quartesixte

Japan had a near-apocalyptic financial disaster that to this day they haven’t really recovered from. Could have seriously affected the population’s psyche and stance towards things.

What you see from the legal perspective vs the actual on-the-ground wheeling, dealing, favor-trading, social circle maintaining, networking actions to even get onto a union production as a non-union worker can be quite a big spread.

The intended legal requirement can be very different from the way it’s practiced on the ground.

My own attempts to break-in + friends’ experiences shows a clear pattern: the guilds gatekeep, almost arbitrarily, and creates environments primed for abuse.

Perhaps the legal, corporate side of the guilds should realign with the reality on the ground and change this. That is, if this is an undesirable state of affairs.

And that is the main gatekeeping mechanism that keeps so many talented young writers, actors, cinematographers, etc. out of the game or working for pennies on the dollar as assistants.

It’s great when you’re in but if you don’t have the connections to get in you can find yourself on the outs for years.

If a SWE guild can find a way to eliminate the nepotism and create a meritocratic way to get into a guild…

JIT also works really well when all your major manufacturing centers are an average 3-4 hour drive from each other. 6-8 at the furthest maybe.

JIT breaks down over global distances because “in time” and “instant” mean very different things even when moving nearly at the speed of sound. Even if no one embargoed anyone, you can’t beat the laws of physics.

Compilers, tools, libraries.

Also things such as flight software, aerospace controls, hardware. Plenty of industries where their hardware needs to run on low-level to keep costs low (both in material and energy consumption).

>Scientists have used 3D lasers and CT scans to measure the precise geometry of a Stradivarius, but so far no one has been able to replicate its sound.

To my understanding, most modern violins are patterned after the Stradivarius. Modern violins sound the way they so because of all the violins of the early Baroque, only Stradivarius’s violins (and to a smaller extent Guaneri’s) survived to the Classical and Romantic, where (with some modifications) became the Platonic pattern all luthiers followed for violin shape, size, and timbre.

So in a way, all modern violins replicate Strads because that is the only violin sound in existence.

Yes, all Strads are Frankensteins in some way, and for some a ship of Theseus problem emerges.

Which makes the entire question of which is better an odd one and quite frankly kind of uninteresting.

You would need to teach the robot how to shift balance from where the index finger is placed to where the pinky is placed on the bow as the bow travels up and down the strings so that a consistent pressure is placed that produces the silvery, warm tone violins are best known for.

And sometimes the hobbyists will beat out the corporations a la open source software.

But yes money + fear of being fired can be a powerful motivator.

Strange use of the word civilian. Aren’t private companies similarly civilian?

That being said, if they truly beat out Kestrel (or are they referencing Merlin 1A?) that’s no small feat.

Yeah I think the slight nuance that some people miss is that many of the regulations in place are interpretations and implementations of more ambiguous laws.

And they are updated quite frequently and implemented quite programmatically!

But the laws also remain ambiguous because the world is an ambiguous place with a lot of edge and corner cases with unforeseen knock on effects.

>I just treat my Tesla like a car from the 90s and always do the standard “sideview mirror into the over the shoulder” glance whenever I’m changing lanes.

You are doing the correct thing anyways. I find it so concerning that so many people rely on the sensors ONLY. The sensors can fail. Your eyes/attention can fail. But having both fail simultaneously is rare and so you should employ both anyways.

Kind of related, but the slightly odd thing about a lot of Japanese commentary is that people forget the suburbs exist.

And these suburbs are very car centric.

The major difference is that the suburbanites will not visit the major city by car, and most young people do not become stuck in the suburbs and instead leave for Tokyo or any of the other big cities.

>One of the big worries about the Japanese economy is a sense that Toyota has massively missed the bus on electric cars. Especially after building the first really successful hybrid, how have they fallen so far behind the likes of GM or Mercedes/BMW/Audi? Why are they still pushing hydrogen decades after everyone else has realised it's a failure?

But are lithium-ion skateboard cars a success? People are rightly fretting about the lithium supply chain and the sheer weight of these cars raise eyebrows for many observers. We’re not completely in established territory yet — it’s still a frontier out here.

Probably just pure logistics. No one thought of it because getting to Japan in any kind of reasonable time frame was physically impossible.

Even today, a flight from the US west coast to Japan is ~11 hours one way and involves losing a day due to the international dateline. So you lose about 3 days just flying back and forth. And costs nearly a thousand dollars for economy class.

