6 ms·

Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past (2023)

73 points by amichail 2y ago

billy99k 2y ago
I traveled to Japan and Vietnam last year. I got far faster Internet speeds in Vietnam. Sometimes double or triple the speed.
- alexott 2y ago
  I was in Thailand in 2017th - mobile internet with 4g was almost everywhere, including small islands. It was a huge contrast to Germany where you need to get 15 minutes drive from most of cities to get only Edge at best, or no mobile coverage at all
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Interesting. Where in Japan and where in Vietnam? And when in Vietnam was it via Vintel [EDIT: Viettel - doh I need my noon coffee]?
  - billy99k 2y ago
    Japan: Tokyo Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh city Vintel, yes. I also noticed free wifi at restaurant and cafes were much faster in Vietnam as well.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      > Ho Chi Minh city D1 and D3? And yea Vintel [EDIT: Viettel - doh I need my noon coffee] makes sense - they're the military monopoly on telecom in Vietnam. Vintel was always slow for me, but they were also trying to MITM and my setup was always evading that. Who was your mobile operator in Japan?
  - huy77 2y ago
    it's Viettel not Vintel
- jamesfmilne 2y ago
  My colleague in Tokyo has 10Gb internet in his apartment. The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed
- lhl 2y ago
  For mobile coverage and speed, I've found Japan (I've been from Ishigaki to Shiretoko in the past few years) to be pretty world class (assuming your device supports the proper bands - for anyone visiting, refer to https://www.frequencycheck.com/countries/japan https://www.frequencycheck.com/countries/japan ). For wired connections, almost every new building in Tokyo has fiber, and 10Gbps support is pretty common (NTT, Sony, Softbank and others all offer it) while I don't believe it's widely available at all in Vietnam. Anyway, everyone will have their own experience, and I haven't been in Vietnam since before the pandemic, but last time I was there (4 cities and a few out of town trips), while I had OK connectivity, I wasn't blown away by it vs Japan or other places. I'd take Japanese traffic safety and street sanitation over Vietnam every day of the year though.
- huy77 2y ago
  not true, im vietnamese and the internet in the us is faster in many regions
mdp2021 2y ago
Very good recent (Aug 12, 2024) exposition from Economic's Help (Tejvan Pettinger, Oxford): # The Rise and Fall of Japan's Economy - Can it Recover? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNYMNzdSQwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNYMNzdSQwc
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
nextworddev 2y ago
Lived in Japan. I think world will come to realize that Japan's past is also the world's future.
- jbm 2y ago
  Came to say the same thing. The supposed backwards parts are seeming charming the longer I live in Canada. Having a sovereign language has allowed it to avoid so much brainrot in our culture today.
  - jperras 2y ago
    Québecois here. We've been trying to tell the rest of Canada this for _decades_.
    - jbm 2y ago
      I mostly agree. Still, being a minority from Montreal who left and found life in Japan significantly less alienating, I hesitate to agree wholeheartedly.
      - jperras 2y ago
        Very fair. The line between conscientious preservation and alienation can be (and often is) an easy one to cross.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > Having a sovereign language has allowed it to avoid so much brainrot in our culture today. それは、翻訳行為が高価である限りにおいてのみ機能します。 (That 'free' is also 'mediocre quality' does not help when the problem is 'brain rot': viral memes still be viral)
    - 4bpp 2y ago
      Well, for what it's worth, your machine-translated sentence is basically incomprehensible in Japanese, let alone in a position to go viral (except in the capacity in which exquisite gibberish sometimes does). I could only infer what I think you intended to say ("This only works as long as translation is expensive"...?) by translating it back literally coupled with guesswork about what English text could have given rise to this "translation". Not that your point isn't actually a good one - we do now often see the worst of US-made culture war toxoplasma (in all stages of its lifecycle) being imported wholesale into European cultures where it is barely relevant to local circumstances, which I would squarely blame on sufficient English skills and superior production value of anglophone politics.
keikobadthebad 2y ago
From Jan 2023
alephnerd 2y ago
