It only looks like that because you're looking over a relatively short timeframe. Start looking over more than a generation and things will look different. I just have to check my father's ancestry research to see that - his notes includes a lot of extra information not directly related to my forefathers, and yes people moved. That a lot of people move in, historically, an instant, is something that doesn't happen always, but it has happened again and again over time. The net result is in any case that anyone country is, when you look back, always a product of its immigration. And it's still a country which you would attribute national culture to. The culture isn't frozen if you look over a large enough timeframe, and I for one am happy for that - my boring childhood town isn't that way anymore: boring.
Rice fields, around here at least. That's always been very labor intensive. They do use tractors to do some of it, but around the periphery of every field it's still done manually. Rice fields are very different from wheat production.
In my country strawberries are picked manually. There's yet no mechanical solution which can do what humans can, with respect to quality and more. And that's already a problem, without seasonal immigration there will be no strawberries on the market, simple as that. There are many other kind of work which still requires a young healthy work force.
What I'm asking is "..dared to try what?". What, excactly, would you offer? As I mentioned in another comment, those families in my own country which a) do not have any economical worries, and b) have great family leave support from work, i.e. no career problems whatsoever, and c) even more that I don't list here, they DO NOT WANT more than two children anyway. Because it feels fine with two. And then there's a problem, because that's not enough - there are a lot of singles out there, and most of them don't produce any children. You need more than two children per family, on average, to keep up the birthrate vs the death rate.
So, what is the solution that nobody has dared to try?
>They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
That idea is a fallacy. It has never been true. All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere. Over the centuries people kept moving, immigrating and emigrating. England.. Britons, Celts, Anglo-Saxxon, Norse, Normans (which were themselves originally immigrants). And my own country? Surnames from everywhere. 40% of my language's vocabulary came from immigrants. Is that a problem? I most certainly can't see any.
The idea about 'homogenous culture and shared traditional values' is as true as looking at a flower for five minutes and then claiming that "nah, it doesn't grow, it's frozen".
It is not as simple as that. In my country giving birth is free. And you get economic support for every child. For most people it's still an economic burden to some extent, but for the majority it's not something which blocks them from having children. It's more that most families I know are content with having two children. It feels fine to them. But that's the families that do have children. 25% of men in my country never have children. It's not enough. A lot of families need to produce 3 children, and better if there are some with four.. and most people simply don't want that. And that's for the most part not a question of economy.
The worldometer statistics site doesn't fully agree with that, the Guardian reports that the rate went from 0.75 to 0.80, while worldometer states that the 2026 rate will probably end up at 0.76. At best this has kind of stopped dropping, but it is any case catastrophically low (and way worse than Japan)
Look back a few hundred years and you'll find that the country you grew up in, in Europe, was constantly in that situation. People moved a lot back then too. And the countries are today.. the countries. It'll be fine.
I don't think that's correct. Saying that "solutions would be very expensive" implies that there are actual solutions in existence. I've seen a lot of suggestions, and many have been implemented, some do slow down the dropping birthrate problem (countries with good maternity leave systems and regulated working hours are doing way better than those without), but nowhere have I seen any true fix presented, with or without a label "will work, but will be too expensive".
Around 1900 the median age of the Japanese population was somewhere in the twenties, in other words, they had a healthy and able work force relative to the population size. Today the median age is above 50, and there aren't many who can work the fields. In fact around here I see very old people doing that, and a lot of them can hardly walk normally, they're permanently bent.
Fertility rate of 0.80.. and I thought Japan, Italy, and my own country had problems. Note however that https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-p... says 0.76, and last year was 0.75, so there's barely any change there. Catastrophically low birth rate, and maybe it's not so hard to figure out why.
Japan's population is dropping like a stone. Since I first arrived here some years ago the population has gone down by several millions.
Countries which have more immigration (like my native one, also with a low birth rate) manage to keep up the population size, and, equally important, manage to keep the median age somewhat lower (the median age in Japan is now above 50).
If immigration is not a solution, then I assume you mean that reversing the birth rate problem is the way to go. Can't disagree there, but how do you propose to do that? No country with a birth rate below 2 seems to have been able to come up with a way to "fix" that.
Yes, that's annoying. I have no interest in connecting my phone number to accounts here and there.
Some firms go the other way.. I use the "Line" app for communication, and initially (many years ago) it was connected to your phone, which caused difficulties if you moved countries (among other things).
They have, however, now removed the connection to a phone number. Good.
I've seen those categorizations used, and to me they're totally useless. I instead filter messages in the Filter settings, and apply labels and other things as I wish. This works exactly as I need it, unlike the Google categorizations.
This seems to be caused by "smart features" enabled in settings, and can be turned off. When they were introduced they popped up in gmail and you could choose to accept or reject, I of course rejected all of them (nothing good could possibly come from accepting), so I've never had any of the issues mentioned in the blog post.
Somewhat off-topic, but also a followup.. I'm worried I'll be "kicked out" of gmail as well, at least on my mobile gmail device.. an Android tablet. I have an old one which doesn't receive Android updates anymore, gmail works perfectly fine in Opera (and Vivaldi). I have a newer Android tablet, I bought it to be ready when the day came that the old one doesn't work for some reason, or an app won't work and can't be updated (due to too old Android - and in fact there are a few of those already).
The problem? The browsers work fine on everything on the new tablet, EXCEPT gmail. Whenever I try gmail, in Opera or Vivaldi (same versions as on the old tablet), I get something along the lines of "the site can't be found". As if wifi was off. (paraphrased, I don't have one in front of me). Been like that forever. It's baffling.
I use filters for categorization, where neeeded. Been doing that for years and it does what I need. I don't see any value in google doing it for me, when I can set the filters just as I want them.
