If coding by hand took 10x longer, why would it have bee unreasonable for people to demand more time to code? Seems like floored logic and you're just exciting to dunk on people?
I'd say if you're a semi-competent developer, as probably many people reading the article and commenting already are, this comment adds nothing new to the discussion and would already be a very vanilla usage example of "AI".
I think the point is that while you can "do things" like extracting the stripe integrations out into their own service in ten minutes, you're not stepping into other problems, such as how do you handle failures, how do you scale the stripe service, how do you structure all your other micro services so they can communicate in a coherent way, basically you're speed running yourself into harder decisions when using AI.
> basically you're speed running yourself into harder decisions when using AI.
on the contrary, I freed myself from the burden of having to find all the places in the code base where we used stripe and patched them in one go along with the tests to prevent regressions. That represents DAYS of work that I condensed into a few hours.
who cares if it can't know good structure and how to handle failures? I know how to do that. I have a skills file I created that tells stripe our policy for handling error failures, defaults for structures as well as guidelines for how we should deal with communications between different systems. Before i spent hours building this stuff out. now I just spend 20-30 min reviewing a pr to make sure it follows my directives and move onto other problems.
Thats said, i agree with you on principle. I hand coded an app from a solo dev to now managing a team and gettin ready for an imminent series A. AI doesn't save you from scaling issues, you still need to have a clear idea of what you want from the ai and build processes that give it the context to do its job.
This new business visa thing in Japan is just so so stupid. As if people with money can't wrangle up 300k to get the business visa and then just do nefarious things like this, all the while locking out potentially millions of hard working entrepreneurial types from all over the world who would actually make good citizens, and good honest money.
Before: Need $50k in bank, register business, sponsor yourself for a visa
Result - lots of people just abusing the system for a visa
After: Need $300k, must hire at least one local, must show a profit of $200k within 2 years. Must be reviewed by the government multiple times a year to show your business is serious
I can see some issues. If you want to start a company that requires a year or more of R&D before you can ship you're S.O.L.
Yeah, if the foreign entrepreneur argument is that they're helping the Japanese economy and not just barely sustaining another person in japan then the new requirements seem exactly in line with that?
I know several young people who have migrated to Japan and due to the low cost of starting a company ended up building great businesses with pretty serious revenue and employee ten to hundreds of staff. This wouldn’t have happened if they needed such a large amount of capital just to start.
The problem I see with the new rules are it just stops entrepreneurs and rewards rich money launders. The visa applications should considered based on merit and not just about capital.
This new law is doing what it's suppose to do. You can't get a business visa for $300k in the US. You need $800k in a bad area or $1m in a good area to get an investment visa.
Why should Japan allow $30k? Doesn't make sense.
I had a friend who was looking to move to Japan and abuse this visa. The business was only there to get the visa with no intention of operating it.
I'm not Japanese and I don't live in Japan but even I think this new law makes more sense than previous.
I had a friend who was looking to move to Japan and abuse this visa. The business was only there to get the visa with no intention of operating it.
So this invalidates what ? I know many foreign people
Who moved to Japan, work harder than many Japanese I know and run great businesses but it was only possible due to the low initial outlay for the visa.
If your friend came here he still had to pay taxes, present income statements and pay pension , if he didn’t his visa would be revoked. The new rule is to appease the xenophobes at voting time. It’s as simple as that. What will happen ? Rich people who will actually come here an abuse the system will be the ones they get to stay… this is country with a rapidly depreciating population and currency valuation remember…
A smarter solution is to evaluate the visa application. based on the intentions of the person wanting to start she business. Not locking out large swathes of people.
If the US lowers investment visa to $30k, I’m sure many comers will work very hard.
So why doesn’t the US do it? Why doesn’t every country give you a visa for $30k business investment?
Japanese people are saying they no longer want mass low quality immigrants. They want fewer, higher quality ones. Nothing wrong with that. All their recent immigration policies point to toward this theme. It’s their country. Let them do what they want without calling them xenophobes.
My comment was about the increasingly high bar for entrepreneurs / protectionism. Immigration will happen regardless of the cost of a business visa...
What is a "low quality immigrant" and why do you think immigrants with money are "high quality immigrants? Because the most damage I've seen done to Japan and the culture is rich people from Singapore, China and Taiwan buying up large swathes of property and then keeping them vacant while driving up property prices and locking out locals. The high price of a business visa will ensure this trend accelerates as more and more actual well intentioned foreigners are locked out of opportunities. Basically if you're a hedge fund, you have the ability to setup shell companies and rape the place.
Anyway, there is still mass migration happening, and it will continue to happen as the population ages they need more workers, it's everywhere now, airports, combinis etc, that has nothing to do with the "business visa". Most actual poor people were never planning to come here to start a business anyway, they were coming here to do slightly less shitty jobs than they were doing in their home countries.
