The article seems a bit scant on details re: why people are leaving. Is it because the youth are unsatisfied with the quality of life available in the country? Are they seeking a more western-style way of life (perhaps one that’s more secular)? Is this yet another case of younger generations getting pushed out because they cannot find success in a place where all the good homes and jobs are tightly clutched by the older generations? Or is there something completely different causing the mass migration out of the country? The article mentions “the economy” but that could mean so many things, especially when much of the world is also still struggling with post-covid fallout in one way or another.

To be clear, Reagan youth were on the generational cusp between Boomer and X. The “quintessential” Boomer youth experience was the Vietnam war, ~15 years prior to the cited 1984 election.

This little bit of news has been hitting the media circuit this week: Americans are eating a meal’s worth of calories in snack foods every day

…the average American had between 400 and 500 calories worth of snacks a day, which is typically more than what they ate at breakfast. Even worse, the snacks usually carried little to no nutritional value

All food has gotten expensive due to inflation/greedflation, but (at least in my area) snacks, desserts, and some sugary drinks got hit especially hard. Except maybe for people living in food deserts, snacks are way more of a luxury good than “whole” foods are nowadays.

What’s with the potato-quality map at the end? It’s so low-res the key is completely illegible. Leader of the free world can’t even afford 150dpi… Don’t go teasing us with a map in the preview and then fail to deliver like this!!!

They rank lower than Volkswagen! I didn’t think that was possible given the VW emissions scandal that just happened [checks notes] eight years ago?! My god everything from 2016 onward has just been a giant blur hasn’t it

If it’s a work requirement then use work resources to print it. Why is this an issue?

Actually it’s looking like German cars are extremely bimodal.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/iYWPd

You’re still making this out like it’s an individual problem and not a genuine (and major) gender difference.

From a BBC article on office temperature wars:

Boris Kingma from Maastricht University Medical Center decided to take a closer look. He found that women have significantly lower metabolic rates than men and need their offices 3°C (5.4F) warmer.

That’s a huge discrepancy! Obviously not something you can chalk up to individual factors like exercise rates or medical disorders.

Women are biologically more susceptible to getting cold than men are (or conversely, men are more susceptible to getting hot than women are). Also most people in America need more cardio; it’s not a gender thing.

[It seems I accidentally deleted the original comment when I went to edit it, so here’s the repost]

There were literally classes at the public library where people would get together and share websites. Also, because the web wasn’t monetized, similar sites would link to each other because they didn’t see other sites as competition for views and ad dollars. The Anime Turnpike, for example, was basically a yellow pages of any and all English-language websites related to anime. There were also “circles”* (even well after search engines entered the picture) of sites sharing a theme (eg a TV show fandom) and you could click through them like flipping through a Rolodex. But yeah, in the very early days (as in, before most folks even had email) word of mouth was quite prevalent; one of my mom’s favorite sites she heard about from a taxi driver.

*EDIT: Sorry, I think I got my languages mixed up; as others have said they were called webrings in English

(For those who don’t read Japanese: 彼=he 彼女=she)

Sure those exist, but so do many gender-neutral pronouns, although many of them are impolite and/or colloquial. However the main difference between English and other European languages vs Japanese is that you can make a fully-formed Japanese sentence with no subject at all. “Went to the store” (or even just “Went”) is a fragment in English but a perfectly complete sentence in Japanese. Actually if you say “he went to the store” you’re emphasizing that HE went to the store, rather than SHE or I or WE or THEY (Japanese verbs do not conjugate based on the subject). So if context makes it clear whom you’re speaking about, it’s actually clunky to include a subject. It’s like saying “Sam dropped her son off at school, then Sam went to the store, then Sam went home” instead of “Sam dropped her son off at school, then she went to the store, then she went home.” In Japanese it would be something like “Sam dropped son off at school, then went to store, then went home” (so if you don’t know whether “Sam” is male or female, this sentence would provide you with no information on the matter).

A fun wrench in the system is that Japanese has gendered speech; in theory you can tell the gender (and sometimes rank and age) of the speaker based on their speech pattern, although this is significantly less true in writing, especially formal writing (e.g. academic, business, etc). There are gendered forms of “I” (あたし, 僕, 俺, わし, etc) as well as various phrases and conjugations (such as かな vs かしら, ~て vs ~ろ, use of の at the end of a sentence, etc). However the Japanese people, especially the younger generations, have been breaking away from these conventions, and it’s not that unusual for women to use male speech patterns, and to a lesser degree vice-versa. Plus there are gender-neutral speech patterns where based on context you might be able to make a guess as to the gender of the individual, but this is highly context-dependent and again, these conventions are being contested.

There are lots of examples out there of works that are successfully able to obscure the gender of characters (intentionally or merely by chance) for either a chunk of time or even the entire series. This happens pretty frequently in manga, where the pictures provide extra context and make gendered pronouns (or any pronoun at all) even less necessary: no need for “he said… she said…” when there are speech bubbles, and no need to say “he’s doing a thing” when a character can point to another character. This occasionally creates problems for the English translation, where it’s much harder to avoid gendered pronouns; if it’s not immediately obvious what the character’s gender is based on context or appearance, translators have to either hope that future chapters will include a gendered pronoun, or that the manga-ka will clarify in supplementary materials. This usually happens in fantasy/sci-fi series with non-human characters, but it can also happen with androgynous human characters. For example, nearly every character (except for the human protagonist) in the CLAMP series Wish is a gender-less angel or demon; for ease of translation the English version made the angels female and the demons male because they thought the translation would be too clunky if they couldn’t use gendered pronouns (this was back in the early 2000s, when the singular “they” wasn’t a mainstream thing yet).

