history, text was definitely considered a source of truth, at least to the extent a lot of people see video now. A fancy recommendation letter from a noble would get you far. It makes sense because if you forge it, that means you had to invest significant amount of effort and therefore you had to plan the deception. It's a different kind of behavior than just lying on a whim.
But even then, as nowadays, people didn't trust the medium absolutely. The possibility of forgery was real, as it has been with the video, even before generative AI.
To back up this claim, when fictional novels first became a literary format in the Western world, there was immense consternation about the fact that un-true things were being said in text. It actually took a while for authors to start writing in anything besides formats that mimicked non-fictional writing (letters, diary entries, etc.).
As has been pointed ad nauseam by now, no one's suggesting that AI unlocks the ability to doctor images; they're suggesting that it makes it trivially easy for anyone, no matter how unskilled, to do so.
I really find this constant back and forth exhausting. It's always the same conversation: '(gen)AI makes it easy to create lots of fake news and disinformation etc.' --> 'but we've always been able to do that. have you not guys not heard of photoshop?' --> 'yes, but not on this scale this quickly. can you not see the difference?'
Anyway, my original point was simply to say that a lot of people have (rightly or wrongly) indeed taken photographic evidence seriously, even in the age of photographic manipulation (which as you point out, pretty much coincides with the age of photography itself).
> Yeah, we are very close to losing video as a source of truth.
Why have you been trusting videos? The only difference is that the cost will decrease.
Haven't you seen Holywood movies? CGI has been convincing enough for a decade. Just add some compression and shaky mobile cam and it would be impossible to tell the difference on anything.
> Yeah, we are very close to losing video as a source of truth.
We've been living in a post-truth society for a while now. Thanks to "the algorithm" interacting with basic human behavior, you can find something somewhere that will tell you anything is true. You'll even find a community of people who'll be more than happy to feed your personal echo chamber -- downvoting & blocking any objections and upvoting and encouraging anything that feeds the beast.
And this doesn't just apply to "dumb people" or "the others", it applies to the very people reading this forum right now. You and me and everybody here lives in their safe, sound truth bubble. Don't like what people tell you? Just find somebody or something that will assure you that whatever it is you think, you are thinking the truth. No, everybody is the asshole who is wrong. Fuck those pond scum spreaders of "misinformation".
It could be a blog, it could be some AI generated video, it could even be "esteemed" newspapers like the New York Times or NPR. Everybody thinks their truth is the correct one and thanks to the selective power of the internet, we can all believe whatever truth we want. And honestly, at this point, I am suspecting there might not be any kind of ground truth. It's bullshit all the way down.
so where do we go from here? the moon landing was faked, we're ruled by lizard people, and there are microchips in the vaccine. at some level, you can believe what you want to believe, and if the checkout clerk thinks the moon is made of cheese, it makes no difference to me, I still get my groceries. but for things like nuclear fusion, are we actually making progress on it or is it also a delusion. where the rubber meets the road is how money gets spent on building big projects. is JWST bullshit? is the LHC? ITER? GPS?
we need ground truths for these things to actually function. how else can things work together?
I've always found that take quite ridiculous. Fake videos have existed for a long time. This technology reduces the effort required but if we're talking about state actors that was never an issue to begin with.
People already know that video cannot be taken at face value. Lord of the rings didn't make anyone belive orcs really exist.
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.
A key difference in the current trajectory is its becoming feasible to generate highly targeted content down to an individual level. This can also be achieved without state actor level resources or the time delays needed to traditionally implement, regardless of budget. The fact it could also be automated is mildly terrifying.
Coordinated campaigns of hate through the mass media - like kicking up war fever before any major war you care to name - is far more concerning and has already been with us for about a century. Look at WWII and what Hitler was doing with it for a clearest example; propaganda was the name of the game. The techniques haven't gone anywhere.
If anything, making it cheap enough that people have to dismiss video footage might soften the impact. It is interesting how the internet is making it much harder for the mass media to peddle unchallenged lies or slanted perspectives. This tech might counter-intuitively make it harder again.
I have no doubt trust levels will adjust, eventually. The challenge is that takes a non-trivial amount of time.
It's still an issue with traditional mass media. See basically any political environment where the Murdoch media empire is active. The long tail of (I hate myself for this terminology, but hey, it's HN) 'legacy humans' still vote and have a very real affect on society.
It's funny you mention LotR, because the vast vast vast majority of the character effects were practical (at least in the original trilogy). They were in fact, entirely real, even if they were not true to life.
You can still be enraged by things you know are not real. You can reason about your emotional response, but it's much harder to prevent an emotional response from happening in the first place.
The issue is not even so much generating fake videos as creating plausible deniability. Now everything can be questioned for the pure reason of seeming AI-generated.
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.
Your money losing half its value in about a year tends to do that.