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It is hard to read this any other way then - you are in a privileged position of having never been personally challenged by a lack of privacy so are fine with privacy not existing. By that reasoning you are also OK with those who are effected being silenced, because they are, for example, not cisgender, white skinned and male and could face attack for random individuals for expressing their views in public.

The challenging thing about reading books like Bonhoffer is that it compels you to questioning what your response would have been if placed in the same situation.

The cowardice is in surrendering your moral agency

"So if there was anything I was considering doing where if it became public I would be hurt, I wouldn't do it."

There is a great book Bonhoeffer[1] by Eric Mataxas which deals with this and a lot of other issues

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35493109-bonhoeffer

I think this is generally good advice for software engineering, accept when its not. The problem is that some bad ideas become better ideas by virtue of being popular ideas. Write a shitty framework/language/technology and you have nothing, convince a million people to use it and it becomes compelling because it has a lot of users working with it and solving problems.

Its the classic stone soup story[1]. You see this especially with software and tools that focus on front load new users making it really easy to do trivial things but failing catastrophically when you need more.

You also see the reverse of this, great ideas that don't get bye-in failing by virtue of being too niche.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

100% this. People forget when using dynamic languages they are trading up front cost - its easier to write the code but harder to test. In trivial or exploratory coding the tradeoff can be good, but it is a tradeoff.

That being said, using rust can be really nice for exploratory coding. If don't worry about edge case (use unwarp()/panic!) and don't worry about memory efficiency (use clone()) it still produces fast, memory efficient code.

If you are talking speed to production ready code then rust is really productive. The rust tooling picks up a lot of errors and leads you to spending more time fixing coding issues rather then compile to test your code.

If you are trying to promote usage of the data you might want to put the dictionary under a more permissive license as GPL-3+ conflicts with a lot of other licenses. Something like Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence (V3.0)[1] might work better.

1. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Ironic to me that it is completely possible to make pdf copies of a physically borrowed book, and at least in academia making physical copies of chapters of books was extremely common and one of the primary uses of photo copy machines.

If the people you borrowed from say its OK after the fact then yes it is OK.

If I borrow a neighbours defibrillator, without asking, to save their child it would be insane for the manufacturer of the defibrillator to sue me for not buying my own defibrillator. While in theory the neighbour could object to me borrowing the defibrillator without permission, that does not appear to be what happened. Based on IA's statements it appears that libraries are saying after the fact that they were happy for their copies of books to be loaned by IA.

I would assume from their actions these publishers hoped to make a windfall on book sales when people were no longer able to access libraries and they saw IA's actions as attacking this potential profit. I can't think of any other reason why they would peruse their current course of action.

I think that's more perception then reality. I live in a 30 year old house and it could easily last 100 years if properly maintained, but there is little incentive to improve the building because it will not improve the resale value.

You are loosing the investment potential of the building on your property. There is nothing to stop you buying an old house (that is essentially valued at nothing) on a property and living in it. That will essentially maintain the equity you put in.

Japan introduced taxes to remove the incentives for speculative investments in realestate. The changes mostly seemed to have worked, but it came at a high cost for the speculators.

The big issues that consistently affects real-estate around Tokyo is proximity to a station and the age of the building. The basic rule is that a condominium must be within 10 minutes walk from a station, and a free standing house up to 15 minutes walk. A house around 30 years old is worthless, and a house younger will be some fraction of its original purchase price. There are exceptions but this is a pretty good rule of thumb. Land is generally the only thing that appreciates in value and only if its in a desirable location. As a point of reference, we live in an 90m^2 home 45min from Tokyo station and it was less then the above price.

Good advice 1 year too late.

If there were an unlimited supply of surgical masks that would make sense. If you wearing a mask deprives actually sick people of wearing one then you are still worse off then not wearing one.

Surgical masks are designed to prevent you spreading viruses. That is the type most people wear in Japan. N95 masks are designed to protect you.

It is too early to know whether what Japan has done is enough and whether it will be effective long term.

That said, It isn't just people wearing mask, or something innately Japanese. At the beginning of last year they had a serious flu outbeak[1]. This years flu cases saw a major reduction when measures to combat COVID-19 came into effect[2].

I have noticed a lot of little things that have come into effect as a response to covid-19.

* Medical clinics put signs up saying don't come in if you have flu like symptoms, phone and keep yourself isolated. That allows them to keep the vast majority of people with mild colds and flu separated from those with possible COVID-9.

* Stopping schools reduced the numbers of people on public transport.

* Putting pressure on companies to allow people to work from home.

* The supermarket bakery started wrapping all bread and pastries before putting them out, previously you would place what you wanted in a tray and they would wrap it.

1. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00386/japan-gripped-by... 2. https://twitter.com/adtimmering/status/1240900101687480320?s...

I would guess their criteria for testing is people who could develop into a critical situation quickly because the tests are not 100 percent reliable and they are slow.

They were talking about having a televised only Olympics which might work if there were enough countries with athletes willing to fly to Japan.

I would assume its because the number of people with similar symptoms far exceeds the capacity to test for covid-19. If the numbers in this article[1] are accurate there were around 2.23 million people who went to the doctor for flu related symptoms from January 21 to 27, 2019.

1. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00386/japan-gripped-by...

The question is do longer stays result from worse care or economic incentives.

In the case of our child, we choose a 7 day inpatient treatment that could have been done as a more risky outpatent treatment.

I don't think simple comparisons between Japan and US are meaningful. Japan has a universal health care system so everyone is covered by health insurance. There is little incentive to leave hospitals prematurely.

One of our children spent a week in hospital and the out of pocket cost was 500yen (about $5USD)[1] plus food. My mother in law joked that it was cheaper then childcare.

Hospitals are also not incentivized to mess around with trying to extract the most from billing because its prescribed.

A friend from Australia needed stitches while in Japan and didn't have travel insurance. We went to the local doctor explained the situation and they refereed us to a hospital. They didn't charge us for the consultation because "they didn't do anything, only gave a referral". At the hospital we explained the situation and the bill was less then the excess they would have payed in Australia. My impression is that they didn't feel the need to extract every dollar because they were getting full payment from everyone else.

These are exceptional cases and the usually out of pocket is more like $30~$50 for a consultation.

1. Where we are children cost a flat rate of 500yen for a consultation and as the hospital stay was a result of the consultation that was also covered.

There are some graphs broken down by age for the Spanish flu https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734171/

The information release so fare makes this look more like a bad flu with a 2.5% mortality rate, nothing like the Spanish Flu's 10%~20%. The Spanish Flu was also especially bad because it effected young adults disproportionately[1]. This caused massive problems because that was the age group of most care givers.

1. as appose to 0.1~0.2 for regular flu 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734171/

Some interesting infograpics but I really don't like the

"Coronavirus vs Sars: daily cases and mortality rate"

it is a misleading way to represent the data. By separating cases from deaths you are mislead into thinking the death rate (your chance of dying if infected) is much higher for Covid-19. Its shortcoming would be obvious if they had included data for the regular flu which based on American numbers should be somewhere around 130,000[1] annually.

The

"How deadly is coronavirus?"

infographic is better, but it doesn't give you any point of reference to make the scales meaningful.

1. https://qr.ae/T3bu6E

This was not the case with the Spanish flu, which disproportionately effected young adults[1].

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734171/

Most of our presentations are in English which is a barrier to many.

That said, around 20 attendees is a really nice size. Its small enough that its easy to host technical meeting or book restaurants but large enough that you have a range of different people.

The Tokyo Linux User Group

I have been running the Tokyo Linux User Group for the last 13 years. The club was started in 1994. I was first involved in 2002.

We have an event once a month alternating between technical meetings were we have speakers and Nomikai's[1] (Japanese drinking party).

Its hard to say exactly how big the group is because we have a lot more users lurking on our mailing list then people attending any given event. Our events attract between 10-30 attendees, and they are mostly different people depending on the time and topic being discussed.

Open source software dramatically changed the way a lot of people used computers. A lot of open source software runs on Linux which made TLUG a great meeting place for a diverse group of people.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomikai

The plumber analogy is a bit silly, as it is not access to the hardware of your phone that the author is objecting to (which would be analogous to your home), its the confidential private information that is stored on it. The issue is not that you think the Apple store employee will steal the 128G of flash memory from the hardware of your phone, it is that he will copy credit card or other personal information from your phone. The assumption here is that having access to an unlocked phone gives access to these things.

Yes people do give service professionals access to there homes, but unless they are hopelessly naive they don't leave credit cards, money, jewellery and guns around.

If you read the fine print in the agreements you make to have such items you explicitly agree not to allow other people access to them.

The scary thing is that responses here don't seem to be playing the devils advocate and actually seem to be believing this is OK.

Policies that encourage internships and entry level recruitment of young workers. Policies that encourage the supply of child care, schools, university access and other services to support families. Access to family medical insurance.

The pension scheme is a bad example as it was put in place in 1961[1] long before Japan experienced it current population decline. Furthermore recent government actions have been towards weakening the yen which will adversely effect the elderly and pensioners (who are on fixed incomes).

Unlike the US, there does seem to be a recognition that people are part of the economy of the country and that there are mutual shared interests in making things work. The issue seems to be more in the speed and adeptness at which changes are made.

That being said, the biggest obstacle to start-ups in Japan is the Japanese aversion to risk. The most talented people would rather work for peanuts in large Corporations or in secure Government jobs rather then risk failure in a start-up.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Pension

The Manhattan project was a boy band or had a significant boy band component. It clearly involved a number of amateur male musicians[1][2].

Science is about understanding, engineering is about building something.

If the Manhattan project had resulted in no new understanding, but had created a nuclear bomb it would have been a success. The science was incidental to the success of the project.

Engineering is built on science so there will often be scientists involved in Engineering projects, however the assumption with an Engineering project is that the science is already understood (or at least significantly understood) and so the main effort is in the design and construction.

The problem with Science projects is that they are hard to sell to the public. Thats because its hard for someone who isn't a domain expert to put a value on its significance. This is why a lot of Science projects are dressed up as Engineering projects[1] to sell them to the public.

Its pretty clear that the above fusion research is a Science project, i.e about understanding.

If this facility is being used to produce new bombs then that is an engineering project but if it is just being used to gain understanding about existing bombs then its science.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Love_of_music

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative