My old officemate from Singapore, who only lived here (Japan) 3 years as opposed to my 7, figured it out, I think.
Historically, Japan has had a highly connected, functioning, modern economy for much longer than most places. Even though they were technologically backward when the West came chugging in, socially, they may have been better developed. This might explain why they were able to retool and thrive even as the world political landscape changed in the late 1800s. It was a matter of acquiring new physical tools, not new values (there were some radical changes in values as well--but not to the extent that, say, Papua New Guinea faces).
Because of this, part of the culture is an understanding that you are just a cog in a machine. The downside to that is that I find that people are generally incompetent, by my standards. BUT, get them in their field, and they are often stunning. They know absolutely everything about it, and it consumes their mental life. I mean, if they care. The mean is just kinda plodding along, same as anywhere.
So, whereas we conceptualize creativity as a trait which will manifest itself everywhere, it may be that the Japanese simply focus on one single thing. This would explain a lot, like how a nation where seemingly no one knows how an internal combustion engine works, even conceptually, can be the unchallenged master of the world automotive industry...
This is what I have already addressed in another post. It's not actually that easy, and it's very hard to find good people (I cast voice actors for a test of English I work for--much smaller scale, but it's still hard!).
That being said, the voice work on GTA is good, but it's nothing like that on Mass Effect. With the control the player had of the characterization there, the actors had to actually act each line in such a way as to make it believable even if they player had been playing with a different attitude the line before. I.e. they had to do multiple characterizations of the same person in the same conversation. The guy who played Shepard did a so-so job, but the woman nailed it. As I was playing, so many times I thought "My god this woman is a genius."
Granted, that comes from a guy with a decent amount of acting, writing, and directing experience in his past, but that is essentially the point. These are incredibly difficult skills, and are worth money.
That being said, honestly, I think this fellow was very well-compensated. The union might want to negotiate for some royalties, to be sure (I'm sure the musicians/labels providing music for the radio stations are getting a cut), but I think $100k for a total unknown is really great (I know my professional actor friends would be incredibly stoked to make that!).
1) I think this guy was well-compensated, but I also think a royalty deal (a small one) would be fair.
2) For me, actually, voice talent is basically the make-or-break point for a video game. I'm serious. Here's a review of Mass Effect to prove it. However, while I don't think I'm alone in that, I think it's fairly uncommon.
3) If acting is so easy, why aren't you doing it? It's one of the hardest things to be good at out there. That's why it pays. Anyone can do it poorly. But as a guy who does a little acting, writing, and directing, I have to tell you that most people are frickin' terrible. Even trained people are often terrible. It's partly a talent, partly an art, and partly a technical skill. It's really quite difficult.
4) Y'know, IT work is not the only job that requires expertise and skill. In fact, I've met a lot of dumb IT people. Really dumb. But the dumber they are, the smarter they seem to think they are. It's just a job, dude. We all have them. You couldn't do mine and I couldn't do yours. That's why we have jobs!
Thanks. I tire of people reducing an entire computer to 3 or 4 components. I bought a MB simply because it was the best laptop for what I wanted to pay. I figured I'd poke around in OSX, but basically run XP on it.
A month later, I had put my work computer away and was only using the MB at work, and then found that XP at home just bugged the hell out of me with all its annoying messages and beeps and boops and "I connected to the Internet, aren't you proud of me" business. The next bonus I got bought me a Mac Pro (on it right now) and I sold my lovingly handcrafted gaming PC to a friend so it would stop collecting dust.
Full disclosure: My wife is an ex-careerwoman and current furiitaa. Once I got out of grad school and got a nice job with the gaijin exclusion bonus, we decided there was no point in having that if we couldn't enjoy it together, and she does temp work now (staying under the 1,500,000 yen/year cap so she can be on my social security and health plan and we don't have to pay twice). She's a lot happier. We're a lot happier.
That being said, just a couple weeks ago (Golden Week), we took a little trip back to "our" hometown and to our old company, and it was really nice to see all those people. It was very much like coming home.
And that's the thing. In Japan, you are a member of a company. You don't just work there. It is your social group. It is your community. Since it's basically impossible to get fired, everyone there has to learn to get along and work together. You have to learn to cope. And that creates a family atmosphere. You may hate your father (Just an example! My dad is great!), but you're family. Same thing about your boss.
In North America, you are your job. In Japan, you are your company. When we meet, we usually ask, "What do you do?" The answer will be something like "I'm a programmer" or "I'm a lecturer" or "I'm a graphic designer." But asking the same question in Japan might get you "I work for FedEx" or "I work for Sumitomo" or "I work for Toyo University." It's a very different way of thinking.
In North America, your skillset is who you are. Where you work is considered unimportant. We are constantly applying for different jobs and weighing offers. Not so in Japan. There are very very few mid-to-upper-level job offers in Japan. Everyone comes in at the bottom, like professional zygotes which can develop into anything. Your skillset is understood to only be valid at the company where it was developed. This is why you'll sometimes talk to people who are programmers or whatever, and you will quickly find that they know almost nothing, outside of the specific thing they do at work. That's all they know, but they know it very well.
In North America, it is in our best interest to be a bit of a jack of all trades, with specific competencies in one particular thing, but a very broad base. This makes us hire-able. In Japan, coming into a company, they really are just looking for general intelligence and certain psychological profiles. All the skills they need will be imparted by the company.
Despite the fact that I ostensibly teach some very high-level English at my university, both the students and I know that if they really need English at work, they'll be sent to a training course, maybe even outside of Japan, to really get good. Of course, having a foreign language on your resume can't hurt your employment options, but it usually doesn't translate to a job that actually uses that language.
