> Japan has a serious problem with lack of sound proofing in most of the buildings you'll come across
In older or cheaper buildings this is true. However if you pay you can have better sound proofing. For example some Japanese mansions (residential low-rise condominiums) are built from reinforced concrete and isolate sound fairly well. You just have to be careful to read about the building and its construction. You also have to be willing to pay extra for better construction materials.
> as well as some discrimination (not necessarily racism) you might find while looking for housing
This is true for rentals. I also want to clarify Japanese also experience discrimination so it is not purely a non-Japanese thing. Generally landlords have freedom to put whatever restrictions they want on who they rent the unit to. But this is for good reason. A landlord cannot easily evict a tenant. So the landlord is taking a huge risk in trusting that the tenant will respect the contract and actually pay the rent.
I will say in buildings owned by corporations or businesses, they sometimes don't have any discrimination by nationality. They do tend to have higher requirements for income and may discriminate based on your current company employment contract. Also they may require a specific guarantor company which tends to be more expensive. The guarantor company is sort of a risk insurance for the landlord paid by the tenant.
However things are quite different if you buy the land outright. Here the only restriction is bank loans. If you do not have permanent residence, the number of banks willing to lend money are very few. If you have permanent residence then you have many more banks to choose from. Otherwise there is no restriction on who can buy land.
> Unless you have a company dealing with this stuff for you, you're going to have some headaches.
I think it is all about perspective and expectations. In Japan the Japanese are used to dealing with bureaucracy (though many Japanese also really dislike it). The information is readily available, you just have research yourself. Otherwise you have to accept that you are moving to a non-English speaking country and it is your responsibility to find a way to understand the local language or get someone to help you.
I do agree that there are still many headaches to adjust to Japanese business and culture. But I also don't understand why everyone has an expectation that Japan must change to meet their expectations. Japan is a first world country with many issues, but it isn't a place where you can expect to be free of first-world problems.
For example in the US nearly nobody bothers to complain about credit rating agencies. Maintaining your credit is seen as something you control. Which isn't necessarily true. Credit ratings greatly affect American lives. So everyone is in a way obligated to participate in a non-government created scheme yet nobody bats an eye. Just sign up for a credit card.
3rd party packages are already a problem because a github repo shouldn't be treated as a dependency source. Gomod solves some problems but still uses git repos as the source.
The primary reason Go can get away with this strategy is because the Go community actively promotes fewer dependencies = better. So if you write Go you have to often accept the fact that the second you add a 3rd party dependency that you're now officially on your own if that dependency breaks or becomes unsupported.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. But in order to move software forward I still think we can do better than to push this responsibility to all individual end users.
This is one area where I feel like most popular languages today still fail compared to CPAN. CPAN's value was not just packaging and distribution, it was an integrated test report pipeline and infrastructure, actively managing and gatekeeping of library maintainers, CPAN mirroring functionality, and easy acceptance of bug reports and user feedback against a library.
I don't agree. The ruby community had a recent love affair with dsl. Taking a peak at rspec library source made my eyes bleed. There's also a huge preference for "magic" even outside of rails, so much that when you want to augment or add functionality you're supposed to monkey patch. There's also a huge preference for "clean" syntax when it doesn't necessarily improve maintainability--it just makes the number of odd syntax rules you have to learn and internalize more convoluted. Also I feel as though the reason there's so much preference for tests and strict rubocop is exactly because there are too many footguns baked into the language.
That's not to say other dynamically typed languages (including js) or even statically typed languages are all that much better. But I would say ruby is really showing its age with the number of warts and hacks that have accumulated.
FYI, there is a significant contingent of the Ruby community that doesn’t use rspec (for exactly the reasons you mention). Heck, the test suites for Rails and Ruby itself use minitest, not rspec. It’s hard to notice this, though, because the rspec people have a vastly larger written output.
It sounds like most of your criticisms are criticisms of dynamic languages. Ruby gives you a million and one footguns, but they are beautiful and elegant footguns.
Dev: Ok, give me 2 days and it is done. after 2 days Here's your particle board table about 1 meter off the ground with seating for 4.
Customer: Great, but it would be nice if it could seat 6 sometimes because we sometimes have guests.
Dev: Ok, give me half a week. 3 days pass Ok, here's your table for 6, we had to change the material to wood to make it more durable and unfortunately it increases the cost.
Customer: No way I'll pay extra for wood. What's wrong with particle board? And the texture of this wood is too noticeable, the texture has to be more subtle. And we want to minimize the size to a table of 4 when the guests are not around so we can have more floor space.
Dev: Ok but expandable tables are significantly more complex and I don't think we can do it with your cost contraints. Can you consider increasing the cost?
Customer: What are you talking about? When I asked the Indian shop down the road they said it was possible at this cost. Are you lying to me? If you don't fix this and deliver then I want my money back and I'll just go with the competition.
Dev: Ok, we obviously can't compete with that price so here's your refund. But we highly don't recommend that shop because you will have issues with the table.
Customer: I think everything will be fine. Good luck to you and don't try to upsell me.
