gryson

The way this has all unfolded is very interesting.

From the beginning, Ghosn has employed a team of publicists to manage his image during the arrest and trial. Their primary focuses have been on highlighting the injustices of the legal system in Japan and on portraying an apparent conspiracy against Ghosn perpetuated by Nissan and the Japanese government. It's not hard to see how successful they've been in getting support for Ghosn.

Meanwhile, this strategy has successfully shifted focus away from the charges themselves - charges that include Ghosn secretly shifting $5 million from Nissan to companies his wife and son own in Lebanon.

One point that is interesting in hindsight is that Ghosn decried the injustice of not receiving bail in January, when prosecutors successfully argued that he was a flight risk. He received it in March with heavy restrictions.

In hindsight, the strategy of managing his image, promoting a conspiracy, and denouncing injustice, all while diverting attention away from the charges, seems built with the intended outcome of him fleeing the country. Of course, it probably wasn't planned that way, but it's certainly better to flee and rebuild your life when international public opinion is in support of you rather than against.

In any event, the likely outcome now is that we will never find out the truth behind the four charges against Ghosn.

While there may or may not be an element of Nihonjinron to this idea in general, I think people are intentionally taking parts of the article out of context as justification to dismiss it outright.

I mean, here is the quote that is getting everybody upset:

> “It’s unique in Japan because one word takes care of so many phenomena, behaviours and interactions”, from a toddler crying to be picked up to a wife begging her husband for an expensive gift, “but amae exists everywhere beyond Japan and people can identify it in their lives, even if they didn’t know what to call it.”

The interviewee clearly says this is a global concept, which goes against any notion of Nihonjinron. The claim is that only Japan has a term for this specific, nuanced behavior, which is a debatable issue.

Anybody that has ever spent time in an intimate environment in Japan (e.g., at home with family) will likely notice amae and its prevalence in close relationships, no matter the age or gender of the people involved. The purpose of the article, as far as I can tell, is not to claim that this behavior is unique to Japanese people, but rather to emphasize its importance in the culture at many different levels.

The authors discuss this in the paper's Discussion.

The prevalence of ramen restaurants is suggested as an indicator of general food preferences in the regions studied. Regions that have a higher prevalence of ramen restaurants also tend to have a higher salt intake in general. This can be seen by the increased use of soy sauce and miso compared to other regions in Japan (from personal experience, these regions are famous throughout Japan for their high-salt diets).

So I'd say that the authors are very careful to clarify that they are not implying any sort of causal relationship between ramen restaurants and stroke mortality, and I don't think anyone reading the paper would assume that either.

The authors state (the obvious) in the discussion: the correlation is likely not caused by ramen itself. Rather, the prevalence of ramen restaurants is an indicator of general food preferences in a particular region. The regions in question are known to have high salt diets.

Good faith is required to accept any type of reporting. Otherwise, your question can always be extended to "How do we know that they didn't just make it all up?"

The researchers did not report conducting more comparisons and they did not adjust for this in their analysis, so we have to assume that they are telling the truth.

Of course, there's always the chance that they are being deceitful, so we have to reserve some skepticism and take into consideration related studies before forming any firm conclusions.

In this particular case, the correlations that they found have quite strong effect sizes with p < .001. Figures 2 and 3 are quite striking. These results are also supported by previous research. That doesn't mean the matter is settled by any means. It's just another piece in the puzzle. But there is no indication whatsoever that they are p-hacking or going on a fishing expedition.

Identity is a big confound in the relearning experiments involving foreign adoptees. There are quite a few studies looking at Korean children adopted by French or North American families. These children seem to completely lose their first language (no neural response in fMRI), even though some were adopted as late as 9 years old. However, when they enroll in introductory Korean classes in college, they seem to pick up the phonology more quickly than their classmates.

The confound is that it's not clear if they are "reactivating" some long forgotten part of their brains that maintained Korean phonology, or if they are simply more apt learners due to identifying as Korean. In other words, one of the challenges in learning to pronounce a new language is the ability to overcome "sounding funny" to your peers/yourself, but these Korean adoptees may not have that holding them back since they feel that they are reacquiring a lost part of their identity.

You're referencing a scandal unrelated to your original point that sparked massive outrage when it was uncovered.

Where is your evidence that it is "established practice in many Japanese companies today" to fire women when they get married?

