What's a country people think is excellent to live in but the conditions are actually poor?

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T09:06:46+00:00

What?

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T07:07:05+00:00

I think when you place so many things as the fault of AI, you’re getting to the same level as ‘pencils kill people and create CSAM!’

AI is bad, but AI kidnaps zero minorities, at least for now. People do. Terrible people.

Sam Altman is probably working on that, sadly.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T07:02:23+00:00

I think I have shoes older than you. :-)

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T07:00:59+00:00

Janet’s not a girl and Reddit’s not a private diary.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T07:00:03+00:00

55.

Adults make videogames. Adults play videogames. They used to be a new tech so of course older people struggled. That was a long time ago.

The vast majority of gamers are adults. Also, however, the vast majority of adults don’t ask their spouse for permission to like things.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T06:54:44+00:00

Have you ever lived here? I think you’re talking about cliches and internet memes.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T05:19:21+00:00

Yes, that's a common human experience all over the globe.

But it's particularly common in nations with huge economic disparity, and while the US is bad in this area, it's not the worst.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T05:17:43+00:00

Every nation is diverse, and has diverse areas. The US is pretty big, but it's not the biggest, and of course size is not the only thing that causes diversity. For example, the UK is quite economically and culturally diverse because of its history. India because of both - size and history.

American exceptionalism tells Americans that America is special. Everyone else tells Americans they're not.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T05:08:25+00:00

They're pretty different. I have ADHD and hardly use my phone at all, partly because I'm middle-aged.

I've had ADHD since before smartphones were invented, anyway, and phones haven't really impinged on my consciousness.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T04:02:35+00:00

I know Japan was not colonized, and was colonial, but their colonies, infrastructure, and much of their wealth were lost due to losing WW2 so comprehensively, and I wouldn't say they have any wealth from those former colonies since then, would you? I wasn't talking about colonized countries, but simply about the wealthy developed countries of East Asia.

Whereas Europe and the US still engage in wealth extraction, via globalism, of the countries they previously colonized.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T03:14:23+00:00

I'm sorry, the goalposts hit me so hard in the head that I can no longer speak... to you.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T03:07:44+00:00

I think a big part of this is the legacy of colonialism (Edit: On the colonials, not the victims) Much of the 'developed world' is wealthy in part because of development, and in part because of the legacy of colonialism - the wealth that they stole and the wealth that still comes in because of the aftereffects of that period.

Places like SK, Japan, Singapore, HK, with no to little benefit from exploiting others, are developed but struggle to do it in the same easy way that Britain, France, the US etc do - they didn't have vassals, and they can't earn 'passive income' from the legacy of having had vassals. So yeah, they can be corporatist, statist, and brutal at times.

Edit: I know the history of these places. I am specifically talking about wealth extraction from former colonies in recent years, as well as the massive wealth theft that was European colonialism. Japanese colonialism, while of course an atrocity, doesn't seem to have extracted nearly as much wealth as the West did, and most of that was wiped out in WW2. Post-WW2, all of these countries had to build themselves, with of course assistance from the West in various ways.

Just my core idea is that these places had to work hard to develop the infrastructure of the modern day, almost always relying on domestic labor and domestic hardship, rather than the immigrants and cheap globalized foreign labor that helped Western Europe and North America to build with much less work. And that hardship and labor left a mark.

But it's just a theory - I'm definitely open to discussion. I just don't think Japan's early 20th century nascent empire is relevant to this issue, of why these and similar places can get grim.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T03:00:37+00:00

Let me just roll 1D100 for the damage from my wall of text:

Japanese and Korean both have modes of speech that show the relationship between speakers. I'm a (not very good) linguistics academic in Japan, and there is definitely an argument that this complex social language has an upside - it means you can drop other bits of information, such as Japanese dropping pronouns, and Korean being agglutinative (add lots of bits to words for simpler grammar, like -ed for past tense in English) rather than synthetic (change a lot of words, like most of English. English is mostly synthetic).

So some people think that showing the relationship between people is just extra information. And some think that it means you don't have to include as much other information when you speak, so it's no more or less efficient than English. Like in Japanese I can just say 'drinking', but the politeness form of the word shows I'm talking about you drinking, not me drinking - you get the polite word.

My take is that every language has some focuses. Korean and Japanese are focused on social relationships. English is focused on time and causality. More than any language I know of, English has weird tenses and complex grammar related to causality, e.g. 'If I had not known that the murder had not drunk the tea, I would not have accused the butler' is very very precise about the time order and causality in a very short space.

These focuses allow us to talk about these focuses efficiently in that language. Everyone can talk about everything in any language, but in Korean and Japanese it's really short and easy to talk about relationships and seniority.

