Japan: Living in an Internet Cafe
pulitzercenter.org
pulitzercenter.org
One of the enduring memories I have of such accommodations was the seedy underbelly of society I was exposed to. Drug addicts wandering the halls, mentally ill homeless spending their panhandling money for a night in a clean bed with a hot shower...it culminated when a local, very high, gang member mistook our room for another, and at 2 in the morning tried to force entry so he could "cut the balls off of Tony". It was one of the few times I've ever seen my father scared, with noplace to run and 3 other people he was responsible for, I remember him rummaging through the room looking for any kind of weapon. My grandmother ultimately convinced the gang member that he had the wrong room and there was no Tony. He went down the hall and tried to force entry into another room. The police never bothered to come.
As appealing as these kinds of places might seem for the startup hacker culture, remember, cheap Japanese Internet Cafes won't necessarily translate into cheap American Internet Cafes, even with the same amenities.
(In Korea, they have something called Goshiwons [1], which are small cheap rooms students rent out while studying for exams. They're usually near universities and would seem like a much better hacker dorm than sleeping on the dirty floor of an internet cafe.)
We stayed in a shady motel for 3 months. They hadn't paid the electric bill and we found out in the middle of the second night there. Front desk clerk waited for the technician to leave, then brings bolt cutters, a 2x4, and metal shims to the master panel... 3 minutes later (and a little bit of my help) power was back. Police visited daily, victimless felony arrests were quite common.
In another occasion, we spent 10 months in a campground frequented by biker gangs. To my parents' dismay, I made many friends (both my age and significantly older) and learned how to fight, had my first kiss, and grew to love heavy metal, got drunk for the first time, among other things.
And it is occasionally used as a cheap replacement to hotel for some people.
The conditions(, as much as I know,) are far poorer than the Japanese ones shown in the photos, and many (maybe most of the) net-bars are open spaces, that there were rumours that people had their World of Warcraft passwords(, or maybe the passwords for value-add cards to WoW, which I cannot remember clearly) stolen after someone peeked through CCTVs.
On the face of it, this solves two problems in one go, the poor have a basic guaranteed income; and printing and distributing money solves the deflationary spiral and pushes the currency towards inflation.
What do you guys think? Is there any research on this?
Many European countries (mainly in northern Europe) have a more bureaucratic system, but one that amounts to a minimum income: if you completely run out of eligibility for anything else, you still get some low level of welfare benefits, and might also be eligible for housing assistance. In Germany for example, there have been some cuts to the benefit, but it is still nearly impossible to fall out of the lowest level of benefit, which is around €375/mo for a single person.
Is that really the only/cheapest option for that much rent?
Still seems to be a bit of a losing proposition, though.
Don't you see? These type of thinking is what has gotten western countries (including Japan) into this crisis in the first place.
You can't print your way out of a crisis without harming savers (retired) and young people (lower skilled, less experienced).
Taxation is very different.
I know this is a pretty popular opinion but if you look at the past 15 years, this has been proven to not hold very often.
It takes a much longer route to the hands of the ordinary man (and indeed, often never does - it gets printed and the same day locked away again), and on the way seems to get locked inside ridiculous house price inflation, and stock markets doing far better than they should. I complain about this, but should state that I dumped as much as I could into stocks when interest rates went to near zero and the printing presses started up, and I've done very well out of listed companies that really aren't doing much better than they were before.
It all has to go somewhere - it's just not going into bread.
for the time being.
On a related note, a globally deployed national currency used for savings, trade and reserves on a world-wide scale for about half a century now is historically kind of a first. "Price inflation resulting from quantity inflation" might well take a lot longer in the case of USD than any other national currency ever before took. What ultimately leads to the massive "wheel-barrow hyperinflations" is an exponentially exploding collective loss of confidence, as in "dropping by the minute". In fact, at this point the "famous" (as in Zimbabwe, Weimar etc.) absolutely massive printing at the late stages is no longer the cause but the result of that utter confidence loss.