And one more thing, because it's related. Tests are very important in Japan. That's why so many people in my actual field, psychometrics, have cut their teeth here in Japan. Most company and university and high school entrance tests are pretty terrible on any scale of reliability or validity, but it seems people are realizing that and there's a lot of work for people who think that multi-parameter item response theory, for example, is really interesting (like me!). But even if we make a really good test, all a test will ever really test is the examinee's ability to take the test. And if it's a well-known test, like the TOEIC (Test Of English for International Communication, by ETS), it can be defeated with strategies. So people work on strategies instead of skills, because the test numbers are all that matter. This ends up inflating the scores that companies look for, which forces people to study even harder, all the while knowing that they aren't actually acquiring any useful skills!
To conclude before I spend the whole morning typing instead of doing my actual job, work culture is probably
Hmmm. I would actually not lump China in with Japan. China and the Chinese seem to be at least as individualistic as North Americans. They can and do change jobs. In Japan, you basically can't. You'll start again at the entry-level pay, even with lots of experience. You'll be a "freshman" again. And that's if you can even find another job. When you've had work experience at another company, it's like you're damaged goods.
Company going down in China? Screw 'em. You go get another job.
Company going down in Japan? You are screwed.
Be very careful with Orientalist thinking. China, Korea, and Japan are very different places, with very different histories, and therefore, very different worldviews. A lot of the things we think of as "Asian" are really more Japanese, and they come from a long history as a highly organized society with a functioning capitalist economy on a small archipelago. Capitalist in that people owned their own companies and could grow into giant ones, capitalist in that they have had pretty modern banking and accounting practices for a VERY long time, but... Don't shit where you eat. Everyone is connected and you all live on the same strip of habitable land around the same island, so you have to be careful with cutthroat tactics because the throat that gets cut could very well be your own.
You bring up a point I almost tacked on there at the end: Basically everything I've said doesn't apply to gaijin. On the one hand, you usually are kept on a tight contract leash, which sucks if you're in the settlin' down mood, as I am these days, but on the other, you're paid more than your Japanese friends and colleagues for less work.
I'm lucky to work in a department that is almost 100% foreign, and the Japanese administrators I work for are all foreign-schooled and/or trained in their fields. The culture is a lot more forgiving.
When my students are bemoaning the life they are looking down the barrel of in their fourth year, I always recommend looking for work outside of Japan or at a foreign company. I mean, they've just spent 4 years studying English and/or some other language (Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Thai, Indonesian), and some of them are really good. Why put up with the bullshit if you don't have to?
I've said it for years, though: Japan is a great country to be a foreigner in (Well, unless you're from an Asian or African country... then I'm told it can suck quite a bit.).
I teach at a foreign language university in the Tokyo area. My students get hired to become software engineers pretty regularly. No experience. No interest. They just scored right on the company aptitude test.
See, that's the thing that every single person on this thread is misunderstanding: In Japan, university is just a kind of finishing school. You work your ass off to get in, then play guitar in a band or play American football or some other club activity for 3 years, then spend your last year of university going to cattle-call interviews for all the companies you're interested in. You should probably have your job--the job you will have until you retire, I might add--worked out by about the beginning of your last semester.
Companies do not look at your GPA. They don't look at your transcripts. All they really care about is the name of your school and how you interviewed and how you did on the aptitude test. If they want you, they'll make an offer, and if you take it, they will take care of the rest.
For the rest of your life.
All you have to give in return is, well, the rest of your life. All of it. Every waking hour (and by the time they're done with you, that might be 20 a day). Until you're a hollowed out shell of a human who hates life and chainsmokes through rotten teeth in a stained suit at a barbecued chicken place, slamming back beer and shochu until you've worked up enough of a drunk to stumble back to your home and crash, avoiding all contact with the family you barely know, but despise nonetheless.
Okay, that's a bit of satire, but there's some truth in it, to be sure.
If I were a Japanese kid today, I'd be one of these supposed "dropouts" (called "freeters," for some reason) who just run from temp job to temp job and moonlight at a bar. They make enough money to be happy, not enough to have to pay that much in taxes or health insurance, and they can have a life anytime they want.
Who the hell would want to be a salaryman in Japan?
The likely problem, I think, is that Japanese corporate culture has finally been rejected by the generation of kids who have grown up knowing nothing but the rich Japan and don't have the fearful, hard-headed, overworking mentality of their parents.
I'm sorry, but you're just plain wrong. I've been doing basic tech consulting for years, and about the only CLI thing I do in Windows is ipconfig. Why? Because what is usually wrong with a Windows machine?
Spyware/viruses
Bloated registry
Something that you could look for for a day, or just reinstall the image and apply updates in a couple hours
Of course, to really get in and fix Windows, you might need the CLI, but there are far better uses of your time.
On the other hand, on every Ubuntu install I've done, I've had to go edit conf files. I've had to sudo something. I've had to do the things that my mom and dad absolutely could not do and wouldn't even know to think about doing.
And that's what people mean when they say Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
Before I get the typical Slashdot response of "WHY DON'T SANY ONE WANT TO LEARN SOMETHING OMG!!!! REATARDS!!!!" let me say this: I can hand my mom or dad a Windows machine or a Mac, and they can happily install things, uninstall things, and run their business without ever even knowing that the CLI still exists. Why should they feel compelled to learn some arcane gibberish when they don't have to? Do you buy butter at the store, or do you churn your own? Do you know how? Why not? Don't you want to learn anything?
