There's just something about Japan that makes its simplicity so beautiful. Yes, we all know Japan has dealt with economic problems, lost decades, declining fertility, etc.
But they still manage to keep the beautiful simplicity of life that makes their culture one of the world's richest.
There's an excellent book by economist Michael Hudson called "America's Protectionist Takeoff" that discusses how the US used tariffs to promote certain industries in order to compete on the world stage. It was part of Alexander Hamilton's American System. Friedrich List, the German economist that wrote "The National System of Political Economy", used the American System to advocate for the same policies in Germany. Germany eventually adopted these policies and became an economic powerhouse themselves. Likewise, Meiji Japan went so far as to adopt the ideas of Friedrich List's economic policies, which resulted in them becoming a great power in a generation.
Tariffs can work, but only if they are targeted towards certain industries/sectors. They can't just be slapped across the board and be expected to work properly. Furthermore, they must be attached to certain KPIs such as exports (i.e., the ability to effectively compete on the international market). Joe Studwell's "How Asia Works" argues that Japan, Korea, and Taiwan all used tariffs and subsidies to promote their own "national champions". In turn, they forced those companies export their products rather than just sell domestically in order to compete. If they didn't meet those export targets, those companies were cut off from state support. Ha Joon Chang, a Korean developmental economist, likens this to raising a child: you spend their initial formative years supporting them until they are able to support themselves without your help.
> As Wilson writes in his expansive and somewhat baggily written introduction, now—amid increasingly dire ecological and political conditions—we can see our own world in Faust more clearly than ever before. For Faust, he writes, is “about a world which had taken leave of God but did not know how to live.”
Man has a natural inclination to worship something. For most of human history, that has been the divine/supernatural/metaphysical. Nowadays, rationalism and materialism have become the main objects of worship. But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.
Similar to Christ saying that "man cannot live on bread alone", man cannot live on materialism alone - spiritual nourishment is a very real and necessary thing.
No offense, but you have to be an idiot to not even consider the possibility that your data was going to be sold. What do they think they were going to do with the data? Just keep it safe in storage?
Can someone tell me what the point of RTO is? These companies made insane profits during the pandemic and when everyone was WFH. Why rock the boat? Is it just corporate real estate prices? Is that all it comes down to?
What does that have to do with civil vs. common law? There isn't anything inherent in rule of law based on cases and precedent that should restrict infrastructure projects.
Why doesn't California actually do something productive with all its economic power? It now has the fourth largest economy in the world in terms of GDP. Why not experiment a little bit by providing public healthcare to California citizens free at the point of delivery/service? Or constructing high-speed rail to connect SoCal to the Bay Area?
On the one hand, capitalists and business owners want people to have more children in order to keep the economy functioning. On the other hand, they want to make work as inconvenient as possible and want work to encompass the life of the employee.
It's becoming increasingly clear that there is a trade-off and an inverse relationship between career growth and family formation.
> To get a detailed lay of the land, Frachetti and Maksudov equipped a drone with remote-sensing technology called lidar (light detection and ranging). Drones are tightly regulated in Uzbekistan, but the researchers managed to get the necessary permits to fly one at the site. A lidar scanner uses laser pulses to map the features of land below. The technology has been increasingly used in archaeology—in the past few years it has helped uncover a lost Maya city sprawling beneath the rainforest canopy in Guatemala.
> This method has its limitations, Silvia says—namely, it often turns up false positives. It’s also impossible to confirm which features come from which time period without more excavation.
Despite the limitations, it's still great that this technology is making inroads in archaeology. Would be interested to see this put to work in the Sahara and other mostly unexplored/unexcavated areas. Seems to be a low-cost but potentially high-reward project.
There needs to be public funding of elections. That would go a long way.
If we really want reform, the system should be changed from a first-past-the-post presidential system to a parliamentary system with party-list proportional representation. Neither system is perfect, but the latter captures a wider range of views within society.
Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.
> The Japanese Fifth Generation project was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry coordinated by the Japanese Government
> In a sense, Japan's ability to stay the course in pursuit of a long-term payoff-- usually considered one of the country's strongest assets-- turned into a liability.
Japan is an expert at public-private partnerships. Their entire economic development story was based on the government and private enterprises working together. They didn't take an ideological approach to development. They ignored both the neoliberal route and the socialist route.
> This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists, but for many languages (Spanish, French, German…) there is a central institution that does indeed decide what is officially correct. Their decisions are taken seriously and intentionally propagated anywhere where language is used in a somewhat official context (not just in public institutions).
This sounds very similar to the common law vs. civil law traditions as well. I wonder if there's a connection between linguistics and legal systems.