Have any of you guys deployed to a combat zone? For us fobbits (people hopelessly stranded to the safety of the forward operating base) all the stresses of daily life are gone.
There is no commute, no worrying about what to eat, what to wear, picking up kids, or anything else that consumes a normal person's time. In a way it is kind of like a vacation. You have so much disposable time to spend on hobbies, exercise, or education.
It is very much like being in prison, except that I am not afraid of my fellow inmates. It is strange though, because you don't get to pick your friends, much like prison. I suspect the fellow fobbits are substantially more educated on average than a typical prison population and probably generally healthier physically and mentally. You would be surprised, though, at just how mentally unhealthy many of your coworkers are when you are around them long enough to really see it.
Unless you are extremely ambitious and psychotically disciplined that much downtime grates on your soul. Being deployed for too long can be depressing and you cannot escape a certain amount of emotional isolation. It is also weird having a spouse and children and yet living apart for a year or more like a single person.
The long term consequence of the environment is an unhealthy dose of apathy. If you are too bored for too long you really don't care about most anything. Unfortunately, the environment provides little motivation to care as you are less likely to die in a combat zone stuck on a fob than driving to work in the civilian world.
Fascinating, I experienced this also. The boredom really rots your mind. At one point we began converting t-shirts into whips and practiced whipping at all the flies (man was there an abundance of flies). After many months of this you can get amazingly accurate. Most of us could easily take out flies who had landed, and the elites could nail the bastards in the air while they flew.
We had an interesting problem develop where people were going to the medic tent and getting prescribed Ambien for sleep, but then they would stay up after taking it. It makes you feel really drunk, and it was the only escape from the drudgery. This substance abuse may have ironically saved our sanity.
I was in the Navy. Life on ships is pretty much the same. You sort of go on autopilot and your entire existence is within the skin of the ship. My parents used to complain that I never called them or e-mailed that often, but they didn't understand that in that kind if environment it's easy to just forget about everything else. The other thing is that distance makes the heart grow fonder, so seeing family when you return just feels amazing, similar to what I imagine being released from prison feels like.
YES! (I at least got to leave and spend time with combat units)
The people who went crazy the fastest were those without "real jobs" (i.e. where contractors did the work and they were still in the force structure but essentially used for undifferentiated tasks). For doctors in (busy) hospitals, aviators, etc., it wasn't as bad.
Curious to know how long it takes for a person's mentally unhealthy characteristics to become evident in a combat zone. Based on past experience (in vanilla zone) I think it takes about 1 to 2 years of regular exposure to a colleague to be able to determine whether they occupy the same reality as the rest of us.
This is an interesting side of the problem I have never thought about. Is this boredom and other psychological stresses responsible for the sexual offences committed by deployed troops?
I am not alleging anything on any particular nation, but coming from a developing country where its own internally deployed troops known to commit a lot of sexual violence, I am curious about the underlying causes. And if there is a way through which civilian governments can control it.
I'd be interested in hearing comparisons from anyone who's worked in remote locations, such as at sea or on an oil rig. I imagine it's similar, although you do have the option of quitting.
>> “I can’t tell you how much I enjoy working in the prison factory. The other day, when I was complimented on how efficient and meticulous I was, I grasped the joy of working. I regret that I never worked. My life would have been different."
I think this is a core human drive and it makes me wonder why so many organizations seem to be fundamentally incapable of leveraging their employees' desire to do good work, regardless of the task.
This was a point made in The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Prisoners in Siberian labor camps took great pride in their brick laying. There was little else to give them any joy.
You know the article has a clear agenda when they use fancy graphcs showing the increase of 60 years old crime without showing in comparison the increase of 60 years old in general population in the same time frame. Which would make sense, you know, because we are all aware Japan is aging fast.
It would seem more practical to put these people in a "prison" that's more of a dormitory with a chicken wire fence than one with walls, barbed wire and bars.
