Honestly, I've been to SF and NYC (Manhattan only) and have barely seen any homeless people. It didn't look better or worse than a typical European city. Probably I just didn't go to the bad districts?
I didn't feel like a saw many more obviously homeless people in the parts of Manhattan or Brooklyn I was than I do in say Oslo or London, but I realize that that is only a small part of NYC.
I've never, ever heard anyone not wanting to go on public transport here because of homeless people shooting heroine in there. Unlike Californians among which this seems pretty popular
However, Japan has more than its fair share of far-right fruitcakes who deny everything, and in both Korea and China politicians have found Japan to be a convenient whipping boy whenever they need a distraction from domestic problems.
To be fair, they only elected the conservative party, the LDP; the party elected the prime minister. Granted, they've elected the LDP almost continuously since 1955. Of course, they tried electing the other party in 2009, but their leadership kept resigning. Of course, given the LDP's stranglehold on politics, one has to wonder why they feel a need to pander to the nettouyo.
I stopped paying to attention to politics about 5 years ago and am very surprised to learn that the major opposition party (DPJ?) has essentially fractured into multiple, smaller parties, all using a variation of the same name.
At this point, I'm not even sure who to vote for anymore.
The problem is that Japan has a history of doing things like this:
> In October 2006, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's apology was followed on the same day by a group of 80 Japanese lawmakers' visit to the Yasukuni Shrine which enshrines more than 1,000 convicted war criminals.[57] Two years after the apology, Shinzo Abe also denied that the Imperial Japanese military had forced comfort women into sexual slavery during World War II .
Germany's the exception, not the rule. Most countries's governments like nothing more than to behave as if their past transgressions never happened. And even then Germany has had no shortage of politicians who say "Germany has apologized enough".
The agreement is about "property and claims" between the two states. Of course, individuals can and have sued various Japanese entities, some successfully.
Historically, Korea was repeatedly invaded by Japan. More recently, Korea was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, during which the Japanese ruled with an iron fist and did their best to destroy Korean identity by forcing people to take Japanese names etc.
The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English).
Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul.
I was also very anti-Japan as a I grew up under typical Korean parents.
But after reading the actual history, there were some good parts during the colonization. Although, I'm not denying the horrific parts caused by war. But that's just war. It's horrible to begin with. Not to mention what Koreans did in the Vietnam War to the locals.
I think part of the hostility from either of the countries is caused by only seeing part of the reality.
I guess the word you are looking for is "cultural assimilation". 内鮮一体 is the specific case of Japan and Korea.
The Japanese were fresh out of their own industrial revolution so had plenty of experience to do the same thing in Korea. The legacy of that is that Korean and Japanese societies have a lot in common eg Chaebol and Keiretsu. Following the war Japan sheltered people persecuted by the ROK dictatorship (eg Kim Dae-jung, Lee Byung-chul)
> I think part of the hostility from either of the countries is caused by only seeing part of the reality.
It's tribal. East Asian People are racist against each other and each other's countries, but East Asian Persons get on just fine.
> The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English). Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul.
Banning Hangul and erasing Korea's independent cultural identity intentionally traced the pattern of Japan's nearly identical actions a few decades earlier in conquering Ryukyu, including classifying each suppressed language as a "dialect" of Japanese.
As a contrast to Korea, the former Ryukyu Kingdom is now fully subsumed as the Okinawan islands and its original languages, religions, and culture are, in practice, nearly extinct.
Much of it can be blamed on propaganda driven by economic decline and political scapegoating. While Korean music, drama, and movies are popular in Japan, consumers are mostly women. Among small but growing and very vocal population of Japanese men, Korea-bashing books and manga are popular. Later trend is not unrelated to continuing economic decline of Japan. And Japanese politicians are leveraging and fueling that trend to divert the blame.
Both countries have low birthrates, but Japan is far enough along the labor shortage curve that unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan. From the friendly article:
According to Statistics Korea, the national statistics office, the unemployment rate last year for people aged between 15 and 29 was 9.5 percent, compared with 3.8 percent overall and 3.6 percent for Japanese 15 to 24.
Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular. There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...
> unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan
Much of that is the surprising amount of minor busywork the country uses instead of welfare support e.g. multiple people doing circulation around a minor bit of roadwork when other countries would use traffic signs or temporary traffic lights. This is mostly unreliable contract and part-time work.
Japan has fairly high rates of relative and working poverty, with north of 15% living under the poverty line.
To draw some analogies, Japan has some very conservative people in power, but that's more to do with the election systems that give more power to monolithic parties that attract rural voters. When you look at the proportional vote (Japan has FPTP + a non-reproportioning proportional segment), Japanese people are on average much less conservative than their elected government would make it seem.
> Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular.
And Israelis love Palestinian/Arab hummus. That feeling is not transitive to the Palestinian people.
> There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...
Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens and have limited rights in Japan, and can face widespread discrimination if they do not hide their identities/ancestry.
> Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens
That's a bit of a tautology: if they nationalize, which they can if they wish to, they become citizens and stop being counted as Zainichi. They're also granted a number of privileges (welfare, state pensions etc)
as "Special Permanent Residents" not afforded to any other non-citizen residents, although they're still not to vote.
Variable, but generally worse. It's much more tightly censored than Wikipedia: for example, edits are manually reviewed by admins before going live. Also, most community features (talk pages etc) have been removed, so it's constantly gamed to push spam, copy pastes etc and the mods don't really care unless it touches a red line topic like politics.
how so? it's specifically asking the poster about a process. Then some other service is telling them about their own process while advertising their site, which is also a direct competitor to theirs.