I know what you're saying, and I've been on the CLI a lot more since I switched to Mac (where the CLI makes more sense to me and uses commands that I actually remember), but the point of Windows and the Mac is that you never actually need to use the CLI. That makes them "ready for the desktop."
Lately when I hear smokers complaining about tighter restrictions on where they can smoke, etc., I just replace "cigarettes" with "heroin" in my mind and then it really changes my opinion on their viewpoint.
You know, because a heroin addict shooting up doesn't somehow get their filth into my body and all over my hair and clothes.
You wanna kill yourself slowly while looking like a complete ass, fine. I support your decision. It's your body. But don't bring me with you.
In the case of the anti-smoking laws in restaurants, etc., the only thing that upsets me is the ridiculous 20-25ft-from-the-door rule most states have. I don't care if the bar has a smoking section outside or on a patio at all. I'll even sit out there, no problem. It's outside! That just seems meanspirited.
Yeah, you ate a lot of corn there. The point is that most of the animals we eat, eat corn.
Also, judging from your diet, I don't think most people have the financial freedom you do, and cannot actually avoid corn as much as you have (which really isn't that much, as I said).
I always said I'd never switch to console gaming. But last year there was a deal on Xbox360s at Costco and my friend had been begging me to play with him (we live in different countries and wanted something to do together), and in a weak moment I bought one. Then I got an HDTV.
I haven't really looked back. I have played some things on the PC since, but I now find the keyboard and mouse kind of painful to use. You have more control, yeah, but you have to wiggle your fingers around and hold them at uncomfortable angles... And installing... And things not working quite right...
It's just a better experience on a console, for what has become the exact same game.
This move has also allowed me to get Windows off my desktop (went to the Mac--need MS Office), and that's been great too.
Ironic that MS's games division lost me as a customer of their OS division.
Hey, I might very well do some tray-selling. Every other thing I've thought of selling on eBay from Japan is better-sold elsewhere and I found I couldn't compete in my spare time.
Plus, printing on CDs is awesome. It was such an afterthought when I bought the printer ("Huh. That's cool, I guess..."), but I actually use it for little but. Even just printing notes on what's on the disc is worth it, it's so hassle-free. I don't have to worry about writing incorrectly, and I don't have to fuss with trying to write on plastic, which is hard.
I recently switched to the Mac both at the office and at home, but the sole reason I did was that the Mac isn't some annoying separate hardware platform anymore. I can boot Windows and virtual machines are easy.
If/when I make a Hackintosh (which looks like fun), will it be a Mac?
Sorta.
It's just a matter of semantics. If I were running a Hackintosh and someone who was giving me a file said "you're on a Mac, right?" then I'd say "yes," of course.
But if someone said "what kind of Mac do you have?", I'd have to say something like, "welll, actually it's just a regular old PC running OSX."
Since the Mac has traditionally been assumed to be a hardware and software platform, it just gets tricky.
But there is absolutely zero reason to be snobby about it, and I think you're right that that is a lot of what's going on.
When you criminalize something, it's true, the market size decreases. The supply shrinks, because it suddenly becomes a non-option for the vast majority of would-be suppliers.
That leaves the people who just don't care, and they become the sole suppliers.
This sharp reduction in supply does what to prices?
That's right; it drives them up.
This increase in prices does what?
It attracts more people who don't care.
What is special about these people?
They are criminals, through and through. Fringe. They do not care about people.
So what we can expect to happen with a law like this is for the violent porn market to become more violent and more lucrative; not less. Smaller, to be sure, but so much worse. Where we used to have simulated rape, etc., we'll have real rape. Simulated beatings, real beatings. Etc.
There are certain benefits to keeping something we don't even like out in the open. When you shove things into the dark, bad things happen. More people are exploited; more money is made.
A close relative of mine used to be a drug dealer. He was strongly against any kind of decriminalization or legalization of drugs. Why? It would kill his profits. The only reason he made money is that he was one of the ones crazy enough to take on that risk (and smart enough not to get caught or piss off the wrong people). If just anyone could do it, he'd have to compete, and the scale of the business would blow up beyond what he could do himself (e.g. he'd have to buy land and learn to farm).
This is a thoughtcrime law, to be sure, and even if we don't like the thoughts associated with it, it is better to keep the pressure off and do our best to take care of the associated social problems separately.
I can not at all understand how this jury reached a verdict of First degree murder.
That's my problem as well. They have virtually no evidence in the case, but what is there has all the strange behavior happening after Nina went missing. I'd support a guilty verdict for manslaughter, but first-degree is preposterous.
It's clear that he killed her, I think. But you can't bump it up to first-degree just because the guy is a dolt who wastes people's time.
The important thing to remember is that even though we all like the concept of the police, the simple fact of the matter is that in any interaction with them, they are your enemy. They want you in jail, getting ass-raped. That's what they want. And they can make it happen. All you have to do is let them.
So don't let them. Don't give them anything they can use. Don't say a word.
That being said, remember that these are just people doing their jobs, and that there's no reason to be rude. Be firm, be emotionally neutral, but be polite and respectful.
Because they are people, being a rude asshole to them just makes matters worse. Ask my brother. He can't keep his stupid mouth shut and got breathalysed because he was arrogantly challenging the cop to do it (he didn't realize that having one pint and then driving actually put him into the DWAI range for our state). They did it and he got 2 days in jail (in trade for it not showing up on his record). I am convinced they wouldn't have done had he not taunted them.
Wow, great reply! Thanks for taking all that time!