Ehn, Japan doesn't have the same zeitgeist as it did in the 1980s-early 2000s, but it is still cool and imo forward facing - just different and more self assured. The kind of guy who enjoyed Japan in the 80s or 90s probably isn't the kind of guy listening to modern J-Wave, watching Anime, or digging into METI and the ADB's Flock of Geese strategy. Instead of mimicking and pastiching western culture like back in the 80s and 90s, Japanese subcultures now merge the west and Japan in a more imo mature and self assured manner. Also, Japan has absolutely become more diverse compared to 20 years ago - before the foreign population was fraction of a percent, but now it's reached 2-3% - most of whom are from all across Eastern and Southeast Asia. Japan has been developed now for a generation, so there isn't much of a pull to leave Japan and evangelize within America - especially when Japanese firms have a much stronger market position in ASEAN and India. Same thing will happen to Korea in 10-15 years.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
garou 2y ago
US tried very hard after ww2 to make japan to be "the future" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle). But as it is said in this article (not with these words), the neoliberalism is not compatible. The youngs are literaly dying of too much work and what it wants to summarize is 'the old are still in power', 'samurais that surrended'. It all is just neoliberal ideology. All these contradictions are roting its society.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
(2023) Lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34475915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34475915
akimbostrawman 2y ago
>"Well, you would need to learn our way of life. It wouldn't be easy." The village was on the path to extinction, yet the thought of it being invaded by "outsiders" was somehow worse. throwing foreign people into a country without them adaption the culture is not reviving that country but changing it which on a longer time scale is the same as that country (read culture) dying. nobody would claim old empire are still alive because on there rubble a country stands today.
- mcguire 2y ago
  Allowing the country to die of senescence is also not reviving that country.
  - akimbostrawman 2y ago
    japans problems aren't biological but social. they require social change not hereditary change
nothercastle 2y ago
The Japanese central bank doomed their economy to 20+ years of stagnation. Instead of allowing prices of assets to crash after the big bubble they locked interest rates at 0 and prevented a recession and repricing of assets but at the cost of future
- mcguire 2y ago
  Japan had more structural problems than that. For one thing, at the time it was reported that wealthy, powerful people could not be allowed to lose money in the stock market; the broker would make them whole, until the day that they couldn't anymore.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > they locked interest rates at 0 "How to destroy innovation and ensure monopolies take over your economy."
  - amai 2y ago
    Wasn’t that the case for a long time in the US an the EU, too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy
telchior 2y ago
It's interesting to consider that these "Japan is backwards" takes might persist in part simply because it hasn't melded with the global first world culture. I can go to various countries and very similar experiences at an electronics store, a hotel and a gas station. In Japan all of those (and many others) are distinctively Japanese. I've read travelogues from the 17th-19th centuries, and in a lot of them, all of the countries are described like Japan. "Look at these weirdos, they insist on ______!" A tourist going from France to Italy would be constantly amazed, offended and puzzled. No longer. It's a weird thought for me to have. I'm not a conservative; I view xenophobia, fear of change, and cultural/economic death grips by an older generation as negatives. But it feels like most of the world that doesn't have those things is increasingly homogeneous, in a way that's also uncomfortable to see.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Most writers who give this "Japan is backwards" spiel all seem to have lived in the 80s or 90s. I'm much younger than these Gen Xers and Millenials, but it feels like Japanese style cultural impact is much larger now than "western style". Heck, KWave, KDramas, and Manhwa are heavily based on Japanese JPop, JDramas (the GOTO back in the 2000s before Sony made licensing expensive), and Manga. > view xenophobia, fear of change, and cultural/economic death grips by an older generation as negatives Japan has also changed a LOT demographically over the past 20-30 years - before foreigners were mostly Zainichi or Taiwanese plus a smattering of Chinese illegals, but now you have 2-3% of the population from ASEAN, China across all economic stratas, Koreans from Korea, etc but they all look "Japanese"
  - telchior 2y ago
