RiC#Code

We are in the middle of the Golden week, here in Japan, so I had some time to visit 本川越.

HonKawaGoe (本川越) is the last stop on the Seibu Shinjuku line 西武新宿線.

It is supposed to be a part of old Japan which still resists modernization.

The town of HonKawagoe is full of beautiful old relic like buildings.

If you like old cities and culture, its really a nice place to visit.

 

 

 

When the buildings aren’t antiquated, they are in the very least, picturesque.

 

Maybe because this is Golden week, but at the time there was also a Matsuri 祭り. (Traditional festivities)

 

 

  Click on the image above for a short video of the Matsuri.

Now back to studying and working on my games :)

1844

Soul and body, mind and matter, intellect and sense, reason and emotion, reality and appearance, unity and plurality, perfection and imperfection, immortal and mortal, permanence and change, eternal and temporal, divine and human, heaven and earth.

As Socrates is sentenced to death, he reassures his followers that his soul will not die and that he will be able to pursue his love for philosophy in the after life.

The soul is life and the body is a corruption of the soul.

Ah but you see, Socrates is very dead in the world of today, to witness his demise, fast forward and rewind, until you get to the industrial revolution J

Today, we all agree:

A person’s main function in life is to work for money, the only quality we have as people is to be working, to be a worker in an occupation that permits us to continue to conserve (sustain) our physical body, and it is only as a physical subject (one who follows orders) that we continue to work.

We live for the paycheck and we are not paid to think.

Workers (you and me buddy) are driven away from their potential and tasks become mindless.

Working class

We don’t know anything anymore. We certainly don’t know how to produce things; we cannot produce most of the things we consume daily.

For most people, that doesn’t matter, since we can’t even afford to cook “real” food, let alone produce any other sort of goods...the only commodity we can understand enough to sell is our time.

(And we sell it cheap)

When it comes to trying to be self sufficient, start a business, sell a product, it has become nearly impossible to compete with corporations, the assembly line made sure of that.

All we can do is try to call some attention and sell our business soonish, we want be assimilated!

An alternative is to invoke a sense of identity, to bring some importance to art, some nostalgia in the idealistic notion that there is value in the time, effort, knowledge and human experience poured into the making of the commodity presented.

A return to the old sense of real individuality is always being invoked as a sales pitch for something like sweet drinks.

Still, the need for artisanship has become void in most western societies as fake individuality is as good as the real deal, the idea is the product; the cool you is actually, someone else.

Alienation

With scarce productivity capabilities, (one man, one tool, one finished product per a certain amount of time) we had to come up with a need before wanting to acquire something, opposed to the current status quo:

Plenty of products, not enough people who can afford them.

The current solution to economic woes which comes from this double whammy of too much produce and dwindling resources in our ever increasingly overpopulated little planet is this:

“We don’t care if you need it or not, if you can afford it or not; just buy stuff to save the economy!”

Enter pop culture, forcing commodity fetishism down our throats, making the copy and the artificial be at the same level as the hand made art, where the item, the product and the money it represents, is definitely more important than the people buying it, blurring the lines, between propaganda, commercial interest, rhetoric and design.

We are accustomed now, to being in that assembly line, to be given tiny repetitive tasks, all we do, is done in ways that alienates us from whatever the complete product may become.

We are taught to want everything and anything that is paraded in front of us, where having some people smiling, holding a can, replaces having the description of the product you’re being pushed to buy.

The future of mankind seemed set on factory work for us all, until the computer came along, and replaced us in the assembly lines, created a new age of even more time to spend, being busy doing nothing.

We don’t even have time to sell these days.

Altair 8800

But that’s not all; computers are bringing back the power to the people, or at the very least, getting people together again.

Twitter, facebook, blogging in general, love it or hate it, the truth is, mankind has never been this close to being one race.

We now have the ability to not only exchange ideas, but to also feel connected enough to relate with people who are physically living in places we will never set foot on.

We can once again, have an understanding of the product we produce and the people we share the world with.

Yes, there are always some abstraction levels to take into consideration when it comes to understanding what we do, but all in all, we have, once again, the ability to sell something we create;

As insignificant as these things seem at first look, almost everyone now can create and distribute: movies, music, computer games, books, news stories or even industry application based software.

It was all kind of ugly, big and difficult to use in the beginning of our new modern age, compared to the current machines we call computers today.

The current age of personal computers started with a simple toolkit you could have ordered by mail and build it yourself.

Assembling personal computers isn’t hard to do, even today, I still assemble my desktops at home; it’s just like playing LEGO.

The people who first consumed this product, (the personal computer), when it first came out as a DIY utility, these people are now the big players in the computer industry related business world of today.