For most people, it’s not really an easy trip in the same way a hop to Lisbon from London might be. Now imagine that with prop planes.

“Shutter-gai” shopping arcades are a special kind of depressing because you know that just 20 minutes away by train business is booming in the hip new downtown shopping malls.

And they’re fucking everywhere and inescapable, even in big cities.

And just like suburban malls, rather boring and filled with your usual milieu of chain stores (Uniqlo among them).

>Their vision maybe didn't happen, but that doesn't make it wrong, or that the current technological trends are right.

Nicely put. Perhaps the smartphone era will be seen as a odd blip in a long history of gadgets. Who knows what the future might bring?

Union camera, sound, lighting, makeup, costume, directors, editors, screenwriters. Literally almost impossible to make a film outside of union rules in LA.

It works for film due to some historical circumstances but don’t known if it will work for software

Not to say that it’s all rainbows and daisies.

Part of the guilds’ power is that they have rules and agreements with the other unions that disallow using non-union labor if other union labor is involved. Or if certain rules are broken. Bargaining is much more powerful when the actual product cannot be shipped if the unions strike or don’t work on your project. Software does not really have this restriction.

And as someone who also has many friends across various roles in the Industry (and once tried to break in), there is one not-oft talked about downside: it is rather difficult to get into the guilds, with a lot of unpaid internships and nepotism involved. And even with the great union contracts, hours are long, the work sometimes dirty, and the culture on set often times incredibly toxic.

So yes. The guild model probably the one that is more applicable to SWEs. But also don’t copy the model Hollywood has built too closely.

Modern Japanese society is closer to 1950s America than it is Meiji or Edo Japanese. Occupation had a profound impact on them and still does to this day.

In fact, I’d posit that the reason why the “West” views Japan with such fascination is because it’s looking into an alternate history. “What if the hippies and postmodernists lost in the 1960s?” A lot of the cultural values Japan exhibits can be found in old PSA videos and newsreel footage of 1950s and early 1960s USA. Then they skipped straight into 1980s yuppie consumerism, spedrun straight into a financial crisis and then skipped straight into the smartphone era.

It truly is a different place but not for reasons of deep history (bushido is a 19th century invention, Sushi as we consume it is only as old as modern refrigeration, Tokyo metro used to be a dirty noisy place).

Japan. Land of the overworked Salaryman. Is like the literal embodiment of this.

That’s definitely abnormal behavior. And your local watchmaker just tells you this is how it is?

Also became a fashion statement

> and the thing has had to go in for service every 2-3 years for weeks at a time to get it to keep time properly.

You can stretch this out to 5 years and get away with it. Also, most mechanical watches need some kind of servicing (usually relubrication) along that time frame. Hence why before the quartz revolution, local watchmakers were both a staple of any community and a necessary service.

You should really see to it that the Rolex is serviced by a reputable watchmaker. 20 years is a long time, even for a Rolex. Rolexes can last decades upon decades if properly cared for.

Customary in the US for a new driver to be gifted either a used car or the old family beater.

Don’t even lock it down. Just periodically check in with them and see if they’ve done anything stupid dangerous.

I type moderately fast (can hit 150 wpm, average 110wpm on typing tests) so one of my favorite methods is transcription. I just verbatim type out what the speaker is saying. I can keep up if I leave out filler words, blow past typos and ignore punctuation.

If I need to recall I just go back and read it again.

Edit: Why not record? Because people get weird about it, I’m not allowed to, or literally illegal. Also, playback at 3x speeds still too slow vs reading. Scanning skipping and repeat also too much friction.

This lines up with roughly when this system suddenly took stranglehold at my local school district.

Goodness gracious.

There is an entire generation of school children (at the very least in my locality) who were forced to use an incredibly poor implementation of this method by teachers who barely understood the intent themselves.

On which we were punished for not doing correctly.

The biggest gripe I had about this method was that the lessons in middle school and high school never had enough information density to make this meaningful in any way.

Anyways, I can’t take notes like this anymore. Being punished an entire letter grade for not having enough questions on my notes when I was aceing every single test made me never want to take notes like this ever again.

Edit: I’m sure this system works for some people but it definitely did not click with the way my brain retains information but being forced to try to learn in a manner that my brain did not want to learn has left me with a burning desire to never do it again.