    To be fair, sometimes the "Japan is backwards" spiel is focused solely on their technology. And I don't think that one is wrong, even today. The keiretsus have continued to do a very poor job at innovating.
    - doublerabbit 2y ago
      > The keiretsus have continued to do a very poor job at innovating. It's the same everywhere. We are now stuck in the world where the formula is of A or B. Android vs Apple Intel vs AMD Sony vs Nintendo Microsoft vs Linux Firefox vs Chrome For any technology that has a third party has a very little mindshare. Not only does this make innovation hard. How? When only the same two contenders continue to dominate the market and have newr-infinite resources. "let us buy you out, or we'll make our own"
Xcelerate 2y ago
I’ve lived in many parts of the U.S.—from major cities to the rural countryside. I’ve also lived outside the U.S. And without fail, every time I visit other developed countries, I become so confused about how our economy is apparently one of the strongest, and yet the U.S. just feels behind a lot of other places. A friend was telling me the first time they moved to the U.S. to work in Silicon Valley, they were expecting some sort of high tech glassy utopia. “It’s just suburbs” they said with a frown, “and San Francisco was a grimy disappointment as well.” Most of the U.S. doesn’t even look as nice as the Bay Area. It’s mostly the same suburbs minus the wealth, nature, and sunshine. The buildings and infrastructure and in many cities are decades old by now. What exactly does it mean to have the highest GDP if it doesn’t reflect in your daily life and surroundings? I read that people in Japan tend to travel some of the least in the world outside their own country despite their amazing passports, and most will say it’s because they’ve got everything they need right there. Perhaps relentless economic growth shouldn’t be the goal—rather, building something nice for the society you live in and keeping that way should be.
- huy77 2y ago
  us is the strongest in arm not civil
  - lannisterstark 2y ago
    >us is the strongest in arm not civil the US economy is one of the (if not the, depending on who you ask) strongest economy in the world - and we're not talking military economy. To pretend otherwise is simply naive. Mississippi, the poorest US state, has both higher GDP Per Capita and GDP PPP Per Capita than most of Europe, much less the world.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      It's not really the economy so much as international economics. The term to look up here is 'exporting inflation.' [1] Historically the US was able to engage in what would be unsustainable economic policy for most nations, but kept it going by exporting the normal consequences (inflation) of such. There's a lot of nuanced reasons for this but one of the most simple is that we were the largest consumer economy by an extremely wide margin. So imagine there's a place Carlandia - whose economy is largely driven by exporting cars to the US. And we print a bunch of money so the dollar starts to dump in value. Ostensibly this would initially be really nice for Carlandia because each of their cars would sell for even more dollars. But in practice what happens is that Americans would simply stop buying so many cars from you, and then Carlandia's economy would start to tank. But there's a simple solution. Carlandia intentionally starts to devalue its own currency, precisely to maintain stable trade levels. So they do precisely this, as do other nations around the world. But as prices around the world start to normalize the inflation disappears, but the money we printed doesn't. So this gives us the freedom to print money and have it disproportionately end up being "real" as opposed to just inflationary, as it would be for most other nations. So you basically get a 'print GDP' button. But this is also a liminal state of affairs. Not only is the world going multipolar but other economies are growing much faster than ours meaning are gradually losing dominance in terms of being a key market target. If we're not able to export inflation and demand/dominance of the dollar starts to slide, then things are going to get rocky, fast. [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation
hackeraccount 2y ago
Total aside. In Neal Stephenson book Seveneves the technology of a future is in a few small ways described as weirdly un-advanced compared to the present. I wouldn't describe it as the focus of the book but it still seemed particularly implausible to me but ... I hadn't really thought about Japan. I've never been but I've read that in a few ways technology (fax machines were (are?) still popular just a few years ago) is weirdly retrograde. That said for potential readers of Seveneves - as with all Stephenson's book it needed an editor to keep him in line. The second half was no where near as good as the first. There were plausibility problems with the technology used throughout the book. Also it was really a lot of fun and I have to admit that I enjoyed reading it.