But I collaborate with Windows users all the time; that's basically all I do. I'm the only member of my research team on the Mac (now--my co-coordinator is switching on the next upgrade cycle). I haven't had any problems.
However, there are annoying little differences. The functions thing doesn't bother me at all because I never even knew about "Insert Function" until recently! I've always just typed the functions in! I didn't even realize there was that easy way of doing things until I was teaching a basic stats workshop to my colleagues and I was just giving them the function names and telling them to type this and type that and my co-coordinator is like, "Um, why don't you tell them to just use 'Insert Function?'" I'd never even seen it, heheh.
The styles thing is a minor headache, but it's only a minor headache on top of the major headache that is Word styles. How MS could make such a potentially life-simplifying thing so difficult and unwieldy is utterly beyond me. Sometimes I hear people making fun of users who are so dumb as to not be using them, but really, if you are just doing a one-off document, which is what most people are doing most of the time, they are not worth the major hassle. I finally bit the bullet and set up styles for my research project's product (a test, actually), which is done in Word for whatever ridiculous reason.
It took an entire Saturday.
Then, you use these styles, but the list soon gets polluted with things like "Stem+Bold+Italic." It gets harder and harder to find something. And this is on Windows.
Then it saves these damn things in Normal.dot instead of in some Word pref file. So you have no access to them when you open a document you saved before you made them. You have no way of sending them to other people except to save a new document, have them open it, and then have them check "Add to template," which is a very unintuitive wording for what you're really doing: Making this style available from now on.
I've heard a lot of complaints about the loss of VBA, but we never use it (to a large extent, we really only use Excel as a data-formatter--everything has to be output to text files for the real work--IRT--anyway), so it hasn't bothered me at all. I do, however, think it is a bizarre choice on the part of MS. I have a friend who is an investment banker who moved to the Mac for whatever reason, and he's finding Excel unsuitable on the Mac (surprise surprise). I'm just recommending he use it under Fusion, which is what I often do.
Still, admittedly, I may have an over-critical view of OO.o, which is largely a reaction to the autoerotic platitudes given it on Slashdot. It's okay. That's all I can say. It's absolutely amazing for being free, but it's still just okay. The only people I know who use it full-time are on Linux, and are just doing it because Office isn't available.
But don't worry. When I'm elected king, I'm going to break up MS on antitrust grounds so that the OS and the apps are different companies, and then the app division will fix all this by unifying the code base and releasing a Linux version.
Um... Yes... Every day. It's much better than 2004.
I have had zero problems with it, in fact.
You know that you can set it to just always use the old file formats, right?
OpenOffice, on the other hand, is a pile of garbage. I used it exclusively for a year (on Windows) until I got sick of my documents looking different on Word at university, no matter what format I saved them in. Some people might (even rightly--I don't know) blame MS in that, but when you're the underdog, you have to work with the dominant program even if it's wrong.
I still have installs of it on some Windows machines. It is handy and free. But it's not an option for me every day. I have to do a lot of co-authorship of research papers, etc. and the rest of the world uses Word and Excel.
I have a friend whose father trains guard/attack dogs. They have a gigantic German Shepherd on the farm that is their "show dog."
Goddamn I hate that dog.
You drive up for a BBQ, everyone's inside, and he doesn't know you because you've only been there twice in 5 years. Damn dog charges, snarling, and backs you back into your car. What do you do? You're invited to someone's house, and they have the equivalent of a killbot outside, that makes his own decisions on who is friend and who is foe.
I am very much pro-gun, but attack dogs scare and piss me off. They run on auto-pilot, unlike firearms. A gun sitting in a corner won't hurt anyone. An attack dog might.
So you get back in your car and start honking. The dad comes out, calls the dog off and goes, "Sorry, did he scare you?"
"When he charged me, snarling, with his back up? When he herded me back into my car? Yeah, that scared me." I actually refuse to go there anymore unless they tell me the dog is going to be in the house when I arrive. They think that's a lot to ask, and it is, but I refuse to be put in a survival situation by my friend's damn dog.
Of course, once I've been given the okay by the dad, the dog is just a big sweet dog. I love dogs and usually make friends with them instantly. An attack/guard dog is different. He's trained to hate everyone until told otherwise.
You absolutely nailed it. I decided to get a Mac when I was at the computer store looking at laptops. I looked at a Toshiba with Vista on it. That big circular Start button... That gigantic taskbar (I actually only use the Windows Classic theme in XP), all the shit on one menu, a bunch of crap on the desktop, messages popping out of the damned system tray... All the clutter and noise of Windows XP, plus more, somehow.
Then I looked at a Mac for the first time in years and years and years. "Good lord," I thought, "It's so... clean." Nothing is vying for your attention. Auto-hiding the Dock doesn't cause any problems (unlike auto-hiding the Windows taskbar), you don't have a bunch of helpful messages annoying you all the time, the wireless only tells you when it can't connect, not when it can... Double-clicking a.zip file decompresses it without asking you to hit "Next" a bunch of times...
OSX just stays out of your way and lets you use your damned programs to get things done. It's also almost infinitely configurable, so it works the way you want.
You spend no time thinking about it at all. And that's what makes it great.
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My old officemate from Singapore, who only lived here (Japan) 3 years as opposed to my 7, figured it out, I think.
Historically, Japan has had a highly connected, functioning, modern economy for much longer than most places. Even though they were technologically backward when the West came chugging in, socially, they may have been better developed. This might explain why they were able to retool and thrive even as the world political landscape changed in the late 1800s. It was a matter of acquiring new physical tools, not new values (there were some radical changes in values as well--but not to the extent that, say, Papua New Guinea faces).
