Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 448 posts

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#421

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

tsunamifury wrote: post #398
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is "The American Narrative" how did Chicago or New York City ever happen? How is it that a majority of Americans live in metropolitan areas rather than further out where they can more "elbow room" ? The European conquest of north America and subsequent repopulation with immigrants (alongside a vastly diminished indigenous population) created an ethos and an opportunity for people who wanted to live away from…

So cars did this entirely on their own. Come on You might not like cars but everyone else does. They like and want cities this way and in reality it’s people like us that are the outliers. We aren’t right. We are going against the tide. We built cities around cars Because we like cars — because they put distance between us and our fellow American we don’t particularly like or want to tolerate.

I write:

> Any explanation for the structure, placement, demographics and dynamics of American society that focuses on single reason for things (whether it is "elbow room", "Robert Moses" or "racism") is going to be wrong about most things.

to which you respond:

> So cars did this entirely on their own. Come on

Is there something that unclear about what I wrote?

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#422

Post by axpy906 »

leicapowerball wrote: post #286
axpy906 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more drawback to mention (Having lived in Tokyo a few years) it’s worth pointing out its not exactly kid friendly. I really don’t think most big cities are tbh.

What do you mean by kid friendly? I lived in central, urban Tokyo (Minato) for several years and found raising kids was way easier than where we live now (Bay Area). There were several parks within 10m of where we lived and each neighborhood has a community center with a very nice indoor play area for rainy or cold days. I found businesses to be more children friendly than in the US. Several businesses, both large an…

For context I am comparing it to the suburban United States.

Boarding public transit is definitely an issue. Going anywhere with small children is a bit difficult to be honest as their are quite a lot of rules. For example, no toys in the pool.

Constrained and limited places to play outside. Outside of the park everything is concrete and many types of play are banned. When out, I had to watch them like a hawk. Here they go over to a neighbors yard to play and have no such worries.

Childcare is also expensive to get if both parents do not work (in that case it’s free).

That said I knew plenty of expats from population dense areas that were of different opinion. They had cars too :)

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#423

Post by axpy906 »

wffurr wrote: post #204
axpy906 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more drawback to mention (Having lived in Tokyo a few years) it’s worth pointing out its not exactly kid friendly. I really don’t think most big cities are tbh.

With a kid or is that just your impression? I used to like living in the city with a kid. Lots of access to interesting places and activities, able to walk to school and playgrounds and such. It’s lost some allure during the pandemic.

Small children. It can actually work for older ones I think.

Many places were shut on and off due restrictions during our time. Definitely makes thing harder.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#424

Post by danielrpa »

addicted wrote: post #191
danielrpa wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the US need to have traditional cities? I grew up in a high density city overseas and I can see the appeal of both types of city. I personally prefer low density, car centric cities (obviously we need to finish solving the emissions problem from cars, but that's separate).

Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing. That’s one major reason American infrastructure is so bad. Towns have to balance their books, and that means they cannot afford to maintain their infrastructure until the federal government, which is not legally required to balance its books, borrows a ton of money to give away for basic infrastructur…

This varies a lot across the country. Most of the local suburban streets are maintained through a combination of local city/county and gas taxes and don't come from the "city money" general tax pool. Not to mention that most states don't have a dense city to speak of, so they are in practice >95% low density.

The federal government maintains the highway infrastructure (and subsidizes other non-highway building) which does help enable suburban living in many places. I suppose that you aren't advocating to get rid of that because the immense usefulness of such system (travel, trucks, buses etc), though.

Eliminating the suburban lifestyle wouldn't have a massive impact on sustainability of the system because a lot of it isn't maintained by the federal government or simply needs to be maintained anyway. Reducing the number of cars that are on the road due to the suburban lifestyle will reduce the amount of money that comes from the federal government and shared money pools, but probably not too much in the grand scheme of things.

Thus, I think that saying that "suburban living is fiscally unsustainable" is an exaggeration and we should instead say "we need to better allocate the costs of suburban life to suburban taxpayers" (which wouldn't make such a huge difference anyway, especially if we also remove the city living subsidies that come from rich suburbs).

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#425

Post by luma »

Seb-C wrote: post #308
luma wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Japan doesn’t go around killing opeople who don’t adhere to their society. This is a pretty recent development in Japan's history and the world hasn't forgotten. And for those those single women - why not also married women? How many of them are CEOs? The numbers don't look good for women in Japan when it comes to representation in the higher levels of business https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088…

> This is a pretty recent development in Japan's history and the world hasn't forgotten. What do you mean? No, it's not. With the exception of WW2, Japan has seen way less conflicts and very little wars in it's history compared to other countries. As for your link, I cannot access the source, but your comment seems biased by the meaning of marriage in the first place. Basically, in Japan getting married means startin…

> With the exception of WW2

Except for the one time Japan teamed up with Hitler and tried to rape and pillage the world, and not giving up until someone invented and then used nuclear weapons to make them stop. That is a pretty huge asterisk on Japan's claim to being a peaceful nation. I think Japan's neighbors might have a list of other incidents they could bring to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Japan

> As for your link, I cannot access the source

Here you go: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%...

