shikitohno

I mean, I know there had to have been some, but 2/3 of those are out of business and weren't competitive with their Japanese rivals, while Zenith's most recent "notable product" on Wikipedia dates from the 1970s and has been a subsidiary of a Korean company for nearly 30 years.

I think it's mostly that they did way better than the US in terms of making many consumer technology products widely available at a higher quality and better cost than the US did. Like, Japanese brands were huge for televisions, audio equipment and similar goods. I can think of several that were the go to brands for TVs when I was growing up, but I can't think of a single US-based manufacturer, even a crappy one.

They also did way better in terms of building out internet access and public transport than the US has done.

It might only be within a few limited sectors, but when those sectors account for the vast majority of peoples' interactions with technology, it's going to have a far greater impact on their perceptions of relative advancement.

Also, in the pre-internet days, it probably helped that non-Japanese people largely didn't see all the ways that Japan can be an extremely conservative country, like their reliance on fax machines long after pretty much every other country with the means to do so had almost entirely left them behind as obsolete.

It's seems like the 3d movies of the tech world. Every so often, they release a new iteration, tell us it'll change everything, and while people get excited at first, they rapidly realize it's not as useful as it was presented and often impractical. Start developing the next gen version, rinse and repeat.

I had a different, fun experience. My lab work was actually what got me diagnosed, but to make sure I'm taking the right dose and my medication is being effective, I need to get labs done about every 3 months. Insurance decided that nobody could possibly need lab work done more than 3 times a year, so I got a nice $2,000 surprise bill in the mail for the last labs of the year.

No, of course not. Can't have him getting distracted from advancing his handlers' agendas by handing him a snack, now can we?

And the Lamy ballpoints can finally have a decent ink, now that they're making them with the Jetstream ink. Pretty sure it's a Japan exclusive for the moment, though.

Fountain pens? One may want to consider the excellent German brand Lamy which offers both cheap and expensive models of fountain pens (and ballpoint pens too, but not as cheap as Bic). Their cheap ‘Lamy Safari’ pictured here was designed in the 80s/90s to help kids proper handwriting and is still, imho, one of the best cheap/beginner-friendly fountain pen one could buy here in Europe. Its also real sturdy while still being easy to fix if anythign was to happen to it ;)

Depending on where you draw the line, Lamy might no longer count as a European brand, since they were recently bought out by Mitsubishi Pencils.

That aside, you've still got Pelikan, who do make some entry level fountain pens.

It’s the little things like not understanding the historical context that something from the past fits in while simultaneously telling me Im wrong about the time that I lived through.

In fairness, that's not necessarily a sign of them being young, but could be any number of things at play. I've had my grandmother literally tell me not to tell hew how things were during World War II, because she lived through it, when we were talking about well documented actions of major historical figures that she was confidently incorrect about. No amount of documentation about what Churchill, Stalin or Hitler did during a particular event could change her mind, because she lived through it, never mind the fact that she was like 10 at the time. /r/AskHistorians had a 20 year moratorium on discussing recent events for a reason. Then again, this is the same lady who left her church of decades, because she was sure she was better at interpreting the Bible and church doctrine than all the priests who spent years studying those topics in seminary, since she occasionally read random books of the Bible and was older than they were.

It could also just be peoples' biases at play. A Marxist historian and a fundamentalist, conservative Christian historian will come to wildly different conclusions and interpretations of things like the significance and impact of the rise of the religious right in the US under figures like Ronald Reagan, despite looking at the very same events.

And it could always just be that people are essentially engaging in drive-by posting quite often on the internet. For all the good things it can bring us, and the sense of community that it often provides, I think that internet "communities" really just provide us with a close approximation of community, while fundamentally lacking key elements that help real communities to exist and function in the long term. Personally, I'm closer to the Democratic moderates/centrists that abound on Lemmy.world than I am to my coworkers or my parents politically, yet I find that political discussions here tend to lose all civility and sincerity much quicker than they do with my boss who is all gung-ho for MAGA in real life. Like, I actually got my boss to come around on things like taxing the rich and universal healthcare when I had a chance to explain them without the hysterical stuff Fox tosses out and with examples of how they would actually benefit him to have as a baseline during election season last year, and it was a more civil and less heated conversation than some of those I had here a few months prior about whether Harris was really a good pick when the Democrats announced her as their candidate last year.

Metallicy

Honestly pretty sure not many people used 3rd party apps to begin with so I don’t think it was to do with any of that like the other strangely confident commenters seem to imply.

I don't think it was sheer numbers of users that made 3rd party apps a big deal, but who was using them. Someone would need to actually do some research to confirm or refute it, but my experience was that they were disproportionately favored by power users, i.e. the really prolific posters and commenters that you would come to know and recognize after spending a bit of time in certain subs. If enough of those people decided they couldn't be convinced to use the mobile site or official app, you'd probably have some small amount of previous lurkers step up their posting a bit, and bots.

From what everyone says when they mention the current state of the site, it mostly sounds like it's bots just spamming reposts and arguing with each other with recycled comments originally posted by other users.

Or, I don't know, just go after the companies and individuals found employing people who don't have a legal right to work in the country, with fines that can't be dismissed as a cost of doing business and prison time for those responsible. If there were truly significant consequences for employing people who cannot legally work in the country, people would stop offering exploitative jobs to undocumented immigrants and I can't help but imagine that people would stop coming, once the primary reason they currently come ceased to exist. Probably also much more cost-effective to track down and nail a single employer, operating out of a fixed location, rather than chasing down 500 individuals working illegally for that company.

Of course, the flip side of this is that cost of living would suddenly see a huge spike once the restaurant, agriculture, construction and sanitation industries, amongst many others, no longer have ready access to a whole labor pool that can be easily exploited with minimal, if any, consequences. If people think groceries or eating out is expensive now, wait until they see the prices when those industries have to pay prevailing wages and benefits to US citizens in order to have staff.

It'll get me at least a few years of happiness, and perhaps make my ensuing case of diabetes mellitus more appropriately named than that of most peoples'.