Isn't that a ( "the" ? ) major problem with surveillance, though ? People will change their behaviour when they know they're being observed.
This becoming the new normal is not good.
3,140 karma · joined February 11, 2019
This becoming the new normal is not good.
Which will keep coming up, and hopefully does not create a situation that becomes unpleasant news before somebody from HN addresses it.
Also, there are many types of hikikomori. Some have no family support or live with them.
I know one who lives in an internet cafe, alone, and has for years. The staff told me she avoids everyone as if they were toxic poison. Only comes out at night for bathroom trips / snacks and she will run back into the cubicle if anyone's in the hall when she comes out. It's been three years now. In a cubicle. Leaves the payments near the drink section in an envelope always at the same time of night. Doesn't even use the cubicle computer, she works out of her smartphone. ( Our company actually hired her for a while. ) Most employees do not even know what she looks like, I certainly don't. She's adamant that she wants to live like this.
The son of a friend has been in his room for the last ten years. Does nothing all day. Tried to kill himself several times. Their life is an absolute nightmare.
Etc. There's no one-size-fits-all, and in some cases I don't know if mental illness has anything to do with it.
Edit : Our next door neighbour, as far as I know, has not been out of his one room apartment in at least 8 years. He's old ( 80s ? ) and a couple of volunteers check on him once a week and bring him food, otherwise he'd be dead already. We tried to talk to him once and were told not to do so as he could turn violent, "he's a hikikomori"... It took a while to find volunteers to help him out that he would not attack, apparently. I mean, the list is awfully long. I could go on and on.
Personally, I know a significant number of people ( not just in Japan ) who work from home, glued to a keyboard.
I do too on occasion -- as I assume is the case for many people on HN. But I must travel more than I like for work as well.
At any rate, these people always looking at a screen, they don't think of themselves as hikikomori. And mostly aren't, in fact they may have an uncle, or a son, or a niece, or next door neighbour, who really is, and makes life very, very difficult for people related to them, or living with them. So, not hikikomori, yet these work-from-home types can have close to zero interaction with the outside world other than a couple of holiday trips per year, and the occasional shopping weekend with wife / husband / partner.
I think some of them wake up one day and think they're going to end up like their neighbour. Others want to know how to get their son out of the room.
The thing is, hardly anyone talks in person to anyone else about it in so-called real life.
Maybe many in our line of work can be in situations that relate to the problem. Isolation in the age of hyperconnectivity is ironically very real.
I posted this story. I certainly don't hate my own home or culture. Rather I think one must have lived a very sheltered life in Japan not to have been affected by the hikikomori issue, by alcoholism, or both, which I'd argue are the two biggest problems today in Japanese society, bar none.
Japan Times criticism is valid, somewhat. It's certainly not top notch journalism, very few articles are these days. But I can't quite go and post a study of hikikomori in Japanese.
Not a single person I know in Japan has had no contact with, or not suffered themselves directly these issues. Any public conversation about them is good and necessary.
It's basically just staying home when you could do otherwise. A normal reply to "what did you do last Sunday ?", etc.
No Japanese in Japan, or Korean in Korea, or Chinese in China, or Taiwanese in Taiwan does put family name second. Nor the foreign media when speaking of them, be they leaders, politicians, artists, or plain citizens that make the news. And no media in the world refers to Xi Jinping as Jinping Xi. Or to Tsai Ingwen as Ingwen Tsai, Moon Jaein as Jaein Moon, etc.
Yet they will say Shinzo Abe instead of Abe Shinzo. Why this extraordinary exception ? Does not make much sense, if any. Translate all names or translate none.
Edit : Fun fact; if a foreign born person becomes a naturalized Japanese, they will have to adopt a Japanese name ( could be simply some sort of transliteration of their original name ) and it will be always legally displayed in Japanese order, family name first.
Again, having the Japanese following Western rules instead of their own as an exception compared to Chinese, Korean, etc, makes no sense. If we're arguing for adapting to Western order, then do it for the Chinese and others too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19970922
Personally I don't see a reason not to do it, as it is done for Chinese and Korean names. Japanese name order in foreign media is the outlier.
Nobody in Western media writes or says Jinping Xi.
Edit : Also because the title is exactly conveying what the article is about; no need to spend a ridiculous amount of money for a truly great smartphone.
An exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at legendary Japanese animator and director Hayao Miyazaki. For a decade, he allowed a single documentary filmmaker to shadow him.
Leave it to human stupidity to always find a way.
As proven in the examples mentioned in subsequent comments.
https://spiegel.de/international/europe/anger-rises-in-italy...
... For instance.
Still wrong in my view, and worth giving more value to comments. I've already commented anyway, not sure why HN does not automatically register the first time a link is submitted and redirect the rest to the first one.
Like I said, I upvote all submitters of the same article because otherwise it seems wrong given how karma works now. But we shouldn't have to do that.
Edit : * With the exception of Ask HN or Show HN, I suppose. But the vast majority of links are from external sites and submitted several times by different users.
Maybe if HN consistently registered the first submitted link and marked all others as dupes automatically. Even so, still seems a flawed reward system.
But how does it make sense to give 400 points to a submitter out of 5 who posted the same thing ? And often to an article which may not be neither the first, nor the best about the issue. That's what I mean by entirely random.
Furthermore, without threads and comments HN would just be another link aggregator from some relatively fixed sources.
And you prove my point about comments mentioning a-holes, in that useless ones would be downvoted while useful or informative ones would be upvoted, and quite rightly bestow karma and benefits to contributors deserving it. That would make sense. You wouldn't see actual a-holes, they'd be downvoted to oblivion.
File management is definitely something Apple has never done well. And they absolutely kept it out of iOS, for good measure. Sigh.
Path Finder user myself since it came out years ago, the Finder for me is just unusable.
Edit : Sorry, but after thirty years using it, I simply refuse to spell it macOS or whatever the cool kids in their marketing department want to call it next year.