This is probably more likely to happen earlier/faster in a national-currency-setting when exchange rates from trade with say your neighboring countries and their "stabler" currencies indicate a gradual loss of confidence first on their part, before that spreads to the locals?
But the USD has been / used to be / still to a great deal is "the yardstick" for all other currencies. "The US (Treasury / Fed) does not hold reserves against its currency" (apart from some Forex playmoney, those aren't reserves as such) -- whereas every other Central Bank does hold such "reserves against their currency", and those reserves are to a great degree USD (or USD-denominated debt "assets" aka treasuries etc.) as far as non-metallic reserve "assets" are concerned. Not exclusively USD but overwhelmingly so.
So that "absolutely massive, all-engulfing" chain-reaction-like global total loss of confidence should require a LOT more damage by USD managers than a couple quantitative easings and some fresh Fed cash for the ever-expanding USG and to bail out TBTF banks (aka ensure nominal performance of the financial system and hence all savings/pensions/deposits/insurances etc. regardless of "eventual real" performance).
That depends on how you define "on a large scale". The UK government has printed £375 billion between 2009 and now (that's c. £6,000 per person) without causing inflation.
I'm using a very simple (but I often find quite effective) definition of inflation - more money chasing the same amount of stuff. Note that this definition means that if the government prints a shedload of money but it goes straight into some kind of scheme where it's locked away and not dumped into the general economy, it's not inflation.
If you take money from rich and give it to the poor, there is now the same amount of money chasing the same amount of stuff. Prices do not rise (well, actually, I suspect they will, because rich people were not spending their money and poor people do spend money, so the marketplace does see more money chasing the goods at that level, but this is prices rising because more people want to buy the stuff, not because there is more money chasing the same amount of stuff). The people who had no money do now have some, so they can buy more stuff - they are richer. The people who had paper money now find that they can't buy quite as much stuff with it - they are poorer.
So in both cases the rich become a bit poorer, the poor become a bit richer. If you do this by printing money on a massive scale (Zimbabwe, Weimar Germany, etc.) people spot it happening (not least because they use wheelbarrow to carry the bus fare), inflation becomes entrenched, people stop trusting their own money, all sorts of fun stuff. Argentina's inflation rate is something around 20% to 30% depending on who you ask (don't ask the government - they have a history of not being very honest about it!) and they've seen capital flight, illegal currency trading (mostly illegal as the government has declared illegal currency trading activities that are completely legal in most of the rest of the world - for example, if you're going abroad, you need approval by the government to get some foreign currency and you must get an amount they approve), all that sort of thing, and Argentinian citizens do not trust their own currency to hold value.
It's actually a shift from mass accumulation and "tax havens" (i.e taking the money outside the economy) to consumption which ignites the productive economy bottom-up.
As a youngster I am tired of hearing shit like this. Do you have any historical example to show?
Because from what I've seen, post WWII countries came out of their crises riding protectionist policies rather than sacrificing their last generation or robbing their population. Like Korea.
The government in late 1993 and early 1994 then created a new currency, that would be pegged 1:1 with USD (later the pegging was removed, now it is about 2.2:1 ), and with limited supply. Also a bit time earlier, a president REMOVED money from people savings, literally (ie: he told banks to set the saving accounts to zero, and that is it).
This, along with some new laws about government spending fixed inflation and allowed the economy to run smoothly again.
Then around the 2000s, when the leftist government arose, they decided to solve poverty again by printing money and giving to the poor, at first it seemly worked, with GDP growth peaking at around 8% in a year, and millions of people leaving poverty and entering what here is called "lower middle class" (actually, in US that would still be considered poverty... here "lower middle class" is if you can rent something, and pay your own food, but rely on government services to education, health and transportation).
The popularity of the socialist government soared (it reached around 70% at its peak, that also peaked during the 8% growth year)...