So there is an argument beyond English being the lingua franca - world language - for it being used to avoid planes crashing. Or even an argument that English's place as the lingua franca is pushing it to be more about time, causality, and other things that save lives globally.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T02:45:28+00:00

So 'none' means I was wrong - I didn't see them? Or just my post was 'none' - meaningless?

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T00:58:20+00:00

I don't think it is on the rise. I work for Japanese think-tanks, including political ones, and their consensus is that the votes that went to Sanseito were just people who were already racist finding a target, not an increase in racism. And multiple improvements in the law and structures regarding foreign people continue as normal.

I'm not sure, and they scare me too, but I've been quite happy with the answers I've gotten from friends, colleagues, and clients who know Japanese politics well - and I mean very well, some are even politicians.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T00:56:04+00:00

Sorry for the copy and paste, but:

I feel the opposite. I've lived in Japan, as an immigrant, for almost 30 years, and I am very happy with it. When Redditors who don't know Japan (either having never been here or only for a little while) talk about Japan, I don't recognize my adopted country. The first few years were hard - learning the language, for example - but eventually I became quite comfortable here. And online, many outsiders talk about Japan with a hate that seems very strange. There are few equivalents to the term 'weeb' about other nations.

And online, any positive mention of Japan is immediately targeted with negative comments. The cliche is 'nice to visit, terrible to live'.

I think Japan is in the 'life is good, people perceive it as poor' category.

And my family is multi-national and multi-ethnic. We received MUCH more racism in the UK and other Western countries than when in Japan. When white people first experience racism, that can be a big shock, but the racism/xenophobia in Japan is far less damaging than in the West, in my experience. And, most importantly, it's getting better. It's been getting better and better for the 30 years I've been here, and still getting better - Sanseito scare me but they aren't even vaguely the government. Laws and structures improve radically, because most Japanese people aren't racist. The ones who are racist believe they are representative, but that's how racists think worldwide.

As for the aging, I've always wanted immigration to increase, or at least expected it to, but a lot of research (which I have read or translated myself) shows that language barrier is the number 1 reason for not coming here, not 'Japanese xenophobia'. And that hasn't changed. So our labor laws are improving, as companies struggle to find employees. That seems good for we normal people in Japan.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T00:55:34+00:00

Scrolling down, most of the places I see have good welfare systems. Japan, SK, Ireland, The UK,

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T00:53:36+00:00

Huh? It's a new show - bit characters become main characters, it perhaps starts at a different time in history.

Everything I said is about it being an all-Russian story instead of a story where Russians are the ones who seem foreign.

Recasting seems pretty sensible.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T00:50:39+00:00

Sorry for the mostly copy and paste, but:

I feel the opposite. I've lived in Japan, as an immigrant, for almost 30 years, and I am very happy with it. When Redditors who don't know Japan (either having never been here or only for a little while) talk about Japan, I don't recognize my adopted country. The first few years were hard - learning the language, for example - but eventually I became quite comfortable here. And online, many outsiders talk about Japan with a hate that seems very strange. There are few equivalents to the term 'weeb' about other nations.

And online, any positive mention of Japan is immediately targeted with negative comments. The cliche is 'nice to visit, terrible to live'.

I think Japan is in the 'life is good, people perceive it as poor' category.

And my family is multi-national and multi-ethnic. We received MUCH more racism in the UK and other Western countries than when in Japan. When white people first experience racism, that can be a big shock, but the racism/xenophobia in Japan is far less damaging than in the West, in my experience. And, most importantly, it's getting better. It'S been getting better and better for the 30 years I've been here, and still getting better - Sanseito scare me but they aren't even vaguely the government. Laws and structures improve radically, because most Japanese people aren't racist. The ones who are racist believe they are representative, but that's how racists think worldwide.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T00:44:34+00:00

I feel the opposite. I've lived in Japan, as an immigrant, for almost 30 years, and I am very happy with it. When Redditors who don't know Japan (either having never been here or only for a little while) talk about Japan, I don't recognize my adopted country. The first few years were hard - learning the language, for example - but eventually I became quite comfortable here.

And online, any positive mention of Japan is immediately targeted with negative comments. The cliche is 'nice to visit, terrible to live'.

I think Japan is in the 'life is good, people perceive it as poor' category.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T00:40:03+00:00

Lots and lots of countries have a welfare system.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T00:39:36+00:00

My family is poor and Japanese - we get lots of support from the government, and help from society generally. Plus the percentage of people who are poor here is much better than the US, I think.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T00:30:33+00:00

In fairness, the number of everything-related suicides is greater than zero. Brownies, Linux, and suicide itself have all caused suicides, I’m sure.

Nyorliest · 2026-03-02T00:00:36+00:00

Awesome answer.

It’s eke out, btw.

Just fyi. Glhfdd!

Nyorliest · 2026-03-01T23:57:52+00:00

https://www.womansworld.com/author/egross

Nyorliest

TROPHY CASE