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Sarcasm right? It's difficult to tell these days.
I'll pretend it's not sarcasm despite assuming it is.
Immigration changes the cultural profile of a region and increases cost of living, particular cost of housing.
In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants
31–40 of 258 posts
Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. There is only so much you can pay the people doing the kind of work like cleaning the Shinkansens or manning the 7-11's because it affects customer costs. i.e. There's a point where you increase the salary of 7-11 workers that it causes a $2 fried chicken snack to inflate to $10 that customers will refuse to buy 2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of wo…
Different from the USA, 7-11 in Japan and China are mainly self checkout at least, so they can technically run a store with less people since they don’t have to man cash registers to get people checked out.
I don't know about China, but I live in Japan and most konbini I have visited still have real human cashiers.
Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants
#33"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today. A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training. (Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unempl…
No one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan. Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules. Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN. They don't want Westerne…
I clean shit for free often.
I wouldn't like doing it past the point of exhaustion for low wages and with poor treatment though.
Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants
#34"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today. A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training. (Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unempl…
In case you think 18% is Japan's unemployment rate: it's not. Japan's unemployment rate is 2.5%.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?location...
This is basically the best in the world.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/statistical-releases/2...
Not sure what rate OP is citing, but it's not the one I'd use to draw OP's conclusion. You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants
#35The job no one wants? Grunting out 2.6 babies before you’re 35. Who’s paying for your nursing home? Tax the robot’s income? Will your demographic replacements vote for that?
> Who’s paying for your nursing home Japanese financial institutions massive capital positions across Asia, the US, and Europe which tend to be public-private ventures. > Tax the robot’s income Pretty much, in the sense that corporations and the Japanese government have spent decades working together to build a sovereign wealth model comparable to Singapore and the UAE's.
This is something that really needs to be done in the states imo.
IIRC we don't have a sovereign wealth fund, but we should in order to provide a social safety net for our citizens, especially with all the uncertainties regarding the future right now.
Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants
#36The article seems to say that it's not jobs nobody wants, but rather a labor shortage from an aging population. Japan just seems to be running out of people for its labor market.
> but rather a labor shortage from an aging population. combined with ridiculous cost of living, terrible work/life balance and incredibly xenophobic immigration policies.
Ridiculous cost of living in Japan? What do you mean by that?
Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants
#37"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today. A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training. (Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unempl…
No one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan. Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules. Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN. They don't want Westerne…
I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film.
"Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives his life in simplicity and daily tranquility. Some encounters also lead him to reflect on himself." -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/
Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants
#38It’s amazing to use technology to save humans from toil. The question is, who owns the robot? Who benefits from the labor it produces? The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation. Labor expenditures and taxe…
I believe that is the plan.
Re: In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants
#39"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today. A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training. (Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unempl…
No one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan. Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules. Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN. They don't want Westerne…
Unlike many other developed countries, foreign employees working in cleaning and maintenance are still a minority. This is gradually changing, but I believe the main issue is that young people are completely uninterested in this kind of work. Most people working in these industries in Japan are old rather than foreign. The average is probably over 50+, and there are quite a few people working past retirement.