Ultramanoid

Fix in stone the time to go to sleep. 7 days a week. No matter what. Emergencies apart, nothing justifies breaking this rule.

Now getting regular, reliable rest, waking up naturally ( no alarm ) and yet earlier because of this, with all good effects it has on health, work, and even dealing with other people.

Sure, we can compare life in the EU now with the 1800s too. Or 1492 if you prefer. And Japan today with Japan in 1945.

That's not the discussion. Let's talk about living standards 15 years ago and now. Many EU countries are just reaching parity ( finally 11 years later ! ) with 2008 levels. Life was measurably better here in 2008, and since then until now. The grim dark future of Japan has been predicted again and again for decades now.

Edit : 'measurably' meaning pick any metric you like. Unemployment, health, life expectancy, technology, education, safety / crime, cost of living, real estate... This list can also go on and on.

And this is not to say Japan does not have problems. It's not Paradise at all.

What's 'relative' about it ? Every trip we've made in recent years to a Western country has been truly scary or depressingly sobering.

I get told often I could be earning several times more in Europe and even more in the U.S. but this coming 'dark future' seems much more reasonable and safe to me than moving to a country with gun statistics belonging to war, not to civil society, or the mess of unemployment and sluggishness that was, is, and will be the EU.

As with the stories about 'stagnant economy' and 'aging society' constantly being thrown around since the 80s, the scaremongering doesn't match actual daily life, sorry. Give me deflation any time, happy to buy something for the same price every year, or pay the same exact rent in any central city in Tokyo Metro decade after decade.

I just can't see anyone we know living better, being safer or happier in the West, now or in their immediate future, dark or not.

Couldn't use Android without it by now. Porting, maintaining and updating Linux binaries to use in Android was difficult, time consuming, or simply not worth it before Termux. It's running multiple things in any of my devices 24/7.

Local governments have done something in that regard in recent times, but nowhere near enough.

Many small towns will give houses basically for free in exchange for people moving in and fixing them to stay long term :

https://www.rethinktokyo.com/free-houses-japan-countryside

Context : Podemos ( "we can" ) is a relatively new mainstream leftist party. There's also the traditional centre-left PSOE, traditional centre-right PP, 'new' centre-right Ciudadanos ( "citizens" ) and new far-right Vox ( projected to enter Parliament with as much as 10% of votes ), disputing this general election on a national level.

PSOE is projected to win the most votes but not a majority, Podemos would enter in a coalition government with them. Coalitions of right vs. left parties are almost equal in projected votes though, so it's anyone's guess how this will actually end, and of course there's the question of whether the far right will make it into government on a national level. They have in one of the autonomous regions, Andalusia. ( Spain is a federation in all but name. )

A few days from voting, one would expect this kind of move being done on Vox rather than any of the other four mainstream parties, given Vox's extreme right wing xenophobic rhetoric and destabilizing discourse.

Strange to say the least.

From arguably the main Spanish newspaper, El País : ( In Spanish. )

https://elpais.com/politica/2019/04/23/actualidad/1556024164...

Basically, WhatsApp seems to be calling their use of the platform 'automated spam' which doesn't really look like an accurate assessment.

Their use of it is the same as from the other political parties involved in the election. Not clear what prompted this.

No. Conventional plastic breaks down, and microplastics are now present in soil, water, air, the food chain, and even human poop.

Multiple recent articles about it in Hacker News.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=microplastics&sort=byPopularit...

We literally eat and breathe plastic at this point. With what consequences will have yet to be figured out.

I've had almost the same exact experience in Paris very recently, and my unforgivable sin was to start by saying : "Good morning, I'm very sorry but I don't speak French. Do you..." I got cut off at this point before I could say the rest. ( ...know where I have to go to buy a HS train ticket ? )

The lady scolded me in French for a couple of minutes after which she got up and left the information desk, leaving me and everyone else behind me scratching our heads.

For what it's worth, a Taiwanese co-worker sent me the link, commenting along with it that in Japan we're too nice about this. In Taipei they raise hell when a mob of mainlanders behave like unruly five year old kids.

This is not about anti-Chinese sentiment at all. Spend five minutes talking to Chinese folks of Taiwan, Singapore, or Hong Kong, or you know what, even with Chinese studying or working in the West ( a part of the world which I am not a fan of, and less so every year ) and see what they tell you. This is a very specific issue about a very specific group of people in very specific circumstances.