- davidsgk 2y ago
  Bandwagoning onto this aside, I had really similar thoughts on both fronts. Are things really "retrograde" in Japan because they hang onto older technologies faster, or do they hang around longer because they make sense for their circumstances and needs? We don't say walkie-talkies on security guards are retrograde (not a perfect analogy, I know). And yep, I like to think of Seveneves as 3 books in a big trench coat where the first 2 are fantastic and I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone that likes some solid sci-fi.
  - moandcompany 2y ago
    Agree with your question... "Older" is a relative measurement of time, but doesn't say anything about the marginal benefit or cost. An example of your question I see from Japan relates to payment systems. People often critique Japan for its cash-oriented systems and have also observed the difficulty that digital payment systems have had in gaining traction in Japan... an example for why digital payment systems have had poor adoption is the existence of earlier, well-adopted solutions that provide many of the same benefits in the majority of practical scenarios (i.e. stored value IC cards: Suica/Pasmo/etc.). In cases like this, the "newer" and supposedly better technology doesn't provide as large of a marginal benefit. They already solved much of the problem.
- lxgr 2y ago
woodPurchase 2y ago
Nations are not made from dirt. National character wont seep into any group that wonders in. Replacement of the Japanese means the death of Japan, just as much as it does to any other country and has caused so many issues in the west Economic stagnation is preferable (and has better solutions anyway), the only ones to gain from immigration are foreigners that hate you, your way of life, and some fat cats that hate you ten times more
worstspotgain 2y ago
There are two entangled curves: the demographic shift and the urban real estate pyramidization game. The demographic "leveling off" is inevitable. Until that point is reached, however, favorable demographics can partially offset pyramidization. The US population is still growing (largely through immigration) so it has not reached the endgame stage like Japan and parts of Europe have. The pyramidization game works by artificially restricting urban housing supply more and more over time. If everyone reacted by buying instead of renting, the game would always end in a 2008-style crash, when the pyramid's bottom-most layer finds itself under water with no further buyers to push it up. Instead, with renters in the picture, housing prices rise until rents equal the maximum amount of income that can be extracted from renters. This keeps the bottom-most pyramid layer just afloat. At the equilibrium point, economic growth is stunted. The "working segment" of the population is trapped by rents and mortgages, and cannot take chances. The "housing baron segment" tends to underfund productive investments like the stock market, with real estate looming large on their books. The government has to allocate a lot of resources to the budget effects and stabilization requirements caused by the real estate system, including indirectly via the banking system.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
erie 2y ago
Perhaps a look at Japanese software development will give an interesting look into the subject, not sure how accurate this one is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1nGQhHTso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1nGQhHTso Then there is politics and a controversial one is mentioned here. ''US spy agencies began recruiting former fascists and Nazi collaborators. US officials freed Class A Japanese war criminals from prison, some of whom went on to lead the government in Tokyo.Many of these figures were involved in founding the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has essentially run Japan as a one-party state since 1955 (excluding a mere five years of opposition rule).A textbook example of this was Nobusuke Kishi, a notorious war criminal who ran the Japanese empire’s Manchukuo puppet regime and oversaw genocidal atrocities in collaboration with the Nazis. He was briefly imprisoned, but later pardoned by US authorities and, with Washington’s support, rose to become prime minister of Japan in the 1950s.Kishi’s fascist-linked family still commands significant control over Japanese politics. His grandson, Shinzo Abe, was the longest-serving prime minister in the East Asian nation’s history. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/08/07/atomic-bombing-japan-not-necessary/ https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/08/07/atomic-bombing-ja...

