Re: [tlug] (OT) The enigma of Japan (was: UNIX jobs on TLUG)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

JC Helary writes:
 > 
 > On jeudi 04 juin 09, at 23:02, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > 
 > > But democratically elected governments can't do it, not without
 > > risking everying in the next election.
 > 
 > Investing in bullet train and electric cars ?

Case in point.  The Japanese got both of those wrong, overinvesting in
bullet trains to nowhere (well, Niigata) and linear motor cars that
will never reach top speed because there's not enough space between
stations to accelerate, and underinvesting in electric cars because
(short of coordinated promotion by the U.S. government or $500/bbl
oil) they expect electric cars not to sell in the U.S.  They're
probably right, too.

The rest of your list similarly consists of policies that are worth
considering, but politically seem most likely to be led by industry,
not government, when they do get introduced.

Warning: TLUG relevance ahead!  For a wonderful example of how *not*
to lead your economy in a sane direction, you need look no farther
than the "Fifth Generation Project" which was supposed to be entering
the third decade of Japanese domination of knowledge engineering by
now, but instead has given us fuzzy washing machines and refrigerators
using DSP technology (says so right on the door).  Somehow, though,
the important innovations seem to have come from Finnish grad students
out of favor with their profs, wacko Stanford undergrads, ad hoc
Cabals and coalitions of webmasters, and nuclear physicists turned
social network architects.  And not only doesn't knowledge engineering
exist yet, but there's a serious dearth of undergrad CS majors
throughout Japan (at least, that's what Monkasho tells us).

 > Those would bring huge changes in life styles and are things  
 > governements _only_ can do.

Nonsense.  Grameen Bank (of Bangladesh), although it's not as shiny as
it was 10 years ago, was *not* a government initiative, contrary to
the folklore you might hear in tribal rites in the hallowed halls of
ENA.  Sure, in theory governments have the resources to innovate, but
in practice ... they don't do it.

Or (damn, TLUG relevant again!) how about the global free software
movement itself?  Even in Europe the governments caught on only after
we had already won (in the sense of there being not one, but a half-
dozen thriving open source software platforms running on commodity
hardware).

 > I can choose to grow my potatoes, but that will affect my life style  
 > and mine only. There is still a huge surplus of rice in Japan that  
 > bugs _everyone_ here.

Uh, yes, but that's deliberate and popular policy in Japan (when
properly weighted by the fact that farming districts have as few as
1/3 of the population of urban districts, but send the same number of
representatives to Nagatacho).

I gather that much of your difficulty here is that you simply don't
grok "democracy".  Or maybe you'd like to see a more "effective" form
of government?