Faceman2K23

Its a complex and multi-layered issue, but the short gist of it is that many houses have become effectively worthless, there are thousands of abandoned properties as they are often impossible to sell, whether they are liveable or not, and there is no incentive to hold onto property and maintain it as the value always depreciates.

In most countries, a home will appreciate in value slowly over time, with some fluctuation, but in general it is a good idea if you can afford it, there is incentive to maintain and upgrade the property as it can be sold later in life or passed down to family. The Japanese market has some of that in valuable areas of course, well built up to code homes, with nearby access to public transport and services, same with older historic homes that are worth the cost of upkeep for cultural reasons.

The overall mindset is also different, a home is a depreciating asset, that will wear out and eventually need to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch.

There are a few videos on YouTube analysing it from different perspectives (just search Japanese housing market), and there are multiple perspectives, one being that treating housing as a valuable, appreciating asset is spurning an out of control market with ever increasing pricing pushing home ownership further and further away from the average person and Japans mindset of the home as a tool rather than an asset is a positive. But on the other hand going too far in the other direction where there is zero incentive to build a home that will last generations unless you are highly wealthy to begin with, no incentive to maintain or upgrade the building, they are simply a tool, a utility, an object that you need to have but is a depreciating asset to eventually die and be replaced with the next cheapest option.

It's a completely different mentality that has also led to its own problems, instead of the homes not being affordable because of an increasing market, they are cheap but often entirely useless without great costs to bring them up to liveable conditions or modern codes and standards, but then there is little incentive to do more than the bare minimum because you will never sell it for more than you paid, it will be worth significantly less after you have spent your years in it.]

This is made worse by the lack of young people and ultra low immigration, the cheap houses that could be considered liveable or could be financially viable to bring up to standard have no interest because they are in dying country towns or rural areas with no reason to move there, there are no young people moving back to rural areas like we see in other countries because the home is simply a place to live, not an asset worth moving out of the city for, a dying town will die in japan, whereas other countries are seeing increasing rural growth due to it being the only remaining cheap housing and people having the mindset to invest in it as an asset, making it worth moving for.

Decades of government backed protectionism paired with an ageing population will do that. people were widely propagandised into xenophobia and that sort of thing tends to stick in the psyche of the community for generations.

That said, the older generations are the ones still holding onto those views and they will be forced to change eventually.

You can still find signs on restaurants or shops across Asia that say "no tourists" or things like that, but they are becoming less common, even in rural areas. there is still the language barrier with the older generations, which is part of the reason those signs existed, but the majority of younger people across most of east Asia have some level of English from their mandatory school curriculums. They learn more western history, more western customs, exposed to more western media, western style homes are popular to those who can afford them (the Japanese housing market is it's own deep, deeeep topic), etc. etc. so those people naturally become more open and accepting of immigration

I expect to see japan keep crashing for another 10 years or so though sadly, and while Korea has been fairly stable they are rolling towards the same sort of downturn themselves.

China has been slowing economically for some years now for the same reasons, but their situation is a little different as their government will do whatever is necessary to protect their image, above their actual economy, so it is hard to know what is really happening there. For example, the whole giving gold to home buyers to avoid crashing the housing market thing.

There is a clean version available now. roughly 8.8gb.

Edit: not quite, it's a crop.

good, a fair and sensible decision, now lets just sit and wait for the conservative media to spin this in their usual ridiculous ways

Perhaps the perfect device would be more like a folding phone, with a nice modern oled on the front but a flexible greyscale eink inside. The flexible eink already exists its just not capable of a tight enough bend to work in something the size of a galaxy fold.

Don't know but I always liked them as an all rounder device. I think they are still using a last gen colour tech, but there are dual screen phones with lcd on one side and epaper on the other that are a nifty middle ground.

I don't think colour eink is quite there though. The kaleido tech has enough speed to be usable, but poor colour and much greyer whites than carta greyscale due to the colour being a translucent pigment layer over the top of a greyscale screen. Eink gallery could be used but currently is much slower to do a full colour draw, too slow for a phone or tablet. Eink spectra 6 looks incredible but is also too slow for anything but signage.

There was one group showing off a prototype transparent OLED layer over a greyscale eink backing which sounds like the best of all worlds, so we will see what that amounts to.

Yes indeed, and google get less money. however there are some signs that companies are starting to crack down on that.

good date for a bunch of racist fucks and conspiracy theorists to rant at the general public.

as far as I can tell, but since they don't actually say that it's either due to a patent on transflective tech (transflexive some branded it) or because it doesnt do as much as that technology did, from the examples i've seen of the larger tablets being used in the sun it doesn't look anywhere near as bright and clear as a good E-ink tablet like a Boox, but in low light or night it looks better but the power usage is significantly higher.

Just a tip for those of you that do cave to pressure and go with the paid premium option. or already have one but dont want to pay for more accounts or a family account.

You can set up channels or brand accounts as sub-accounts on a premium subscription and they will act like separate accounts with the advantages of premium, so if you have a large family and don't want to pay for the full family subscription (which only has 5 slots anyway) you can set up a few sub-accounts that each get their own subscriptions, recommendations, settings and all have the premium features.

So if you want to make a premium account for a parent or child, you can do that with one single subscription if you can take the caveat of them being brand accounts rather than fully their own thing.

This works on things like Android TV or Google TV, but you need to log into the main account then switch to a sub account in the app, however, there is no authentication to switch between channel accounts this way, so it's really only useable for families only. I use this at home to run 4 separate nvidia shield youtube apps with their own subscriptions and recommendations on one single premium payment.

I expect they will change how that works in the future to remove the loophole, probably by charging for channel accounts or having it locked behind some kind of overpriced professional usage tier, but for now, it might be a good option for some.

the advantage of a traditional LCD display with backlight is high refresh rate, low pixel response times and full colour, so you can watch video on it an scroll around dragging pictures without smear or blur. these require constant power to keep the image on screen. LED just means the image is lit with LED light, this is how pretty much all LCDs work these days. it used to be there were CFL and LED LCDS, early LCD displays were lit with high voltage fluorescent tubes before LEDs became cheap enough and bright enough to be the better option.

E-Ink on the other hand moves physical pigment particles around in an oil to form an image that works by reflecting ambient light, just like print on paper, no power is wasted on bright LEDs to make it viewable in a lit room or daylight, a small light is used for low light viewing. They are perfectly readable in direct sunlight and once the image is formed it requires zero power to maintain and can stay viewable almost indefinitely, so they are extremely power efficient when used properly. their disadvantage is they take a measureable amount of time to form the image so video or smooth scrolling are not possible and they are mostly greyscale.

It's an IPS LCD with a matte glass display and a slightly reflective base layer for improved sunlight view ability with less backlight power required. similar to the "transflexive" displays that were popular some years ago.