tiredofsametab

Japan apparently has the same problem. It definitely has that probably using a phone to scan the id card to use various services (which is why I run stock android, mostly, with transit passed and banking being the other reasons).

I say apparently because I have zero interest in having the id on my phone itself.

Rooting apparently makes FELICA not work which is super inconvenient in Japan.

Seconded. Not just Tokyo, either, but even up in sendai

I don’t use a smartphone enough to worry about it. If I am using my phone, most of the time it’s either Anki, Google Maps, or, like you mention, banking/government stuff.

Texting via SMS (or whatever it is these days) isn’t really a thing in Japan, either, which makes things more difficult especially as I despise talking on the phone. If, for example, I’m at the supermarket and wife remembers something she needs, getting that message is good

I was redhat/mandrake of which neither worked well on my PC, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and mint (playing with distros like LoaF at various points).

I got started on Linux at home from the valley of despair on early-2000s Gentoo. It wasn’t that bad, but I did have a lot more time on my hands being too poor to go out most of the time.

I just put mint on a laptop yesterday; got no time for it anymore

well, I’m snipped so that’s not a problem, but if we decided to for some reason adopt, they probably wouldn’t love it. I wonder if tabbed browsing would ever go away and it would be a surname based on something that everyone forgets (there are more obscure examples but for example Cooper, Cobbler, Fletcher, Bowyer, Tyler, Taylor, Brewster, etc.)

My brain added an ‘n’ to the first word of “waking universe” and I think it still works

a kitchen is hell… mostly because of him.

As someone who used to work in kitchens before his show was a thing, there’s always been abusive assholes there.

(Mostly) very good public transit in big cities and even in some smaller areas.

I personally still love to see the mountains. I grew up in a place scraped flat by glaciers in the US and seeing the mountains on a couple of sides of me every day here in Japan still feels really neat and inspiring, even a decade in.

I think VK is still around which I also think is Russian.

mixi might still just be owned by a Japanese company, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some US company gobbled it up. You need a Japanese phone number (or maybe phone short mail address from a Japanese carrier) to use it and no one I know has used it in many, many years, but it technically still exists.

Japan takes baseball teams seriously to the point that some bars forbid anything but the most basic conversations like with politics and religion. I think younger generations care less, but ive seen conversations ended as they got heated.

Fucking gross

I agree with charity and giving them away as a first priority. However, have you considered building an igloo?

Get rid of air bnb and similar. It’s caused a ton of problems in Japan as well with people buying whole buildings and pricing out existing tenants. There are legal protections, but most tenants, particularly elderly, don’t know about them and either pay new increased prices by the new landlord or move out. The government enacted laws requiring a minpaku (think lodging/hotel) license and putting maxes on time, but tons of people still run illegal ones.

A lot of those people seem to be Chinese investors running them off of other sites which has furthered anger and xenophobia against all foreigners. One of the parties that skyrocketed in the most recent election wants to strip property rights from all foreigners and not just investment properties but ALL properties. It’s a reaction to getting priced out and the government not doing shit about it. Granted, there are tons of other problems (prices rising weekly or monthly, wages not keeping up at all with inflation and rising prices, and overtourism more generally), but this is low-hanging fruit.

As someone who just bought a house last year (on the market for over a year in the countryside with farmland for which I had to interview and get permits to buy and use), and volunteers in his community, this is terrifying to me. I had to go through tons of extra hoops just for being a foreigner to begin with and now, thanks to fuckhead illegal hotel owners and bad policy, now lots of people want to take the one little bit of stability I finally felt.

My company thankfully still employs simultaneous interpreters for meetings and has one translator on staff. I think, at least in part, because of how bad translation tools can be from EN <> JA.

I used to live in the US and travel a lot by car. The infrastructure, specifically the roads, their striping, their guardrails, etc. could change drastically at state borders. They could sometimes even be of different quality and material at county borders within a state.

Do you want or actually need to talk? I know that places like the US love their smalltalk, but a lot of the world is perfectly content to sit in silence.

If you need or want to for some reason, it seems like you got some good info in other comments. Do read the room for receptiveness, I guess. Realize that, as with any skill, it takes practice and building.

I think Feynman would be interesting based on the videos of him I’ve seen. It probably also aligns best with where my knowledge is. Einstein is probably too theoretical and too much math I don’t know (or have long forgotten in the decades since I learnt it).

I have zero Polish and my French is mostly forgotten so Curie is out, though she would be my second choice of those listed (I don’t recall if she spoke English off-hand).

I was out doing parking lot and road striping doing all the math in my head or on paper to make fit things in, make sure we were square to the curb occasionally, etc. as a young adult. IIRC, the spots were 7-8 feet wide (depending upon what the client wanted, but I think our normal was 8) so knowing your times tables (or, more accurately, multiples of 8) when running down the tape measure made things easier. Pythagorean theorum for checking square to the curb or some other fixed point. More fun math (that I now forget) for doing things on curves.

This would have been 2001, I think, and we probably had a calculator bouncing around somewhere in the truck, but we never used it. No smartphones or tablets in those days.

I still sometimes just go wherever without my phone (more often on accident, but occasionally on purpose), but I definitely don’t find myself doing math on the fly too much, heh. Imma go be old somewhere else now.