Then we have currently 6.7% of yearly inflation (year to date data), 0.9% of GDP growth (2012 data) and most of the inflation drivers is housing costs and food (exactly the things that the "new middle class" could afford). Now the government approval is 30% and we have already 5 weeks of protests and strikes that never end, totally widespread, even to some crucial sectors (ie: several states have the police threatening to strike, and there are also threats of a military police strike, that is kinda ludicrous, because as military they cannot legally strike, and more than one high ranking officer of the army threatened a coup, with a general writing a anti-government text and all)
Printing your way out of crisis, only result in a sort of roller coaster economy, it booms and suddenly bust, at first, people with the influx of money start to spend a lot, and people build business to attend to them, then all this influx money result in inflation, suddenly the economy start sputtering, as inflation rises faster than GDP growth, and particularly food and housing inflation rises faster than wages and government welfare, and you have a vicious cycle of needing to print more money to save the population that spends this money and generate more inflation, and your real wealth creation sink.
EDIT: Oh, striker truckers are awesome too, because they are just parking their trucks in the middle of the highways and fucking up everything... Never piss off truckers when your economy rely completely on them because your trains are shit or non-existant.
That can happen in similar situations if you don't as well, though. Greece's typical response to financial crises until recently was currency devaluation, i.e. massive but controlled step-function inflation. That certainly has a lot of downsides. But now that Greece is in the Eurozone, it can't do that. Even post-crisis, the inflation is very low; there is even deflation if you look at local baskets of goods. But that has not kept the economy off of the roller-coaster. It's just been a different roller coaster, and likely a worse one (in the previous crises, Greece never had 65% youth unemployment).
Huh? If anything it was the exact opposite: giving in to the greed of an uncontrolled financial sector, BS credit products, rampant privatisation, corporate interests and the like.
It has been pretty well established that the financial crisis of 2009/8 for one was cause due to rampant deregulation of the financial sector.
Even Alan Greenspan admitted (and even apologised) for the matter.
And a trillion dollar bailout is a pretty good evidence in itself.
There are people that still believe it all was because, say, single black mothers took social care money, or something?
Far out.
I wouldn't want to live in one but probably would if SoMa had an equivalent - and I imagine many others would as well.
I came to the comments hoping someone else felt this way, actually. I really, really wish micro-accommodation would become a thing in American cities.
I'm moving to San Francisco after I graduate next spring. I would love it if some sort of crossover between a co-working space, a Japanese airport "capsule hotel"[1] and a hacker house type environment existed.
The hacker houses that exist now sound like a nice idea in theory[2] (being around a bunch of interesting, like-minded people). In practice, however, trying to get some sleep in a place like that sounds like - well, a nightmare. Great when you first arrive and are meeting people and going to interviews or whatever - not really viable over the long term for someone like me who values his sleep.
In my mind, I see a place where I have:
* A clean, comfortably appointed, soundproof capsule for sleeping
* Access to a nice, luxury-gym-like shared bathroom
* Access to a co-working space / commons area for hacking
I'm not sure how realistic this is given government regulations, housing prices, the number of people interested in actually paying for such a place, etc. Sure would be cool though.
[1] - http://resources2.news.com.au/images/2011/01/12/1225986/0270...
[2] - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/technology/at-hacker-hoste...
Due to a mixture of social shifts and demolitions/conversions, though, the remaining ones are generally extremely run down and verging on squalid, so it's not as much an option anymore. SF still has some SROs in the Tenderloin, but they are not particularly well-maintained or clean; the upper end of the residential-hotel category has been demolished or converted into condos or regular hotels.
Whilst I can understand your sentiment, I think a better solution would be that American cities had decent-sized cheap accommodation that was also well served by public amenities.
That said, I live in the UK, and when it comes to houses the British population are just plain stupid, and they eagerly rush into ridiculous housing at ridiculous prices.
Many cities do, just not the ones most people would probably rush off too first… and it doesn't help with the increase in housing costs in "popular cities".