Property taxes on land zoned for residential use are 6x more expensive if left bare. That’s why Japan has an akiya plague, because even a dilapidated building will keep taxes down.

I couldn’t find a more general article so here’s an example from a generic small town council.

https://www.city.inagi.tokyo.jp/en/faq/kurashi/1001633/10016...

You're right. I'm not sure how I got mislead or misremembered the dynamic here. I thought there was a specific clear tax benefit but doesn't seem so.

There are tax benefits for new buildings for a limited time so maybe that's what I was thinking about and became confused.

Leaving aside your mistake, you raise a great point. Why are there so many empty lots in central Tokyo for sale? It makes no sense financially! Maybe they assume they can tear-down the existing structure and sell it faster than the tax penalty will hit?

A problem with privatising the railways is that unprofitable routes, ie rural villages, are deprioritised or simply shut down.

My village gets 1 train every 1.5 hours, and none between 3pm and 7pm. For several years now, there has been discussion of shutting down the upper half of the route.

So every household has 2 or more cars.

That's the same in most of Japan. Most people who over-idealize rail transit in Japan only visited or stayed short term within the Yamanote Line.

It's a great country, but using Central Tokyo as a frame of reference as most people on HN do is the equivalent of using Manhattan or Central London as your frame of reference for the US or UK.

Major urban areas like Osaka, Nagoya, and even most of Greater Tokyo are extremely car dependent with plentiful parking as well - let alone smaller towns.

The web client has a select all option, and when one or more emails is selected, two buttons pop up. Delete forever, mark as not spam.

I check my spam folder regularly and it has been this way for as far as I can remember.

I read it multiple times, read your comment and clicked on the article and I still got it wrong.

I saw Robot ear cats and couldn’t make sense of it. But clicking in the article and seeing the title in huge whatever sizes fonts made it click.

I think it’s the small font sizes in HN causing our brains to ‘fill in the blanks’.

Agree. My neighbour is too old to farm and his descendants aren't interested. He has offered to let me use his land for free but I just can’t get interested. Even just taking care of a few potted plants is too much for me.

Could also be Singapore or Taiwan.

Taiwan has waaaay more people, like 20ish million I think?

Singapore has a similar requirement called an Exit Permit. It may have changed, I don’t really know or care anymore. But the conscription was a huge driver for me to emigrate as soon as I could. I left the country 2 weeks after finishing my military service.

My wife's wordpress blog has at least 5 different plug-ins for publishing an article without a header. Every time I fix it for her by removing all but 1 plug-in, she'll install a million others because that's what ChatGPT told her to do.

I have no hope nor expectations of non-technical people performing technical tasks no matter how advanced AI becomes. The only solution is a platform/CMS that already has the all bells and whistles included.

I switched from an 11 to a 15 because my friend got the 14 and it took amazingly stabilised videos while snowboarding.

Photos taken in the dark also became much better.

The default photos app can find words inside photos and translate without going on the internet. My wife’s 13 couldn’t even though we had the same OS.

I’m sure there’s more that I don’t even know about.

And it does the word search and image recognition locally, which is the killer feature for me

Anyone can do it in the cloud, but I don’t want them looking at my photos

How about a Cybersecurity minister who has never used a computer before, in 2018?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026

The only man who has 100% cybersecurity, respect