osdiab

You kidding me? Physical infrastructure is absolutely central to the issue. Demand to live in SF skyrocketed but the city responded by resisting any expansion of its housing stock. To claim that doesn’t have an impact on the affordability in the city, which in turn affects whether or not people can afford to live in a home there, is madness.

Oh, I didn't answer the how - I had been to Japan a lot, so I already had friends here. When I made the move permanent, I had cofounded a company with a few friends, piloted doing remote work from here a couple times before actually moving to convince the team that it can work. Once we were all onboard with it, I crashed at my friend's apartment while going apartment hunting with my Japanese then-girlfriend (now-wife). When I first arrived permanently I was on a tourist visa waiver, but then switched to a student visa studying Japanese (since I was planning to anyway). It was 6 months of full time school + full time job which was exhausting, but after we got married then I switched to a spouse visa and life calmed down since.

I don't know what your profession or situation is, but if you can line up a job you can pretty easily get a work visa (it's much less binding than US work visas). Japanese corporations are known to have pretty brutal work culture so that's something you ought to be aware of when searching, if you seriously pursue it. Hope it's interesting food for thought :)

I do believe city governments play an enormous role in these issues; the most obvious is the ridiculous and convoluted process for housing approvals in SF that has made it impossible for the city to come even close to providing adequate housing supply for the people that wish to live there, driving housing costs through the roof; coupled with the incessant stonewalling of any housing and transportation construction by municipalities across the Bay. Plus the fact that people dedicated to perpetuating this atrocious system keep getting elected to the the SF Board of Supervisors, no thanks to young people who would benefit from competition failing to show up to the elections.

But I also place a lot of blame on state policies too - CA Prop 13 is a cancer on the whole state, incentivizing land owners to fight tooth and nail to prevent progress. I'm glad that Scott Wiener got elected, though, as he's been making solid progress at the state level to rectify these issues.

The roots of these problems are not broadly federal in my opinion and, while they certainly can help, there's a lot of work to do at the city and state level that are achievable with a small number of dedicated people - if only they cared.

Neither would I just blame the sorry state of US cities on inadequate mental health care - while healthcare broadly certainly should be better, I'm in Japan where mental health awareness is relatively speaking in the stone age compared to SF, and that hasn't resulted in the level of human tragedy you experience viscerally by existing for 5 minutes in any of the US's major metropolises. Part of the reason for that is I can get my own apartment without roommates 15 minutes from the center of Tokyo for $600/mo, largely because the local government here actually does things to make it livable (and it's not just here, it's practically everywhere besides US cities).

I hope US cities wake up, become humble, and actually try to fix the deep hole of social issues they’ve dug themselves into. Best I can say is be active and vocal in your local government, since that’s where these messed up policies come from and you have a lot more power to impact your city than you do the federal government.

I’m half southeast Asian, which is different enough people can tell if they get close, but close enough that I can blend in in a crowd. It depends where in Japan you’re moving to as well - but being in Tokyo it’s definitely global and people are generally used to foreigners. Your mileage may vary being more visibly “different”, as well as you motivation to learn Japanese/local customs (I’m pretty conversational, which took a lot of work), and your sensitivity to being treated differently - though for me I mostly don’t take it personally.

Then great news, SF has built almost nothing since 1979, so you’re more likely than not to be covered!

Maybe I was being a cheapskate for keeping my rent under $2k per month when I lived there, but I never lived in an apartment that wasn’t rent controlled.

Uhh, maybe US cities haven’t, but here in Tokyo I never smell feces, step on needles, nor are there hordes of homeless people in every major part of the neighborhood, in a city that has affordable housing, a truly phenomenal public transit network, streets that pretty much never have potholes, and endless cultural and culinary amenities, in a place with GDP per capita far lower than SF. And it similarly was the case for pretty much every city I’ve been to in East Asia, so it’s not even just a Tokyo thing.

I was active in SF housing politics when I lived there for 8 years, and my conclusion is that SF and most other US cities incompetent local governments (SF’s especially) are stuck in a mindset where they still repeatedly declare that they’re “great!” despite their blatantly subpar infrastructure and the rampant, systematic trampling of their own citizens human rights. Perhaps it is great for the elderly voters who never leave their homes in the burbs and see the “undesirables”.

They make excuses about how US culture makes tried and true solutions in other cities impossible to implement (So... are they saying US culture is just inferior?), and that things will get better just around the corner (when it costs 10x more and takes 10x longer to make any updates to the built infrastructure in US cities than anywhere else, and SF itself has built virtually nothing in the last 40 years).

Maybe it will, but I decided for myself that I’m not willing to wait around for it, and chose one of the countless cities in the world that in fact does do better.

I don't think the purpose of these policies are to produce a "better" student population, but are more that a) there are too many qualified applicants for the number of seats and they need a good alibi to justify cutting people basically randomly, and b) the racial aspects are more of an advocacy choice to try to make up for past racial injustices by ironically biasing the system racially.

The latter issue, I don't see a clean cut way to rectify - as an Asian American I get the feeling of being discriminated against, but I also see the power of giving the most discriminated minorities more opportunity to exploit the power that elite degrees bestow.

Personally I end up being OK with affirmative action policies - as much as I'd like a fair system, an unfair system built on past injustices make that impossible, and I'd rather exclusive universities adopt these unfair policies to shift the balance back.

While the Chinese government has forced the majority of young people to learn Mandarin in schools, even just taking a 1 hour train ride from Shanghai to Hangzhou, both cities have local languages that are mutually unintelligible. Elderly people, especially in the countryside but also in the cities occasionally, often don't know how to speak Mandarin at all. But if you mostly hang out with urban youth you should be fine entirely with Mandarin.

Maybe in your region but in suburban Cleveland it certainly is freakish to see anybody on their legs outside of a shopping mall.

Unfortunately I haven’t found any good cycling mapping apps for Tokyo. Most apps try to take you down tiny streets but here those can be pretty dangerous and slow - lots of blind corners and super complicated routes. Best I’ve found is NAVITIME’s 自転車 app but honestly it’s pretty crappy. I end up just eyeballing medium-sized streets on Google Maps and navigate myself; really wish there was something better for here!

Yeah, there are so many alternate syntaxes, shortcuts, and ambiguous statements in Ruby; just reading through Matz’s reference book on Ruby was a trip for me.

I’ve found that doing it has helped me sleep when I’m restless at night - I think it’s more about giving you something concrete to focus on in order to make you more conscious of your body’s sensations, not necessarily something special about breathing through specific nostrils.

It's mostly been word of mouth for me - Japanese friends telling me DeepL is way better for Japanese, people on HN complaining about Google Chrome performance vs Firefox.

And competitors are coming pretty close to other Google stuff, Apple Maps is actually getting pretty good for me right now but mainly lacks the metadata about things like restaurant menus + the flexibility of routing like cheapest train fares or searching by last train and what not that Google has - honestly seems like low hanging fruit. Nobody gets close on search yet though, I've tried and failed to stick with DDG many times now.

The US is so loud! I don’t know if it’s true but one of my theories is that a lot of US cities consist of uninterrupted grids, and noise from a much larger area than in cities with messily organized roads like those in Tokyo where I live now, ends up being audible at any given place. In Manhattan you can hear sirens from like 30 streets away - but here, walk 5 minutes from the biggest stations and intersections and it’s dead silent.

Also, I noticed when I was living in Shanghai that it has gotten pretty silent there too with the dominance of electric vehicles, which has made places like the French Concession a pleasure to stroll in.