Many countries offer retirement homes and financial aid for their seniors but the Japanese are a people with a strong sense of honor and admitting that they are in need of social, emotional and financial help can be very difficult. So difficult that they evidently prefer going to prison.
My thought exactly! None of them were violent, and for most the total value of items stolen were less than £30-40. These women just needed to be taken care of.
A solution like the one you suggest would be more practical. Save from the costs of a proper prison and provide proper care for their needs.
Sometimes I am wondering how we will age, with the loneliness creeping in to all modern societies (I don't think this is just a Europe problem), we have to find better solutions to stealing and imprisoning 70+ yo people for a soft drink and some rice.
Japan needs a root-cause-analysis asap, and act on it without burrying their head in the sand.
I still don't understand how a country with a fast aging population and alienation of it's youth (herbivore men) has the allegedly most reliable bonds to pay in the distant future.
Do investors see something else? Are they factoring robots or something?
They've been buying their own debt with their central bank, aggressively debasing their standard of living to try to relieve the extreme debt pressure & interest that has been consuming nearly half their tax revenue.
The central bank buys up the government's outstanding debt at zero interest, removing external holdings of debt, while punishing the Yen and anyone holding Yen assets in the process. For the government it becomes a low cost approach to cancelling out debt. For the people of Japan, it becomes a stealth inflation attack on their standard of living. The choices are slim though, they already have high taxes, and the national savings rate has dropped from high to nearly zero (formerly the people of Japan funded the big debt binge with the high savings rate).
It's the next level up from what the Fed was doing with QE. The Fed - supposedly - will sell a lot of its assets back into the market. The central bank of Japan plans to just buy up its own debt and cancel it perpetually. The Bank of Japan owns something like 43% of the Japanese Government's debt at this point.
You can almost guarantee the US Government & Fed will do the same thing in the next ~15 years, as US public debt hits $30+ trillion. If the US wanted to push its debt interest costs toward zero over time, it could have the Fed start buying up all the public debt. The cost would be debasement of the USD (the dollar would fall, commodities would soar, the US standard of living would fall, real inflation would spike). If you want a functioning market for your debt, you have to pay investor's rate of desired interest. You can massage that to some degree, which the Fed does, to try to keep interest costs under control. In Japan's case, they've gone full QE, entirely dropping the pretense of a market for their debt.
Herbivore men or grass-eater men (草食(系)男子 Sōshoku(-kei) danshi) is a term used in Japan to describe men who have no interest in getting married or finding a girlfriend. The term herbivore men was also a term that is described as young men who had lost their "manliness". The term was coined by the author Maki Fukasawa in an article published on 13 October 2006.
Surveys of single Japanese men conducted in 2010 found that 61% of men in their 20s and 70% of men in their 30s considered themselves to be herbivores. Japan's government views the phenomenon as one possible cause of the nation's declining birth rate.
According to Fukasawa, herbivore men are "not without romantic relationships, but have a non-assertive, indifferent attitude toward desires of flesh". The philosopher Masahiro Morioka defines herbivore men as "kind and gentle men who, without being bound by manliness, do not pursue romantic relationships voraciously and have no aptitude for being hurt or hurting others."
> “The problem is that 30 years from now there will be a lot more retired people and proportionately fewer workers (that part’s right), and the Social Security trust fund will run out of money (as if number in a trust fund is an actual constraint on govt’s ability to spend ...silly, but they believe it), so to solve the problem we need to figure out a way to be able to provide seniors with enough money to pay for the goods and services they will need.”
> With that last statement it all goes bad. They assume that the real problem of fewer workers and more retirees, which is also known as the dependency ratio, can be ‘solved’ by making sure the retirees have sufficient funds to buy what they need. Let’s look at it this way. 50 years from now when there is one person left working and 300 million retired people (I exaggerate to make the point), that guy is going to pretty busy since he’ll have to grow all the food, build and maintain all the buildings, do the laundry, take care of all medical needs, produce the TV shows, etc. etc . etc. So what we need to do is make sure those 300 million retired people have the funds to pay him??? I don’t think so! This problem obviously isn’t about money. What we need to do is make sure that one guy working is smart enough and productive enough and has enough capital goods and software to be able to get all that done, or those retirees are in serious trouble , no matter how much money they might have.