73 points by amichail 2y ago

I traveled to Japan and Vietnam last year. I got far faster Internet speeds in Vietnam. Sometimes double or triple the speed.

alexott 2y ago
I was in Thailand in 2017th - mobile internet with 4g was almost everywhere, including small islands. It was a huge contrast to Germany where you need to get 15 minutes drive from most of cities to get only Edge at best, or no mobile coverage at all
alephnerd 2y ago
Interesting. Where in Japan and where in Vietnam? And when in Vietnam was it via Vintel [EDIT: Viettel - doh I need my noon coffee]?
- billy99k 2y ago
  Japan: Tokyo Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh city Vintel, yes. I also noticed free wifi at restaurant and cafes were much faster in Vietnam as well.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > Ho Chi Minh city D1 and D3? And yea Vintel [EDIT: Viettel - doh I need my noon coffee] makes sense - they're the military monopoly on telecom in Vietnam. Vintel was always slow for me, but they were also trying to MITM and my setup was always evading that. Who was your mobile operator in Japan?
- huy77 2y ago
  it's Viettel not Vintel
jamesfmilne 2y ago
My colleague in Tokyo has 10Gb internet in his apartment. The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed
lhl 2y ago
For mobile coverage and speed, I've found Japan (I've been from Ishigaki to Shiretoko in the past few years) to be pretty world class (assuming your device supports the proper bands - for anyone visiting, refer to https://www.frequencycheck.com/countries/japan https://www.frequencycheck.com/countries/japan ). For wired connections, almost every new building in Tokyo has fiber, and 10Gbps support is pretty common (NTT, Sony, Softbank and others all offer it) while I don't believe it's widely available at all in Vietnam. Anyway, everyone will have their own experience, and I haven't been in Vietnam since before the pandemic, but last time I was there (4 cities and a few out of town trips), while I had OK connectivity, I wasn't blown away by it vs Japan or other places. I'd take Japanese traffic safety and street sanitation over Vietnam every day of the year though.
huy77 2y ago
not true, im vietnamese and the internet in the us is faster in many regions

mdp2021 2y ago

Very good recent (Aug 12, 2024) exposition from Economic's Help (Tejvan Pettinger, Oxford): # The Rise and Fall of Japan's Economy - Can it Recover? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNYMNzdSQwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNYMNzdSQwc

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

nextworddev 2y ago

Lived in Japan. I think world will come to realize that Japan's past is also the world's future.

jbm 2y ago
Came to say the same thing. The supposed backwards parts are seeming charming the longer I live in Canada. Having a sovereign language has allowed it to avoid so much brainrot in our culture today.
- jperras 2y ago
  Québecois here. We've been trying to tell the rest of Canada this for _decades_.
  - jbm 2y ago
    I mostly agree. Still, being a minority from Montreal who left and found life in Japan significantly less alienating, I hesitate to agree wholeheartedly.
    - jperras 2y ago
      Very fair. The line between conscientious preservation and alienation can be (and often is) an easy one to cross.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > Having a sovereign language has allowed it to avoid so much brainrot in our culture today. それは、翻訳行為が高価である限りにおいてのみ機能します。 (That 'free' is also 'mediocre quality' does not help when the problem is 'brain rot': viral memes still be viral)
  - 4bpp 2y ago
    Well, for what it's worth, your machine-translated sentence is basically incomprehensible in Japanese, let alone in a position to go viral (except in the capacity in which exquisite gibberish sometimes does). I could only infer what I think you intended to say ("This only works as long as translation is expensive"...?) by translating it back literally coupled with guesswork about what English text could have given rise to this "translation". Not that your point isn't actually a good one - we do now often see the worst of US-made culture war toxoplasma (in all stages of its lifecycle) being imported wholesale into European cultures where it is barely relevant to local circumstances, which I would squarely blame on sufficient English skills and superior production value of anglophone politics.