That's not the case at all. Women certainly quit their jobs due to poor maternity support and childcare services, as well as the managerial glass ceiling, but I don't know how anyone can believe that Japanese labor law would allow for the standard practice of firing women when they get married.

There are two open-air museums in Inuyama, Japan that this reminded me of: (1) Meiji Mura, and (2) Little World.

Meiji Mura is an impressive collection of Meiji-era buildings that have been gathered from around Japan, including the lobby of the Tokyo Imperial Hotel (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) and two full-size churches from Kyoto.

Little World is primarily a collection of traditional houses that have been transported to Japan and reconstructed from around the world.

The amount of effort that went into moving and re-building the dozens of buildings at each site must have been incredible. Both are worth visiting if you are near Nagoya.

(1) https://www.meijimura.com/english/

(2) http://www.littleworld.jp/english/index.html

What you want is a fulfillment service. You have the printer print 1000 copies, then ship all of those copies to the fulfillment service's warehouse. Orders go through the fulfillment service's system and they ship directly to customers. They take a small cut from each purchase. This is standard practice, as far as I know.

I think it's important to point out: There is large variation between different locations of Donki. As the article states, floor staff have a large say in what is sold at each location.

If you go to a location in a crowded tourist spot, then most of the customers are going to be tourists, and the selection of items will reflect that (more throw-away crap). At the Dotombori location in Osaka, for example, it felt like almost every customer there was speaking Chinese, and the staff also spoke Chinese.

Out in more rural areas, in my experience, people primarily shop there for discounted household items. The more bizarre items (and sex toys) seem limited to the urban locations. There is a degree of dichotomy between the two that is worth keeping in mind.

Tokyo Bus Guide is my favorite Dreamcast game.

It requires intense focus. A single mistake 15 minutes into a course will result in a game over (small mistakes like going out of the lane or forgetting to signal the next stop will deduct points, but if you even tap another car then that's it). You have to find the perfect level of pressure to apply to the analog trigger to get the bus at the correct speed. I find it meditative in a way that resembles when I work on something that requires very precise and fine movement, like soldering or fine woodworking. A course might take 20 minutes to complete, but time seems to pass in an instant, and when it's done I feel incredibly relaxed.

I highly recommend it, at least to try once!

According to this comment, it seems it is noticeable, though: "The speedup can be significant. On my stock A1200 Ultima 6 was annoyingly slow in PAL mode but much more playable in NTSC mode."

http://www.lemonamiga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=129566&sid=d...

The author does state "I could play the game on my A1000 Phoenix in PAL mode, but I really wanted the NTSC version."

The problem with running it in PAL mode is that it won't run at the correct speed (I assume). Most of the time when a game was converted to run on a PAL system, developers didn't adjust the game to take into consideration the slower framerate (50 Hz for PAL vs. 60 Hz for NTSC). This is very noticeable on action-based games like Sonic the Hedgehog, where if you are used to the NTSC version, playing the PAL version makes it feel like Sonic's feet are glued to the ground (not to mention how off the music sounds!).

Comparison video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSSYo0npMhA

To add to this last comment, I would say that the entire point of early JRPGs was grinding. It was a simple formula:

Go to new area -> grind -> level up, buy gear -> defeat boss -> go to new area

Even in later 8-bit JRPGs such as Dragon Quest IV, that's pretty much all there was. Very minimal story/dialogue, rare puzzles ("get item A to proceed" type). Story was necessarily limited by the small ROM size.

I find that grinding has an almost calming, meditative quality that sets JRPGs apart from action-based games that require a lot of focus.

With recent JRPGs, the shift has been to lessen grinding and include a much larger emphasis on story and dialogue. The downside here for traditionalists is that more of the game is spent reading dialogue than fighting random battles.

Does any of this reflect bad game design? I doubt it. I would say that the gameplay of DQIV is highly polished for its time. But you must approach it knowing what it is (a game of turn-based random battles) and what it is not (a game of rich story and dialogue).

At the large public university where I am employed, there has been a recent sharp drop in enrollment in humanities departments, which has sparked a lot of concern about what the future holds for these departments. The business school, on the other hand, is overwhelmed with applicants and growing rapidly.

From personal observations, it seems that students are becoming more and more focused on practical skills development. I would also say this seems to be the prevalent viewpoint on HN. But it is hard to deny the enormous benefits that a liberal arts education can have.

I have a background in the hard sciences, but I would say I owe the heart of my education to the many humanities electives that I took as an undergrad. I can only hope that the pendulum swings back at some point.