In conclusion, while gendered pronouns and speech-patterns certainly exist and are frequently used in Japanese, it is also possible (and more importantly, grammatically correct and not linguistically awkward) to avoid gendered references to individuals in Japanese, especially when done on purpose.

I remember a pre-search engine era, but that didn’t last too long. First there was Yahoo!, then Altavista, then Google came on the scene and changed everything. God those early Google days were amazing; it felt like if it existed on the web, Google could find it for you with the right search input.

There were literally classes at the public library where people would get together and share websites. Also, because the web wasn’t monetized, similar sites would link to each other because they didn’t see other sites as competition for views and ad dollars. The Anime Turnpike, for example, was basically a yellow pages of any and all English-language websites related to anime. There were also “circles”* (even well after search engines entered the picture) of sites sharing a theme (eg a TV show fandom) and you could click through them like flipping through a Rolodex. But yeah, in the very early days (as in, before most folks even had email) word of mouth was quite prevalent; one of my mom’s favorite sites she heard about from a taxi driver.

*EDIT: Sorry, I got my languages mixed up; as others have said they were called webrings in English

Current Paternity Leave Uptake: Despite existing benefits, only 17.13% of new fathers took leave in fiscal 2022, a slight increase from 7.48% in 2019.

That’s the real problem: it’s not that paternity leave doesn’t pay enough, it’s that workers don’t feel empowered to take the time off. Or any time off for that matter.

Interesting note: the journalist managed to avoid using pronouns entirely when referring to any non-binary individual during the entire article (with the exception of when they included quotes from others who did use the singular “they” pronoun). I wonder if this is AP standard or the journalist’s preference. Either way I’m impressed; it’s somewhat difficult to do in English without sounding incredibly clunky. Which is too bad, as it’s not true of all languages (Japanese for instance makes it fairly easy to avoid gendered pronouns if so desired).

Meanwhile I’m over here amazed that if you replaced the ¢ with $, the menu would be instantly updated to current restaurant prices.

To be clear: I’m far from an expert in the topic, so all I can provide is a shrug and some possible factors to consider.

One is that as much doom and gloom has been spread about Japan’s socio-economic situation since the 90s, the country continued to stumble along as the world’s second-turned-third largest economy. Certain problems (both economic and demographic-related) continue to persist if not worsen in Japan, but so far they haven’t caused the ceiling to collapse so to speak; perhaps this indicates that these kinds of decay are much slower and lead to a gradual erosion rather than a catastrophic downfall so often implied by the media. In other words, “just keep kicking the can down the road” seems to keep these types of issues somewhat at bay for decades. So one conclusion is to look at Japan and say “clearly this type of thing isn’t sustainable in the very long term, but countries can continue lumbering along even under these pressures.”

However, as mentioned initially, the problems in South Korea sound way worse than in Japan: the birth rate is much lower, the cost of living much higher (IIRC), the pressure on youth to follow a specific path to success is more intense, etc. For instance, I don’t remember anyone in Japan ever reported saying “my spouse and I are just having one kid so that we can put all of our time, money, and focus into preparing them for their academic and job-search success” (I don’t know how prevalent an attitude this is in SK today, but I’ve heard it does exist). Plus there are other factors, like SK has a much smaller population, economy, and global reputation than Japan (in the '80s people in the West legit thought Japan was going to take over the world; the bubble years were bonkers like that). In other words, if SK’s starting situation is worse than Japan’s, and the severity of their problems worse than Japan’s, they may not be able to accomplish a similar slow erosion.

Furthermore, the global situation is looking really bad. Without going into too many details (because that would be a post of its own), there are a LOT of economic and demographic and climate factors that are looking really unsustainable in a lot of countries, from housing and general cost-of-living to aging populations and infrastructure to increased instances of severe natural disasters and poor agricultural yields. Back in the Great Recession the saying I heard in Japan was: “the US sneezes and all the world catches a cold.” And indeed, Japan got hit pretty hard by the Great Recession, I believe especially so because of their export-oriented economy. So what happens when not just the US, but Canada, Australia, the UK, and many European countries all seem to simultaneously be making the same scrunched-up pre-sneeze face? Meanwhile many other major economies like India are dealing with different but significant looming socio-economic issues (I am really not an expert in Central Asia, but the bits I hear about don’t sound good). And then there’s China, which from any angle looks like a ticking time bomb IMO. Put it all together, and it’s a lot harder to experience slow erosion when the rest of the world is engulfed in a landslide.

Granted, I’m assuming that SK has and will continue to have a similar political culture to Japan, one dominated by the older generations and conservatives/moderates who are more likely to embrace status quo and half-measures than radical reforms. I’m also assuming a similar social culture, one that’s not open to possible stop-gap solutions like mass immigration (although given they share the same language barrier issue as Japan, I’m not sure immigration really is the golden ticket everyone makes it out to be regardless). I think these general assumptions are fair as SK is probably the closest country to Japan in terms of cultural similarity, however SK has shown they’ve a bit more spice to their step (see: massive protests in recent years). Plus the 2020s have become an era of upheaval, and it can be easier to enact radical shifts in trajectory during unstable times.

In conclusion SK is not doomed, but I think they’ll need to do more than Japan has simply to obtain a similar slow decline, and they’d need to pull out some near-miracle moves to get back on a healthy track.

This read like an article about Japanese youth twenty years ago. They’re even replicating the hikkikomori phenomenon. That said, it sounds like things in SK are way worse than they ever were in Japan, especially considering their demographic situation. This will not end well.

Not “just”… It happened in May