The whole foundation on which this article builds its argument upon, that the labor market is strong, may not be true. There is data suggesting that the gig economy is obscuring the true unemployment numbers and that it has been growing for quite some time.
Interested to learn about the encroachment into bear territory. Disappointed this article didn't dig more into exactly why this is becoming an increasing problem. Since Japan's population is declining and most younger people moving into larger cities like Tokyo in search of jobs, my assumption would be that there would be less development in more rural areas, not more.
Can anyone speak to the quality of the apartments built too? I imagine a large part of affluent families choosing to continue to live in apartments is because their quality of living doesn't decrease. Whereas I feel the median apartment in the US has issues with noise between walls/windows, low quality flooring/cabinetry, and depending on the area you may not even get the benefits of mixed used zoning.
It's interesting to compare this with non-solar based pattern as in the Siffre cave experiment where they ended up falling into 48 hour sleep cycles instead.
I also fall into the camp where I believe that there are probably a variety of different sleep cycles that people are just predisposed to. I haven't seen any studies definitively indicating that there are a common sleep cycle. Even anecdotally, I know several people that are just more alert at night.
I've always wondered if there was a way to structure society so that there could be more time variety in socially needed functions. Perhaps one bank could be open 9-5 but another bank could be open 5-12. Or at the very least, improved flexibility for jobs where constant communication is not needed and can be done asynchronously. A set of core hours where communications could happen and then allow workers to work on their own cycles, taking naps as needed so that they can operate when they are most productive.
The fact that the US is growing more soy when one of its largest importers, China, hasn't agreed to an import deal and actually seems to be importing more and more from Brazil instead, is extremely confusing. That is unless the farmers are pretty confident that the US will come to an agreement or failing that, expecting some type of US government bail out/subsidy.
The front page mentions that the intention is to capture the public opinion. I felt that looking at the rankings didn't really meaningfully give me any useful information about a broad consensus on any of the topics. As many have mentioned, there are many nuances to a lot of the options.
Perhaps adding a text input after the selection to ask a user to describe their position on the topic and having that broadly shared would help towards that goal?
The rankings page doesn't give me any sense either of how my opinion broadly tracks against the "public opinion". This would fundamentally change the flow you have going but presenting the options and then asking the user to manually tier list them would allow for that side by side comparison.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4846215-jobs-update-the-gig...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2025/07/nes-gig-econo...
Even with that, the trend line of unemployment appears to be going upwards.