I think robots are cool, but it is a bit depressing that a big driver for their development is that the japanese want to keep immigrants out... makes me a bit hesitant to wish them luck with it.
I live in India. My country has 300M people living in acute poverty - less than $1/day.
These are the people who would likely benefit most from immigrating to a developed country with better healthcare and opportunities.
Yet:
1. These people would be liabilities in a developed nation since they have no transferable skills apart from manual labor. Most can't even read or write.
2. In 99% of cases, these people wouldn't even know anything about immigration, refugee status, etc.
Open immigration essentially helps people who already have the knowledge and means to immigrate. These are not the poorest and most in-need.
The Indian immigrants moving to America or Europe can have perfectly okay lives in India. I don't begrudge them for moving, but for western people to assume a philanthropic stance for taking them in is wrong. You aren't helping the poorest; you're helping the "doing okay" segment of the population.
Yet, legal roadblocks make mechanization unfeasible in India (laws against owning farm land beyond a certain level, making mechanized farming effectively unfeasible).
These roadblocks are mostly because of political reasons. Politicians know that if they were to make mechanized farming possible, they'd see massive unemployment and hence, massive loss of votes.
So the same thing is going to happen to any other technological advancement that affects this massive vote bank: it will be stopped at a political level.
Silicon Valley ambitions tend to fail hard when confronted with the reality of acute poverty and the kind of political situations it engenders.
The people I'm talking about are from states where 40% of the population lives below poverty line and the literacy rate is still at 60%.
Or do you just not care for those 300 millions of citizen?
The govt and pop at large want to keep Japan Japanese. It's not a new religion. They've been that way since before cmdr Perry. I can respect that.
In Tokyo these days, you can go to a culture festival and not have to see police stationed every block with assault rifles and flak jackets.
They're watching and learning from us, that's for sure.
Honest question.
In fact, even if UKIP did win outright, I doubt there are enough qualified instructors to train a significant number of police with firearms in just a few months. I think there are only about 1000 officers in the UK with firearms training at the moment.