IT geniuses spend their time changing our lives, when they are not getting themselves in trouble with the law.
Self in Exile

Computers are an interesting tool, but a tool none the less.

What makes a computer different from most tools and machines is that it can evaluate the status of a task, it can be told to stop itself when it’s done...

When computers first came out, they were already quite powerful machines; enough to help mankind finally start space exploration.

I like to think of machines as our first non human cognitive partners; they brought us a step forward in human evolution.

So much so, computers are currently helping us with a reversal of our existential dilemmas.

Computers are more than a work tool; they are used to augment our reality.

My point being, they are also a socially evolutionary and revolutionary tool.

Not just being used as a medium for getting things done, getting your point across, or breaking geographical borders, we are now making computers a part of our life.

What is interesting to see, is the human world changing once again towards a practice of skill, of craftsmanship, of easy deliverability of products being introduced by individuals to individuals, of trade, cooperation, of a return to our humanity, no longer just droning in to work for someone else.

No words against the corporations in general, they also have a part to play, most are playing their cards very well and owe their success to the respect they have for and from their workers; from their success, it’s not hard to understand that which is desirable:

Understanding, collaboration, respect and real freedom of choice will bring back the Socrates in all of us.

El estupido: Nothing to say, jump straight to my tip: to work with this kind of person, you have to lower yourself to their level, lower the level of every element on your team and also the expectations of your combined work, once you do that, things may go on without that many problems, if not, even the best plans will fail at his hands and it will be someone else’s fault.

The copycat: there is a famous saying “don’t reinvent the wheel” which makes perfect sense, but is poorly understood by many developers and more often by management people, who, think it means: just copy someone else’s code, no point in thinking or understanding what is really going on, as long as it works.

Well sometimes it just may happen that coding something your self can be much faster than fishing for the code online. (But then you would have to be someone who knows how to program in the first place)

In the best cases, this kind of programmer will create bad code out of good one, in the worst cases, he or she will make a career out of search engine driven copy paste code development.

The work produced by such a person, will be iteratively demonstrated to an audience to find out if its “ok”, until the number of fails possible or the patience of the clients is exhausted.

 

This kind of guy, will, unfortunately at times, be considered productive enough; in some badly managed institutions, they may even be given a certain amount of power and credibility, which more often than not also results in poor decision making.

(they often end up googling for decisions online, which is quite different from performing research on a subject, the first hit they get on a topic becomes gospel)

My tip: get pragmatic with this guy, don’t try to make sense of this person, enlightenment has to come from within or from a higher power, if you are not this guy’s boss, and your boss actually values the work of a lemming, then basically you either become one, continue to insult yourself by being made an equal to someone who does not value the gift for creative process, or you move on to work somewhere more appropriate for humans…

Lastly the “Who are you?” Character

Funny enough, I always see one of these, in every office, the quiet guys who often “seem busy” enough, but are never really doing anything, its almost like they don’t really exist; you even forget who they are and what they were hired for…they usually don’t have an opinion, no input, may seem nice and respectful, but ultimately, aren’t doing any work and have no work done to show… still, they are always there, often arriving before you get in the office and lingering on after you leave.

My tip: of all types these are the ones to avoid at all cost, they make for formidable foes when provoked, are extremely good at sabotage and make everyone else seem quite annoying compared to how quiet they are:

If you do ask them to do something for you, they will make sure it’s the last time you’ve ever asked them to do anything at all.

Since there isn’t a board responsible for evaluating IT professionals, it’s the employer’s responsibility to train and increase the professional level of workmanship of their employees.

Competent and competitive companies do this, Microsoft, Google, IBM, etc these are all successful companies setting themselves as a good example to follow.

Being an optimist, I believe evolution will make it so one day all companies will see the benefit of enforcing best practices and avoid the cowboy approach to software development, improving the work conditions of us programmers (and hopefully the end products we produce)

Me, I see myself more like a Jerry Lewis kind of guy, easily distracted, but always trying to learn or researching on what the most appropriate/productive way of doing things is, trying to code as often as I can (sometimes just for fun), sometimes blog reading and on the increasingly rarer idle times, browsing for the latest cat meme…to avoid getting bored.

Which is funny…since here in Japan, people are seen sleeping pretty much anywhere:

So actually, in this culture, it’s better to be seen sleeping at your desk rather than to be seen  actively performing a task which isn’t strictly work related (like reading twitter posts)

One interesting thing about Japan:

Japan is the 10th most populated country in the world…which is nothing compared to China and India

(both countries make up 40% of mankind!)