My wife translated some text she had written in her own language to my native language, as she didn't feel she could do it.
I found grammar errors, surprising ones. I found places where pronouns were used so far into the sentence that a reader would be lost finding what that pronoun actually referred to. And more.
In the end I rewrote the LLM-generated text myself, many pages of it.
Research on LLMs show that they so far can't summarize. They fake it by just extracting stuff, i.e. making the text shorter. They, as you found, can't understand intent. Or what's actually important.
I never read summaries generated by AIs, it's a waste of time, and worse.
I don't see any of those (horribly-sounding) AI "helpers" when I read or write messages in gmail. I tried it again just now, to make sure that nothing had changed since yesterday.
I do remember clicking through some suggested "feature improvements" a while ago and saying "No" to all of them. Can't really remember what it was though.
Can it be that the author has some option enabled in settings somewhere which allows this? Or is this something GMail is (forcibly) gradually rolling out? If so, shudder.
EditUpdate: After reading another comment, this must have been a bunch of "smart features" which gmail suggested a while ago. I just, as I said, refused all of them. So they're available in Settings somewhere. Find, turn off.
When I started studying electronics in 1975 I didn't have a calculator, they were very expensive. Then rumours started about an upcoming low-cost Texas Instruments calculator, and IIRC early 1976 I could buy one - the TI-30. As did many of my classmates. The next year or two I used that one, and other similar calculators which entered the marked.
Then one day a guy some two classes above me handed me a HP calculator to try.. and the RPN immediately clicked with me, I could just enter arbitrary long calculations without ever messing up anything or having to keep track of parentheses in my mind. From then on I never looked back and I was on HP calculators ever since (up to and including the Free42 on my phone today).
I have an original HP-16C as well, I used it a lot back in the day, until calculations and transformations of hex, octal and binary was so ingrained in my mind that I didn't really need it much. It's in a drawer, but it's still good. I think I'll make some more use of it now that I'm near retirement age and just doing retrocomputing.
I've heard about the supposed loss of quality of later "HP" calculators, and I may not want to buy this one anyway (as I have an original), but I'm also waiting for someone to review the keys. The keys! That's HP calculators as I learned to know them.
Naphta may sound obscure, but it's the base for a ton of products. I actually had no idea, until the building / construction companies around here started getting into serious trouble (I wrote about that in another comment).
The situation may stabilize over time as Japan gradually manages to shift sources.
However, the situation has been and is serious, the Calbee issue isn't really what matters of course. As someone who's currently in the process of building a new house, I'm in constant touch with my construction company, and they tell me that there are tons of procurement problems because of the naphta shortage. Some companies have stopped taking orders altogether. We're lucky in that our construction company managed to secure what we need just in time, those just a couple of weeks after us have problems. We are mostly fine, except for some stuff, which, while important, can be handled. Or delayed, at least.
There's also an ATM in every 7-11 in Japan where you can withdraw cash with a foreign credit card. That used to be very difficult most places, until the last few years. Some years ago I could only count on the post office (which by law needed at least one ATM which worked with foreign cards), and 7-11. Low charges as well, or none, depending on card type.
In our local 7-11 I can find the exact same carton of milk as sold in the supermarket, and the price is also exactly the same. So it depends. Some of the other stuff sold there is more expensive, but somewhat surprisingly it isn't that more expensive, so if I need butter or yoghurt or tea in a hurry then it's no big sacrifice to stop at the closer 7-11 instead of adding the extra five minutes (of walking) to go to the supermarket instead.
Japanese "disposable houses" was a policy implemented after WW2, to rapidly rebuild the country as well as keeping a lot of people employed. And indeed a house has traditionally dropped faster in value after purchase than even cars.
And this policy has also meant that houses haven't been insulated, and very often haven't been strong against earthquakes, the latter is kind of baffling in this earthquake-prone country (the Noto earthquake on Jan. 1 2024 flattened large areas of houses, with nothing left standing). It's only gradually, through certain code changes implemented a couple of times post-1980 that things are improving. But it was as late as just a few years ago that the Japanese government hesitated, and in the end didn't implement certain new building standards, because that would put a LOT of makers out of work as they didn't have the competance to build to those standards. But this has finally changed, with the latest update a year ago.
I have to take issue with the ".. out of wood and paper". Because that's not the cause. There are buildings here literally a thousand years old and built of wood, still standing, after centuries of sometimes unbelievably big earthquakes. And wooden homes built properly these days handle earthquakes as good as anything else. It's not the material, it's how it's done which matters.
Source: Researched a lot of house building companies the last couple of years. Some of them, building wooden houses, have been in business for a long time and haven't had a single house as a victim of earthquakes for half a century, with the occasional exception where the earth has literally flipped over. Nothing can handle that. But "ordinary" earthquakes? All still standing. There are photos around showing certain houses alone on a field of flattened buildings. These guys.
Meanwhile, here in Japan I've been in touch with several companies, some small, some quite large (e.g. some building companies) which have a policy of no advertising. No marketing. None. They don't do it. They mostly do have web sites, but that's all. They say they rely on word of mouth, and from what I can tell it works, they're all busy. They say that instead of using money for advertising they want to use everything for the products.
Buildings, as in large buildings, maybe. Homes don't use that much aircon. We actually never do, except if we have guests, and in any case it's never used the way I experienced so often in the US - that it's actually cold (and very uncomfortable). When used in Japanese homes it's used sparingly. There's also typically a "dehumidify"-only setting, but that's mostly a losing battle, what with the house being surrounded by humid air (and until very recently even new homes were far from airtight), so mostly you just live with it.