> The arrogance of American tourists is truly boundless. How dare Japanese people not speak English! Who do they think they are?
This attitude is so unbelievably prevalent among native English speakers. "Obviously everyone should speak *my* language -- why should I ever have to learn another one?"
One would think "not being able to speak anything but Japanese" would be a problem for anyone not speaking Japanese, not just English speakers specifically, so this framing is more than a bit ironic, don't you think?
Seriously, what is so baffling about expecting an interpreter to be provided? Even if you do "speak" the language, this is not some everyday environment, and evidently not a good-faith one either. If I got into a similar situation in the US or similar, you can be sure as shit I'd ask for one too, even though I do believe I have a reasonable command over the English language in general.
An interpreter is in fact provided for important communications, but it's a given that there's not going to be interpreters on-hand for every foreign prisoner 24/7. I think most people would simply accept that a language barrier is a normal fact of life of being arrested in a foreign country. The expectation of not needing to speak a foreign language in a foreign country seems to be a uniquely English one, and it manifests in other ways. There are many people who come to Japan to teach English without understanding a word of Japanese, and then complain about the difficulty of life, how restaraunt staff won't speak English or provide an English menu for them, how this and that are not provided for in English. They don't attempt to learn Japanese even after teaching for 5+ years, and yet criticise Japan for not catering to their needs. The sense of entitlement gets nauseating after you've witnessed it enough.
You are legally entitled to an interpreter when being questioned by police or while in court. I believe the claims in the article are exaggerated, I would speculate intentionally so as the author is an engagement-farming content creator who has made several videos about the subject garnering hundreds of thousands of views. Of course, it is possible their experience was worse than what they are legally entitled to -- the real world often doesn't live up to ideals and legal rights can be violated -- but they speak in broad generalizations about the system as a whole that are not representative.
100% this -- westerners love to criticize Japan's justice system, while ignoring the fact that much of it actually works.
Drugs? Petty crime? Homelessness? No other country comes close to managing these problems as well as Japan does, and Japan somehow manages to do this without descending into a 1984-esque surveillance state. Wander the streets of Tokyo at night and you will see zero drug-addicted homeless people. How many western cities could one say that about?
The virtues you mention are not a consequence of the tortuous treatment described in the post though. Conditions could rise to Western humane standards and the underlying Japanese culture that allows for such peaceful living would still remain.
You can't take the Japanese criminal justice system out of Japan. It's part of a larger whole.
The Western mentality, especially in the USA, focuses on independent will. The government is not supposed to stop people from making choices that are bad for society or bad for themselves. In Japan, the mentality is that every person has an obligation to work with society and to fit in at all costs. The Japanese criminal justice system exemplifies that spirit, but it touches all areas, such as employment, personal relationships, behavior in public, talking to strangers, etc.
In short, if you want to have the advantages of Japan, you need to take it with the disadvantages as well.
Skid row isn’t abandonment, CA spends $47K per homeless person per year in direct and indirect assistance. It exists as it does due to intentional and well funded policy.
Even granting that (which... no. How is it true? Any evidence?) it's still less inhumane than what Japan is doing here. The conditions amount to torture.
The fact that many people opt to falsely plead guilty and get a reduced punishment in a society that highly values honor and saving face should say a lot about it.
Californian spend on homelessness is public info, you’re free to search it yourself.
There is something about seeing drug addicted zombies impossibly contorted in on themselves and swaying in the wind that appears very inhuman to me. If given the choice, pre zombification, of a false confession or life as a zombie I know which I would chose.
Extreme control of movement and sleep including deprivation of it for arbitrary amounts, constant lighting, no outside time, nothing to do for months at a time, lack of nutritious food, all those things in combination constitue torture under most modern definitions.
> Andrej Karpathy can train a GPT-2 class model for less than $80 now, so at least the environmental cost of training may drop to a point that it's acceptable to LLM vegetarians: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587
I suspect that even if you reduced the cost of training or any other real world metric, the goalposts would immediately move. It seems to me that it has never been about those things, but simply about the feeling of superiority one can attain by eschewing something seen as trending.
> built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources
This kind of hyperbole repeated ad infinitum by haters online is not-constructive, IMO. I would be quite certain that the manufacture of whatever computing device the author is accessing the internet on used far more resources and exploited far more human labor than training an ML model ever did.
It's fair to think there will be positive effects and negative effects. The next question should be "for who?"
If the majority of the positive effects of AI are privatized and captured by people who are already wealthy, and the majority of the negative effects are socialized and felt by the poor, then I still think the correct position for most people is to be strongly against AI
> Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?
Of course they would want this -- as long as the OS reports that the user is over 18 via such a system, then Meta is legally off the hook for any COPPA violations.
> The proposals, which return to Parliament on Tuesday, would replace juries in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where a convicted defendant would be jailed for up to three years.
Wow, this is literally the plot of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney video games. I'm sure it will go great with no downsides.
I'm a little torn on this one. On the one hand, people are bad epistemologists and lots of countries manage with similarly limited jury trials. On the other, we're doing it for cost reasons, which I think is the worst basis imaginable for such a move
This attitude is so unbelievably prevalent among native English speakers. "Obviously everyone should speak *my* language -- why should I ever have to learn another one?"
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