farmgineer

Thank you!

That’s interesting! To me, it reads as ‘if I (have) belief’; false cognates are fun!

Edit: s/toe/to me; I hate typing on mobile

Thinking of this later, isn’t our English usage of ‘please’ contracted from ‘if it pleases you’ as in French "s’il vous plaît’? This would be closer to the Norwegian ‘vær så snill’ I mentioned in a previous post, I think? Looking at one source on old English, though, shows ‘Iċ þancie þē’ which looks like ‘I thank thee’ to me. It’s interesting.

Norwegian has ‘x, vær så snill’ which is functionally ‘x, please’ so far as I can tell. Adding ‘takk’ (thanks) at the end of a sentence is another way.

State has multiple meanings such as in the phrase ‘sovereign state’. It doesn’t just refer to subdivisions of other areas (which I think is what you’re thinking here?)

Not in Japan yet, at least on my account. I only use amazon a couple of times a year for things I can’t get anywhere else, but it should have plenty of history to work with.

My union says we will go to the legal system if no agreement is reached. It’s just been very slow going and, at first, felt like nothing was happening.

People do hidden recordings. I’ve heard a mix of things about them actually being admissible if it goes to court (mostly that they are not).

Japanese reputational damage laws. You can get sued even when what you are saying is 100% true

My family gets sued. AboardInJapan would also get sued which is why no news orgs ever pick this stuff up.

Farming is a hobby. A lot of it is done on tractor or seated in the dirt.

I was also tired of the constant noise and business of Tokyo. Don’t really have expensive maintenance.

Call the media, do the drama

Even saying 100% true things, this gets you sued in Japan. This is specifically why I don’t name the company.

I considered killing myself last night. I self-harmed for the first time in many years. My company advertised remote work. I asked if I could move far away from Tokyo and sure, no problem. I got told if RTO, then it would be close and new people only. I got permission to run a side job doing a small farm. Sure no problem.

I’ve been in this industry for 20+ years now.

Mandatory return to office (I live 4 hours each way). They pay transportation expenses per month at a level that wouldn’t cover one day. If you’re nice and apply, we MAY approve (for three months only) 2 days a week required in the office. No guarantee it will be approved. I joined a union to fight this but it’s slow. They will likely still try to fire me.

I have a mortgage. I got a subsidy to move to this small town, that many in Japan provide, but it must be paid back if leaving within 5 years. I also am a registered farmer with farm land which means I legally have to maintain it properly.

Yesterday, they said no more side job is allowed. So I’m not allowed to sell anything I grow anymore, have to close my self-proprietorship, and have to close my company (which has tax impacts on me because now nothing counts as expenses and I lose my ability to do special tax forms). They apparently want food to rot. They want me to rot. The farm was not even yet at a point to make me money. They falsely claimed I got subsidies for farming (I did not and do not) and that it’s no longer just selling extra produce (it still is) and is a full-scale farming operation (it is not). My sales were like 10k yen last year and maybe will get to that this year.

My wife does not work. There are few jobs out here. No remote jobs in the US or Canada are responding and few would even allow Japan time zone even with overlap. Remote jobs for a backend engineer (primarily golang lately with very rusty Java somewhere in my brain unused for many years) are basically non-existent. I’ve applied for jobs in the EEA but, as a non-EEA-citizen, I can basically go fuck myself. My body is way too messed up (multiple broken bones, back issues, etc.) for any really hard manual labor.

So I lose my job, I lose my income, I lose the house, I will never get another mortgage in Japan again, there’s no point to being alive. My wife’s birthday is coming up, which is basically what stopped me. She’ll have a better life without me and at least the house will get paid off so she can do whatever with it.

Living in an apartment in Tokyo would also violate the terms of my mortgage making me lose it (on top of losing a huge chunk of my paycheck) and would also make it impossible to keep up with farm maintenance, let alone the rest of the house and property.

Having worked at a company where all the code was written by Japanese for Japanese-speakers, it’s just nouns in romaji for variables, something verb-y for functions. Some function names had particles as a part of that (still in romaji). No counters that I recall in code (though used in comments).

If zionism means “we have the right to live and worship in our ancestral homeland” only and has nothing to do with power, government, control, etc. then that sounds fine to me (I mostly think humans should be able to do that everywhere). I know some people believe in zionism in that sense.

As soon as it becomes exclusive/exclusionary or involves control or power, or involves “chosenness”, it’s into racist territory IMO.

edit: I can’t spell.

But they don’t always mean what you think 写真はイメージです。 is a classic. “[the] picture is an image”. Of course it is! Well, except it means image in the sense of a representative sample image, not an image of the exact thing. It’s basically a disclaimer they put on product images in case it doesn’t look exactly alike.

I’ve worked in Japan for years which has plenty of people terrible at English, especially in the older generations. They find (or these days google/ai/whatever translate) any documentation they need and just learn the various built-in names for things as needed. This doesn’t stop them from programming. There are websites where people have done that and uploaded the resulting translation and/or answer questions in Japanese about things. I stumbled upon similar sites in Chinese by accident.

Identifiers in code that didn’t support non-ascii identifiers were just romanized Japanese (and I assume Chinese does this as well). So print(zeikomi_nedan); or something where that is the variable name. They don’t redefine alias print in some library or something (though I’m sure a small minority might, I’ve never seen it).

I have seen some kanji-based identifier names in languages with default utf-8 support, but I still don’t think that’s the norm, especially if non-Japanese-speakers are expected to read the code such as in shared projects.

Being old enough to remember Windows not being common, it’s always been a mixed bag. It was interesting to see the transition from windows being a thing you sometimes invoked from the commandline to being the thing into which the computer booted. Gamers and others of course had opinions on all those system resources getting used when they weren’t even needed.

'98 was stable after some big patches for the most part. XP was really the move to make after that. I used to work tech support and had to learn and support all of the various flavors before XP. I’ve used XP onward moving as support gets dropped for the previous one, though one of my PCs runs only linux. If davinci would kindly be stable on linux, I would probably switch, maybe keeping windows around for any games I might really want to play.

Haven’t watched yet, but the stuff they’ve been doing here lately is nuts with visa timing/pricing, etc. “we brought it in line with other countries’ prices” except, y’know, the salary here is 1/2 to 1/3 of those other countries. I got PR before all this mess, thankfully, and had planned on retiring in Japan. I’m now looking for an exit.

The country I’m targeting allows PR after 3 years and one can actually vote in local and regional elections; that’s not a thing in Japan outside of a couple of cities and the right-wingers are always trying to take even that away. The country I’m targeting also allows keeping previous citizenship which I need to help take care of aging family smoothly. I started working on moving to Japan in 2013 and have been here since 2015, but I feel forced to make another choice.

You can check the major Japan carrier sites to gan an idea of what’s around (au, kddi, dokomo, etc.)

I used to fish with my dad in a creak/river than ran behind a different Navistar location. Freaky perch were not rare. No idea what they were dumping in that water (or I guess someone upstream; I can’t prove it was them, but I don’t recall it from other parts upstream).