The Monday Read: Consistency

Lake Biwa was stunning -the light changed almost on the hour. I recommend spending at least a couple of days looking at it.

I’ve been finishing my shower with a minute or two of cold water for a year and a half now. Haven’t missed a single day other than when they wouldn’t let me shower in hospital.

I’ve been doing my monthly finance spreadsheet on the first day of the month for almost ten years now. Can’t imagine not doing it.

I’ve been reading daily for almost forty years. It brings me unimaginable enjoyment and knowledge.

What have you been doing regularly? How long have you been doing it?

(things I do not do consistently but want to: eat moderately and healthily, exercise, go to jiu-jitsu practice, stretch, keep in touch with people, write, cook, clean up)

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This week’s books

Two new sci-fi books this week: an ‘optimistic’ environmental collapse novel, and, something I’ve been looking forward to for a while, the new Murderbot novel 🙂

This week’s links

  1. Dogen has some interesting ideas here (YouTube): “Use Japan to Get Famous”
  2. That’s good, I guess: The Risks of US-China Military War Have Declined and a New Type of War Has Begun
  3. And just as he was starting to fall off the radar, Derek writes a gem of a post like this one: NHK News Watch 9
  4. Why yes, yes I am: Are you worried about wars, market drops and a messed up world?
  5. More kids = cheaper home loan? Media watch: New child-oriented housing loan plan literally has something for everyone
  6. Enjoyed this eulogy from Vitaliy: My father -A Life Worth Living
  7. This is largely how I think about this: 4 Charts That Explain the Stock Market
  8. I’ve never gotten into audiobooks (or podcasts, for that matter): Audiobooks Are Books and They’re Also Practice
  9. I do a weekly standing meeting with the head teacher at my wife’s school: Should this meeting have been an email?
  10. I really enjoy this blog for some reason, been reading it for years: Glutton Aboard: A Slog of Fire and Ice
  11. I’m not sure this can be changed, or that it is desirable to change it: A Deep-Dive into Japan’s Declining Birthrate

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

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13 Responses

  1. I’ll check out the murder bot series. Thx! Also, subscribed to the Bangkok Glutton … Such a funny writer! I’m going to go back and read that again. Ha ha. As for the declining birth rate, I get it.

  2. #11 — It puzzles me how Japan’s birthrate and its effects can be so decontextualized, leaving out any mention of what is happening Korea, China, and Taiwan. While looking at those countries may not provide a complete set of answers (or any at all?!?), to see the merit of any possible suggestion/solution to the birthrate ‘problem’, or the reasons for it in the first place, why wouldn’t you want to tune or adjust it a little by seeing how valid an analysis might be in a few nearby countries that, arguably, share some cultural background, if not other similarities? (And the lead off, “Japan is the oldest nation in the world”, just sets the stage for it to be analyzed as a separate tchotchke on a shelf–i.e., of course Japan is unique…)

    And #10 — a really nice picture: https://bangkokglutton.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/northernlights.jpg

      1. Indeed. The fertility rate is exactly the same in Spain and Italy as in Japan. But what differentiates Japan is the longer longevity. When it comes to this Japan beats every country putting more pressure on the pension system, health insurance system than everywhere else in the world.

        2. Spain now exceeds Japan in life expectancy. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/17/health/life-expectancy-forecasts-study-intl/index.html#:~:text=People%20in%20Spain%20will%20live,)%20and%20Switzerland%20(85.2). Its advantage over Japan for demographics will come from immigration as it has a much larger fraction of its population as immigrants than does Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Spain#:~:text=As%20of%202023%2C%20there%20were,didn%27t%20have%20Spanish%20citizenship.)

  3. I’ve been training consistently for almost 40 years as a bodybuilder, competitive in three decades. It taught be consistency, persistence, planning, goal setting, and patience.

    3. “What have you been doing regularly? How long have you been doing it?”

      If I answered this–talking about myself–and someone who’d been around me answered this–describing me from the outside–someone reading those two might not recognize it as being the same person.

  5. I was disappointed by #11. I don’t think there’s any chance that the birthrate problem would be improved by further support of parental leave because the problem is not really because of the difficulty parents experience in the first year of having a child or of how much time parents spend working. The “work-life balance” issue has improved immensely during my time in Japan (averaged working hours per year has declined steadily (https://www.statista.com/statistics/643765/japan-monthly-working-hours/) and Japan was already well behind many contries with much higher birthrates in yearly hours worked by the average worker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours). Immigration is the key to solving this issue for Japan (if the country really wants to solve it) and far from being a temporary solution could address it for decades as the world’s population shifted to where younger people find the best economic opportunities. Immigration is the main reason the US has so far avoided this demographic trap.

    1. I agree this is not primarily a problem of work life balance even though the difficulty for women to combine a good career with maternity remains a real issue.

      Regarding immigration I find that the change has been very rapid over the past 5 years. In Tokyo (maybe different in other parts of Japan) it is now rare to find a Japanese working in a combini. Same for food chains like Yoshinoya, Matsuya. Also more and more foreigners working at hotel front desk…etc.
      And one thing I noticed is that so far Japan seems to have managed this immigration pretty nicely which is not the case in most in Western countries.

      The other recent spectacular change is the number of elderly especially women working in the similar type of job. I noticed several women in their seventies working at Mac Do recently!

      I think we are reaching a point where basically all the work in the 1000 to 1300 JPY pay range will be done by foreigners and elderly.