Because of this, part of the culture is an understanding that you are just a cog in a machine. The downside to that is that I find that people are generally incompetent, by my standards. BUT, get them in their field, and they are often stunning. They know absolutely everything about it, and it consumes their mental life. I mean, if they care. The mean is just kinda plodding along, same as anywhere.
So, whereas we conceptualize creativity as a trait which will manifest itself everywhere, it may be that the Japanese simply focus on one single thing. This would explain a lot, like how a nation where seemingly no one knows how an internal combustion engine works, even conceptually, can be the unchallenged master of the world automotive industry...
This is what I have already addressed in another post. It's not actually that easy, and it's very hard to find good people (I cast voice actors for a test of English I work for--much smaller scale, but it's still hard!).
That being said, the voice work on GTA is good, but it's nothing like that on Mass Effect. With the control the player had of the characterization there, the actors had to actually act each line in such a way as to make it believable even if they player had been playing with a different attitude the line before. I.e. they had to do multiple characterizations of the same person in the same conversation. The guy who played Shepard did a so-so job, but the woman nailed it. As I was playing, so many times I thought "My god this woman is a genius."
Granted, that comes from a guy with a decent amount of acting, writing, and directing experience in his past, but that is essentially the point. These are incredibly difficult skills, and are worth money.
That being said, honestly, I think this fellow was very well-compensated. The union might want to negotiate for some royalties, to be sure (I'm sure the musicians/labels providing music for the radio stations are getting a cut), but I think $100k for a total unknown is really great (I know my professional actor friends would be incredibly stoked to make that!).
That is all because they are a single point of failure. They have you over a barrel and they know it.
Welcome to economics.
1) I think this guy was well-compensated, but I also think a royalty deal (a small one) would be fair.
2) For me, actually, voice talent is basically the make-or-break point for a video game. I'm serious. Here's a review of Mass Effect to prove it. However, while I don't think I'm alone in that, I think it's fairly uncommon.
3) If acting is so easy, why aren't you doing it? It's one of the hardest things to be good at out there. That's why it pays. Anyone can do it poorly. But as a guy who does a little acting, writing, and directing, I have to tell you that most people are frickin' terrible. Even trained people are often terrible. It's partly a talent, partly an art, and partly a technical skill. It's really quite difficult.
4) Y'know, IT work is not the only job that requires expertise and skill. In fact, I've met a lot of dumb IT people. Really dumb. But the dumber they are, the smarter they seem to think they are. It's just a job, dude. We all have them. You couldn't do mine and I couldn't do yours. That's why we have jobs!
Sure you do. Because then you don't have to be running Windows on your computer anymore and can move to something more civilized.
The Microsoft Xbox 360 took my business away from Microsoft Windows, heh.
Thanks. I tire of people reducing an entire computer to 3 or 4 components. I bought a MB simply because it was the best laptop for what I wanted to pay. I figured I'd poke around in OSX, but basically run XP on it.
A month later, I had put my work computer away and was only using the MB at work, and then found that XP at home just bugged the hell out of me with all its annoying messages and beeps and boops and "I connected to the Internet, aren't you proud of me" business. The next bonus I got bought me a Mac Pro (on it right now) and I sold my lovingly handcrafted gaming PC to a friend so it would stop collecting dust.
It's a whole package.
Full disclosure: My wife is an ex-careerwoman and current furiitaa. Once I got out of grad school and got a nice job with the gaijin exclusion bonus, we decided there was no point in having that if we couldn't enjoy it together, and she does temp work now (staying under the 1,500,000 yen/year cap so she can be on my social security and health plan and we don't have to pay twice). She's a lot happier. We're a lot happier.
That being said, just a couple weeks ago (Golden Week), we took a little trip back to "our" hometown and to our old company, and it was really nice to see all those people. It was very much like coming home.
And that's the thing. In Japan, you are a member of a company. You don't just work there. It is your social group. It is your community. Since it's basically impossible to get fired, everyone there has to learn to get along and work together. You have to learn to cope. And that creates a family atmosphere. You may hate your father (Just an example! My dad is great!), but you're family. Same thing about your boss.
In North America, you are your job. In Japan, you are your company. When we meet, we usually ask, "What do you do?" The answer will be something like "I'm a programmer" or "I'm a lecturer" or "I'm a graphic designer." But asking the same question in Japan might get you "I work for FedEx" or "I work for Sumitomo" or "I work for Toyo University." It's a very different way of thinking.
In North America, your skillset is who you are. Where you work is considered unimportant. We are constantly applying for different jobs and weighing offers. Not so in Japan. There are very very few mid-to-upper-level job offers in Japan. Everyone comes in at the bottom, like professional zygotes which can develop into anything. Your skillset is understood to only be valid at the company where it was developed. This is why you'll sometimes talk to people who are programmers or whatever, and you will quickly find that they know almost nothing, outside of the specific thing they do at work. That's all they know, but they know it very well.
In North America, it is in our best interest to be a bit of a jack of all trades, with specific competencies in one particular thing, but a very broad base. This makes us hire-able. In Japan, coming into a company, they really are just looking for general intelligence and certain psychological profiles. All the skills they need will be imparted by the company.
Despite the fact that I ostensibly teach some very high-level English at my university, both the students and I know that if they really need English at work, they'll be sent to a training course, maybe even outside of Japan, to really get good. Of course, having a foreign language on your resume can't hurt your employment options, but it usually doesn't translate to a job that actually uses that language.