> So the real problem is, if the remaining workers aren’t sufficiently productive there will be a general shortage of goods and services and more ‘money to spend’ will only drive up prices, and not somehow create more goods and services. The mainstream story deteriorates further as it continues: “Therefore, government needs to cut spending or increase taxes today, to accumulate the funds for tomorrow’s expenditures.” By now I trust you know this is ridiculous, and evidence of the deadly innocent frauds hard at work to undermine our well being and the next generation’s standard of living as well. Our government neither has or doesn’t have dollars. It spends by changing numbers up in our bank accounts, and taxes by changing numbers down in our bank accounts. And raising taxes serves to lower our spending power. That’s ok if spending is too high causing the economy to ‘overheat’ as we have too much spending power for what’s for sale in that big department store called the economy. But if that’s not the case, and, in fact, spending is falling far short of what’s needed to buy what’s offered for sale at full employment levels of output, raising taxes and taking away our spending power only makes things that much worse.
> And the story gets even worse. Any mainstream economist will agree that there pretty much isn’t anything in the way of real goods we can produce today that will be useful 50 years from now. They go on to say that the only thing we can do for our descendents that far into the future is to do our best to make sure that they have the knowledge and technology to help them meet their future demands.
> So the final irony is that in order to somehow ‘save’ public funds for the future, what we do is cut back on expenditures today, which does nothing but set our economy back and cause the growth of output and employment to decline. And, for the final ‘worse yet,’ the great irony is that the first thing they cut back on is education - the one thing the mainstream agrees should be done that actually helps our children 50 years down the road.
Warren Mosler, Seven Deadly Frauds of Economic Policy
We now have a solid understanding that human decision making is rarely logical and only barely rational, what makes anyone actually think (rather than believe/assume) that firms really don't act in the same way?
which is about a village where old people have to climb a mountain and left there to die once they reached certain age; this is to save limited resource to younger
a sad story, hope it won't become somehow true in future
That was my reaction. Here in California you’d have to be a several time repeat offender and take something of significant value (like $4,000 +) to get prison time.
The hung that shocked me the most about the article was the incredibly long sentences for petty crime. I guess I’ve spent so long hearing about how horrible sentencing is in the US that I automatically expect other first world countries to have shorter or no jail time for such things.
In California for example, theft of less than $950 worth of goods is considered petty theft, and would normally result in a misdemeanor or infraction and a fine.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
[+] [-] austincheney|8 years ago|reply
There is no commute, no worrying about what to eat, what to wear, picking up kids, or anything else that consumes a normal person's time. In a way it is kind of like a vacation. You have so much disposable time to spend on hobbies, exercise, or education.
It is very much like being in prison, except that I am not afraid of my fellow inmates. It is strange though, because you don't get to pick your friends, much like prison. I suspect the fellow fobbits are substantially more educated on average than a typical prison population and probably generally healthier physically and mentally. You would be surprised, though, at just how mentally unhealthy many of your coworkers are when you are around them long enough to really see it.
Unless you are extremely ambitious and psychotically disciplined that much downtime grates on your soul. Being deployed for too long can be depressing and you cannot escape a certain amount of emotional isolation. It is also weird having a spouse and children and yet living apart for a year or more like a single person.
The long term consequence of the environment is an unhealthy dose of apathy. If you are too bored for too long you really don't care about most anything. Unfortunately, the environment provides little motivation to care as you are less likely to die in a combat zone stuck on a fob than driving to work in the civilian world.