keikobadthebad 2y ago

From Jan 2023

alephnerd 2y ago

Ehn, Japan doesn't have the same zeitgeist as it did in the 1980s-early 2000s, but it is still cool and imo forward facing - just different and more self assured. The kind of guy who enjoyed Japan in the 80s or 90s probably isn't the kind of guy listening to modern J-Wave, watching Anime, or digging into METI and the ADB's Flock of Geese strategy. Instead of mimicking and pastiching western culture like back in the 80s and 90s, Japanese subcultures now merge the west and Japan in a more imo mature and self assured manner. Also, Japan has absolutely become more diverse compared to 20 years ago - before the foreign population was fraction of a percent, but now it's reached 2-3% - most of whom are from all across Eastern and Southeast Asia. Japan has been developed now for a generation, so there isn't much of a pull to leave Japan and evangelize within America - especially when Japanese firms have a much stronger market position in ASEAN and India. Same thing will happen to Korea in 10-15 years.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

garou 2y ago

US tried very hard after ww2 to make japan to be "the future" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle). But as it is said in this article (not with these words), the neoliberalism is not compatible. The youngs are literaly dying of too much work and what it wants to summarize is 'the old are still in power', 'samurais that surrended'. It all is just neoliberal ideology. All these contradictions are roting its society.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

(2023) Lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34475915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34475915

akimbostrawman 2y ago

>"Well, you would need to learn our way of life. It wouldn't be easy." The village was on the path to extinction, yet the thought of it being invaded by "outsiders" was somehow worse. throwing foreign people into a country without them adaption the culture is not reviving that country but changing it which on a longer time scale is the same as that country (read culture) dying. nobody would claim old empire are still alive because on there rubble a country stands today.

mcguire 2y ago
Allowing the country to die of senescence is also not reviving that country.
- akimbostrawman 2y ago
  japans problems aren't biological but social. they require social change not hereditary change

nothercastle 2y ago

The Japanese central bank doomed their economy to 20+ years of stagnation. Instead of allowing prices of assets to crash after the big bubble they locked interest rates at 0 and prevented a recession and repricing of assets but at the cost of future

mcguire 2y ago
Japan had more structural problems than that. For one thing, at the time it was reported that wealthy, powerful people could not be allowed to lose money in the stock market; the broker would make them whole, until the day that they couldn't anymore.
akira2501 2y ago
> they locked interest rates at 0 "How to destroy innovation and ensure monopolies take over your economy."
- amai 2y ago
  Wasn’t that the case for a long time in the US an the EU, too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy

telchior 2y ago

It's interesting to consider that these "Japan is backwards" takes might persist in part simply because it hasn't melded with the global first world culture. I can go to various countries and very similar experiences at an electronics store, a hotel and a gas station. In Japan all of those (and many others) are distinctively Japanese. I've read travelogues from the 17th-19th centuries, and in a lot of them, all of the countries are described like Japan. "Look at these weirdos, they insist on ______!" A tourist going from France to Italy would be constantly amazed, offended and puzzled. No longer. It's a weird thought for me to have. I'm not a conservative; I view xenophobia, fear of change, and cultural/economic death grips by an older generation as negatives. But it feels like most of the world that doesn't have those things is increasingly homogeneous, in a way that's also uncomfortable to see.