6 months later
Customer: Here's the table the Indian shop built. It sometimes won't collapse and they can't figure out what's wrong with it. Can you fix it?
Dev: Ok, we can take a look... You see the problem is this rail design is not fit for these specifications. We can fix it temporarily but in order to fix it permanently we have to rebuild the table top surface which means only the legs will be reused.
Customer: What do you mean? Can't you just install new rails?
Dev: You see, particle board is too flexible a material so over time the fasteners will fail. That's why we recommend wood. But you didn't want to pay for that in the beginning so we didn't want to continue with the contract.
Customer: Fine! Fix it, we need the table next week for a dinner party. How much?
Dev: Our backlog indicates we're booked for the next month. So to prioritize this job we need additional compensation as we'll temporarily have to hire additional help to satisfy demand.
Customer: Are you crazy? I can get 2 new tables that don't expand for that price. This isn't rocket science, I'll find my own way.
6 months later
Customer: We need a table. We're ready to pay anything.
Dev: Oh, you're in luck. Expandable tables are now free of charge. We only charge an installation fee and optional warranty fee if you want us to fix potential issues after delivery. The only catch is they only come in white.
Customer: Excellent, but what about brown? And since it is so cheap now can't you make it height adjustable?
Dev: The brown configuration is a small additional fee but the height adjustable feature has to be made from scratch as it is new technology. It is quite expensive because the motors have not been validated yet, so we have to do a qualification test on each part.
Customer: what? just give me the white table and I'll go talk to the Indians again.
---
Software often has expanding scope and new "innovative" requirements. It is almost never the case that we have a fixed deliverable; once the customer has a solution, they immediately want something else improved. This flexibility manifests on additional R&D costs for new or customized technology.
I once did a website to specification + some additional optional, free bells and whistles. They were like this is perfect! everything is great except for some small changes....
the small changes never stopped coming until it was a new website. I kept all the major versions so they could see their changes as they developed, so that when they demoed it to a focus group one of the people accidentally navigated to the original version.
next meeting: What is this website? a user accidentally navigated to it and this is now what we want. ... the original version
Haha. The references to Indian developers were funny. But this joke works even if you replace Indians by other developers in US. Remember healthcare.gov fiasco?
The same is said about Indian outsourcing (expensive in the long run), right?
I think many people miss the fact that boring jobs with low wages will not attract talented programmers. Same holds true when you outsource jobs. Send interesting jobs and pay for good Indian programmers for quality results.
healthcare.gov was a clusterfuck not because it was complicated (a typical data integration task with a query layer) but because of the quality of programmers and managers working on it. Later after political and international embarrassment, a crack team of exceptional programmers was assembled (on leave from major tech companies) to fix that website.
But communication overhead and a wage that attracts talented programmers in India, will make development there just as costly as if you do it locally. So your manager outsources to cheap Indian shops, and then always gets frustrated with the quality.
I'm not so sure what you're defining is completely different. Doing things the "right way" in Japan and other east asian cultures has more or less the same effect as trying to be "perfect" in American culture. The effect is both cultures encourage the individual to act in a manner they may not accept themselves. The difference being that in a conformist culture the avenues for self expression are limited by culture and society. In an ambition oriented culture the concept of "failure" has the same damaging effects.
This isn't to say that both traits, conformity and perfection are inherently bad, instead we should be teaching the purpose or reason to do so rather than blindly require the behavior without justification.
Conformity and perfectionism is the western translation, but they are inaccurate, for the same reasons most translations are inaccurate. They are translations by appearance only. As a culture perfectionism is shunned, and individuality is encouraged. The translation would have you believe the opposite.
The cause lies in their extremely specific moral values as a society. They call it the Japanese spirit (nihon no kokoro, 日本の心) and it embodies discipline, proper procedure, mastery, sacrifice for the greater good, among other things. A good member of society is one that aspires to be an iconic Japanese. And when an entire culture behaves in this manner, they do appear to conform, and to value perfection, and to even act as one. But they're aligned only because they uphold similar values and share common goals.
The Japanese are conformist as much as a good Christian wants to be a good Christian. Christians don't conform to Christianity. They embody it, and hence become similar as a result, not as their motivation.
They are perfectionist as much as an aspiring athlete wants to be like Mike. They aren't looking to master Perfect or become Perfect. They just want to be like Mike.
And we don't say kids playing basketball are conformist for all wearing Jordan or Steph Curry gear, nor do they wear it to conform. They do it because they love those players (just as the Japanese love their country).
Another great Japanese word is kodawari (こだわり). It's the obsessively picky and uncompromising soul of a craftsman. This too could easily be translated as perfectionism, but "perfection (kanpeki)" is not their goal. "Ideal (risou)" is their goal. And kodawari is an emotion, whereas perfectionism is not. And "ideal" is a dynamic and personal target, where as "perfection" is not. Perfection is for amateurs.
> Google’s adoption of gradle has been a disaster and proved to be a terrible decision. It did help out with some previous issues, namely multiple app targets, but it’s slowed down compilation severely. It also makes for masochistic configuration files with major redundancy and fragmented dependency hosts. Getting an app to compile shouldn’t be a challenge.
