Pretty much. It's reiterating an observation of mine [0] that we now live in a K-shaped economy where the 70th percentile and above are distinct from the 50th percentile and below.
Most HNers and their social peers are in the 70th percentile and above.
> but will there be such opportunities for their children
Yes, assuming they grew up in a household in the 70th percentile or above [0] income bracket and/or are on good terms with your parents and siblings.
At the end of the day, the family unit matters because intergenerational wealth has always been important.
> I thought I did well for myself, finding myself among the middle class, the end is on the horizon
Are you maxing out your Roth 401K (and if possible) your Roth IRA as well while also keeping fixed costs like rent or mortgage at around 40% of post 401K+IRA disbursement?
If so, you have a shot of climbing up into the upper middle class.
This. Also there is a social backlash against Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai service workers in Japan now (the people who tend to be working the counter at a kombini, but apparently Asians all look the same to Western HNers), as well as Western tourists.
Edit: can't reply
> I doubt many Chinese youths want to work for minimum wage in Japan
Chinese are the 2nd largest nationality of foreign agricultural and food workers in Japan [0].
As long as the median household income in China [1] remains below the minimum wage in Japan [2], members of the bottom half of Chinese society will continue to emigrate there, Korea, and other countries to work, that said not at the same rate as was seen a decade ago.
It's a very recent shift that began in the last 3-5 years.
Traditionally, India never had a Japanese vocational program in the manner you'd find in Vietnam, Thailand, China, Phillipines, etc but in 2021 [0], the Japanese and Indian government began working on a vocational/blue collar mobility program [1] to build a Vietnam, China, or Phillipines style pipeline.
There will be a lot of Indians coming, but they will be cycled back in 2-3 year batches to then become floor managers and foremen for Japanese fixed investments in India. It's the model that Japanese automotive JVs in India operated on for a decade [1].
And it's was these kinds of vocational programs that helped dramatically upskill Chinese manufacturing in the 2000s and 2010s.
If you click on the time the person you ‘can’t reply’ (where it says ‘n minutes’ or ‘n hours ago’) posted their comment you can reply to your hearts content.
This is what I did to reply to you.
You don’t have to say ‘ can’t reply’ then quote someone like that.
Context is preserved better the proper way but it’s not very discoverable.
Japan doesn't have UBI, but it's welfare system is extremely expansive as Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees a minimum standard of living through livelihood, housing, education, and medical assistance.
Additonally, Japan has spent decades thinking about this eventuality (at least since the 1970s), which is why Japan worked on the "Flying Geese" paradigm where Japanese public-private ventures would end up become major capital stake holders across Asia, the US, and Europe.
Taiwan (1960s onwards), South Korea (1970s onwards), and China (1980s onwards), and investments by what are now Master Trust Bank, Trust & Custody Services Bank, JTSB, and SoftBank.
Japanese financial institutions massive capital positions across Asia, the US, and Europe which tend to be public-private ventures.
> Tax the robot’s income
Pretty much, in the sense that corporations and the Japanese government have spent decades working together to build a sovereign wealth model comparable to Singapore and the UAE's.
This is something that really needs to be done in the states imo.
IIRC we don't have a sovereign wealth fund, but we should in order to provide a social safety net for our citizens, especially with all the uncertainties regarding the future right now.
No one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan.
Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules.
Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN.
They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirigiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net by commercializing and deploying automation.
Who do you think SoftBank and MUFG's largest LP's are lol.
Edit: can't reply
> I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film
It is! But for every Hirayama there are dozens of ASEAN and Chinese migrant workers doing menial work as part of the JETRO Trainee guest worker program.
> NYC sanitation dept...
Sanitation Engineers aren't janitors.
Janitors, fish cleaners, farmworkers, bricklayers, service staff, and other low and unskilled work is what is being supplemented by foreign workers and depending on the job by automation.
> So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there
What's with this kind of orientalism?!?
Japan's Labor Ministry literally has a strategy around hiring foreigners for cleaning and janitorial services [1] due to persistent labor shortages.
And if we want to go that route of shallow orientalist sterotypes, Japan is also a society where whether you or not you attended a Teidai/Sokei/Hitotsubashi/TokyoTech/Ivy/Stanford, whether you have a Government or big corporate job, and whether you will be able to afford a house and have kids by 35 matters.
There's a reason Japan's birth rate crisis is overwhelmingly impacting the lower tier of Japanese society [2].
I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film.
"Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives his life in simplicity and daily tranquility. Some encounters also lead him to reflect on himself."
-- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/
People will clean garbage and shit for a DB pension, stability, not sitting at a desk, and avoiding corporate politics.
All of these things are easier to give to sanitation workers because human waste is a recession-proof good and it's less affected by boom-bust. Many people want these jobs.
If you're a tech worker that likes a clean office and new technology this is boring.
But I'm sure there's a sanitation worker going on a similar rant about how terrible the tech industry is.
Japan is very different than most cultures in cleaning after yourself. It's very ingrained in their psyche, e.g. school students are trained to clean their classrooms in organized way.
So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there (and it's super-clean as people trash way less).
More of a “it’s an honourable job, and I respect people who do it, but personally I wouldn’t do it” kinda thing.
Status is ingrained in the culture. What you do, which neighbourhood you live in Tokyo, what school you went to and etc. matters a lot to a random person.
Good to know, thank. But the status thing is very much the same, if not even more important on in US. The whole red-vs-blue counties thing, is very much urban rich-vs-poor countryside.
