case in point: lots of places have lots of restrictions (either through legislation or just industry norms, usually a combination of both) about advertising for alcohol or tobacco.
And those efforts seem effective to me, at least anecdotally. I don't feel particularly bad about those restrictions either.
The NSA tried to do this during the Snowden leaks!
There were stories like "look at how we stopped this thing using all this data we've been scooping up"... but often the details lead to somewhat underwhelming realities, to say the least.
It might be that this stuff is very useful, but only in very illegal ways.
There's a problem with older Macbooks on older MacOS/factory reset where they can't access the App Store, so they can't directly download newer MacOS, you gotta go sidecar it
Of course this is completely opaque to people who have to do this, it just ends up prompting you to login and things like that.
I think newer MacOS avoids this stuff by not having OS updates be linked to the App Store
> Notably, the lack of legalised marriage is not because the population is too conservative. Rather, it is because the US forced a constitution on Japan which enshrines heterosexual marriage as constitutional law, and changing the constitution is significantly more difficult than changing a normal law.
Beyond the fact that they could easily get around this with civil unions, this feels like a massive misrepresentation of the status quo inside the LDP politicians that ultimately get to decide whether progress is made on this.
The current prime minister, in her previous attempt to campaign to be the head of the party (back in ... 2022 I think?), declared her opposition to married couples opting out of sharing a last name[0]. In the 21st century, strong opposition to the idea that somebody might want to keep their own family name after marriage. Something so small and unimportant. Still very far away from civil unions for non-hetero couples.
The Japanese ruling class is so far away from acceptance of anything beyond a very specific notion of married couples, even if the general population thinks differently. These things can change quickly but just in terms of policy delta between Japan and most other members of the OECD the gap is quit huge. Legal rights for one's spouse starts is important, and right now there's really nothing.
(There are some logistical things around the family register that mean that such a change would require some changes to that format. This is not a good enough reason to prevent this!)
[0]: In Japan if two Japanese people get married then they have to unify on their last name. In practice this usually means the woman throwing away their last name. In a funny twist of fate you actually have more flexibiltiy in an international marriage. If a Japanese person marries a foreigner they _don't_ have to do this (and can even go with a hyphenated last name!).
While there is no national civil union law, and it would of course be great if there were, enough prefectures and municipalities have implemented civil unions such that >90% of people live in areas covered by them, so the legal status quo isn't horrendous.
> Something so small and unimportant. Still very far away from civil unions for non-hetero couples.
Your framing of this issue is a bit misleading. You suppose that this name change issue is a prerequisite step for support for civil unions because in your perception it is more trivial. But actually, support for same-sex marriage is more popular than support for different surnames in marriage. Although even then, a supermajority also support different surnames, and even a majority of LDP supporters support both too.
Do the locality-based civil unions actually provide necessary rights for spouses when it comes to things like property rights and the like? Maybe it does.
You’re right to point out public support (I didn’t realize the name thing had less support than same-sex marriage!)
I mainly wanted to highlight that the politicians are not there yet (or rather the ones that end up making the decision, even if supporters and the rank and file support it). But maybe we’ll get same-sex marriage before the name thing!
I could totally be misreading what the state of things on the ground is.
The municipal/prefectural civil unions aren't fully legally equivalent to marriage unfortunately, they do offer tangible benefits but there is still room to improve. It's not nothing, at least.
One thing I would like to note is that Takaichi doesn't necessarily get to make the decision. Japan does not have a presidential system and the PM does not have veto power. As PM she does obviously hold significant influence in the party, but the LDP is a broad tent with multiple factions, and those factions could potentially pressure her given the LDP is losing ground and opposition to same-sex rights is unpopular even with the party's supporters. Due to the constitutional law issue, I'm not optimistic about same-sex marriage in the near-term, but I do think things are trending in the correct direction, that it's likely that more legal rights will continue to be enshrined in the short-term even if full marriage recognition isn't, and that Western media creating a panic about Takaichi and Japan's supposed trend towards ultraconservatism is more oriented towards garnering engagement than accurate reporting.
It is kinda interesting how like every company seems to go through this flow of highlighting that something is an ad (usually even with some differing background color like what Google used to do!), and then they just pull back differentiators more and more until it really is the smallest minimal marker possible
I think a big difference between Japan and many smaller markets is you are going to have local competitors in almost every sector that have some sort of buy in.
Even if you win on a feature matrix in theory (and is your feature matrix actually tailored to a local market!), the general sort of "well, local companies will be more responsive to our needs" is going to be very present.
Obviously people use Microsoft products for example but Microsoft has a _huge_ presence in Japan to support that. I have been on the receiving end of SaaS's trying to roll out their Japan sales strategy, and all the ones that got a nice and strong footing basically hired loads of local sales talent to do it.
Obviously Europe has a lot of fragmented business process things, but I think that many smaller European companies will be pretty habituated to buying services from outside the country because... well, there's no Salesforce Dot Com alternative based in Italy for example
(There are several SFDC alternatives in Japan)
Anyways the short thing is "buying services from abroad" is a perceived risk for Japanese enterprises because they will often not have to confront that issue, because the local market is "healthy"[0].
[0]: People will whine about the Japanese options being worse, but the options are at least there.
Not to argue too much against what you're saying but I thought that some EU gov't entities had moved off of Windows a while ago.
I know at least one university that doesn't put Windows on its machines either. While Uni requirements are not the same as "enterprise" requirements, it does feel close-ish.
Having said all this, I am very primed to believe that they have a Group Policy-sized hole in their systems. Just thinking they are doing ... something.
While Rust doesn't have C coverage, it has (by my last check) better coverage than something like CPython currently does.
The big thing though is Rust is honest about their tiers of support, whereas for many projects "supported platform" for minor platforms often mean "it still compiles (at least we think it does, when the maintainer tries it and it fails they will fix it)"
Not to be too glib though, there are obviously tools out there that have as much or more rigor than Rust and cover more platforms. Just... "supported platforms" means different things in different contexts.
All too common (not just with compilers) for someone to port the subset they care about and declare it done. Rust's decision to create standards of compliance and be conscious about which platforms are viable targets and which ones don't meet their needs is a completely valid way to ensure that whole classes of trouble never come. I think it's a completely valid approach, despite complaints from some.
reply