I've added a public/private toggle as well as a delete-account functionality in the settings. Changing handles is tricky, and haven't implemented it yet but I'll definitely think about it.
There are maps online [1],[2] that you can use. Oceans and deserts are the darkest, but national parks and sparsly populated areas are also a good choice. Of course, most of the time there’s nothing ‘nearby’ as population centers are always well lit.
Japan is basically socialism when it comes to values and the actions people take. Limited tolerance for big change or extreme competition, very static communities and low mobility. It used to work uptill the 80's, but in the age of innovation and change, it's backfiring.
Japanese society is collectivism, not socialism. They have a long history and many traditions around keeping social harmony. This is has both good and bad effects.
This gets confused for socialism because when action happens, everyone is on the same page and working to support the action. Before that point, there are lots of meeting and discussions to create harmony and make sure that everyone agrees with the action. Sometimes this is lead bottom up, workers will get an idea and circulate it to get everyone's buy in but without the upper management's approval, no one will try an idea for fear of causing offense. Which leads me in to how they are very authoritarianism, if the boss tells you a poster is blue not green, everyone will agree that it is blue. Only after the boss is gone will people stand around and question the edict.
If you look at how Toyota reacted to electric vehicles, someone did not like the idea or their pet project was fuel cells and that is the direction they took for a long time, rather than hedge their bets and split focus that is what they were committed to and now they are late to the EV party where they had a large head start with the Prius.
Socialism is worker-controlled means of production. State-controlled means of production is socialism if the workers control the state (which is generally not the case for states that call themselves "socialist").
No, that's communism, or at least what communist propaganda say it is. In communism the means of production are controlled by the state (saying they're controlled by the workers, but it's false).
AFAIK, the means of production (large ones, not a one-man-tailor-shop) were never controlled by the workers, except maybe in the extremely short periods of anarchism.
In any case, Japan and its history are very far away from Socialism / Communism. Meiji Era was pre-industrial Samurai. Meiji / Imperial Japan was Fascist but with the rise of independent companies like Mitsubishi (who had ties to the old Samurai families). Perhaps its best to use Japanese words: like Zaibatsu, to describe these concepts.
I don't know if Capitalist is the best word for Japan, because those weird centuries-old Samurai families / companies are just an alien concept to Western-language. Yes, Zaibatsu is kinda-sorta like a Western Company or Corporation, but not really.
If I were forced to put Japan on the Capitalist vs Communist axis, I'd say the proliferation of Zaibatsu clearly put them towards Capitalist slant (ie: private entities who control large sums of wealth). But its very different than Western societies or our concept of companies. The values system of a Zaibatsu / Japanese century-old company is very different from the values system of a traditional American mega-corp.
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Going back to this topic: Nintendo itself was founded in 1889, during this rise of the Meiji Era and Zaibatsu (though I don't think Nintendo ever grew to the size large enough to be considered a Zaibatsu... it grew up and existed in the era of such beasts).
Due to the emphasis of longevity and company values, Japan has odd traditions. Such as the concept of adult-adoption, where some Fathers (often businessmen in charge of a 200, 300+ year old company) will adopt 20 to 30+ year olds with the expectation that these adults will take over a family business.
Does this make Japan more capitalist or socialist? Well, neither. Its just different and probably best to try to not bring Western axis (like Capitalism vs Socialism) to describe their society.
Japanese society from Meiji era onward was undoubtably influenced by the British (Japan studied the history of the other "industrialized island", and used Britain as the basis for their new government / theories). And later, when USA took over and occupied after WW2, Japan further was influenced by USA. As such, I really do think they're more capitalist if we had to pick capitalism vs socialism.
Japan's big deviation from what "capitalism" has meant since the 1980s, in the US and Britain, at least—which is to say, neoliberal economics—wasn't quite as weird to "westerners" at the time it was really at its height, I think, because we hadn't so entirely shifted our Overton window to put neoliberalism smack in the middle. But now, for sure, it doesn't look like what's usually promoted as healthy capitalism around here.
Instead of "my half-understanding of Ricardo means I'm sure this will make us all better off" free trade and laissez-faire domestic economic policies, they pursued lopsided (export-focused) trade, plus heavy government intervention and public-private partnerships aimed at accelerating technological development and reducing domestic technical competition among the zaibatsu, in order to make them more competitive in foreign markets. Their "miracle" economy spanning decades involved a ton of government guidance and spending and seemingly-weird shit like deliberately keeping domestic prices higher than they otherwise could have been—with the guidance part maybe being the most surprising bit, to those who've internalized certain limited ideas about what can and (surely!) cannot work well in economic policy.
