The common English word the country is "America". The continents are "The Americas" or separately as "North America" and "South America". The word for a person from the US is "American".
You might be interested to know that アメリカ (the romanization of America) is also how the country is referred to in Japanese. There are many other languages that followed English's use of America as the common name for the United States of America.
A notable exception, and where much of the disagreement comes from is Spanish. I generally try to follow the convention of the language I'm speaking and would never try to push the English-language conventions onto Spanish or vice versa.
It's a very different situation in Japan than most western countries. In western OECD countries, many large immigrant groups, particularly from East Asia or India have noticeably lower crime rates than the baseline. But in Japan, there are no large groups of foreigners in Japan that don't commit crimes at far higher levels than the extremely low Japanese baseline.
Those kinds of statements about foreigners are known to be false or a misrepresentation, that tends to be perpetuated by xenophobic groups with various eugenic ideologies. It is an example of false equivalence, where dissimilar types of crimes and minor violations are compared to felonies or as if all the same[1].
The majority of "foreign crimes" are passport violations. These are nearly always non-violent offenses and where such foreigners are trying to stay in Japan (or whatever country). There is nearly no equivalent of this for the native population.
> But in Japan, there are no large groups of foreigners in Japan that don't commit crimes at far higher levels than the extremely low Japanese baseline.
Can you share a source for this?
From the most recent numbers I've found - "foreign nationals" made up 5.5% of all arrests in 2024, while comprising just 3% of the population. But that number includes visitors/tourists as well, and that group accounts for two-thirds of all cases. [0]
Taken together, it seems like foreign residents at worse match the Japanese baseline, but are likely committing crimes less often.
I don’t like how the phrase “commit crime” frames the foreigner as morally bad.
Japanese people all have a long family history of living inside of the same flavor of society they live in now.
Outsiders might on average have a harder time coping with the expectations of Japanese society, because they don’t share this multigenerational experience in the society. The degree to which they will have a hard time likely depends on how similar the society their own multigenerational experience comes from is to Japanese society, along the most relevant behavioral dimensions.
It’s not that they are bad people, they just have a harder time with the system. We can’t really blame them for that, can we? While at the same time, it is a valid reason to not let them in.
I'm not speaking of people failing to navigate local bureaucracy or "having a harder time coping with the expectations of Japanese society". I'm talking about theft, battery, and homicide (for which the stats are hardest to dispute).
Regardless of your feelings about assigning blame, it's very hard to fault people for choosing to decrease the likelihood of themselves and their fellow citizens from suffering harm from more outsiders.
Well, prior to the imposition of colonial rule in various parts of the world, were there formal penalties for theft, battery or homicide?
As far as I’m aware, it very much depended on who you know, who your family or tribe is, and the power dynamics between the various groups in the territory.
It’s not as if laws and enforcement banning these actions are universal today, and they absolutely weren’t universal not that long ago.
PS don’t miss where I said…
> While at the same time, it is a valid reason to not let them in.
Japanese people had similar restrictions on uncontrolled violence back then too, people from some other parts of the world didn’t. People from those other parts may have a harder time complying with restrictions on uncontrolled violence, due to lacking a long familial history with those restrictions. Like, why would someone whose family has had these same kinds of restrictions in place for 1,000 years or more not be better at following them than someone who hasn’t?
Are they committing crimes typical in other nations, like robbery or littering, or are they behaving in ways that would be socially acceptable but are crimes in Japan?
I think you are pattern matching too hard on what I’m saying.
A population being, on average, substantially less able to comply with social rules (including murder etc) is a perfectly valid reason to bar them from entering (which I mentioned in my original comment). But let’s be realistic about what the problem is. Rhetoric about them being “bad people” essentially does get a knee jerk reaction from progressives, and I’m suggesting we focus on a different angle (which is apparently so compatible with the progressive framing that readers are confused).
This is a great project to see. I'm also an early fan and customer of Math Academy and am glad to see something like this focused on micro skills. As much as memorization is dismissed, having automatic recall base skills lets you get much further, much faster in harder ones.
Thank you! Yeah, Justin Skycak's writing really turned me on to the benefits of automaticity. Once you're aware of it you start to notice everywhere you lack it and how much it'd help in raising your ceiling.
It doesn't! Livewire is a way to build UI/form interactions over http/js.
Lightspeed is a websocket server.
Livewire talks to the server over normal HTTP requests and for anything pushed from the server it uses Laravel Echo. Lightspeed is a Pusher-compatible server so you'd point Echo at it like you would Reverb.
The thing Lightspeed adds is letting the browser send messages back into Laravel over that same socket, with auth on each one. Livewire doesn't do that its actions are still HTTP.
For most applications Livewire would be the goto. Lightspeed is kind of a high speed specialist option for building real time apps like you might do with node.js for exmaple.
Migaku is far from perfect, but it's fairly polished and supports a ton of languages. Honestly, I wish it just focused on a couple of languages and did them well instead of trying to support as many as possible, though.
I tried Language Reactor a couple of years ago and bounced off of it because of its absolutely atrocious support for traditional character Chinese. Its page literally says there is none on Netflix despite most their Chinese content being from Taiwan.
Migaku is flawed, but better. This tool seems like a much less polished version of Migaku or Lexirise with just a local media player and no ability to use it on YouTube, Netflix, Bilibili, etc.
Of my closest friends when I was in high school, the one with the best social skills had been home schooling since I met him when he was 10. However, he did participate in extracurricular activities at the local public school, like a computer club in middle school and then theater in high school. The only area he was really lagging at age 18 was in math, but that reversed a few years later and now he has a STEM PhD and has been teaching at a large state school for the past decade and a half.
I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.
Charging devs a percentage App Store sales is very different from shoplifting and equating the two is extremely misleading.
Devs voluntarily choose to publish apps on the App Store and doing so gets them both another discovery channel and a low-friction sales channel. Stores being robbed by shoplifters don't voluntarily enter that arrangement and they get no benefit from it.
Look I'm not going to say the analogy is perfect. No analogy ever is.
But at a fundamental level, they are breaking the law to extract money from people. You may not call that stealing, but imho it's not a huge stretch of reality.
There is no choice involved. You either pay Apple the required blood sacrifice or you lose access to more than half of all possible customers for your business.
This is like saying that every American can choose to trash their car and take public transit. It sounds like a choice, but the real world has consequences and in fact most Americans do not have the ability to eschew private transport. That is just simply not how the world works.
Firefox has been my main browser for almost 10 years and I haven't encountered any challenges other than availability of plugins, but even that has been a very rare issue.
You might be interested to know that アメリカ (the romanization of America) is also how the country is referred to in Japanese. There are many other languages that followed English's use of America as the common name for the United States of America.
A notable exception, and where much of the disagreement comes from is Spanish. I generally try to follow the convention of the language I'm speaking and would never try to push the English-language conventions onto Spanish or vice versa.