331–340 of 448 posts
I thought about getting a job there as a dev. However certain things like culture, low pay, the language, and making new friends has held me back. I really loved the city when I visited a couple years back. Does anyone live in Japan as a dev and not really know how to speak japanese? How has the experience been?
As others have pointed out, you probably don't want to be working for businesses that are run in the Japanese way, but there are plenty of both expat and native run businesses that aren't. The pay will be low but Tokyo is incredibly cheap so it's not really a problem locally. (but it is a problem in the sense that whatever you save won't be worth much elsewhere if you move back to the states or whatever later years l…
It's likely that I'm just looking in the wrong places, though. About all I understand how to do is to just trawl through public job boards looking for open positions. I still think it would be nice to work in Japan, even if it's only a thing that lasts as long as I can bear it. However, the pandemic has set back so much as visiting Japan as a tourist by several years, so I don't know how that bodes for working there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the things you mentioned here is why I like Japan more han the Western world. To be fair, Japan isn’t perfect. But a lot of things make sense for us. Are you a westerner? It seems that your way of thinking is just different than ours. We value things differently. For example, have you ever stopped to consider that maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role? The western world has a lot of problems t…
Please don't misunderstand me. Maybe I wasn't precise enough with my thoughts. My main point was: Western people are often pro Japan but anti China. If people would apply the same norms, this wouldn't be possible as there is clearly a double standard. My wish is that Western people (i am one of then) stop apply their world view, norms and values to everyone else on this planet. We believe that so many things that def…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no "cannot", it's a conscious choice - if you have more space than necessary that absolutely does not require that you expand to fill all of it. And in particular this has caused issues because American cities tend towards sprawl, filling up area with low-density housing that requires significantly more infrastructure per capita, and implementing zoning laws to prevent higher-density development even as the p…
They sprawl because people want space. If you're from Paris or Tokyo or London you really just don't know what it's like to have a quiet, detached house with a nice garden, maybe a pool where your kids can play randomly without needing to plan a trip to the community center, space for a garden, knowing everyone within 200m of your house by name... It's a completely different way of life that is not possible without l…
I would wager that the vast majority of the folk here that are pushing this romanticized idea of car-free european city have actually grown up in upper middle class US suburbs and bulk of these attitudes are really just subconscious rejection of their parents' lifestyles.
Having grown up in one of those car-free european cities myself, I can vouch that the US set up is, on average, far more convenient, which is also why you see car/pool/detached house/garage ownership rates increase with income and GDP. People that have the means clearly choose to avoid communal setups.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuinely curious: what do you find "hilariously bad" about public transport in Stockholm? I've never lived there, but as a casual visitor the T-bana, trams, ferries etc seem to work just fine.
Often, trains and subways will straight up not run because "there were leaves or snow on the tracks" or whatever. Like, OK? No other city I've ever lived has had that problem, lol? (let alone that often! it happens all the time) Punctuality is pretty bad, which wouldn't be a problem if frequency was good, but it's not, so... It can be pretty unsafe and unpleasant. Basically, it's "OK" in inner city and immediate surr…
Some trains have special brushes or water jets to clean the tracks
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2860418/End-...
Many posters have already mentioned some of the great things about Japanese cities: walkable neighbourhoods, good public transport, life without cars. I agree with all of these. However, you can't get something for nothing. Even in the suburbs there are essentially no gardens (a friend of mine lives way out of town and has a 10m by 10m garden which is enormous and unusual). Houses and apartments are significantly sma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.
It’s pretty easy to live in big cities in America ( Seattle, SF, Boston, Chicago, parts of LA ) without a car or without regularly using a car.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> consider that maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role? This obviously can’t be true for all Japanese women, so what’s your solution to that? At least in Western countries there is progress being put towards letting women chose if they’d rather be a housewife or an independent person. In Japan there is no such option.
Please see my other comments. Diversity vs harmony.
Reading between the lines, your answer so far is "Sucks to be them".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is inaccurate. The GM conspiracy bought streetcar companies to replace them with buses, not to eliminate public transportation. The reality is that streetcar companies were already unprofitable, killed by infrastructure cars and poor urban planning. So it was already easy for GM to buy these companies.
> The reality is that streetcar companies were already unprofitable What seems to me to be a good takedown of “public transit must be profitable or be dismantled”, or “the US post office must be profitable or be dismantled” is: How profitable is the US military?
A streetcar enhance economic activity and transportation, especially when built with proper urban planning, and may even make a profit.
With the profit, the public transit agency can use the fund to improve infrastructure with hopefully less political influence in order to further it missions.
You could of course make a trade off and not mandate the agency to be profitable and subsidize it, but it's a political tradeoff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I go to France or England or India (city centers and countryside) people may not Love each-other but they seem to generally be ok with being together and cooperating a bit more. In America it’s a whole new level. Except for a few idyllic small towns and suburbs that are actually economically and racially exclusionary that seem to have a faux-community.
Those quaint European neighborhoods, towns and villages are all also racially and culturally homogenous. And where that is changing, there is animosity and discord.