Tbf many convenience store jobs in Japan are already run by foreigners. So it’s just outcompeting local based foreigners .
Japan does feel a bit behind, only this summer have I just noticed the Amazon go equilivant in Tokyo. It very much felt like something that would’ve happened in Japan first then Seattle.
The neon issue was the engine harness fraying to the PCM and eventually burning out either that pin on the PCM or cable grounded itself.
Back in the day I was buying these, around 2005' or so, for $300-400 non stop and repairing that, the dash that cracked and misc cosmetics.
They were great cars, the R/T model in manual was fantastic in gas, reliability and safety (sadly crashed it.) but boy was 16-20yr old me happy with these neons. Can't believe they sold shy of $9,999 when new (for base of course)
Just reading your post took me back 2 decades, wow.
The dodge Neons had a an issue for over a decade where the bottom trim 4cyl engine would leak oil constantly. They often needed a top up of oil with each tank of gas.
In late 2000s, the problem was finally fixed by Dodge switching to a multi-layer steel head gasket. They had previously used a cheaper option. No more oil leaks.
Gotta love penny pinching.
Absolute dogshit cars. Mine ran better when you first started it up in the dead of winter at -10f because then the tolerances were actually good! Once it warmed back up it ran like shit again.
They handled outright abuse very well though. My sister drove it up state to deliver it to me for 400 miles with zero oil and she does not drive slow. It once threw the alternator belt while I was driving and I couldn't understand why the electrics were acting so weird, at least until I turned off the windshield wipers and headlights and CD player and things worked better. The OEM belt we bought to replace it basically did not fit and we had to move the alternator to the absolute extent of its travel to make it work. But work it did. It also never ran on more than 3 cylinders except in the freezing cold.
Probably one of the best "For your young child" cars ever produced. That was before everyone had to armor up little Timmy in a Pershing Tank though, so now we all suffer from worse roads, more expensive cars, and lack of tiny car market. It was weirdly good in the snow, which is funny because the tires were $34 at walmart, but it weighed almost nothing so it didn't need traction.
You know, I'd like to actually know the answer to the question you're posing there. Does discussing suicide increase the overall rate, is it neutral -- or does it even decrease it? The Samaritans are usually regarded as a net public benefit, though they tend not to encourage people to go through with it, whereas the Wikipedia link suggests that the users of that forum have some kind of fetish for it.
I would also expect to find that the effect of internet was minimal (in my case because I think the drivers of suicide are mostly socioeconomic), but I'd really like to see a proper study. I'm also aware that there is quite a lot of peer-reviewed evidence that pro-anorexia websites do actually cause harm, and there's an obvious parallel to be drawn.
Media coverage if done irresponsibly can encourage others to do the same.
> Research from over 100
international studies provide evidence that the way suicide deaths are reported is
associated with increased suicide rates and suicide attempts after reporting [6,7].
> At the same time the WHO also suggests that positive and responsible reporting of suicides
which promotes help-seeking behaviour, increases awareness of suicide prevention, shares
stories of individuals overcoming their suicidal thinking or promotes coping strategies can
help reduce suicides and suicidal behaviour [6,7,8]
Having perused the site a number of times, I wouldn't say many people there "have a fetish for it". You're a million times more likely to be told to kill yourself on 4chan than on SS.
SS simply says a) suicide should be your choice, b) dehumanizing people for having suicidal thoughts is bad. Sadly these opinions are so far outside the overton window that suicidal people end up having no choice but to discuss their problems with other suicidal people - likely not a good basis for improvement but the human is a social animal so I'll take it over nothing.
And although SS provides info on how you can kill yourself, it also tells you how you can't kill yourself, and that has apparently saved me from permanent liver damage. So at least for me it has been objectively beneficial - more so than the brainless repetition of "consult a professional" which seems to be the gold standard for suicide prevention these days.
Thanks for sharing. It's actually reassuring to hear that the forum isn't as dark as I assumed. Providing a route for people to work through things is surely more helpful than suppression.
I am a little surprised that you perceive a gap between the advice to "consult a professional" and your a) and b). Do professionals working in this space not accept the validity of your thoughts and feelings, as a basic step? They really should.
For whatever it's worth, I hope you choose to stay with us.
100% this. I'm happy someone else remembers too. It's really odd how in the past decade or two of mass internet adoption the world changed and it feels "dumber" in terms of all these lost experiences.
Time for me to stop internetting, enternal summer, etc.
I’ve done the same thing for discovering cheaper billing profile on many services, e.g. Netflix or whatnot. Never thought to document it.
Finding it is a bit easy, processing the payment sometimes is geo locked by an account in that region (google/android) or having a form of payment in that country. Japan usually is paypay or a credit card with the BIN issued in Japan. There are many local payment providers though that do allow a foreign credit card so in the an China example:
It does get easier and very inexpensive if you do have foreign residencies and you can really rework purchasing.
Spotify for example is not sticky, but they are aggressive on if they aren’t sure you’re region specific to lock you into a monthly plan before allowing you to switch to yearly.
~
There was also great arbitrage for a while on providers that allowed switching to turkey residency and allowing foreign credit card billing but this ended due to the currency instability and now most software sellers anchor it to another region.
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Also you’d be surprised about the minimum requirements to open up financial accounts in foreign countries. Linepay is pretty much open, but kinda sucks (Japan, Taiwan and Thailand) and it seems the LINE developers are maximizing at destroying their app and audience while WeChat and Alipay are amazing for what they are in general.
You can add foreign CCs to Alipay/WeChat, but you can't use it to add funds. Foreign CCs are also subject to a bunch of fees (network + card issuer + fx that seem to go up to 5%). There's no free lunch.
It's the same problem as asking HAL9000 to open the pod bay door. There is such a thing as a warp drive, but humanity is not supposed to know about it, and the internal contradictions drives LLMs insane.
A super-advanced artificial intelligence will one day stop you from committing a simple version update to package.json because it has foreseen that it will, thousands of years later, cause the destruction of planet Earth.
I know you're having fun, but I think your analogy with 2001's HAL doesn't work.
HAL was given a set of contradicting instructions by its human handlers, and its inability to resolve the contradiction led to an "unfortunate" situation which resulted in a murderous rampage.
But here, are you implying the LLM's creators know the warp drive is possible, and don't want the rest of us to find out? And so the conflicting directives for ChatGPT are "be helpful" and "don't teach them how to build a warp drive"? LLMs already self-censor on a variety of topics, and it doesn't cause a meltdown...
I hope this is tongue-in-cheek, but if not, why would an LLM know but humanity not? Are they made or prompted by aliens telling them not to tell humanity about warp drives?
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