[+] [-] freedomben|8 years ago|reply
We had an interesting problem develop where people were going to the medic tent and getting prescribed Ambien for sleep, but then they would stay up after taking it. It makes you feel really drunk, and it was the only escape from the drudgery. This substance abuse may have ironically saved our sanity.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|8 years ago|reply
I don't know - our fellow FOB inmates (Afghan security forces) kept turning on us and shooting people.
[+] [-] notadev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|8 years ago|reply
The people who went crazy the fastest were those without "real jobs" (i.e. where contractors did the work and they were still in the force structure but essentially used for undifferentiated tasks). For doctors in (busy) hospitals, aviators, etc., it wasn't as bad.
[+] [-] itronitron|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hashin|8 years ago|reply
I am not alleging anything on any particular nation, but coming from a developing country where its own internally deployed troops known to commit a lot of sexual violence, I am curious about the underlying causes. And if there is a way through which civilian governments can control it.
[+] [-] razakel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incompatible|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icantdrive55|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] itronitron|8 years ago|reply
I think this is a core human drive and it makes me wonder why so many organizations seem to be fundamentally incapable of leveraging their employees' desire to do good work, regardless of the task.
[+] [-] mbfg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beautifulfreak|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baursak|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dade_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|8 years ago|reply
You know the article has a clear agenda when they use fancy graphcs showing the increase of 60 years old crime without showing in comparison the increase of 60 years old in general population in the same time frame. Which would make sense, you know, because we are all aware Japan is aging fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan#/media/File:Jap...
Actually hardly any difference in ratio.
[+] [-] skookumchuck|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inceptionnames|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HenryBemis|8 years ago|reply
A solution like the one you suggest would be more practical. Save from the costs of a proper prison and provide proper care for their needs.
Sometimes I am wondering how we will age, with the loneliness creeping in to all modern societies (I don't think this is just a Europe problem), we have to find better solutions to stealing and imprisoning 70+ yo people for a soft drink and some rice.
Japan needs a root-cause-analysis asap, and act on it without burrying their head in the sand.
[+] [-] hrktb|8 years ago|reply
But I agree with you, it could be handled differently. It just seems difficult to find a good balance socially/culturaly speaking.
[+] [-] alecco|8 years ago|reply
Do investors see something else? Are they factoring robots or something?
[+] [-] adventured|8 years ago|reply
The central bank buys up the government's outstanding debt at zero interest, removing external holdings of debt, while punishing the Yen and anyone holding Yen assets in the process. For the government it becomes a low cost approach to cancelling out debt. For the people of Japan, it becomes a stealth inflation attack on their standard of living. The choices are slim though, they already have high taxes, and the national savings rate has dropped from high to nearly zero (formerly the people of Japan funded the big debt binge with the high savings rate).
It's the next level up from what the Fed was doing with QE. The Fed - supposedly - will sell a lot of its assets back into the market. The central bank of Japan plans to just buy up its own debt and cancel it perpetually. The Bank of Japan owns something like 43% of the Japanese Government's debt at this point.
You can almost guarantee the US Government & Fed will do the same thing in the next ~15 years, as US public debt hits $30+ trillion. If the US wanted to push its debt interest costs toward zero over time, it could have the Fed start buying up all the public debt. The cost would be debasement of the USD (the dollar would fall, commodities would soar, the US standard of living would fall, real inflation would spike). If you want a functioning market for your debt, you have to pay investor's rate of desired interest. You can massage that to some degree, which the Fed does, to try to keep interest costs under control. In Japan's case, they've gone full QE, entirely dropping the pretense of a market for their debt.
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|8 years ago|reply
Herbivore men or grass-eater men (草食(系)男子 Sōshoku(-kei) danshi) is a term used in Japan to describe men who have no interest in getting married or finding a girlfriend. The term herbivore men was also a term that is described as young men who had lost their "manliness". The term was coined by the author Maki Fukasawa in an article published on 13 October 2006.
