Reddit -> Beehaw until I decided I didn’t like older versions of Lemmy (though it seems most things I didn’t like are better now) -> kbin.social (died) -> kbin.run (died) -> fedia.

Japan-based backend software dev and small-scale farmer.

  • 0 Posts
  • 628 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 14th, 2024

help-circle












  • 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.





  • 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.



  • I have stronger than average taste and smell. Do not recommend. Various things taste pretty awful, I’m more sensitive to smells and even things I like can become overwhelming.

    I used to be able to see better in the dark than anyone I know, but that has faded with age. I’ve also always been somewhat colorblind so fixing that might be nice. I would also fix my hearing being kinda wonky (as in basically useless whenever multiple things are producing sound at once).

    I’m tempted to want some kind of better balance or electromagnetic perception (though that one could be awful for the same reason I wouldn’t want to see much beyond what I do on the visible light spectrum since UV radiation and infrared could be a wall of noise).