Maybe not so much in Europe, although I'm not sure. Japan has a different sense of shame, that's for sure. But status (neighborhood/job) sounds the same.
Unlike many other developed countries, foreign employees working in cleaning and maintenance are still a minority. This is gradually changing, but I believe the main issue is that young people are completely uninterested in this kind of work. Most people working in these industries in Japan are old rather than foreign. The average is probably over 50+, and there are quite a few people working past retirement.
There's a de facto standoff going on in the Yellow Sea since last October [0] over the PRC-SK maritime boundary.
American, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian [0][1][2][3] forces have been running sorties over the Yellow, East, and East China Seas for the past several months now.
The ADIZ acts as an intimidation tactic to both SK and Japan, especially as Korean [5][6] and Japanese [6][7] perceptions of China grow increasingly negative.
France hasn't bought Israeli weapons systems and vice versa for years, so it's just a quick populist win with 0 practical implications either way.
That said, French and Israeli vendors like Thales, IAI, Dassault, Rafael, Elbit, etc still collaborate closely becuase they are both OEMs, vendors, and JV partners in Indian defense deals that integrate both into Indian weapons systems - especially as both are integrated (along with Russian and indigenous weapons systems) with what is become Indians version of the Iron and Steel dome [0][1]. Vietnam is mandating the same thing as part of their 2045 Drone manufacturing strategy [2].
And both MIC ecosystems still collaborate together on defense deals back in Armenia, Cyprus, and Greece.
Most countries that historically had a Soviet/Russian kit are now mandating French+Israeli interoperability becuase of India's success at using it to replace older Soviet or Russian systems where possible.
I think there has been some low volume defense trade in both directions.
What some people seem to forget is that France and Israel also compete over some of the same defense deals. There was these incidents where France banned Israeli companies from some defense shows:
Yep, but the biggest customer and JV partner for both the French and Israeli MIC (India) ensures that they cooperate, as India has forced both to create JVs owned and operated by Indian SOEs and transfer IP and manufacturing capacity as a result.
And French and Israeli companies are fine with that - as can be seen by Thales [0], Safran [1] and Rafael (IL) [2] working on Indian JVs for India's Rafale [3] and Tejas [1] requirements.
It's cheap for French politicans to make pronouncements (and given how competitive the 2027 election is going to be, Macron has no choice but to resort to such populism in order to try and poach some amount of LFI voters to Renaissance/En Marche), but France Inc ignores it and carries on because business is more important.
It's the same reason why Dassault bluntly rejected German input on SCAF [4] and why France's Safran and Russia's UAC are working with India's HAL to indigenize the SJ-100 [5]. And now that the UAE has pulled out of Dassault's F5 program [6], they are even more dependent on India.
As I've mentioned before on HN, French and American business culture are very similar.
Even Vietnam is starting to turn the screws on France, especially now that En Marche's Stephanié Do has now become a lobbyist [7] for FPT's defense arm [8] which is partially owned by Vietnam's KGB (the MPS/BCA).
It's the same kind of arm-twisting China used in the 1980s-2000s and 1990s-2010s respectively to force Israel [9] and Russia [10][11] to transfer IP for China's J-XX program, except both India and Vietnam are applying such arm-twisting on France in addition to Israel and Russia.
And Macron and all the other centrists politicans cannot do anything against Dassault, Thales, etc lest they switch to supporting Bardella and RN like Bolloré [12] and Stérin [13] are doing. Macron himself is only in power because Arnault [14] and his son-in-law (and CEO of Scaleway) Xavier Niels [15].
> Most countries that historically had a Soviet/Russian kit are now mandating French+Israeli interoperability becuase of India's success at using it to replace older Soviet or Russian systems where possible.
Elbit also has previous experience retrofitting Soviet MiG-21s to operate with NATO munitions.
Most early stage companies are now doing the same thing as well. It's basically a re-invention of the "build fast and test" model that was the norm amongst startups in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Yes it led to some degree of tech debt, but it also made it easier to experiment, validate, and identify good and bad workflows.
At least in my network, we don't think AI will replace all workers and we strongly believe AI will lead to a significant amount of tech debt, but we do also recognize a lot of work in tech today is busywork and will be automated away in the hands of actual engineers with domain expertise.
How is it nonsense? Vision doesn't matter - customer feedback matters.
You start off with a hypothesis (X will solve Y's problem by doing ...), you build a prototype, and then you start testing with multiple Ys. Based on that feedback, you then tweak your initial hypothesis or you scrap it and pivot.
The whole point of engineering is to build tools that solve a specific class of problems for the buyer.
Most people are not Steve Jobs, and do not have such a vision. Or the ability and capital to see such a thing through to the end. Steve Jobs also had a number of visions that didn't work out so well too - he learned and interated from them.
Thus, for most folks releasing a product and getting to market/revenue is more important than anything else. Then iterate from there.
YMMV of course. But the older I get, the more I realize "just get it done" is far more important than almost any other metric there is. There is a ton of navel gazing in tech that provides negative value. If I had released some of the things I worked on in the past vs. carefully designing and polishing them, I might still be working on them today. Competing products have maybe 50% of the "quality" of even my prototypes of 10 years ago - but they exist in the market and are used every day by customers to generate income.
Comparing NYC in the 1970s to today isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.
NYC in 1970s was also on the verge of bankruptcy [0] and a mass exodus of businesses [1].
[0] - https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
[1] - https://www.polyarchives.hosting.nyu.edu/exhibits/show/strug...
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