The OP was joking about the plot twist but as it turns out we actually did the plot twist! We released one of the first free to try deep-learning powered photo to painting service shortly after the paper was published in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10162121. The initial version was a general one that took 1 day to train each image uploaded, and worked on arbitrary images.
That being said I think your belief somehow these comments shouldn't be used to promote competitors—at the expense of hiding potentially relevant comments from the community—is misguided. Ultimately HN, and even Show HN, are here to serve the interests of the community first—not the poster. I personally always appreciate when reading "launch HN" when someone summarizes the competitive landscape because this information helps me, the community member, and so that HN doesn't simply become a PR channel for every startup. It would make sense if this were an actual advertisement (say, on Facebook) that you'd get rid of comments mentioning competitors, but this isn't an ad platform, and I think mentioning competitors contributes to the discussion around what is being launched. Comments and discussion should benefit the community first, and not the poster of the story.
You have misunderstood. I don't have a problem with regards to you saying something like, "I represent Instapainting, which is a competitor and we used CNNs..."
Your response to this particular thread made it seem like you were somehow connected to the OP and if one didn't read the link properly and distinguish it, might just seem like the OP is linking to their product's version of CNN powered paintings.
I hear you and I agree with you. HN shouldn't be a PR channel for your startup and the community benefits from talking about the competitive landscape. Your other comments about your margins and business model were quite insightful to me.
However having said that, it does feel like you are hijacking this thread. You have linked to your own website multiple times, advertised your own competing Indian artist services, and you are even answering questions that were posed to the OP. That, in my opinion, is a step too far. Your thoughts on "Community First" come across as a tad hypocritical as you seem to be doing plenty of PR for your own service. This may have not been your intention but that is what it is coming across as.
> You have linked to your own website multiple times, advertised your own competing Indian artist services, and you are even answering questions that were posed to the OP
Yes I did answer a question technically posed to Koonchi, though they also directly mentioned Instapainting in the comment. In other areas I replied when Instapainting was mentioned and/or to clarify some outdated facts such as that there are also Indian artists on our platform that compete with Koonchi (someone implied we only had Chinese artists).
I'm not saying that HN shouldn't be used for PR, or promoting your own business (in fact it should be and is what show HN is for), but this channel isn't a PR channel exclusively for a single startup.
As for this direct thread, it doesn't seem like Koonchi provides deep-learning powered photo to painting services, which is something we do provide and why I felt it was relevant to the discussion of the commenter.
I can see why it looks like hijacking, especially the wording of some of the other commenters (who are unaffiliated with me or Instapainting) that commented and inserted "ads" for Instapainting well before I even woke up in the day. But I tried to only add to what was already there, because I'm also running a business after all.
As you may have noted already I've posted about Instapainting on HN many times before as well, and have always gotten other competitors mentioning their businesses in the comments, and I have never nor would ever question them on why they are "advertising" their businesses on my thread—because it's not actually "my" thread. I hope that offers a perspective window into why I responded or joined the discussion. I've been doing this for about 5 years now and also part of the HN community since pre-2011. It would just feel a bit odd for me to stay silent when a near identical business launches and for me to not offer any feedback.
It's all relative. I spent six years at university without ever taking a single taxi and I still consider Uber rides a luxury, because I can also take the bus for a quarter of the price or bike for free.
Also, as the OP mentions, the trap of getting used to nice things is that while you soon stop appreciating them, you will feel their loss quite painfully.
There's a huge difference between a luxury and something that indicates you have achieved a lavish and impressive lifestyle. A cup of coffee at starbucks is a luxury.
Lavish and impressive is also relative. Your original statement about "these things are all rather unimpressive to those that actually have them within reach" is tautological: having a yacht with a helipad is not going to be particularly impressive to anyone else docked next to me in St Tropez, even if it puts all of us in the global 0.01%.
I think there's a subtlety in my point that you're missing. When you can just barely manage a yacht with a helipad, you're impressed with yourself for being that successful. When you can comfortably afford it, you cease to consider it something to boast about.
A joke in poor taste. Melbournians are notorious coffee snobs. As jpatokal said, locals wouldn’t be caught dead in a Starbucks. Basically if the cup is taller than 4 fingers 8-10cm or the ingredients include anything other than coffee, water and milk, or it was made by percolating - then it’s not coffee as far as we’re concerned. It’s either dishwater or a confection of some sort.
It may be a fact that Melbourne has more coffee shops per capita than any other place on earth.
Melbourne is a mecca of coffee snobbery, and most locals wouldn't be caught dead in a Starbucks. (Although you need to try pretty hard even to find one.)
Australia is one of the only markets where Starbucks' global domination strategy failed horribly due to several factors (I'm not an Aussie so I can't explain the cultural differences). IIRC, in 6-7 years, they opened ~100 locations only to close over 60 of them. Aussies tend to deride the chain and Starbucks themselves have pivoted and tend to mostly cater to tourists so as not to go under completely.
Australia is a stupidly uncompetitive place to manufacture anything. A friend of mine is managing a (rare!) factory expansion in Sydney right now, and costs of all inputs (rent, labor, etc) are 3-8x what the company is paying in Malaysia.
We in South Africa have the same issue due our location and the dependence on the export of natural resources.
Our third biggest export is motor vehicles and parts mainly from VW/BMW/Mercedes Benz/Toyota but we dodged the Holden/Ford bullet by making cars that could be sold locally and worldwide.
