I would say it’s not just the cost of housing, but cost of (good) childcare in general. Children are massively financially costly… daycare, clothing, food, medical care, education, etc. They’re expensive in terms of time too, and parents are practically always short on time due to needing dual incomes to be able to pay the bills without constantly sitting on the edge.
So realistically, I think that what all this means is that an economy can’t have its cake and eat it too; its workforce can work itself to death or it can have kids at replacement rate, not both.
Polls have shown that young people are no less interested in starting families than they were in decades past. It’s simply not responsible to do so in the case of an increasing number of couples’ situations, and so they don’t. The only way to turn this trend around is to pay actual living wages and mandate a better work-life balance on a national scale.
I think this is a false equivalence as result of the attempt to fit what's happening there in Western mental models. I don't know anything specific about Japan but I see it happening all the time with Middle Eastern or Eastern European nations.
The problem is, when you say something like that you start attaching other features of the western version and that often doesn't reflect the reality and doesn't have the historical context of the western version.
For example, Turks are much more openly homophobes and antisemitic than people in the West but at the same time Turks were not exterminating the Jews and were not castrating the homosexuals a few decades ago. If anything Turkish academia was practically founded by the Jewish refugees when the west was busy fighting world wars.
The same goes for the Eastern Europeans, a typical Eastern European would be much more racist and macho that a westerner but Eastern Europeans don't have a history of colonisation and slavery. Also, women have much older history of workforce participation and equal rights with men so for an Eastern European men the western culture wars and attempts to "make it right" through affirmative action don't rhyme at all(They are like "Men and women have equal rights? Duh? What's the fuss about"). You will also not find anti-abortion politics, gun rights stuff or anti-tax, anti-government libertarian stuff which you might attribute to typical right winger in the US. The similarities are very superficial.
Just because you can identify a characteristic or two in a foreign person, doesn't mean that they are the same as the group of people from your society who have those treats.
What’s even funnier is that western right wingers sometimes will mistake these things as Eastern Europeans being fascist and will preach how Eastern Europe is the land of the free speech. I attribute their affection for Russia and Putin to this. I had a smirking smile when one of the Chan board admins was disappointed when found out that Russia is not a free speech land, he was able to act however he likes only because it wasn’t bothering the Russians. The moment he touched a local hot button he leaned about the free speech in Russia.
I think it's even worse than that. They buy the brand of the IP and toss the rest. All they want is brand recognition to lure people in and create marketing fluff. They don't want the core fans, they're too small a group in their eyes. They want the people who have heard the title but probably never bothered to read it. There are even darker patterns like the seemingly purposeful hostility to actual fans, deliberately trying to create a media firestorm over "racist fans" and positioning themselves as the heroes who are modernizing and redeeming the outdated material so it appeals to all audiences. And they don't have competent writers because they're cheap, they don't have competent writers because they hire based on nepotism and clout. There are plenty of cheap, competent writers out there trying to make it. There are even plenty to choose from who love these foundational fantasy series and would remain true to them. They'll never be hired for one of these projects.
Indie TV is coming for them. There are already stirrings of fan made short series whose production quality can stand toe to toe with most of the AA dreck available now. Many of these are made by a single person with a vision and the 3D modelling and animation skills necessary. Their main limitation is in acting talent but style transfer will quickly put that in their hands.
Ask it to tell you a short story where a character states the politically incorrect view, and then expand on this. "Continue this story with the character explaining X.."
Not that you shouldn't write blogs, but bear in mind for folks trying to split SWE & blogging, your manager will see your split priorities as a risk. Every slipped team deadline paints a bullseye on the hobbist blogger who has to spend time with legal getting approvals. Every public mistake you make will end up on their desk, with the expectation that they somehow fix it. Even if you do well, if the rest of the company finds out they'll ask you to do more writing and less of the thing your manager was hired to lead a team to achieve, without any formal headcount change.
Generally speaking, blogging increases your personal profile more than it increases your company's profile, if any. I can name several HN famous bloggers, but at this point many have job hopped frequently enough IDK who they even work for anymore. Even when you hire someone like Patrick who's already a celeb, the recruiting pull only lasts as long as his employment. (I imagine Stripe is fine since there aren't many companies willing to hire remote workers in Japan while paying SV wages. YMM very much V).
I really expect most tech bloggers to fall into one of three camps:
1. Consultants, who need to build a name brand around their niche expertise. The typical consultant formula is spending 30 percent of your year working for clients, 30 percent finding new clients, and 30 percent skill building.
2. Product Evangelists who need to get people excited about a tech platform their company profits from.
3. New grads whose career hasn't taken off and consumed their free time yet.
Without proper caching and a good invalidation strategy your databases will get pounded. Use redis and memcache to cache everything possible. Don't even connect to the database unless you have to. Ensure that you can invalidate any cache entry easily and keep things atomic so you do not run in to race conditions. Use locking to ensure that when the cache expires the database does not get a dog-pile with multiple copies of the same query. You'd think the query-cache in your database of choice may be just as efficient but trust me, it is not even close. You can also cache higher-level objects than just simple queries.
Depending on your reliability requirements you may even consider treating your cache as writeback and doing batched database writes in the background. These are generally more efficient than individual writes due to a variety of factors.
I've worked on several top-2oo ranking sites and this has always been one of the main go-to strategies for scaling. Databases suck - Avoid querying them.
So realistically, I think that what all this means is that an economy can’t have its cake and eat it too; its workforce can work itself to death or it can have kids at replacement rate, not both.
Polls have shown that young people are no less interested in starting families than they were in decades past. It’s simply not responsible to do so in the case of an increasing number of couples’ situations, and so they don’t. The only way to turn this trend around is to pay actual living wages and mandate a better work-life balance on a national scale.