> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.

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pezezin 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On the other hand the Japanese economy has been quite stagnant since 1990, and the yen is right now on a downwards spiral, so I don't think it is such a good solution.

And as a gaijin living in Japan, I usually get extremely pissed off at the extreme inefficiency of Japanese companies, things that in any other country would take one month here take 5 years.

	▲	tokioyoyo 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Every country has their own problems. Honestly, there aren't a single large country where everything is perfect. Too many opinions, too many needs, increase median age of the politicians and the population, and etc. causes imperfect solution to every problem. At the end of the day, you have to prioritize and figure out what's important to you. I agree with literally every point you made. Sure economy is stagnant, but I'd rather take stagnant economy than a collapsing one. I agree with a lot of things are slow, but also, most of things are just... not a big deal, at least for me? I lived in Canada, and have parts of my family living in NYC as well. For every slow government related slow things, you can find something that's also slow in the NA as well. I'm not going to mention Europe at this point, as from what I've witness from my European partner, you can find inefficiencies there as well. Again, pros and cons everywhere, just gotta pick and choose what matters to you.

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Klonoar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I was going to comment the same thing.

The prime example for me was always driving at night in Japan and coming across some grandma waving a traffic light for construction. On the surface, it's ridiculous that she's even there - but then again she has a job and can pay her bills (presumably).

Shit might be annoyingly inefficient over there, but it does just work.