It worked incredibly well and was the first draft of what would become the blueprint for the "Asian Tiger" economic strategy.
[EDIT] Big deviation in the postwar era and (kinda) up to today, I mean. Obviously it was doing some different stuff during and before WWII.
Then you're just describing your own experience. Unless you're saying your experience is the objective definition of a real life definition. Is there an objective definition you had in mind?
My experience is shared with millions of other people that lived in communism. To me (us), the difference between communism and the rest of socialist spectrum is that in communism, the state owns (100%, not just some shares) and runs (manages) the factories.
I thought the declassification of US government documents was 25 years. Or I guess there's an exemption when it comes to military intelligence? I wonder where and when the data was collected.
The data has been available for quite a while, but available is different from usable:
> While challenges involved in spatially correcting these unusual panoramic film images has long served as a stumbling block to researchers, an online tool called “Sunspot” now offers a straightforward process for efficient and accurate orthorectification of CORONA, helping to unlock the potential of this historical imagery for global-scale archaeological prospection. With these new opportunities come significant new challenges in how best to search through large imagery datasets like that offered by CORONA.
You're right I should've looked more closely, but I was just wondering about what it said towards the end of the article about U2 spy photographs and what's becoming declassified.
> After 25 years, declassification review is automatic with nine narrow exceptions that allow information to remain as classified. At 50 years, there are two exceptions, and classifications beyond 75 years require special permission.[0]
The nine exemptions can be found at the Justice Department's website[1].
The amount of available documents has skyrocketed in recent past, especially for present-day history, and they're not always easily usable. For instance, if your interested in the Stalin administration, there are millions of orders, notes, studies and transmissions stored in boxes somewhere. If you were a historian in that time period, studying new documents, a lifetime would only let you see a very tiny fraction of existing sources.
Remember these movies where a small-firm lawyer is hammered with tons of document boxes in a discovery process against a big corporation? Well, historians are like that, but they have less money and they don't know how many boxes there are. Also they have to look for the boxes themselves rather than them being delivered at their office.
In older, well-studied fields there are few boxes, they are already referenced, and historians have a chance to see everything over their career. In more recent, less studied fields, there are countless unopened boxes.
I'm not a big proponent of LLM proliferation, but I was thinking that mass review of tons of scanned documents might be exactly the sort of thing they're really useful for. Given an AI that hasn't been ruthlessly tuned to be as politically neutral as possible, you could have a huge database and query it in plain English like "were there any documents that made overt reference to extremely corrupt behavior?"
People with the knowhow to do this kind of stuff are mostly busy trading eyeballs or stock, and college history departments are not exactly rolling in it.
Still, there is an effort made to make these collections more easily avaialble. For instance, in the case of soviet archives, [1] describes the work done and the conditions to access. That work is far from exhaustive though, and a large part of the stuff still needs to be done the slow way, or require special requests in order to be accessed.
To answer a query, your LLM needs to "read" the documents first. The context window will not be big enough for this, so you have to fine tune the model.
Problem is, you need to cross-check with the reference material in case it's subject to hallucinations.
Oh, I was thinking that the cross-checking is the point. You'd use the LLM as a "hazily thinking search function" to narrow your examination of old documents, not as a replacement for reading the documents.
I don't know what to do about the context window, though.
Maybe it's just analog to digital conversion. Some stuff only gets used for research after some digitization project since it's not really searchable on a more global scale otherwise. Could be completely wrong here of course.
" In August 1974, the Joint Chiefs of Staff destroyed all the minutes and transcripts of their meetings going back to 1947, and in 1978 essentially stopped keeping any such records. Only 30 pages of notes have survived, much to the dismay of military historians and scholars of the Cold War."
So, like, we will never get the discussions around, say, them using smallpox against North Korea.
>25X7 – reveal information that would impair the current ability of U.S. government officials to protect the President, Vice President, and other protectees for whom protection services, in the interest of national security, are authorized;
Like that scene from the JFK movie where Donald Sutherland's character is going through a long check list of all the things the secret service would have done.
Like, snipers on roof tops, planning the route so there's no slow downs, etc.
> (6) reveal information, including foreign government information, that would cause serious harm to relations between the United States and a foreign government, or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States;
I've added a public/private toggle as well as a delete-account functionality in the settings. Changing handles is tricky, and haven't implemented it yet but I'll definitely think about it.