Surveys of single Japanese men conducted in 2010 found that 61% of men in their 20s and 70% of men in their 30s considered themselves to be herbivores. Japan's government views the phenomenon as one possible cause of the nation's declining birth rate.
According to Fukasawa, herbivore men are "not without romantic relationships, but have a non-assertive, indifferent attitude toward desires of flesh". The philosopher Masahiro Morioka defines herbivore men as "kind and gentle men who, without being bound by manliness, do not pursue romantic relationships voraciously and have no aptitude for being hurt or hurting others."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbivore_men
[+] [-] wz1000|8 years ago|reply
> With that last statement it all goes bad. They assume that the real problem of fewer workers and more retirees, which is also known as the dependency ratio, can be ‘solved’ by making sure the retirees have sufficient funds to buy what they need. Let’s look at it this way. 50 years from now when there is one person left working and 300 million retired people (I exaggerate to make the point), that guy is going to pretty busy since he’ll have to grow all the food, build and maintain all the buildings, do the laundry, take care of all medical needs, produce the TV shows, etc. etc . etc. So what we need to do is make sure those 300 million retired people have the funds to pay him??? I don’t think so! This problem obviously isn’t about money. What we need to do is make sure that one guy working is smart enough and productive enough and has enough capital goods and software to be able to get all that done, or those retirees are in serious trouble , no matter how much money they might have.
> So the real problem is, if the remaining workers aren’t sufficiently productive there will be a general shortage of goods and services and more ‘money to spend’ will only drive up prices, and not somehow create more goods and services. The mainstream story deteriorates further as it continues: “Therefore, government needs to cut spending or increase taxes today, to accumulate the funds for tomorrow’s expenditures.” By now I trust you know this is ridiculous, and evidence of the deadly innocent frauds hard at work to undermine our well being and the next generation’s standard of living as well. Our government neither has or doesn’t have dollars. It spends by changing numbers up in our bank accounts, and taxes by changing numbers down in our bank accounts. And raising taxes serves to lower our spending power. That’s ok if spending is too high causing the economy to ‘overheat’ as we have too much spending power for what’s for sale in that big department store called the economy. But if that’s not the case, and, in fact, spending is falling far short of what’s needed to buy what’s offered for sale at full employment levels of output, raising taxes and taking away our spending power only makes things that much worse.
> And the story gets even worse. Any mainstream economist will agree that there pretty much isn’t anything in the way of real goods we can produce today that will be useful 50 years from now. They go on to say that the only thing we can do for our descendents that far into the future is to do our best to make sure that they have the knowledge and technology to help them meet their future demands.
> So the final irony is that in order to somehow ‘save’ public funds for the future, what we do is cut back on expenditures today, which does nothing but set our economy back and cause the growth of output and employment to decline. And, for the final ‘worse yet,’ the great irony is that the first thing they cut back on is education - the one thing the mainstream agrees should be done that actually helps our children 50 years down the road.
Warren Mosler, Seven Deadly Frauds of Economic Policy
http://www.heterodoxnews.com/htnf/htn93/Seven_Deadly_Rev12_D...
[+] [-] avs733|8 years ago|reply
We now have a solid understanding that human decision making is rarely logical and only barely rational, what makes anyone actually think (rather than believe/assume) that firms really don't act in the same way?
[+] [-] hujun|8 years ago|reply
which is about a village where old people have to climb a mountain and left there to die once they reached certain age; this is to save limited resource to younger
a sad story, hope it won't become somehow true in future
[+] [-] eeereerews|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justherefortart|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myroon5|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark212|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t3rmi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crispyporkbites|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] classichasclass|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891674
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] djrogers|8 years ago|reply
In California for example, theft of less than $950 worth of goods is considered petty theft, and would normally result in a misdemeanor or infraction and a fine.
[+] [-] sg0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inquisitorial|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exolymph|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] wpdev_63|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Noos|8 years ago|reply