alephnerd 2y ago
Most writers who give this "Japan is backwards" spiel all seem to have lived in the 80s or 90s. I'm much younger than these Gen Xers and Millenials, but it feels like Japanese style cultural impact is much larger now than "western style". Heck, KWave, KDramas, and Manhwa are heavily based on Japanese JPop, JDramas (the GOTO back in the 2000s before Sony made licensing expensive), and Manga. > view xenophobia, fear of change, and cultural/economic death grips by an older generation as negatives Japan has also changed a LOT demographically over the past 20-30 years - before foreigners were mostly Zainichi or Taiwanese plus a smattering of Chinese illegals, but now you have 2-3% of the population from ASEAN, China across all economic stratas, Koreans from Korea, etc but they all look "Japanese"
- telchior 2y ago
  To be fair, sometimes the "Japan is backwards" spiel is focused solely on their technology. And I don't think that one is wrong, even today. The keiretsus have continued to do a very poor job at innovating.
  - doublerabbit 2y ago
    > The keiretsus have continued to do a very poor job at innovating. It's the same everywhere. We are now stuck in the world where the formula is of A or B. Android vs Apple Intel vs AMD Sony vs Nintendo Microsoft vs Linux Firefox vs Chrome For any technology that has a third party has a very little mindshare. Not only does this make innovation hard. How? When only the same two contenders continue to dominate the market and have newr-infinite resources. "let us buy you out, or we'll make our own"

Xcelerate 2y ago

I’ve lived in many parts of the U.S.—from major cities to the rural countryside. I’ve also lived outside the U.S. And without fail, every time I visit other developed countries, I become so confused about how our economy is apparently one of the strongest, and yet the U.S. just feels behind a lot of other places. A friend was telling me the first time they moved to the U.S. to work in Silicon Valley, they were expecting some sort of high tech glassy utopia. “It’s just suburbs” they said with a frown, “and San Francisco was a grimy disappointment as well.” Most of the U.S. doesn’t even look as nice as the Bay Area. It’s mostly the same suburbs minus the wealth, nature, and sunshine. The buildings and infrastructure and in many cities are decades old by now. What exactly does it mean to have the highest GDP if it doesn’t reflect in your daily life and surroundings? I read that people in Japan tend to travel some of the least in the world outside their own country despite their amazing passports, and most will say it’s because they’ve got everything they need right there. Perhaps relentless economic growth shouldn’t be the goal—rather, building something nice for the society you live in and keeping that way should be.

huy77 2y ago
us is the strongest in arm not civil
- lannisterstark 2y ago
  >us is the strongest in arm not civil the US economy is one of the (if not the, depending on who you ask) strongest economy in the world - and we're not talking military economy. To pretend otherwise is simply naive. Mississippi, the poorest US state, has both higher GDP Per Capita and GDP PPP Per Capita than most of Europe, much less the world.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    It's not really the economy so much as international economics. The term to look up here is 'exporting inflation.' [1] Historically the US was able to engage in what would be unsustainable economic policy for most nations, but kept it going by exporting the normal consequences (inflation) of such. There's a lot of nuanced reasons for this but one of the most simple is that we were the largest consumer economy by an extremely wide margin. So imagine there's a place Carlandia - whose economy is largely driven by exporting cars to the US. And we print a bunch of money so the dollar starts to dump in value. Ostensibly this would initially be really nice for Carlandia because each of their cars would sell for even more dollars. But in practice what happens is that Americans would simply stop buying so many cars from you, and then Carlandia's economy would start to tank. But there's a simple solution. Carlandia intentionally starts to devalue its own currency, precisely to maintain stable trade levels. So they do precisely this, as do other nations around the world. But as prices around the world start to normalize the inflation disappears, but the money we printed doesn't. So this gives us the freedom to print money and have it disproportionately end up being "real" as opposed to just inflationary, as it would be for most other nations. So you basically get a 'print GDP' button. But this is also a liminal state of affairs. Not only is the world going multipolar but other economies are growing much faster than ours meaning are gradually losing dominance in terms of being a key market target. If we're not able to export inflation and demand/dominance of the dollar starts to slide, then things are going to get rocky, fast. [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation

hackeraccount 2y ago

Total aside. In Neal Stephenson book Seveneves the technology of a future is in a few small ways described as weirdly un-advanced compared to the present. I wouldn't describe it as the focus of the book but it still seemed particularly implausible to me but ... I hadn't really thought about Japan. I've never been but I've read that in a few ways technology (fax machines were (are?) still popular just a few years ago) is weirdly retrograde. That said for potential readers of Seveneves - as with all Stephenson's book it needed an editor to keep him in line. The second half was no where near as good as the first. There were plausibility problems with the technology used throughout the book. Also it was really a lot of fun and I have to admit that I enjoyed reading it.

