shioyama

This a thousand times.

> And while they are the primary workhorses of research, there are large swathes of their graduate student careers where they are not particularly (or often negatively) productive.

Um, hello. This happens in industry as well. It's called training, learning, whatever. It's an investment on the part of the company in the future of its workforce. Why should academia expect to only pay employees who are "fully educated" and require no non-productive time to learn things?

As someone who has been there, academica is so f*cked up and those in it seem completely out of touch with the reality outside of it.

So true and so sad.

"Consumers seem to believe that products cannot become more sustainable without becoming more expensive."

This unfortunately prevalent belief is extremely destructive. If people believe it must cost money to be environmentally friendly, then they will not be motivated to look for profit from actions that have a net positive impact on the environment. And that means the entire motivation to make money, which drives business and most of the economy, is largely absent from the range of serious problems we label as "environmental".

Luckily some people (like the ones in this article) see through this myth to find profit from this collective blind spot.

I wasn't the only author on those gems, the others are (mostly) still active. Not sure how orphaned gems are handled, though.

> I think a primary issue with code is that the kind of people who like to explain it tend to think it has something to do with engineering, or an expression of a deeply objective scientific method. It seems to me that it has far more resemblance to a cargo-cult like set of cultural trends, riven with changing fashions, competing tribes and decisions based on hunches with no real evidence about anything at all. It is this of course that makes programming interesting and possible to poke fun at and celebrate in equal measure - and it seems you get further by teaching it based on this reality.

I actually ended up going further and removing me as author from gems I don't actually maintain anymore, which brings down my exposure considerably. It's actually not as easy as it could be to remove yourself as an author from a gem (have to do it via command line).

I'm an author of gems with a total of more than 4 million downloads. I just setup 2fa now after seeing this.

I'm Canadian, I used "North America" because I wanted to include Canada. Not in reference to "arrests" but in reference to attitudes about giving children freedom, which are very similar in my experience.

> Country or region is just too broad a brush to stereotype, even in Japan Sapporo is very different from Tokyo.

I agree about stereotyping. But seriously: even Sapporo (which as a rare relatively new Japanese city has similarities to modern western cities) is much more similar to Tokyo than it is to, say, any North American city.

My point is not about whether laws are what where, but that attitudes are in line with those laws (and are what gave rise to them).

Read other comments in response to the post, and you see many other people referencing experiences similar to what I'm talking about.

I'm not trying to say Japan doesn't have problems (it does). Just that on this specific point, Western countries are heading in a very bad direction IMHO.

This is one regulation in one state. Do you think that even impacts things like dirty diapers, one of the items that was strewn over the news? Of course not.

If you're thinking people are paying ~ $1,200/container to ship plastics to Malaysia without anyone paying on the other end, it would have to be pretty darn hard to throw stuff out in the U.S. And clearly it's not.

The stuff in the news is fraud, the same as if you ordered something from Amazon, paid for it, and you didn't get what you paid for.

Sorry, we'll just have to agree to disagree. I live in Japan, so I'm speaking from direct daily experience with a local school system (not international school).

But I completely disagree with your statements about "Asia", as if all countries are the same. Let's at least be specific about which countries you're talking about, and what direct experience you have with those countries.

I make no claims beyond my local context, and North America (with which I have contact through family/friends).