> Apartment prices are ALMOST back to where they were in 1989.
You mean when Japan was in an epic price bubble (ie: the imperial palace land alone was worth more than all of California) which was followed by decades of economic stagnation? I'd guess that has impacted their view on real estate to a somewhat unique degree in the world.
Yeah, if the foreign entrepreneur argument is that they're helping the Japanese economy and not just barely sustaining another person in japan then the new requirements seem exactly in line with that?
I know several young people who have migrated to Japan and due to the low cost of starting a company ended up building great businesses with pretty serious revenue and employee ten to hundreds of staff. This wouldn’t have happened if they needed such a large amount of capital just to start.
The problem I see with the new rules are it just stops entrepreneurs and rewards rich money launders. The visa applications should considered based on merit and not just about capital.
Does Japan need more small businesses owned by foreigners (that make so little money as to be useless for economic growth) or do they actually need more foreigners to change the adult diapers of their ever aging population?
Buddy, when your population is in decline at Japan levels I think it makes sense to have all the businesses you can get. I’ll also say compared to many local businesses in Japan, I know several that make 100-200x what the local, totally outdated <insert store / business type> make.
I’m talking hospitality, bar owners , cafe, therapists, even people who have setup manufacturing businesses building anything from prefabbed affordable housing and to handmade skis. These are business that need a lot of materiel and help the economy keep moving here. Many of these businesses exist because it was cheap to get started. Young people who came here for various reasons , had visions and executed. Many being the kind of people that make the world a better place.
Would you prefer Japan just imports south East Asian slaves and boots them at will, stifles any competition and just falls apart ?
I honestly found your comment really short sighted / uninformed.
The whole point of these investment visas is to inject large amounts of money into the country or build what the country wants to strategically. These $30k business visas, if it isn't a visa scam, is simply starting restaurants and small businesses that Japanese people can do themselves.
So what if their population is in decline? It'll just pick back up when there is plenty of space. Just because their population is in decline now doesn't mean they should import from other countries who most certainly do not share the local culture an is a disruption to their way of life.
Once again, I'm not Japanese and do not live there. What happens in Japan doesn't affect me. As a neutral bystander, the new rules make far more sense for Japan even if it hurts a few good honest foreigners.
Hopefully people like you realize many good things about Japan come from outside of Japan. People act like the only way Japan can survive is to return to some sort of isolationist state.
The good news is that once America becomes more liberal again, Japan will do, it's just a global outrage against "foreigners" going on right now which the herd follows.
Should other countries where Japan benefits greatly, ie Australia constantly move the goalposts on Japanese businesses and basically make life harder for them to protect “their way of life” ?
> then you end up with a different interface everywhere.
This whole post is about someone being upset that Firefox finally did support the system level interface and shortcut. And you're upset about that while asking for consistent interfaces. Some people can just never be happy I guess.
Just to put the record straight, I'm (author of the post) not upset, mad or sad about anything, it is what it is, I'm sure some like it, others don't. I'm glad I have the option to turn it off, like most stuff I don't like in Firefox, it tends to be easy to get rid of it.
I shared it as a blog post as I've already had two people asking me privately if I know how to get rid of it, as I'm the reason they use 1Password in the first place, not because "I got so upset I couldn't contain it" or something like that. Surely there are more wondering it then.
I also don't think parent seem upset either, but I won't attempt to speak for them. But arguing for/against a position doesn't mean they aren't happy or that they are upset, conflicting views and perspectives is normal, even within the same person sometimes :)
I'd bet money that the gun lobby is behind this. What better way to dilute the anti-gun sentiment then to get useless legislation that targets a group that has traditionally been anti-gun. Even the EFF, which generally doesn't touch second amendment stuff, is speaking up. Massive gun lobby win right there.
More I'd guess since the new org needs to prove itself long enough for stock to vest. Fudge the benchmarks gives them a longer horizon before they're all fired anyways.
My sense is that it sounds amazing in theory to executives who have never had to themselves look at internal data. In reality the internal knowledge base is a mix of incomplete, inaccurate, self serving lies, out of date and so on. At worst, the data is explicitly biased to hide reality from executives so the AI will look extra good to executives. Of course, a business that makes all tactical decisions based on lies is not going to do well.
If a startup is laying off engineers then it’s dead in the water. That means it’s not growing and focused on cost cutting at the expense of velocity. Thats what a large company does. The issue isn’t AI but the startup fundamentally being broken and this being a last gasp for air before it dies.
Yeah what a lot of people are missing here is tons of small startups are laying people off, but it's not because they don't need engineers, it's because they are out of runway because their entire vertical (usually some sort of SaaS, often b2b SaaS) is basically now nonexistent. Traditionally businesses favored buying software over building it for cost reasons. Now they can cheaply build exactly what they want instead of paying through the teeth for something that is only slightly like what they want. This doesn't mean the work is gone, but it does largely mean large swathes of the SaaS vertical will be gone. The work itself is shifting to the individual businesses that were once the customers of the SaaS.
SWEs will be fine, all these small VC-funded startups building another CRUD app will not.
I work for a startup that makes a b2b SaaS that is _way_ too complex for anyone to spec out in a markdown file, especially when taking things like ITAR compliance into consideration.
We have seen steady growth and there’s been no signs of slowing down.
Our software facilitates order/quote/factory floor workflow automation with auditable trails in the manufacturing space, with cad file analysis and complex procedural pricing equations for quote generation, alongside a Shopify style storefront and many more goodies. We interface with things like shipping, taxes, erp integrations, and so much more.
I don’t see anyone vibe coding an alternative to our software even if they could. Manufacturers have enough on their plate managing their factory floors.
That said, we facilitate $millions in manufacturing orders per week and our engineering team is 3 people. We couldn’t do what we do without AI, and we would have needed to hire more engineers to handle the scale of our business if it weren’t for the power of Claude Code and Cursor.
A poster-child startup is one that has a long waitlist of willing future customers, and whose engineering team is scaling the tech up, up, up to keep up with the demand.
No, it's "if you already have engineers that know your stack and customers and business then getting rid of them to save a bit of short term cash is stupid unless you're out of runway because of bad business decisions." That is a tangential point to hiring more engineers. You may slow down the rate or hiring however the ROI for getting rid of them in a growing startup is silly imho. A collapsing startup is a different beast.
You mean when Japan was in an epic price bubble (ie: the imperial palace land alone was worth more than all of California) which was followed by decades of economic stagnation? I'd guess that has impacted their view on real estate to a somewhat unique degree in the world.
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