abff08f4813c

Love this idea. Yes, everyone should have a say and have representation of their choice!

This is another reason why proportional representation is a better system. One vote wouldn’t matter because one vote wouldn’t flip a riding or change the number and type of representatives who become MPs. After all, the percentage of MPs elected in the riding wouldn’t change significantly enough with one vote.

Agree 100%, we definitely need to move to PR ASAP.

With proportional representation, we would have the same or fewer elections than we have now.

Elsewhere on the piefediverse I've seen the argument made that PR also generally leads to other benefits like better cooperation between candidates and less mudslinging.

The money and resources used for this one vote, along with court time and a potential byelection, make a mockery of our democratic process.

I mean it does have it's uses. The byelection for the two Georgia Senate seats back in 2020 (technically a pair of runoff elections) is what ensured the Dems senate majority back then.

Just going off the article alone, I'm not 100% sure if that's the rule. But it sounds reasonable enough...

Yep. But in Japan there is no such thing as a family doctor or GP. Closest is a doctor of internal medicine naika

Interesting. In fact there's quite a bit of difference between the two, https://mana.md/whats-the-difference-between-a-general-practitioner-and-an-internist/

But there's also already concern that we're running out of GPs in other countries, e.g. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/oma-declining-number-medical-school-students-family-medicine-1.7182901 - so perhaps this is just a glimpse of the future.

Were it so serious, you would be identified and put on leave or whatever was deemed appropriate for the circumstances. It would not be anonymous but compartmentalised.

That's not as bad, but it's still a case of an employer knowing far more about my medical health than I'm used to.

In more populous areas, mobile clinics (think RV buses) will be brought to offices to conduct the exams.

Interesting idea. Would certainly make it easier to get it done when the clinic is brought to you.

As it so happens I just got the email from my company about the medical check. It needs to be conducted by the end of October.

Good luck!

All employees no matter their nationality are to take yearly medicals. The results are shared only with a company appointed doctor. One reason is so that the company can implement changes if there is a pattern of bad health. Like if their workers are unfit, they might start a fitness program, or education program etc.

So far this sounds reasonable and makes a lot of sense.

If a diagnosis from the examination comes back as needing more attention, you will be directed to do so (but you can ignore these, too if it is not severe).

Ah, so basically the same as if just seeing my own personal family doctor.

If there is something majorly wrong that would affect your work, the company doctor would have to notify the company.

Ah, so the exact opposite of seeing my own personal family doctor. And I assume it's not an anonymous report (you have X people working for you who have Y disease which will affect your business) but an identifying one (abff08f4813c has Y disease which you need to know about). Which leads to why someone might attend but refuse one or a few specific tests...

Some are very basic like height and weight, hearing and so on.

Well, even this - if I have that job which requires me to be under a certain weight, and I know that I just recently gained a few above. So I refuse that part to avoid getting it reported to my company. Or if I know my hearing has gotten worse (say due to a checkup I had with an overseas doctor) where excellent and superior hearing is a requirement for the job, same deal.

As for everyone attending and refusing all tests, I doubt that would happen.

Agreed. I didn't mean all, but just some. Perhaps like the one specific test involving needles to check blood (maybe this would happen due to a fear of contaminated needles based on a hypothetical recent incident?). But you answered below - if it's just attendance that's being counted, then the specific nature of this kind of refusal wouldn't matter so much.

But I ...[doubly].. believe that attendance is what is counted, not what tests were or were not taken.

That makes sense. It's probably hard in practice to require a company get N number of employees to take a specific test (and prove it was done) while attendance is easier to count, so attendance is used as a proxy that enough employees are getting checked for the necessary things and being found in good health.

Again, opinion only.

Well, these are facts - meaning that they're fact-checkable. We might not be entirely sure of the answers to some of these and perhaps have to make guesses or speculate, but unlike opinions a fact like "(In Japan) attendance is what is counted" for example can in principle be checked and confirmed as right or wrong, which is not the case for a true opinion.

And it's not clear that tariffs will be lifted on the UK as part of the agreement?

Will wait for the details to be finalized, but we shouldn't sign a similar agreement unless it makes sense. And it's hard to see a world where a trade agreement with tariffs would ever make sense, so...

If everyone who voted Liberal in your riding thought that, and decided not to vote for that reason, then I think the results would have been very different.