Still, Japan is able to bring nice enough imagery when the thought of world overpopulation comes to mind

Regardless of this, the Japanese people are constantly being urged to increase the country’s birth rate!

yes we can!

 

Some of the "grow and multiply" encouragement packages include:

• Endorsing studies in ways to make prospective parents interested in building a family.
• Giving away cash for kids

Which I find interesting, I mean: have a payback per child of about 300,000 yen or 2,400 euros, when most hospitals in Japan will charge a new mom, an amount of around 1000,000 yen per delivered baby, which equals to about 8,000 euros…

So how does a nation with scenes like this:

Encourages an increase in birth rate?

The reasoning seems to be:

• Japan’s birth rate is amongst the lowest in the world
• Japan’s life expectancy is the highest in the world
• Japan's labor force is projected to shrink 33 percent by 2050

Points to consider (besides the obvious elephant in the room: the country is already overpopulated)

• Japanese are like human pandas in the bedroom
•   Raising a family is so expensive, Japanese often opt for abortion
  • the abortion rate is well above child birth rate
    • rate of 13 abortions vs  7 successful childbirths per 1000
• When abortion isn't an option, the child may end up being abandoned
  • On a happy note, the Jikei Hospital, has come up with a novel way for allowing parents to “drop” unwanted babies anonymously:

My 2 cents on all of this:

I find it very difficult to believe that the decreasing birth rate is the real problem (or the right problem), or that the solution can be found in increasing the birth rate…

Actual births in 2009 were in the range of 970,000 as opposed to 920,000 in 2008, this means that the actual number of births is increasing, even if the rate decreased between 2008 and 2009!

There  seems to be a paradox here:

The worry is that, people live too long nowadays, (or so the message from the government seems to point out), and therefore require even more young people to pay the cost, on the other hand, people are dying in greater numbers than they are being born, which is the root cause of the c.b.r. deficit…

Does this mean most people dying comes from the productive demographic group? That’s a whole different problem isn’t it?

Try adding the number of suicides in Japan (30,000/year) to that thought and we just might be on to something.

I would personally prefer to have people not kill themselves rather than try to convince them to have more babies…

In sum:

Yes, the ratio between the number of births, (people who will be paying taxes in the future), versus the ones who will stop paying taxes at the same time, will be negatively disproportionate, and that will be a problem, with the current economic system.

But that just means the current economic system, doesn’t work

Point is, pensioners aren’t freeloaders, they paid their taxes too, and that should account for something.

The real problem is the fact governments keep spending everything people pay on taxes as soon as the money comes in…why not use the novel idea of actually keeping “some” capital (real money) in the coffers huh?

I was going to say, why not do as banks do, where value of the money we put in, increases with time, but recent economic events prove that wrong...

Add that to teaching people what money is, how to use it, in school!

I mean, it should be part of school curriculums, to teach people how money works, a little education could be what’s needed to put a positive spin on the average person’s general crazy unrealistic overspending.

Once that’s done, we should also set boundaries relating (realistically) the price of a product, against the cost of manufacturing it. yay

If this can be done without going too much on to the so called dark side of socialism, which we all agree would end up depriving us of our so called freedoms (including the freedom to buy useless junk until we go bankrupt--and bring the economy down with us) then I’m all up for it!

 

Funny enough, even in Japan where people like to follow the leader, most will respect public announcements and requests from officials, there isn't a great number of people wanting to pay attention to government pleas for help in increasing the birth rate; I wonder why.

Some people end up in government (read "management people") because they they have risen to their level of incompetence

Other interesting and related cultural issues in Japan:

• Gokon and other artificial forms of “arranging” blind dates
• Tanshin funin (stay away parents)
• Nisetai jutaku (stay at home grandparents)

On a tangent, a decrease in the number of Japanese people wanting to have babies, makes for an increase (in the ratio) of children, born to foreign parents in Japan (1 in 30)

• Obsessive compulsive disorders

An average of only 5% of samples of the Japanese population under study show themselves NOT to have OCD

Japanese crazes which are a form of OCD:

• Anything Otaku
• Itasha 
• Nevada tan
• Cosplay

Actually, in Japan, OCD is well accepted in Japanese culture, usually the cleaning mania type:

This song is about a girl, who is recollecting on her best childhood memories, the time she spent cleaning the toilet, for her grandma while she was growing up.

The song is a real tear jerker and a huge hit here in Japan as you can imagine.

There are games and game items for OCD people in Japan:

There are more of these interesting issues, but these ones really do seem to stand out the most.

In contrast, there is a little country called Pitcairn, population: 50

And you can fit an entire population of a country in one single photo :) awesome!