davidsgk 2y ago
Bandwagoning onto this aside, I had really similar thoughts on both fronts. Are things really "retrograde" in Japan because they hang onto older technologies faster, or do they hang around longer because they make sense for their circumstances and needs? We don't say walkie-talkies on security guards are retrograde (not a perfect analogy, I know). And yep, I like to think of Seveneves as 3 books in a big trench coat where the first 2 are fantastic and I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone that likes some solid sci-fi.
- moandcompany 2y ago
  Agree with your question... "Older" is a relative measurement of time, but doesn't say anything about the marginal benefit or cost. An example of your question I see from Japan relates to payment systems. People often critique Japan for its cash-oriented systems and have also observed the difficulty that digital payment systems have had in gaining traction in Japan... an example for why digital payment systems have had poor adoption is the existence of earlier, well-adopted solutions that provide many of the same benefits in the majority of practical scenarios (i.e. stored value IC cards: Suica/Pasmo/etc.). In cases like this, the "newer" and supposedly better technology doesn't provide as large of a marginal benefit. They already solved much of the problem.
lxgr 2y ago

woodPurchase 2y ago

Nations are not made from dirt. National character wont seep into any group that wonders in. Replacement of the Japanese means the death of Japan, just as much as it does to any other country and has caused so many issues in the west Economic stagnation is preferable (and has better solutions anyway), the only ones to gain from immigration are foreigners that hate you, your way of life, and some fat cats that hate you ten times more

worstspotgain 2y ago

There are two entangled curves: the demographic shift and the urban real estate pyramidization game. The demographic "leveling off" is inevitable. Until that point is reached, however, favorable demographics can partially offset pyramidization. The US population is still growing (largely through immigration) so it has not reached the endgame stage like Japan and parts of Europe have. The pyramidization game works by artificially restricting urban housing supply more and more over time. If everyone reacted by buying instead of renting, the game would always end in a 2008-style crash, when the pyramid's bottom-most layer finds itself under water with no further buyers to push it up. Instead, with renters in the picture, housing prices rise until rents equal the maximum amount of income that can be extracted from renters. This keeps the bottom-most pyramid layer just afloat. At the equilibrium point, economic growth is stunted. The "working segment" of the population is trapped by rents and mortgages, and cannot take chances. The "housing baron segment" tends to underfund productive investments like the stock market, with real estate looming large on their books. The government has to allocate a lot of resources to the budget effects and stabilization requirements caused by the real estate system, including indirectly via the banking system.

deleted 2y ago

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erie 2y ago

Perhaps a look at Japanese software development will give an interesting look into the subject, not sure how accurate this one is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1nGQhHTso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1nGQhHTso Then there is politics and a controversial one is mentioned here. ''US spy agencies began recruiting former fascists and Nazi collaborators. US officials freed Class A Japanese war criminals from prison, some of whom went on to lead the government in Tokyo.Many of these figures were involved in founding the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has essentially run Japan as a one-party state since 1955 (excluding a mere five years of opposition rule).A textbook example of this was Nobusuke Kishi, a notorious war criminal who ran the Japanese empire’s Manchukuo puppet regime and oversaw genocidal atrocities in collaboration with the Nazis. He was briefly imprisoned, but later pardoned by US authorities and, with Washington’s support, rose to become prime minister of Japan in the 1950s.Kishi’s fascist-linked family still commands significant control over Japanese politics. His grandson, Shinzo Abe, was the longest-serving prime minister in the East Asian nation’s history. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/08/07/atomic-bombing-japan-not-necessary/ https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/08/07/atomic-bombing-ja...