gkanai

Once an underdog, the Emerald Isle is now on top.

You have a gift for writing.

As for your job search, I would recommend that you look way beyond your home country if you haven't started doing that already. There are markets where there are jobs and while finding work overseas is not easy, there are markets where ML/product/research roles are still open.

I used to be first to try out new Apple products. Now I wait for OS upgrades and will let others try new Apple products or major software updates. Too many times Cupertino has let users down with poorly tested software. This problem with the Airpods- it should have been caught if this many people are experiencing the same problem.

Apple doesn't deserve the share price it enjoys.

Acupuncture is widely used across East Asia for multiple issues. If it didn't work, it would not be used. But it does work, for some people, for some issues.

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun.

For each of those firms there was a 'golden era' and then a time when the company coasted on their laurels, and then the slide to irrelevancy.

They never did afaict. Eventually smartphones became ubiquitous and I think most S. Koreans bank on their phones using apps. As for those who bank on computer, I dont know what happened when Active-X was deprecated. It was a poor decision by the S. Korean govt. to hang their hat on that technology.

Back when I worked for Mozilla, I had the chance to go to Seoul to meet with various companies and some governmental ministries. This was when Korean banks and ecommerce sites required Internet Explorer and Active-X controls for secure transactions. This meant that MacOS users or Linux users couldnt do secure transactions in Korea without emulating Win/IE.

> Today, no U.S. transit agency still uses BYD busses, because none of them managed a service live longer than about a year.

This is a fascinating data point. This should be more prominent.

It's not that simple.

China has supported key industries (like EVs, batteries, solar, semiconductors) that it views as strategic. Each country should do the same for their own situation. There is no such thing as pure capitalism- and what you see is 'protectionism' is to a lawmaker a way to ensure that the local company survives and provides jobs for the local region/state, etc.

And as the other commenter mentioned, auto manufacturing plants were retooled to make tanks and jeeps in WW2 and so no country that cares about their own military survival should cede auto manufacturing to another country, let alone China.

> it would be great to be able to get one in the USA.

Allowing in Chinese EVs into markets where there are important domestic auto manufacturers will be very bad for those domestic manufacturers. (US, Germany, France, S.Korea, Japan, etc.) Outside of Tesla, none have EV brands competitive with the Chinese firms and if customers in those non China markets migrate to Chinese brands en masse, it would be tremendous disruption and the failure of many storied domestic brands.

It is important that the US have strong auto companies. Same is true for Germany, France, Japan, S. Korea, etc.

China should have strong car companies for their domestic market. The problem comes when they end up destroying other/outside markets.

Look at solar panels, drones, batteries, for similar comparisons.

Japan has a digital national ID ("MyNumber" is the name). There was a lot of pushback before it passed but it did pass. It is now the main ID that is used for national health insurance and other government services. The rollout has been rocky with bugs and whatnot, but in the past 2 years or so there's been no drama. The ID is now supported in iOS and is coming to Android soon too, so one can have their ID on their phone instead of carrying around a physical card.

I remember reading about Gutta Percha in Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board.

"Wildman Whitehouse predicted that sending bits down long undersea cables was going to be easy (the degradation of the signal would be proportional to the length of the cable) and William Thomson predicted that it was going to be hard (proportional to the length of the cable squared).... The two men got into a public argument, which became extremely important in 1858 when the Atlantic Telegraph Company laid such a cable from Ireland to Newfoundland: a copper core sheathed in gutta-percha and wrapped in iron wires."

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2005/07/neal_stephenson.html

Why didnt the USGov/US military force their suppliers (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.) to buy from Intel? That would create some demand for 18A or 14A.

> More companies going public, earlier is better for markets and society.

I would disagree. Japan is a good example of a market where there are a lot of small public companies and they're largely held by the founders. There is not enough share holder pressure and these small public companies are often barely profitable and run poorly. I am sure there are other markets that are similar to Japan where there are publicly traded companies without enough buyers or liquidity or transparency, etc.

That seems like a reasonable price premium to pay for having given up fabbing in the US previously and now paying to catch up.

That is... crazy.

Would the CCP allow their cloud infra to be administrated by US staff in the US? Never.

Every day one step closer to the reality of Wall-e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E

> when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries;

America is a shrine to capitalism. Capitalism has driven most of the outsourcing that American companies did first to Japan (ship building, autos, then semiconductors), then to Korea (again shipbuilding, autos, semiconductors, smartphones), then to Taiwan (shipbuilding, semiconductors). Then to China- which is now a problem because the divergence between the US and CN post-Xi.

Tesla and Apple's investments in China specifically supercharged the EV and smartphone industries in China. Yes it meant that those companies benefitted from Chinese manufacturing, but it also trained Chinese industry to build those products at scale.

Also America did not reinvest enough in developing new industries or retraining in the regions which lost those industries.

America should never have moved critical manufacturing away from the US (certain shipbuilding, latest-edge semis) etc.

Japan is similar in terms of moving on from environmental catastrophes. Due to it's geographic location, the number and severity of earthquakes and tsunamis not to mention the regular stuff like wildfires, flooding etc. there's just a lot of devastation and loss. Japan does memorialize the larger events of course and there's public memorials at annual schedules, etc.

I cant imagine writing this having experienced the loss the author has.

Japan should qualify any future ODA to Myanmar requires the junta goes in and breaks up these scam centers and put the scam owners in jail.

An required in-person verification due diligence step would stop this, no?

Related to Kevin Kelly, if you want to hear from Kelly's collaborator in the walks, Craig Mod was recently interviewed by Tim Ferriss (episode #803).

> could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?

Yes, but the key man problem still exists. For instance, SpaceX could build/operate a network of weather satellites for various nations but the instability of the founder leads to similar issues.

I do a lot of product searches in Japanese and there is a ton of SEO spam on domains (.br but also many others) that are basically irrelevant to Japan. Google should be blocking all of that SEO spam but they can't seem to walk away from the ad revenue. There's no good domestic Japanese search engine so it's a defacto monopoly of bad search.

If this continues, will maritime insurance keep paying out for these total losses? It seem untenable.

Some thoughts: 1) drain almost all the gasoline from vehicles so that if there is a fire, the fuel is limited.

2) for battery EVs, other than disconnecting the batteries, I dont see a way to make them safer for transit.

If we wanted to limit the spread of Chinese EVs globally, one way would be for shipping companies to tax EVs heavily for sea transport so that fires would be covered by the increased transport costs.

yeah that made me stop too. Who, writing on these topics, does not know that the movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In Japan, except for certain areas in the top major metros, only land has value. Buildings lose value over the life of a 30 year mortgage due to the changing nature of earthquake regulations for buildings. It will almost always be cheaper to tear down and build new than retrofit. Its also why Japan has very creative residential architecture- owners can build what they want without caring about resale.

Many non Japanese who are buying in Japan without understanding this fundamentally different aspect of real estate in Japan do so at their own risk.

Thank you! This is cool. I hadn't seen it before.

I was with Mozilla when OSU's OSL was supporting the mirroring/serving of Firefox and Thunderbird globally. They were a key mirror/supporter during the early days of Mozilla and definitely contributed to the growth of Firefox.