pigsty

At my previous job, I made the robots that Toyota, Suzuki, etc use in their manufacturing lines and directly installed them inside their factories. My experience is, for the most part, first hand.

The vehicles Japanese companies make for the American and US markets have no overlap. Nothing sold in America is made in Japan, and nothing sold in Japan is made in America. A lot of those vehicles are loaded up into tractor trailers and hauled off to their destination—Japanese tractor trailers that those manufacturers use aren’t large enough to haul American vehicles in Japan. Furthermore, the economics for manufacturing huge vehicles in a tiny country that can barely build for its own needs and shipping across the world wouldn’t make sense. The raw materials, energy, and real estate needed for the factories are simply far cheaper in the US.

The interesting thing is Japanese companies generally manufacture cars they sell in America entirely in America, while “American” car companies manufacture their huge polluting machines in Mexico and maybe add one final part in the US so they can claim some work is done in the US. Japanese cars in the US aren’t imported while US cars are.

> In countries with state controlled healthcare, service is rationed.

Americans really love eating up this meme. I can get scans any time in Japan and I never wait. If doctors think it’s an emergency, they’ll do whatever scan is necessary then and there. If not, they’ll pull out a calendar and ask me to pick any day that’s convenient for me.

Meanwhile my friends in the US are waiting months for basic shit. My dad visited me in Japan in December and had to visit a dentist for emergency care and was offered to do surgery on the spot. He decided to delay it until he returned to the US. The earliest available appointment in his area is next month.

It’s insanity seeing Americans parrot this stuff. It’s North Korea-level propaganda. Hell, it’s worse. North Koreans have no access to the outside world so you can’t blame them. Americans just actively turn away anything in favor of “well a guy who knows a guy said he saw a guy on tv who heard about a guy who once heard a story about a guy from a guy in another country said those people wait a long time for health care!”

But the strangest thing is countless Americans, including myself, will pop into any thread to talk about how they have endless bad experiences with health care in the US (I’ve been forced to wait forever and then still charged out the ass because my health insurance was randomly rejected), while most bad experiences with other countries is seventh hand info. Americans complaining about health care in countries they’ve never been to far outnumbers people with first hand info—usually the ones with firsthand info are saying “it’s pretty good out there”

I’d say ask find out why they’re saying they don’t want to read and address all those causes.

There are plenty of kids with great parents who are surrounded by awful peers at school and media that glorifies being uneducated. Then you leave 2 bad kids in a class of good kids, and you’ll get endless distractions that cause the others to give up and resent school. You address just one cause and you have countless others. You need to go after a load of issues and it’s honestly more complicated than we want to admit.

Yeah, being a criminal safe haven right next to a country that has no problem supporting terrorists and dropping bombs on civilian targets is a wonderful idea. Can’t imagine why they never tried it.

The kid is the one in class choosing not to read. Parents can be destructive influences on kids, but kids also do have free will and destructive influences amongst their peers who they choose to associate with.

It’s a compounding problem and each time we assign blame to one (1) thing, we’re leaving other causes untreated and not making the problem better at all.

English has one word answers for those questions.

It’s just conversationally dry and people will assume you’re not interested.

Probably because every powerful economy of the past 6 centuries got there due to strong trade, which the US has gone out of its way to prevent Cuba from doing.

No country with a strong economy got there by being forcibly isolated from the world.

Japan doesn’t have a nearby superpower that makes sabotaging your entire economy a yearly campaign point in order to prove your country sucks. Cuba’s had that for well over half a century.

My parents were straight D/F students and never helped me with classes at all. I would’ve appreciated help that would’ve let me go farther, but that’s at a point well past algebra.

Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.

I was in Borneo last month and saw round lamps in a rainforest covered in swarms of ants at night, all standing equidistant and with their jaws wide open and raised. I picked up a leaf and poked one in the mouth and it immediately clamped shut and other nearby ants rushed over to assist the ant in pulling in the leaf.

It seems like the ants stand on the lamps and wait to catch other insects that fly by then strike in unison. It was an incredible strategy.

I don’t trust that the infrastructure will always work.

I’ve had my cards rejected randomly. Since I travel a lot and mainly use cards abroad, I’ve had my cards rejected more times than not. It’s pretty troublesome to be stranded somewhere and unable to get a hotel or ride a train because your card was rejected.

I always keep a fat wad of cash for that reason. Also that at any time my bank could be shut down, governments or banks could decide I don’t have a right to buy something, power outages could render payments useless, or hackers could easily take down a network if they were motivated (and state-level actors have plenty of motivation now).

I don’t think communist countries have a higher rate of trans people. Blaming random, irrelevant things on communism is a hallmark sign of believing media fear mongering.

> What's you explanation then for why literally nobody cared about adult trans people just a few years ago?

Because it’s an invented political scapegoat, just like countless others. Trans people were out and about 10 years ago and nobody gave a shit. I’m from a small town in Appalachia and my grandma had a trans friend that was out and open 30 years ago. They stopped by when I was a kid and we treated her as a normal human. Nobody gave a shit.

Social media told you to be angry about people that’ve been around forever. You chose to only pay attention recently and get angry.

Right wing organizations are making huge buckets of cash from donations and “anti-woke” brand campaigns targeting trans people, getting gullible people to think being trans is some new trend and they need to fight back. Normal people have known trans people for several decades and we are absolutely bewildered that people like you are suddenly outraged about people we’ve known all our lives. Same with how 15 years ago ”the gays” were going to destroy the world.

A person who doesn’t believe in religion being sworn in on a religious book is probably just annoyed. They’re not going to feel loyal to it.

Sworn statements as a whole are just entirely symbolic and don’t really guarantee loyalty or honesty, but if someone who doesn’t believe rejects a religious text that they disbelieve and instead choose something that has meaning and value to them, it’s better in the symbolic sense. A scientist swearing in on a scientific text that’s meaningful to them and that also addresses human morality makes as much sense and symbolically reflects their devotion to their mission as a Bible to a devout Christian.