tkt
9d ago
TBF it probably helped I was in a provincial university in the boondocks, a ways from the city center, so it was a hassle to go there on bicycle, narrowing down the food options. Like, the nearby options for anything with fries or bread or pasta were mostly famiresu chains that are sort of a weird uncanny valley imitation of some American diner. There was IIRC way more pasta and sandos in Tokyo. Going to the city center there was the best pasta I'd tasted to date but I wouldn't burn an hour+ of a day on the bicycle too often to get there :P. And I was on budget, which would bias me toward the school cafeteria or cheapo rice bowl places like Sukiya that didn't really give an urge to have the meal with extra everything. Going to visit as a grown up tourist with techie salary I engorge myself way more on the good stuff, so I guess moving there wouldn't have the same salutary effect anymore, unless I simultaneously went broke.
tkt
9d ago
Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.)
On personal anecdote this feels kind of more of an indictment of the modern Western nutrition and food knowhow, whatever that consists of. I spent an year there, and basic Japanese university cafeteria chow + restaurant food had me lose 15kg, going from overweight to borderline normal, in a few months, without any special effort on my part. Like, a bowl of rice + some toppings would have me totally lose any sense of hunger for the rest of the day while keeping me energetic and alert (and doing more exercise than ever since), and I'd have to consciously try and eat more than that. Seems to work fine on the native population too.
tkt
2mo ago
It feels very highly British that the article brings up a crime of "criminal conversation" and a "peculiar court".
tkt
5mo ago
And they have plenty of human capital
Hard to say. Most of the births are now in the countryside to poor peasant farmers. Hardly “elite human capital”
One of Scott's book reviews had a neat thesis that homesteading peasants are the first step of the magic formula that produced the Asian tiger countries.
But even beyond this, Studwell talks up the almost spiritual benefits of land reform. In a typical land reform measure, an equal amount of land gets allotted to every peasant family. This is about as close as anything ever comes to the completely fair starting position that eg John Locke liked to fantasize about. Everyone gets to work for themselves in their own little small business, reaping the consequences of their own decisions. The generation who grow up immediately after a land reform tend to be thrifty, hard-working, honest, and civic-minded. They go on to found all of the giant world-spanning Toyota-style companies you get in the next round of development.
Totally would expect this to produce a better sort of human capital than the Western combo of iPad + tiktok + sleeping through primary ed.
Tried very cursorily to search if the Chinese peasants are the homesteading sort and got as first hit a local paper which sounds like yes, and they now want to run down the homestead system. Maybe that's how they finally fall flat.
tkt
5mo ago
Frankly, it would make more sense to turn Canada into five states than one big one (BC, Ontario, Quebec, Western, and Maritimes).
Giving Democrats a good time in Senate elections too!
tkt
6mo ago
Also they have the data point that the pro-Russian breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk ended up being AFAICT horribly, cartoonishly bad places to live vs. usual post-Soviet oligarchy. If they threw in the towel, sure, they might end up a Belarus, much better off in hedonic terms than being current Ukraine in war. But they might also end up a DPR/LPR, a way worse place to be. A principle of being cautious and not gambling with bad outcomes doesn’t really point at capitulation then.
tkt
6mo ago
My pet lowbrow armchair sociological theory is: there is no drift apart, there is instead an incredibly high level of cultural, ideological, whatever coupling. When any bigger US issue du jour appears on an US-centric forum like this, it shows up here in Europe a bit later, usually as a malformed parody version of itself, often on high levels of public life and politics. As a prime exhibit, see our Finnish center-left party head doing an over the top cringy imitation after Obama got elected. Or in the pandemic times, in quick succession, we first got a condemnation of local antivaxxers protesting when the act of gathering in a crowd might spread the disease, followed by it being excellent to gather up in a crowd to protest in solidarity of BLM. Likewise the local anti-immigration right parties run very much on American import anti-woke memes. The US cultural influence somehow inflicts on us the animal spirits of whatever is going on over the Atlantic, no matter how out of place in the local circumstances or logically inconsistent with itself the result is, and we go helplessly along.
Because of this this coupling, we won't sound very friendly and grateful toward the US no matter what -- we run too much on material copied from the US, and the content of it is all wrong for that. The local population more influenced by US progressive thinking will have a lot of imported self-flagellating anti-American memes to chew on (sometimes weirdly idolizing Scandinavia so at least we're getting a healthy boost in national self-esteem out of it). The folks inspired by current Trumpish thinking from the US right maybe aren't that flavor of anti-American, but will also not be America First, but of course rather rah-rah Finland First or Portugal First or Poland First.
If America someday feels like really warming up the transatlantic relationship, it just needs to develop a mainstream cultural worldview by whose standards America is just fine, and which is universalist enough that if you make a garbled copy and search-replace the word 'America' with 'Belgium' it doesn't turn into 'Belgium is the greatest country in the world, every other country (such as America) is run by little girls'. We'll lap it up instantly. It doesn't have to be all the way universalist -- Biden's 'let's own the Russkies together' seemed to me to work to this purpose just fine while it lasted. Sadly it was also very easy for the US right to see that as a project of a self-interested Europe to fleece the US, I guess.
tkt
1yr ago
is this, like... actually a defensible salient? It doesn't really look like it
It sort of maybe does to me? There is some sort of a river going through Sudzha, which sounds by default nicer to defend than the original state border. I was pessimistic at the start, thinking there was no way UA wouldn’t stall out before reaching the river bank, and now optimistic again since they did. (Well, in Google street view the river looks very puny so this might be wishful thinking)
As a one-time applicant, H1B kind of seems to anti-select for high skill a bit. If you have legible skills in demand (like when I had lucked on a momentarily hot PhD topic), you probably have other options too, and are less likely to keep taking a stab at a vaguely demeaning 1/5 hit rate lottery with 1 year between draws, a ridiculous stack of paperwork to get that lottery ticket, and a delay of months to even find out if you got the short straw. I did one attempt at H1B, didn't win the lottery, then the firm trying to hire me wanted me to go for O-1 next which had its own set of offputting hoops to jump through; and rather than stay more months in a bureaucratic limbo working from the wrong time-zone, I ended up signing on at a local subsidiary of an US bigcorp instead.
In this European office, taxes are higher, salary maybe has a bit of a cut vs. California, and climate is worse, but OTOH there is more vacation and no 60h work week hustle, cost of living is modest, I'm way in top 1% of the country's income stats, and would likely feel less well off at SV. If I was dead set on maximum earnings, my first pick now would be to try and finesse a transfer to Zurich where in turn I'd make more after taxes than US. Some friends in my techy bubble did manage to migrate to the States, at least one via O-1 and one via some roundabout route of being a postdoc researcher first. They've expressed envy that my office's mostly Europeans instead of mostly Asians that are 90% of the workforce over there.
OTOH if H1B is your one great shot at exiting a drab developing country, you're probably way more likely to keep plugging at the lottery year after year and finally make it through.
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