I'm not sure to what extent the problem is due to economics and to what extent it's due to culture. I read recently that half of single men in Japan are virgins, which is quite staggering. Lots of Japanese people seem to have simply "dropped out" of the idea of having an intimate relationship, replacing that with video games and pornography.
When I lived in Japan, what struck me was how infantile and coddled the whole culture seemed: lots of "kawaii" anime everywhere, in advertisements, on product wrapping, etc. Signs everywhere telling you how to act (in grocery stores they have footprint markings on the floor to tell you what path to follow...). Grown men watching anime about little girls. I wonder if all this is creating a masculinity crisis in Japan.
Samurai were meant to be literally all about work with as little emotional tie to familly so that they are ready to die on command.
So you know, familly and kiss not being priority might not be shocking outcome of such culture.
That being said, why is grown man watching anime about girls something bad? Men were consuming entertainment with girls in it in many cultures ... heterosexual men don't naturally mind watching opposite sex, especially when framed cute or sexy.
The problem is it is not females as such they are watching but young teens and children. Japanese men seem to have a fear of adult women who are their psychological equals.
Something else I have read is that traditional Japanese marriage is very oppressive for women, and as new work opportunities have opened up in recent decades a large proportion of women have just decided to stay single.
In addition in recent decades there are few jobs for young men that would give them enough income to support a family.
Interesting that you frame it as a problem with the men and not the women - I'm not Japanese, but from what I've read, most Japanese men who regress, either by avoiding women or worse, see women as "not worth it". Why would they pursue women who don't seem to want or need them, act like men (rude, outgoing, and independent), don't want to have sex (God forbid children), and forgo traditions like marriage?
On one hand, being upset that women have financial independence seems fairly sexist. But on the other hand, if you're seeking affection and someone to raise your children and nobody is offering that, then ...
Basically it seems to me like both sexes are asking too much, while also being victims of the culture and the economy.
I think one of the main impediments to having children is just having space for them. You cannot have a child in a 40m2 apartment, and more is very hard to get in so many places. Certainly not for the people usually inclined to have babies (ie. the poor).
I don’t think that’s strictly true. Flavela housing is also smallish but that doesn’t stop reproduction. It’s more a cultural thing with many other contributing factors, like economic outlook, cost of living, etc.
It's not housing. It's basically lack of time. Japanese are allowed to work almost all of their waking hours. So they do. They pretty much have to because rent is on average always as high as people can afford. Not much time for anything else.
The last time Japan had a population close to replacement rate was 1974, with the population at 109.5m.
Japan will reach that population again in 2046, so maybe we can hope for a recovery by that stage?
Part of the solution certainly needs to be voluntary Euthanasia for the elderly. If you're above 80 and decide you've lived a good enough life, you should be free to go out on your own terms, even without a terminal disease.
> Two black people living in the same area, sharing the same cultural and ethnic identity, can differ more genetically than either with a white immigrant.
I'm pretty sure that's false. What is true is that africans exhibit a great amount of genetic diversity, i.e. two africans will typically be more genetically different than two europeans. But the genetic distance between either of those two africans and either of those two europeans will still be even greater.
> In other words, that "black" is a race, and "white" is a race, etc, is entirely a social construct, which should be non-controversial given that these categories were created and solidified, culturally and politically, long before genetic science was even a thing.
It's a social construct to the same extent as colors are a social construct, which were formulated long before the theories of electromagnetism was even a thing.
A thing being a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't describe an underlying reality. That applies to any category invented by mankind. For instance, considering plants and animals, or even living beings and inanimate objects, as belonging to different categories is also a social construct. Because, after all, they're all just an association of atoms.
>I'm pretty sure that's false. What is true is that africans exhibit a great amount of genetic diversity, i.e. two africans will typically be more genetically different than two europeans. But the genetic distance between either of those two africans and either of those two europeans will still be even greater.
I didn't say Africans and Europeans, I said black people and white people.
A black person from Africa and a black person from elsewhere are considered the same race because of their visual similarities, regardless of their background. That's the social construct.
>A thing being a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't describe an underlying reality
It can be inaccurate enough that it isn't useful, though.
> I didn't say Africans and Europeans, I said black people and white people.
Same thing
> A black person from Africa and a black person from elsewhere are considered the same race because of their visual similarities, regardless of their background. That's the social construct.
And also perhaps because they actually are from the same race? Do you consider all the current inhabitants of the USA to be native americans?
