This, and also: all the discoveries that don't immediately help solve our problems rarely make the news, or if they do we gloss over them and forget them immediately.
You're right on some, but I have to say that some of those are indeed common (instead reminding me that these things may not be common outside of Japan).
Including: the calculator on ATMs (at least Mitsui-Sumitomo ATMs usually have them), the all-in-one sink with soap, braille on top of cans (just checked my fridge and all alcoholic beverages have it), the paper in bubblegum boxes (always bothers me when I'm in Germany), that most restaurants (including fast food) try to make the dish look like the ad, and reading glasses at city hall.
In the US, I remember when the "wide-mouth can" gimmick became popular; nearly all the soda and beer brands adopted it at exactly the same time, because there's really only one supplier of aluminum-can-tops. I would expect that's true about the braille thing in Japan too.
I'm not opposed to fasting, but many things are wrong with this. Just to point out a few:
(1) A general "naturalistic fallacy" where the author believes that people of the past must have been more healthy.
(2) I assumption that there is an increase of cancer in modern age solely because of humans change of diet - ignoring factors such as environmental pollution, ozone depletion, increase in radioactive particles from weapons testing and accidents...
(3) Assuming that a change in mean is brought about by changes in every individual to the same degree. Differences in the mean can be produced by just a subset, even a minority of outliers. Today, many people are overweight, which is known to increase all kinds of risks. So caloric restrictions applied to the whole society will always cause a rise in mean life expectancy. But that doesn't mean that it will have any benefits for the people who aren't overweight.
(4) Confuses brain size with brain function. I guess the author then must also believe that women are significantly more stupid then men. Also fails to explain that people can sometimes lose a big chunk of their brains and still perform well on tests.
Again, I'm not saying fasting is bad, but that the author just throws together some unrelated scientific studies with a bunch of common fallacies (and, it seems, bias towards his own lifestyle choices).
> people can sometimes lose a big chunk of their brains and still perform well on tests
This one is wrong. People without big chunks of brains are significantly worse than their peers. I vaguely remember that none of them ever had IQ > 100.
I think that's a pretty contrived "after-the-fact" explanation for why it's called "~punk", that reduces the whole of punk culture to just mean "rebellion".
But the truth is, just like every scandal is now called "~gate", new genres are just called "~punk" because it sounds good. Not because they have anything to do with punk culture.
Where is the "rebellion" in "steampunk" or "dieselpunk"?
Whether or not that's the case, they are not perceived as such. Europeans may be mistaken in believing Ukrainians just want temporary shelter and Syrians are coming to stay, but whether it's true or false doesn't matter. It's this belief that affects their attitude.
I did hear on the Bulgarian TV some Ukrainians openly saying: "We're gonna learn the language, we're gonna work in Bulgaria." That won't be news as most of our seasonal work was already done by Ukrainians, but speaking to Ukrainians who do seasonal work in Poland and Germany - they've shared to me that they were often treated as cattle.
That's because you're looking at this with your "professional" hat on. If your look at this with your "philanthropist" hat on, the optics are suddenly very different.
There's a weird type of logic going on where almost everyone who would be willing to do it for almost free is probably not qualified for the job. Would you really stake the future of your foundation on someone who still needs to build their resume?
$2.5 million per year is in the top 0.1% of income in the United States. No matter how you shake it, whether you want people with management experience, tech experience, browser experience, or some combination thereof, you will find a significantly large number who would be able to do the job, do it well, and make more than their current salary.
I bet any mid level tech manager from a large company (who loves open source) would do a much better job and work for 1/4 her salary until he proved he was worth her old salary and raised the tides of success for the company.
You could make this same argument about professional athletes, but all across the world no one seems to follow through on this obvious money-saving hack. So I presume it's more complicated than you're suggesting.
Japanese CEO salaries are famously very low. The Toyota CEO makes about USD 3.5m. There are other C levels that make 3 times what the Toyota CEO earns in direct compensation.
Japanese CEO salaries in general seem to be below USD1m on average.
Toyota is a huge company though. It's nothing like Mozilla. I would imagine there's a lot of responsibility riding on it. And I'd imagine that in Japanese culture badly performing CEOs actually face consequences.
I disagree, if you're a company raking in $270B a year in revenue, you want the absolute best running it. The Toyota CEO is like 0.001% of the revenue, an extremely small price to pay for the right management.
I don't believe that for a second. Unless you just mean it in the sense of "90% of people that apply to a job aren't good at it". You can get many many qualified people for $250k.
Paying more doesn't get rid of the risk, so yes do the version that has risk but without the bonfire of cash.
I find it a bit strange that she's decrying that the laws makes people afraid to associate with her, but she's perfectly fine with the fact that her clients/customers are criminalized.
It appears to mike like some cognitive dissonance of her to think that her clients are justifiably "bad" by buying her services, but her selling these services is okay.
Maybe I'm naive, but if my customers would face criminal charges for buying my products, I'd speak out on behalf of my customers or (if I really feel they should not buy such stuff) I'd stop selling it to them.
That's what I thought as well.
Possibly also correlated with the time of day.
Temperature and other possible factors vary over the course of the day and cats tend to be active at certain hours of the day.
As a stupid example: some update service is set to check for updates between 5pm and 6pm. A bug in the update check causes crashes. The cat expects dinner at 5pm.
Why not? If you'd rate your happiness or peace of mind on a scale of 1 to 10 every day, and after a donation the rating goes up, that's an empirically measurable improvement to your quality of life, much more so than a product that may make your life more convenient but you're still stressed and unhappy.
While not technically a "purchase", I also must say that this year, no single product even came close to the donations I made to those who protect the environment and fight climate change.
Now, every time I consider a purchase I ask myself: "do I really need this?" and if the answer is no, I forgo the purchase and donate the same amount of money instead.
This "negative consumption" turns my feelings of gloom and helplessness into a sense of purpose and power.
I can only imagine how awesome it must be to be able to donate almost a whole salary!
Can you please share some of the charities you've found to be trustworthy?
Our main causes are environment, poverty and homelessness, and disability. Most of our charities are local, such as each of the major homeless shelters in our city. Medicins Sans Frontières and Sierra Club are our two international-level charities, but I hesitate to offer endorsements. Due diligence is important when donating larger sums.
