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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The politics aspect is much more driven by identity and social group than by sunk cost or refusal to have buyer’s remorse. A singular respected leader can turn the ship - churches and pastors were critical in the US civil rights movement, for example - but groups can be more nebulous without a particular leadership structure, like how difficult it is for people to leave Twitter: even though most users agree the experience has significantly degraded, there is no critical mass agreed on a replacement.

    The more nebulous groups can break up - Twitter’s engagement is declining - it’s just slow. Maybe years or decades slow to get to the point it’s no longer one of the dominant social media. So I guess keeping the social connections open (giving someone who wants to make a major change an option to still have a friend or family member who will talk to them after), and patience.


  • A quick internet search suggests 36 weeks (eight months), which is well into the third trimester, is the most common start of restrictions, and many airlines will accept a doctor’s note the woman is low risk even past that. It was a 2008 election blip when the media got ahold of Sarah Palin flying while in labor because she wanted her special-needs baby delivered by the medical team that had prepared for him, which suggests even the written restrictions in airline policy are not consistently enforced.


  • Part of my YouTube diet is English-speaking expat YouTubers who live in Japan (UK, US, Canada, Australia), and just based on what they have shared there are some firms that specialize in property searches by foreigners. Not like “buy up a Japanese town and make it Australian”, just networking with more open-to-foreigner Japanese, and being an interface with foreigners to help them learn to integrate.

    Like everywhere in the world, remote villages in Japan lack services. From restaurants to health care to home supplies, it’s more time consuming and expensive to get some things, and others are just not available. From the YouTubers I watch, the community connections enabled by the great mass transit and walkable urban areas in much of Japan (though not all - some parts ate the car-centric pill) are what keep them there, and the friction to maintaining friendships from a rural area has pushed several to move to Tokyo.

    As far as “how is Japan adjusting” to population decline, elder care sucks. A lot of people die alone unnoticed (kodokushi). Markets adjust to lower supply of workers (Japan is at the cutting edge of automation), but quality of life for seniors can’t be automated.



  • It’s important for vote counts to to be independently checked. Having who voted publicly available means an investigative journalist can prove the county clerk’s claim that dead people voted and so they can’t certify the election is false. Or catch attempts at fraud. Both as a double-check on government in the case of officials who are lying or have acquired false beliefs, or as outside help if the issue isn’t caught internally due to under-resoucing.








  • Some departments at my plant have 12-hr shifts, two teams consistently days and two teams consistently nights. Two days on, two days off, two on, two off, three on, three off, repeat. Long days, but also lots of days off.

    Other departments work 8-hr shifts, one team days, one team afternoon/ evening, one team nights, and one team to cover every other team’s days off. Rotating shift is two or three days one set of hours, 24 hours off then two or three days the next set of hours. All new people in these departments start on rotating shift.

    Management has resisted spreading the 12-hour schedule to more departments, even though more workers prefer it, because it costs more in overtime pay.


  • Modern industrial farming is not sustainable for the next hundred years, no, but there are a lot of levers to work to transform it into something that will reliably feed future generations.

    One lever is amount and kind of meat in the average diet. It takes something like seven pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. Modern chicken breeds are amazingly efficient at converting feed grain to chicken meat, but even they are something like two pounds in to one pound out. Reducing the percent of meat in our diets would make our food go significantly further.



  • The energy input is the sun, and most of the calories come from the air (carbon dioxide). Given so much external input, harvesting from a plot without reducing soil fertility is totally possible. With nitrogen-fixing crops (soybeans being the poster child), even the nitrogen fertilizer comes from the air.