This is very much so. It is even used by the Chinese government as significant economic leverage over Taiwan. In times of political confrontation ( such as with the present DPP government ), the Chinese authorities regulate ( read : prevent or even stop completely ) tour operators from managing large numbers of Chinese tourists in Taiwan. This prompted the Taiwanese government's recent shift to strongly promote tourism in other Asian countries, starting with the many agreements with Japan in this regard.

You can find something to complain about in most touristy folk from any country. Italians and Spaniards are particularly loud, Americans are arrogant, expect everyone to speak English, etc.

But it is remarkable that even in Taiwan, obviously of Chinese culture, many ( and I could probably safely say 'most' instead of 'many' ) think of tourists from the mainland as a rough, rude, loud, and generally dirty bunch.

Linux : PCManFM, VeraCrypt, xed, Terminal. Android : FX file manager, Fennec ( Firefox ), Termux.

Edit : Forgot mpv running in a tab in Termux. ( Listening to radio news. )

Hah. Let's combine your pain and mine. I actually use FFmpeg daily in Android. Terminal, indeed.

Android.

What the heck, here's another four.

File management : https://sourceforge.net/projects/ghostcommander/

Scan for application embedded trackers : https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.oF2pks.classyshark3xodus...

mpv for Android : https://github.com/mpv-android/mpv-android

Multipurpose downloader, aria2 -- it's also available through Termux : https://github.com/aria2/aria2

Edit : https://github.com/termux/

Too many to list, but a few token ones.

Edit / code : https://github.com/billthefarmer/editor/

Photography : https://sourceforge.net/projects/opencamera/

Drawing / painting : https://github.com/Catrobat/Paintroid

Unicode : https://github.com/Ryosuke839/UnicodePad

The cost as well as the duration of the process has been revised several times since 2011, and will be revised again in the decades to come. It is nonsense to put a definitive figure on it now. Or in 20 years.

Been using GColor2 forever on Linux. And I believe there are others.

Don't really see how this improves it. I use Mac OS as well but I don't miss the color picker from Mac OS when I'm using Linux, not sure what his problem is. Or the attitude in general, I wouldn't want to be running something showing at all times such a cute name on screen. No thanks.

Write, just write. Don't stop doing it. Find a reason to do it everyday, for notes, for reminders, write letters to people -- which seems to be a lost custom in Western countries. If you do not like your handwriting, copy someone else's. Change it to make it comfortable for you to write.

> I’m fairly certain that simply practicing the art regularly would improve things...

This.

> ...any guided drills, programs (digital or otherwise) or any iPad apps that would assist in this?

Not this.

Redundancy.

Never ? Tested, many times over the years. But it's never worked reliably or been useful in any way for me.

Is it though ? How is it different from trusting a café's or a hotel's free WiFi ?

Indeed. I thought at first it was a EU-wide resolution. Maybe the title should be edited for clarity's sake.

There are European countries with 5%, 10%, 15% unemployment numbers. It'd be insane if they had that percentage of completely recluse population. And they obviously don't.

Oh, there is acknowledgement that it needs to be treated alright. Especially by those who suffer it, counterintuitive as it sounds.

It's the basis for the wildly successful and profitable "mental clinic" franchise business. There is one of those ( or two, or three, or four ) in front of every train station in Tokyo. For those who don't know Japan, take a look at a train map of Greater Tokyo and count stations, just for fun. You'll be doing that for a while. Then multiply the number by 2 or 4 to get to the number of "mental clinics".

Those are little more than drug dispensers run by legally authorized pimps with no medical expertise of any kind or a psychiatrist or psychologist anywhere on the premises, but anyone ( and millions do ) can "treat" their anxiety, depression, or insomnia, with half a dozen prescriptions a month. For good measure, they make sure to book appointments weekly in both the clinic near home and also the one near work. And maybe have a third one as backup.

What's needed is proper mental health services, on that you're spot on. And as another comment points out, to erase the stigma of suffering a mentall illness, so people don't use alcohol or these vending machine style clinics with no oversight to treat themselves.

That it is a problem and it needs to be treated everyone's perfectly aware of.

The first step to solve a problem is to acknowledge there is a problem.