It has nothing to do with marriage or definitions. Here's the abstract:

This paper examines the effects of female chief executive officers (CEOs) on firm performance. Using data on nonfinancial listed firms in Japan, we show that only 0.8% of some 42,000 firm-year observations have female CEOs. There is also little evidence that firms appoint more females as CEOs during our sample period. While the stock market reacts positively to the introduction of a firm's first female CEO, the relationship between CEO gender and firm accounting performance is generally not strong. However, when we classify the type of female CEO, the estimated coefficient for a founder female CEO and Tobin's Q is positive and significant.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#426

Post by luma »

mrkentutbabi wrote: post #320
luma wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Japan doesn’t go around killing opeople who don’t adhere to their society. This is a pretty recent development in Japan's history and the world hasn't forgotten. And for those those single women - why not also married women? How many of them are CEOs? The numbers don't look good for women in Japan when it comes to representation in the higher levels of business https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088…

Because married women takes care of kids? I genuinely don’t understand this question… I guess this just serves an example how western mindset and our mindset in Asian countries are just different. Even the questions seem weird to us.

> Because married women takes care of kids? I genuinely don’t understand this question…

Your comment here is 100% the problem we're talking about. In your mind, women get married for the sole reason of having kids, and further, it's their job to do so. It's incredibly sexist and that's not because of Western ideals.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#427

Post by danielrpa »

betterunix2 wrote: post #317
echelon wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing. These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development. Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems. Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people…

"Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes." Then city residents shouldn't have to pay for the roads that make car-centric suburbs possible or the various subsidies given to rural residents. Honestly, one of the benefits of civilization is that we help each other out even when it does not immediately benefit us as individuals. Rural and suburban life would not be possible without cities, and cit…

Migration patterns overwhelmingly demonstrate that people are migrating from high density cities to low density, "hardcore suburban" cities. In the US, high density living is a boutique lifestyle choice that is constrained in the offer side (NIMBY), thus the prices. The fact that there are people willing to pay for this lifestyle doesn't mean that they are a majority, or even a significant percentage of the overall population.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#428

Post by Kavelach »

tsunamifury wrote: post #420
Kavelach wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure this is what really happened? The US built cities like any other country on this planet, but the influx of immigrants and people's pursuit of wealth pushed them to settle new lands and establish new population centres. What's more, until not so long ago, US cities looked differently. Then a lot of what was already built got destroyed to build motorways and huge parking lots. If you look at aerial photos…

Am I sure that westward expansion in the 1800s really happened? A lot of people seems to quote a lot of stuff in HN while missing the pretty obvious big picture. And you are making my point. If we wanted to shift back to carless society we could, others have. We don’t. Because…

I'm not asking whether the expansion happened, but whether you think whether it happened because people in the US dislike each other, which is a completely different questions altogether

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#429

Post by post_from_work »

analog31 wrote: post #156
_8j50 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means you are dependent on cars for one, which also means insurance companies, gas,car payment, etc... I am actively trying to ditch cars in a car city because of this. You wastr so much space for parking lots too. You interact with a lot less people because you are always at some destination with the journey barring you from interacting with the people of the city. Physical fitness and health is also affected. It…

From what I can tell, depending on the "car lord" is getting worse and worse too. There may have been an era when cars got more affordable due to greater reliability and longevity. I'm concerned that the car makers have figured out how to defeat that idea by charging fees to use the electronics in your car, and that servicing the batteries is going to be a rent-seeker's heaven.

This is why it's so important to own and maintain the good older vehicles. Resto-modding reliable chassis like 1990s Lexus LS should become more popular. Developments in rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing, etc... all make this easier. I'd love to see more open-sourcing of aftermarket parts as well.

But then again, I'm a weirdo who pulled out a car's entire wire harness to install a CAN-BUS system and solid-state power distribution modules....

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#430

Post by voidfunc »

supertrope wrote: post #410
voidfunc wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like most Americans like it this way. You say unhealthy but that is what the market overwhelmingly wants.

A market with federal intervention in the form of implicitly guaranteed 30 year mortgages and toll free highways.

And that government was created by the same people… your point is?
Post reply on HN