I sometimes wonder if something similar happened further south last November - too many voters were lukewarm on Harris and sat out instead of voting, figuring that Harris would win anyways. And we all know how that turned out.

No need. Interest and penalties on the unpaid taxes amount to significantly more than the float.

Hmm. Perhaps your right. I just dislike the idea of a rich dude essentially getting a loan from the gov't by refusing to pay his share upfront. But if the math works out and it doesn't hurt fundability then I'm sold.

UBI should be treated more like a dividend paid to a shareholder. The shareholder’s financial situation is irrelevant to what the shareholder is owed.

This is tied to the "entitlement vs charity" concept. So agreed on that point.

However, I also wrote earlier that,

Basically the rich are required to pay as part of their tax their own BI in advance, before the govt doles it back out to them.

Solely for that purpose the financial situation is kinda relevant. The rich, and perhaps the really high middle class, effectively have to self-fund their own UBI. Everyone else has it funded through a pool of money that the gov't provides (which in turn comes from the usual taxation authority, including taxes on the rich).

As a concept, this shouldn't be important to the ideal that is UBI. However, it's an important wonky implementation detail - everyone still gets UBI and it's still an entitlement not a charity, but this detail makes it affordable for governments to provide (the rich technically get it too, but it's basically just an accounting gimmick).

Haha, I like the suggestion of a connection to Polish. kbin and kbin.social were created by a Polish dev, after all, and that was my introduction into the fediverse.

Basically my instance started out as an experiment - I was trying to set up a single-user instance for free. I was successful (well, more or less - my always-on internet connection is paid as a perk by my employer, and I set it up on an old laptop that I had lying around).

One of the consequences though of going fully free is that I don't get much choice in the name of my instance. (It's actually a hash of the SSH key I use to authenticate into the service provider at srv.us I believe.) Likewise, my username is derived as a hash of my posts from spez's website before I moved on to kbin.social

Sorry to get off topic but this is a big annoyance I have as I know people affected by these issues, too.

Happy to take part in discussions like these. I think everyone knows someone who's been affected by the issues at hand. Also, I think the comments are deep enough now that others wouldn't necessarily see any off topic discussion here..

Going back to an earlier point you mentioned about the yearly medical exam required by companies. Companies are required by law to have their employees take a yearly medical exam.

Hmm, is this all employees now (including Japanese nationals and special permanent residents)? Or just the foreign nationals working for the Japanese company in Japan?

The employee is not technically required to

If it was for all employees, then I'd still wonder if the foreign national could get in trouble with Immigration for taking the exam.

(but if too few employees attend it will get the company in hot water).

So the employees are fine to refuse the exam, but the company would be incentivised to get them to take it. I hope that they're only allowed to use the carrot (using positive incentives like gift giving or granting benefits) and not the stick (negative incentives like threatening termination for not taking the exam).

Also, you can refuse any part of the exam if you so wish.

But I wonder also how that ties into the above - if hypothetically every employee in the company takes the exam but every employee refuses the same part of the exam, is the company still in trouble? Or is the checkbox merely "N employees took the medical" with the finer details not mattering as much?

I totally see where you are coming from and feel for it. Knowledge should be free.

So I'd say that there are two parts to this issue. The first is how this is being done. Remember that Stanford already has the Stanford Center at Peking University (SCPKU) and has had exchanges with Chinese students before via the Undergraduate Visiting Research Program. In fact, as recently as 2019, they were a collaborator with Huawei, as per https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20190211124159161

So going to all this trouble, as described in the linked article, isn't really all that necessary. And it's all a bit disturbing if one is in Anna's position - why am I dealing with someone who's dishonest with me about who they are? Why am I being lied to?

The other part is that, I'm not confident that the CCP would be sharing what they learn with us. Unlike the open knowledge exchanges that I mentioned above, what's described in the article is stuff being learned more secretively. Which perhaps would be fine if it ultimately went towards the good of the public in China, but since we aren't even supposed to know (from their point of view) that they have it, who's to say it would be used for the greater good? They might instead hoard it until they figure out a way for individual members to become rich from that. Which would benefit no one.

Finally, I'm ignoring the whole military angle here. But Universities generally have safeguards in place to prevent their research from being used for harm. The manner in which this "espionage" is happening would undermine those safeguards, however, potentially allowing research to be used in ways that the researchers would not have agreed to otherwise.

No, thank you.