Dunan

Automobile-related bureaucracy should have no place at all in anything related to voting. Why should a disabled person who can never make use of the DMV's real purpose have to go there just to exercise a Constitutional right?

If people want voter ID, have them issued by City Hall, or print the voter's name on the sample ballot mailed to the voter's home before the election and have them bring that to the polling place.

It should, but English lacks a suffix for "addicted to...", so people have taken the "-holic" of "alcoholic" and reinterpreted it to fill that void. The genie is out of the bottle now, so to speak, and we will probably continue to use "-holic" for all forms of addiction as long as English is spoken.

I've never understood the whole "doctor's note" thing. When you're sick, the last thing you want to do is go out in the cold or rain, ride the train with other possibly-sick people, sit in a doctor's waiting room with other definitely-sick people, just to get a note that says something you might be able to prove with an e-mailed photo of the thermometer you just took your temperature with.

My Japanese company does this. Their "solution": don't get sick. You should be taking vitamins and getting enough nutrition.

Miraculously people manage it. Somehow I never get sick on the weekdays and then I can feel my body collapsing on the train on Friday night as I am no longer able to push the sickness back.

I'm not sure what I would do if I had children (and I really want to have them). Fighting sickness as a single man is not the same as fighting sickness when you have elementary school kids in the house.

I work for a company like this (a direct rival to Amazon, aping many of its policies) in a country infamous for its workaholism, and given the intense pressure to never get sick (not becoming sick is considered part of one's personal responsibility), what typically ends up happening is one week of genuine vacation, a day or two of scheduled PTO for whatever personal reasons, and then perhaps one or two sudden sick days, in a year.

But there is also half-hearted pressure from HR to consume more than about 30% of our total PTO, combined with unstated pressure from management in general to consume less than 50% of it. Everyone ends up worrying about the exact number of socially-acceptable days to take off per year rather than just living their lives. I've gotten used to it but when I hear about European standards, I'm just green with envy.

Japan is like this, only most regular employees never have to do a thing. Our employers take care of everything and our December pay packets are adjusted so that the correct amount of tax for the year has been paid. Banks also take tax out before paying interest to account holders.

You can also go to a tax office sponsored by your city hall and have a preparer assist you at no extra charge.

Reading about this reminds me of my favorite folktale from Yonaguni, which shows off how ingenious these embattled islanders were:

"It is said that from the top of the hills on Yonakuni, one can see Formosa and sometimes can even notice the lights on that island at night, so that one would think there would have been much intercourse with Formosa during the history of the islands. The commercial route is modern, however, and there has been little communication between Formosa and Yonakuni in former times. It is said that long ago the fierce natives of Formosa came and took captive some men and women on Yonakuni Island and ate them. The inhabitants of the island were, therefore, very much afraid of the Formosans and did not even date to light a fire at night lest the Formosans should see it and visit them again. There is a story that when the wind blew in the right direction, the natives of Yonakuni took long sandals of a length of two feet and threw them into the sea. When they drifted to Formosa, the [Yonagunians] thought that the Formosans, seeing them, would imagine from the size of the feet that there were very big men in that region and would refrain from exploring their country!"

(From Charles Leavenworth's account of his 1905 visit to Okinawa, "The Loochoo Islands".)

The Taiwanese cannibals never came back, so I'd say the Yonagunians' gambit worked!

Right; I wouldn't call them "Japanese ancestors". The Okinawans of today are descended mostly from migrants from the mainland, and even these people are not necessarily the same ones who came to the islands from Taiwan many millennia ago.

(Those underwater ruins that Yonaguni is famous for almost certainly stem from those people and not from today's Okinawans. While some of them look like a city of some kind, it is just as plausible that rock was cut out of the ground to build things. I would love to know the truth behind that amazing place!)