jpatokal

Can you name a European city that has anything approaching the homeless problem of SF, Seattle or NYC?

The agreement is about "property and claims" between the two states. Of course, individuals can and have sued various Japanese entities, some successfully.

> Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens

That's a bit of a tautology: if they nationalize, which they can if they wish to, they become citizens and stop being counted as Zainichi. They're also granted a number of privileges (welfare, state pensions etc) as "Special Permanent Residents" not afforded to any other non-citizen residents, although they're still not to vote.

Japan and South Korea signed an agreement in 1965 that was supposed to settle all financial claims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Basic_Relations_betw...

Actually, Japan has apologized repeatedly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements...

However, Japan has more than its fair share of far-right fruitcakes who deny everything, and in both Korea and China politicians have found Japan to be a convenient whipping boy whenever they need a distraction from domestic problems.

Historically, Korea was repeatedly invaded by Japan. More recently, Korea was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, during which the Japanese ruled with an iron fist and did their best to destroy Korean identity by forcing people to take Japanese names etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea...

Both countries have low birthrates, but Japan is far enough along the labor shortage curve that unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan. From the friendly article:

According to Statistics Korea, the national statistics office, the unemployment rate last year for people aged between 15 and 29 was 9.5 percent, compared with 3.8 percent overall and 3.6 percent for Japanese 15 to 24.

Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular. There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...

Variable, but generally worse. It's much more tightly censored than Wikipedia: for example, edits are manually reviewed by admins before going live. Also, most community features (talk pages etc) have been removed, so it's constantly gamed to push spam, copy pastes etc and the mods don't really care unless it touches a red line topic like politics.

They generally cannot, which is why so many users resort to high-risk, high-reward ways to make money like prostitution, theft, etc.

Because their site is relevant to the question asked?

Melbourne is a mecca of coffee snobbery, and most locals wouldn't be caught dead in a Starbucks. (Although you need to try pretty hard even to find one.)

Lavish and impressive is also relative. Your original statement about "these things are all rather unimpressive to those that actually have them within reach" is tautological: having a yacht with a helipad is not going to be particularly impressive to anyone else docked next to me in St Tropez, even if it puts all of us in the global 0.01%.

Australia is a stupidly uncompetitive place to manufacture anything. A friend of mine is managing a (rare!) factory expansion in Sydney right now, and costs of all inputs (rent, labor, etc) are 3-8x what the company is paying in Malaysia.

The cloud market is pretty darn huge, why are you dismissing it? Aside from the public cloud vendors, containers are very much a thing in the private cloud space too (OpenShift, Pivotal, etc).

Look at the photo, it's hard to describe that as anything but a barrel: https://dynaimage.cdn.cnn.com/cnn/q_auto,w_634,c_fill,g_auto...

In particular, it lacks any conventional boat elements like a method of propulsion or steering.

He is clearly milking the label for all it's worth though, the GPS tracker ID was "diogene" (French for Diogenes of Greek philosopher living in a barrel fame) and his sponsors included several manufacturers of wine barrels (https://www.boutes.com/), who apparently also helped build the thing.

Laws in Australia are already pretty loose: medical marijuana is permitted on a federal level (although in many places the legal hoops required to get a prescription are absurd) and in most states recreational use is more or less decriminalized. I agree that actual legalisation is a long way off, and as usual it looks like our Kiwi brothers will beat us to the punch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_New_Zealand_cannabis_refe...

The Rising Sun flag remains the flag of the Japanese Navy to this day, and is appropriate to fly on any occasion where you'd fly a Navy flag.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_Flag

One factor not discussed in the article is the differing attitude towards exports, piracy and copy protection. Historically, and even today, it's extremely difficult to legally view lots of Japanese content outside Japan, yet Japanese producers pursue copyright claims with rabid fervor. Japanese publishers for books and music were also extremely resistant to move to e-books, digital downloads or streaming.

For whatever reason, South Korean publishers were not as myopic, meaning their content could be more easily accessed -- at first technically illegally, but soon there was a groundswell of demand that led to large-scale legal rebroadcasting (TV stations showing Korean dramas etc) and that then led to today's juggernaut. Manga is just the latest example of Japan losing a market that really should have been theirs for the taking.

This appears to be at least in part a reaction to the backlogs at service centers described in the original article:

With hundreds of thousands more Teslas hitting the road, all those service visits—along with repair work—have reportedly backed up the company's service centers. Now the company has reportedly put an end to those extended service plans and is hoping instead to highlight electric cars' inherent reliability—and hopefully reduce the wait times at those service centers.

Since the name of founder Takafumi Horie may not ring many bells outside a Japanese audience, let's just say he's a colorful character:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takafumi_Horie

Did a bit of a double-take when I saw the large "18+" image: apparently this is a reference to having "18+ products", but that's not what "18+" means in much of Asia.

India as a whole has never been communist, although the Gandhi-inspired self-reliance/import substitution/License Raj era definitely did cripple the economy in similar ways.

Many "communist" countries in Africa and the Middle East were so mostly on paper and they flipped allegiances regularly based on whether the US or the Soviets were offering better carrots.

However, in this case, they're checking the electronics of a Canadian citizen who has every right to be in the country.

The Mosquito Coast novel?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito_Coast_(novel)

Yet the Tether price of BTC is only 6% below the USD price:

http://www.untether.space/

The commercial cities in question, Mumbai and Shanghai, have never been the capitals of India or China.

Delhi was built as a new capital by the British Raj, taking over from Calcutta. Beijing's history is long and complicated, but it has been the capital of unified China since 1421, give or take a few blips during wars.

I recently had the chance to visit Jakarta after over 10 years away, and they're finally starting to get some things right. The recent emphasis on public transport is particularly promising: the first MRT (subway) line finally opened this year, there's a lot more on the way, they've beefed up the commuter railways, Jakarta airport T3 is head and shoulders above the old ones, etc. Some bloggage on the topic:

https://driftingclouds.net/2019/03/28/jakarta-by-rail-mrt-op...

https://driftingclouds.net/2019/04/01/jakarta-by-rail-airpor...

Much of the credit goes to recently re-elected president Jokowi, who's the least incompetent leader Indonesia has had in a while (possibly ever/since independence?) and who's also the prime mover behind the new capital idea. That said, I'm not entirely sold on the idea myself, the track record of other SE Asian countries trying this -- Putrajaya in Malaysia and particularly Pyongyang-in-the-tropics aka Naypyidaw in Myanmar -- are not encouraging.

http://www.thebohemianblog.com/2017/07/naypyidaw-myanmar-gho...

Baidu gives a better idea of what this looks like.

Map: https://map.baidu.com/search/%E8%8C%82%E5%8D%8Euhn%E5%9B%BD%...

Satellite: https://map.baidu.com/search/%E8%8C%82%E5%8D%8Euhn%E5%9B%BD%...