And one more thing, because it's related. Tests are very important in Japan. That's why so many people in my actual field, psychometrics, have cut their teeth here in Japan. Most company and university and high school entrance tests are pretty terrible on any scale of reliability or validity, but it seems people are realizing that and there's a lot of work for people who think that multi-parameter item response theory, for example, is really interesting (like me!). But even if we make a really good test, all a test will ever really test is the examinee's ability to take the test. And if it's a well-known test, like the TOEIC (Test Of English for International Communication, by ETS), it can be defeated with strategies. So people work on strategies instead of skills, because the test numbers are all that matter. This ends up inflating the scores that companies look for, which forces people to study even harder, all the while knowing that they aren't actually acquiring any useful skills!
To conclude before I spend the whole morning typing instead of doing my actual job, work culture is probably
Hmmm. I would actually not lump China in with Japan. China and the Chinese seem to be at least as individualistic as North Americans. They can and do change jobs. In Japan, you basically can't. You'll start again at the entry-level pay, even with lots of experience. You'll be a "freshman" again. And that's if you can even find another job. When you've had work experience at another company, it's like you're damaged goods.
Company going down in China? Screw 'em. You go get another job.
Company going down in Japan? You are screwed.
Be very careful with Orientalist thinking. China, Korea, and Japan are very different places, with very different histories, and therefore, very different worldviews. A lot of the things we think of as "Asian" are really more Japanese, and they come from a long history as a highly organized society with a functioning capitalist economy on a small archipelago. Capitalist in that people owned their own companies and could grow into giant ones, capitalist in that they have had pretty modern banking and accounting practices for a VERY long time, but... Don't shit where you eat. Everyone is connected and you all live on the same strip of habitable land around the same island, so you have to be careful with cutthroat tactics because the throat that gets cut could very well be your own.
Wow! I never realized that! I've asked lots of Japanese people about that word, and no one knew! Is that for sure, or is it your guess?
Where's the "he~~~" button when you need it?
You bring up a point I almost tacked on there at the end: Basically everything I've said doesn't apply to gaijin. On the one hand, you usually are kept on a tight contract leash, which sucks if you're in the settlin' down mood, as I am these days, but on the other, you're paid more than your Japanese friends and colleagues for less work.
I'm lucky to work in a department that is almost 100% foreign, and the Japanese administrators I work for are all foreign-schooled and/or trained in their fields. The culture is a lot more forgiving.
When my students are bemoaning the life they are looking down the barrel of in their fourth year, I always recommend looking for work outside of Japan or at a foreign company. I mean, they've just spent 4 years studying English and/or some other language (Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Thai, Indonesian), and some of them are really good. Why put up with the bullshit if you don't have to?
I've said it for years, though: Japan is a great country to be a foreigner in (Well, unless you're from an Asian or African country... then I'm told it can suck quite a bit.).
I teach at a foreign language university in the Tokyo area. My students get hired to become software engineers pretty regularly. No experience. No interest. They just scored right on the company aptitude test.
See, that's the thing that every single person on this thread is misunderstanding: In Japan, university is just a kind of finishing school. You work your ass off to get in, then play guitar in a band or play American football or some other club activity for 3 years, then spend your last year of university going to cattle-call interviews for all the companies you're interested in. You should probably have your job--the job you will have until you retire, I might add--worked out by about the beginning of your last semester.
Companies do not look at your GPA. They don't look at your transcripts. All they really care about is the name of your school and how you interviewed and how you did on the aptitude test. If they want you, they'll make an offer, and if you take it, they will take care of the rest.
For the rest of your life.
All you have to give in return is, well, the rest of your life. All of it. Every waking hour (and by the time they're done with you, that might be 20 a day). Until you're a hollowed out shell of a human who hates life and chainsmokes through rotten teeth in a stained suit at a barbecued chicken place, slamming back beer and shochu until you've worked up enough of a drunk to stumble back to your home and crash, avoiding all contact with the family you barely know, but despise nonetheless.
Okay, that's a bit of satire, but there's some truth in it, to be sure.
If I were a Japanese kid today, I'd be one of these supposed "dropouts" (called "freeters," for some reason) who just run from temp job to temp job and moonlight at a bar. They make enough money to be happy, not enough to have to pay that much in taxes or health insurance, and they can have a life anytime they want.
Who the hell would want to be a salaryman in Japan?
The likely problem, I think, is that Japanese corporate culture has finally been rejected by the generation of kids who have grown up knowing nothing but the rich Japan and don't have the fearful, hard-headed, overworking mentality of their parents.
That's my reading of the situation, anyway.
I'm sorry, but you're just plain wrong. I've been doing basic tech consulting for years, and about the only CLI thing I do in Windows is ipconfig. Why? Because what is usually wrong with a Windows machine?
Of course, to really get in and fix Windows, you might need the CLI, but there are far better uses of your time.
On the other hand, on every Ubuntu install I've done, I've had to go edit conf files. I've had to sudo something. I've had to do the things that my mom and dad absolutely could not do and wouldn't even know to think about doing.
And that's what people mean when they say Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
Before I get the typical Slashdot response of "WHY DON'T SANY ONE WANT TO LEARN SOMETHING OMG!!!! REATARDS!!!!" let me say this: I can hand my mom or dad a Windows machine or a Mac, and they can happily install things, uninstall things, and run their business without ever even knowing that the CLI still exists. Why should they feel compelled to learn some arcane gibberish when they don't have to? Do you buy butter at the store, or do you churn your own? Do you know how? Why not? Don't you want to learn anything?