> It can be inaccurate enough that it isn't useful, though.
That's true, but racial categories are really accurate, especially in this age of cheap DNA testing. As for usefulness, I'd say it's pretty useful in the medical field, for instance certain drugs work in some races but not in others due to racial differences in body chemistry.
All Africans are black and all Europeans are white? That's a new one.
As for medicine, while the efficacy of drugs can be ethnicity dependent, race is such a weak proxy for it that it often leads to mistakes when doctors operate by habit. Nothing trumps actual genetic screening (as opposed to "which Anglo-centric category do you fit best based on how you look").
What do you mean by racism? Discriminating against people based on their race? I think the reason we've forced ourselves not to be racist is because it's morally wrong.
All dog breeds are part of the same species, and dog breeds are fundamentally a social construct. Does this mean that we need to stop categorizing dogs into breeds?
I find it hard to understand how some people still cling to 1960s "there is no such thing as race" arguments while in the real world you can send a swab of spit to 23andme or similar services and get a precise breakdown of your ethnic background down to the percentage.
> But in a public guide, published by Sense About Science, Prof David Balding and Prof Mark Thomas of University College London warn that such histories are either so general as to be "personally meaningless or they are just speculation from thin evidence".
> The scientists say that genetic profiles cannot provide accurate information about an individual's ancestry.
> They say "the genetic ancestry business uses a phenomenon well-known in other areas such as horoscopes, where general information is interpreted as being more personal than it really is".
>Ancestry’s DNA expert Mike Mulligan (93% Irish – everyone’s email at Ancestry gives their ethnicity breakdown) admits that the ethnicity percentage is a “top line” estimate derived from just a very small part of our DNA, a couple of letters long in the 3bn letters that make up our DNA, and that there are a lot of “inferences” made from the data. Precision is still a problem for DNA kits. Mulligan says that the Irish, Scots and Welsh are “almost indistinguishable from a DNA point of view”. Meanwhile, when it comes to western Europe “it is the most traipsed-about part of the planet The amount of DNA that has been blurred together is incredible”. Remarkably, DNA testers can’t really tell the difference between German and French DNA.
> I suspected the error might lay not in my family narrative, but in the DNA test itself. So I decided to conduct an experiment. I mailed my own spit samples to AncestryDNA, as well as to 23andMe and National Geographic. For each test I got back, the story of my genetic heritage was different—in some cases, wildly so.
"Race" is just how you look to other people and how that ties to your status. Its categorization is very much country dependent - Hispanic people are often not considered white in America, while no one would be making that distinction in Europe. On the contrary, Europeans often don't consider Arabs white, even though they often look white. The US and Europe have things like 'white', 'black', 'asian' but Latin Americans are much more nuanced. There are people that would be considered 'white' in Brazil and 'black' in the US. There are also things like passing [1] and so forth.
All I'm saying is, this has nothing to do with the results of a 23andme sequencing run, which would provide details about your ancestry. Race (in the US sense) correlates pretty weakly with ancestry, e.g. all the early humans for most of human history were black.
If you keep doing flamewars on HN, including race war, we're going to have to ban you. If that's what you want to do on the internet please find somewhere else to do it.
I agree in the real world, I can send a swab of spit to 23andme and get a guess as to where my ancestors were. I could also send a swab of spit to ancestry.com and get a completely different guess. These services are not precise, and even if they were, race and ancestry are not tightly coupled. Race is phenotypes, color of skin, shape of nose. Gene expression is a crapshoot, with the number of genotypes often dwarfing the number of phenotypes, racial features can skip generations or disappear entirely. My grandfather had white skin, a sharp nose, yet none of these features were passed on to me. Ancestry (genetics) and race (gene expression) are not tightly coupled.
I do think that ancestry can provide valuable insights into one's self, however I'm still not sold on the necessity or reality of race. Ancestry is not written on a person's face.
1) Art of Unix programming - amazing book, lots of "ah-ha" moments. Enlightening is the word I suppose.
2) Mythical man month - very uneven. Some chapters are insightful, some are hopelessly outdated. It's short though so it's not too hard to finish.
3) Flowers for Algernon - meh
4) Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh - fun pop sci, enjoyed it
5) Whatever and Elementary Particles by Houellebecq - really liked them (especially Whatever), but I'm not sure I would recommend them since they're so... dark
I'm surprised Bezos doesn't empathize more with the working class, especially given his own humble origins. In fact, I find it hard to discern his personality.
