I live here, but some of the online places are fairly gatekept, such as r/japanlife where non-residents can't post.

It might be worth checking out some travel discords (https://discord.gg/uwTxWekyS) or subreddits do get some initial traction?

And the Shindo system is best described as "what it feels like at the specific location"

So an earthquake can be a 4 at the epicenter, a 3 a little further away, a 2 even further away, and so on.

Common online conversation with a friend in a different prefecture may be something like, "Last night's earthquake was a 3 here, how about you?"

I wonder if they can feel the air pressure change while submerged.

I've been commuting with a mirror for 5 years; it feels SO dangerous the odd time I commute with my non-mirrored mountain bike.

I don't have strava or anything. I don't even know how long my rides are, my best times, my altitude. I just go for a ride; successfully capturing the exact feeling of riding since I was a teenager.

I personally find strava culture to generally be toxic and annoying, though the above poster seems to use it in a genuine way. 8A is similar in the climbing community. Similar to Github: what starts out as an honest need for tracking and documentation turns into a social-media-showboating circus.

Amen

Kei cars can comfortably go up to about 60mph. Not great for an 8 hour drive, but I regularly do 3-hour-drives with a loaded kei-van. Yep, same 660cc three-cylinder engine that those kei-trucks have. It'll hit 70mph, but not comfortably. 50mph is easy.

And on the highway, I see tons of other kei cars, too. Light weight class cars even get a toll discount!

Those were hobbyists, audiophiles, professionals, artists (recording, performing, etc.).

They are talking about a much larger group of people.

I think OP meant noise-cancelling headphones, which were fairly ubiquitous in tech circles in open offices; before Apple launched AirPods.

Airpods Inc. would be very high up SP500 as a standalone business.

One of the cool things about LLM-assisted language learning that I have found is this:

Language is (for almost every adult) deeply personal. Even the best of teachers must be so nuanced for every error correction, repetition request, nudging, encouraging, etc. Why? Because the adult student is greatly affected by human feedback in this context.

This is one of the (many!) reasons why children learn languages (their first included) kinda fast. Their ego isn't involved.

Learning with a non-human, at least for me, is kinda cool as I don't feel bad telling it "look, I get it, don't ask me that again" and I don't take it personally when it says "that's not quite right."

I've got tons of experience as both a language student and a teacher, btw.

Clearly the whole gun thing is working, though. Regular citizens can all feel safe in public areas and schools, while the potential of a fascist government greed-fueled rise is kept well-at-bay by the fact that the general populace has the right to bear arms.

Nice sarcasm

Yeah.... So many bad tenants. So many bad landlords... So many weird laws protecting and hurting both.

What if we shifted to a different system?

Then housing couldn't be used as retirement savings and the economy would collapse immediately

A creative solution! What if we rethought what "retirement savings" is and should be?

Impossible because you'd have to convince everyone to give up theirs

The question that many do not want to think about. We (as a society (referring to all Western Liberalism, not just the US)) are so thoroughly convinced that Liberal Democracy is the End of History, and it's the 'flawed but best,' as many say, but refuse to imagine something better.

It's puzzling that a system that is supposed to reward creativity and genius like capitalism limits it's inhabitants in their imagination when it comes to how one might structure society.

I don't claim to have the answer, and _no,_ my issues with Liberal Democracy/Capitalism don't mean I'm a communist / socialist / thing-people-don't-like.

It's not Liberal Democracy that is the problem but a society where all of the slack has been optimized out, every extraction maximized, every infraction forever a scarlet letter on an individual, zero stability but constant crisis inflicted on individuals. There is no room in modern day America for people in the margins. Society needs to make a place for them and a path out of constant crisis, or the homeless problem will continue to grow.

Another hidden issue in the USA is many households are dependent on contributing income from a retired/disabled/working past retirement age elderly parent/family member. Those people are going to start passing in mass, and a lot of households will become even less resilient.

What would you like us to imagine? So far everything that we've tried at scale other than liberal democracy and capitalism has inevitably led to war, famine, and genocide. Western liberalism appears to be the only system that empirically works. Some would claim that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" works better, but if you look below the surface prosperity in first-tier cities the actual economic situation is rather grim and the human rights situation is horrific.

Arguably, benevolent dictatorships tend to be the best. Singapore is a good example.

The trouble is making a system that can guarantee the "benevolent" part in the longer term.

Make an argument, beyond one city (if it's true there - Singapore might be better off, on some of the best real estate in the world, with free elections)? All the most free, wealthy, safe, creative, innovative societies in the world are democratic.

And on what basis does some dictator get to tell others what to do? OK, I am the dictator and I'm telling you to give me 10% of your income and never post this nonsense in HN again. :)

There are a lot of values there that.you're presenting as though "this is what society should be" when it's actually "this is what liberal democracy thinks society should be". So obviously we have a foregone conclusion.

Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.

That's not an argument: You don't specify which values, don't address my argument, and just repeat an old trope of dictators and their apologists with no support.

> Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.

Which ones? Let's hear some evidence.

People around the world strongly embrace and defend their freedom, including self-determination; the idea that it's not universal (in any meaningful sense) has little support. It's embraced wherever people have the opportunity in Europe and N. America, in East Asia, in China (Taiwan, and also Hong Kong until it was taken from them), S. America, SE Asia, South Asia, a variety of places in Africa, ... you can see the mass protests in Iran, the Arab Spring, etc.

And rationally, again, why should you or anyone else tell me what to do? On that basis, why can't I just as well tell you or them what to do?

Human rights' universality is essential - without it, it's just people fighting for power. That's why it's so important, and that's why those who want to control others try to attack the universality.

Democracy isn't freedom. It's quite easily possible for a democracy to be non-free (many current examples) or for a non-democracy to be free (not as many).

We're really splitting hairs, for no purpose other than to avoid the point.

You'd better start standing up for freedom instead of toying with oppressors. Nobody will do it for you.

Btw you’re replying to different people

As I said in my original comment, I don’t have an answer. I refuse to believe though that the only options that exist are the ones already tried. Do you really think in the couple thousand years of history, we’ve exhausted every viable option when liberal democracy is only an incredibly recent invention?