I know what you're saying, and I've been on the CLI a lot more since I switched to Mac (where the CLI makes more sense to me and uses commands that I actually remember), but the point of Windows and the Mac is that you never actually need to use the CLI. That makes them "ready for the desktop."
Lately when I hear smokers complaining about tighter restrictions on where they can smoke, etc., I just replace "cigarettes" with "heroin" in my mind and then it really changes my opinion on their viewpoint.
You know, because a heroin addict shooting up doesn't somehow get their filth into my body and all over my hair and clothes.
You wanna kill yourself slowly while looking like a complete ass, fine. I support your decision. It's your body. But don't bring me with you.
In the case of the anti-smoking laws in restaurants, etc., the only thing that upsets me is the ridiculous 20-25ft-from-the-door rule most states have. I don't care if the bar has a smoking section outside or on a patio at all. I'll even sit out there, no problem. It's outside! That just seems meanspirited.
Yeah, you ate a lot of corn there. The point is that most of the animals we eat, eat corn.
Also, judging from your diet, I don't think most people have the financial freedom you do, and cannot actually avoid corn as much as you have (which really isn't that much, as I said).
I always said I'd never switch to console gaming. But last year there was a deal on Xbox360s at Costco and my friend had been begging me to play with him (we live in different countries and wanted something to do together), and in a weak moment I bought one. Then I got an HDTV.
I haven't really looked back. I have played some things on the PC since, but I now find the keyboard and mouse kind of painful to use. You have more control, yeah, but you have to wiggle your fingers around and hold them at uncomfortable angles... And installing... And things not working quite right...
It's just a better experience on a console, for what has become the exact same game.
This move has also allowed me to get Windows off my desktop (went to the Mac--need MS Office), and that's been great too.
Ironic that MS's games division lost me as a customer of their OS division.
Hey, I might very well do some tray-selling. Every other thing I've thought of selling on eBay from Japan is better-sold elsewhere and I found I couldn't compete in my spare time.
Plus, printing on CDs is awesome. It was such an afterthought when I bought the printer ("Huh. That's cool, I guess..."), but I actually use it for little but. Even just printing notes on what's on the disc is worth it, it's so hassle-free. I don't have to worry about writing incorrectly, and I don't have to fuss with trying to write on plastic, which is hard.
Thanks for the idea!
Preach it!
I recently switched to the Mac both at the office and at home, but the sole reason I did was that the Mac isn't some annoying separate hardware platform anymore. I can boot Windows and virtual machines are easy.
If/when I make a Hackintosh (which looks like fun), will it be a Mac?
Sorta.
It's just a matter of semantics. If I were running a Hackintosh and someone who was giving me a file said "you're on a Mac, right?" then I'd say "yes," of course.
But if someone said "what kind of Mac do you have?", I'd have to say something like, "welll, actually it's just a regular old PC running OSX."
Since the Mac has traditionally been assumed to be a hardware and software platform, it just gets tricky.
But there is absolutely zero reason to be snobby about it, and I think you're right that that is a lot of what's going on.
I think you're forgetting how markets work.
When you criminalize something, it's true, the market size decreases. The supply shrinks, because it suddenly becomes a non-option for the vast majority of would-be suppliers.
That leaves the people who just don't care, and they become the sole suppliers.
This sharp reduction in supply does what to prices?
That's right; it drives them up.
This increase in prices does what?
It attracts more people who don't care.
What is special about these people?
They are criminals, through and through. Fringe. They do not care about people.
So what we can expect to happen with a law like this is for the violent porn market to become more violent and more lucrative; not less. Smaller, to be sure, but so much worse. Where we used to have simulated rape, etc., we'll have real rape. Simulated beatings, real beatings. Etc.
There are certain benefits to keeping something we don't even like out in the open. When you shove things into the dark, bad things happen. More people are exploited; more money is made.
A close relative of mine used to be a drug dealer. He was strongly against any kind of decriminalization or legalization of drugs. Why? It would kill his profits. The only reason he made money is that he was one of the ones crazy enough to take on that risk (and smart enough not to get caught or piss off the wrong people). If just anyone could do it, he'd have to compete, and the scale of the business would blow up beyond what he could do himself (e.g. he'd have to buy land and learn to farm).
This is a thoughtcrime law, to be sure, and even if we don't like the thoughts associated with it, it is better to keep the pressure off and do our best to take care of the associated social problems separately.
1) Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking in your sig; I like you already.
2) Me too. I've toyed with 3rd party ink on my iP4100 and it looks like crap, runs, and only costs a hair less than the real Canon stuff.
3) Yeah... This printer and my cold dead hands. I can even print on CDs with it (I live in Japan).
That's my problem as well. They have virtually no evidence in the case, but what is there has all the strange behavior happening after Nina went missing. I'd support a guilty verdict for manslaughter, but first-degree is preposterous.
It's clear that he killed her, I think. But you can't bump it up to first-degree just because the guy is a dolt who wastes people's time.
The important thing to remember is that even though we all like the concept of the police, the simple fact of the matter is that in any interaction with them, they are your enemy. They want you in jail, getting ass-raped. That's what they want. And they can make it happen. All you have to do is let them.
So don't let them. Don't give them anything they can use. Don't say a word.
That being said, remember that these are just people doing their jobs, and that there's no reason to be rude. Be firm, be emotionally neutral, but be polite and respectful.