To be fair iOS dependency management is also a huge pain. CocoaPods is worse than working with Gradle in my opinion.
If they were replacing the connector with a royalty free standard connector, then I'd be with you. But the reality is this is a proprietary connector play and if they win we'll all be paying while Apple profits. $9 isn't reasonable, it just increased the base price of all existing headphones while shifting a nice fat margin to Apple.
As for wireless I think many people think syncing and charging headphones is more hassle than just plugging in.
> Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road.
If you're going to use the argument that roads are more useful than transit because they cover the whole nation, then you're making the same argument the article is making for transit, just with different parameters. Rather than paint it black and white, both systems are needed to increase overall transportation efficiency as a whole. Transit is effective in dense areas like large cities. Roads are effective in smaller less dense areas where space isn't a premium.
Additionally, everyone likes to gloss over the fact that you mention where public transit in the US is largely government owned and operated, therefore the expenses include all costs associated with the entire system. For roads, however, only the road cost is covered. This is a different kind of unfairness. It makes roads and auto travel look cheap because costs are dispersed over different parties and items: government pays for the road, drivers pay for their car and maintenance, buildings hide the cost of private parking.
Meanwhile transit systems look expensive because the numbers include all associated expenses. To fix the problem, I actually think transit systems should be allowed to be privatized and treated on the same level as roads, that is just like roads, the government allocates land use for mass transit and private companies operate the system. Additionally most of the recent laws surrounding (free) parking and the interstate highway systems require additional roads and parking for every new development. So ridiculous things start happening like low-income housing in a dense area having unused parking spaces being built to satisfy minimum parking requirements. Downtown road improvements requiring unnecessarily large intersections and allocations to satisfy level of service requirements.
> Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.
The problem is roads are a 2D system with limited scalability while cities are 3D environments that often scale in 3 dimensions. Furthermore automobiles most of the time are used to inefficiently carry 1 person but they have a large footprint. So at a certain point, traffic congestion measures actually do not increase throughput linearly based on investment. So if you want "people to go places" you start finding yourself with ridiculously expensive projects that actually just end up making the problem worse.
Many cities in the world have found solutions to traffic problems and they involve one of 2 things:
1. Introduce a toll or congestion fee thereby encouraging only those that truly want to use the road to use it.
2. Remove high capacity "arterial" roads thus causing traffic to be more evenly distributed across multiple low throughput paths.
The first item operates on the concept that even a relatively small fee will cause standard supply and demand rules to apply rather than users aggressively trying to take advantage of a "free" resource.
The second item operates on the concept that traffic distributed across more direct paths will lead to less overall system traffic compared to a system that encourages everyone to take the perceived fastest and highest throughput path.
Spanish speakers love to tout the simplicity of pronunciation but I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly. This is the main complexity of romance languages and was an immediate turn off to me.
> I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly
I don't think conjugation is such a problem. I'm learning Spanish at the moment and learning the various endings is actually quite easy. What I find more difficult are all the irregular verbs.
On the other hand, I've been learning English for decades and oral communication is still difficult at times.
Yes, I'm getting there :) I speak French which is somewhat similar. However, I feel that what is difficult are not the conjugations per se but the irregularities. Each irregular verbs is a new conjugation table to learn!
What? Spanish conjugation doesn't seem so bad. Simpler than French, at least. Bigger challenge with Spanish is that conjugation of second person stuff varies by dialect - Argentines, Mexicans, and Spaniards do it differently.
What you say about the second person is true, but all the forms are understandable by all Spanish speakers and all of them are «correct». It is mostly a matter of style.
Perhaps introducing and pushing a gender-neutral and conjugation-simplified variant of Spanish would've been the way to make it more successful than Esperanto. Los Vegos anyone?
Eliminate gender, simplify the conjugations, deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality. Throw in some loan words from English to expand the vocabulary and keep the Anglos happy (with regularised orthography and conjugations, naturally). And encourage people to slow down when they speak
Do all this, and you'll have a very user friendly language that half the world's population will be able to pick up muy rapidamente
(I have a feeling this is going to end up like the joke about eliminating all the problems with British spelling, which is achieved by progressively turning it into something sounding like comedy German...)
>deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality
I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted". When you are writing to someone you are not very familiar and you want to sound more formal the way to go is to use a "implicit usted", which means you refer to the other person by name but use the third instead of the second person. Anyway, better avoid using "usted" directly, it sounds awkward in almost any situation.
But that's different, because in Argentina they have replaced the second person and "tú" by the third person and "vos". For them it's not a formal addressing at all.
However, I won't deny that for most Spanish-speakers Argentinians sound surprisingly polite.
Gender is actually a useful layer of redundancy when listening to someone speak. If you miss a syllable or two you can fill in the blanks sometime if you caught the article.
For most situations, having the verb matching in person and number with the subject is enough redundancy. Conjugating also the gender bring the problem that every single thing you can name needs to carry a gender even if the concept of "gender" do not have any meaning.