Because they are people, being a rude asshole to them just makes matters worse. Ask my brother. He can't keep his stupid mouth shut and got breathalysed because he was arrogantly challenging the cop to do it (he didn't realize that having one pint and then driving actually put him into the DWAI range for our state). They did it and he got 2 days in jail (in trade for it not showing up on his record). I am convinced they wouldn't have done had he not taunted them.
Defend your rights, but don't be a dick about it.
Wow, great reply! Thanks for taking all that time!
But I collaborate with Windows users all the time; that's basically all I do. I'm the only member of my research team on the Mac (now--my co-coordinator is switching on the next upgrade cycle). I haven't had any problems.
However, there are annoying little differences. The functions thing doesn't bother me at all because I never even knew about "Insert Function" until recently! I've always just typed the functions in! I didn't even realize there was that easy way of doing things until I was teaching a basic stats workshop to my colleagues and I was just giving them the function names and telling them to type this and type that and my co-coordinator is like, "Um, why don't you tell them to just use 'Insert Function?'" I'd never even seen it, heheh.
The styles thing is a minor headache, but it's only a minor headache on top of the major headache that is Word styles. How MS could make such a potentially life-simplifying thing so difficult and unwieldy is utterly beyond me. Sometimes I hear people making fun of users who are so dumb as to not be using them, but really, if you are just doing a one-off document, which is what most people are doing most of the time, they are not worth the major hassle. I finally bit the bullet and set up styles for my research project's product (a test, actually), which is done in Word for whatever ridiculous reason.
It took an entire Saturday.
Then, you use these styles, but the list soon gets polluted with things like "Stem+Bold+Italic." It gets harder and harder to find something. And this is on Windows.
Then it saves these damn things in Normal.dot instead of in some Word pref file. So you have no access to them when you open a document you saved before you made them. You have no way of sending them to other people except to save a new document, have them open it, and then have them check "Add to template," which is a very unintuitive wording for what you're really doing: Making this style available from now on.
I've heard a lot of complaints about the loss of VBA, but we never use it (to a large extent, we really only use Excel as a data-formatter--everything has to be output to text files for the real work--IRT--anyway), so it hasn't bothered me at all. I do, however, think it is a bizarre choice on the part of MS. I have a friend who is an investment banker who moved to the Mac for whatever reason, and he's finding Excel unsuitable on the Mac (surprise surprise). I'm just recommending he use it under Fusion, which is what I often do.
Still, admittedly, I may have an over-critical view of OO.o, which is largely a reaction to the autoerotic platitudes given it on Slashdot. It's okay. That's all I can say. It's absolutely amazing for being free, but it's still just okay. The only people I know who use it full-time are on Linux, and are just doing it because Office isn't available.
But don't worry. When I'm elected king, I'm going to break up MS on antitrust grounds so that the OS and the apps are different companies, and then the app division will fix all this by unifying the code base and releasing a Linux version.
Um... Yes... Every day. It's much better than 2004.
I have had zero problems with it, in fact.
You know that you can set it to just always use the old file formats, right?
OpenOffice, on the other hand, is a pile of garbage. I used it exclusively for a year (on Windows) until I got sick of my documents looking different on Word at university, no matter what format I saved them in. Some people might (even rightly--I don't know) blame MS in that, but when you're the underdog, you have to work with the dominant program even if it's wrong.
I still have installs of it on some Windows machines. It is handy and free. But it's not an option for me every day. I have to do a lot of co-authorship of research papers, etc. and the rest of the world uses Word and Excel.
I have a friend whose father trains guard/attack dogs. They have a gigantic German Shepherd on the farm that is their "show dog."
Goddamn I hate that dog.
You drive up for a BBQ, everyone's inside, and he doesn't know you because you've only been there twice in 5 years. Damn dog charges, snarling, and backs you back into your car. What do you do? You're invited to someone's house, and they have the equivalent of a killbot outside, that makes his own decisions on who is friend and who is foe.
I am very much pro-gun, but attack dogs scare and piss me off. They run on auto-pilot, unlike firearms. A gun sitting in a corner won't hurt anyone. An attack dog might.
So you get back in your car and start honking. The dad comes out, calls the dog off and goes, "Sorry, did he scare you?"
"When he charged me, snarling, with his back up? When he herded me back into my car? Yeah, that scared me." I actually refuse to go there anymore unless they tell me the dog is going to be in the house when I arrive. They think that's a lot to ask, and it is, but I refuse to be put in a survival situation by my friend's damn dog.
Of course, once I've been given the okay by the dad, the dog is just a big sweet dog. I love dogs and usually make friends with them instantly. An attack/guard dog is different. He's trained to hate everyone until told otherwise.
Don't get a guard dog.
You absolutely nailed it. I decided to get a Mac when I was at the computer store looking at laptops. I looked at a Toshiba with Vista on it. That big circular Start button... That gigantic taskbar (I actually only use the Windows Classic theme in XP), all the shit on one menu, a bunch of crap on the desktop, messages popping out of the damned system tray... All the clutter and noise of Windows XP, plus more, somehow.
Then I looked at a Mac for the first time in years and years and years. "Good lord," I thought, "It's so... clean." Nothing is vying for your attention. Auto-hiding the Dock doesn't cause any problems (unlike auto-hiding the Windows taskbar), you don't have a bunch of helpful messages annoying you all the time, the wireless only tells you when it can't connect, not when it can... Double-clicking a .zip file decompresses it without asking you to hit "Next" a bunch of times...
OSX just stays out of your way and lets you use your damned programs to get things done. It's also almost infinitely configurable, so it works the way you want.
You spend no time thinking about it at all. And that's what makes it great.