What is the demographic looking to immigrate to Japan. I’m surprised to hear Chinese as my outsider view was that China was as good if not better place to live compared to China, is it because they’re afraid of their government and want a liberal democracy instead?
Or is folks from poorer and more distressed countries looking to come to Japan.
Better passport for their kids, better and more reputable, internationally connected banking system to store their wealth. The latter bit is particularly important as China limits the amount of money one can send out of the country.
It was always ridiculously easy to get Japanese citizenship. 5 years of residency, don’t break any laws including traffic, pay your bills on time. Done.
It has recently been changed so that you now require 10 years of residency.
5 years. It's fairly easy to get. Sometimes it feels like half of the Beijing intelligentsia is in Tokyo now.
Lots of Chinese academics, engineers, investment bankers, and others shifted to Tokyo in the past few years. Even the kinds of salons and meetups you used to see at Tsinghua or Peking have almost entirely transplanted in Jimbocho based on my friends account.
I think it’s probably easier and safer for a Chinese national to obtain Japanese citizenship than American citizenship.
If you’ve got ten years (or until recently, five) of residence and can pass the interview process, the acceptance rate for Japanese citizenship is something like 95%+.
On the other hand the process of getting American citizenship can run up to twenty years or more, it’s very expensive, and throughout the process the immigrant has few rights and can be deported for basically no reason, up to the moments before the naturalization ceremony.
If I were a freshman at Fudan thinking about my exit strategy, I know which one I would pick.
20 years ago Singapore was handing out PRs and citizenships to Chinese students like candy. All of my classmates got PR a few years out of school, then citizenship again 2 years later.
And so many of them immediately moved on to the US.
China cracks down on corruption from time to time and lots of rich Chinese got their riches through corruption, so they're always looking for places to stash their ill gotten gains, their family and an offramp for themselves.
Helping launder this dirty Chinese money is a huge business here in BC (Canada) and across the world.
Too late to edit but to add to my comment, it's also the reason this segment of Chinese buyer will massively overpay for real estate, visa pathways, etc...
Western governments also look the other way since these people are defrauding China (our rival) and bringing money to the west.
Does Japan need more small businesses owned by foreigners (that make so little money as to be useless for economic growth) or do they actually need more foreigners to change the adult diapers of their ever aging population?
Buddy, when your population is in decline at Japan levels I think it makes sense to have all the businesses you can get. I’ll also say compared to many local businesses in Japan, I know several that make 100-200x what the local, totally outdated <insert store / business type> make.
I’m talking hospitality, bar owners , cafe, therapists, even people who have setup manufacturing businesses building anything from prefabbed affordable housing and to handmade skis. These are business that need a lot of materiel and help the economy keep moving here. Many of these businesses exist because it was cheap to get started. Young people who came here for various reasons , had visions and executed. Many being the kind of people that make the world a better place.
Would you prefer Japan just imports south East Asian slaves and boots them at will, stifles any competition and just falls apart ?
I honestly found your comment really short sighted / uninformed.
The whole point of these investment visas is to inject large amounts of money into the country or build what the country wants to strategically. These $30k business visas, if it isn't a visa scam, is simply starting restaurants and small businesses that Japanese people can do themselves.
So what if their population is in decline? It'll just pick back up when there is plenty of space. Just because their population is in decline now doesn't mean they should import from other countries who most certainly do not share the local culture an is a disruption to their way of life.
Once again, I'm not Japanese and do not live there. What happens in Japan doesn't affect me. As a neutral bystander, the new rules make far more sense for Japan even if it hurts a few good honest foreigners.
Hopefully people like you realize many good things about Japan come from outside of Japan. People act like the only way Japan can survive is to return to some sort of isolationist state.
The good news is that once America becomes more liberal again, Japan will do, it's just a global outrage against "foreigners" going on right now which the herd follows.
Should other countries where Japan benefits greatly, ie Australia constantly move the goalposts on Japanese businesses and basically make life harder for them to protect “their way of life” ?
Essentially the amount of capital needed to get a business visa went up dramatically. It used to be about 30k USD and now it’s almost 200k. Plus other more onerous requirements:
On the other hand, a lot of those jobs were offshored to places where labor is cheaper. It would be interesting to compare how many people work in the textile industry in Bangladesh today compared to the US 50 years ago.
I believe this is a major part of it. People cannot fathom what the industrial countries look like because basically nothing is made in the west anymore. There are literally hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions that work towards making the western economies profitable who get paid nothing to do it and live in filthy polluted slums for everyone else's benefit.
Looms might speed up the process but I guarantee there are thousands of people working in the poorest countries on earth to make it all happen.
Interestingly, AI seems to be massively polluting and while the west has absorbed some of it, it's probably not long until we see more of the data centers being built in poorer countries where the environment can be exploited even harder.
This was always the undelivered promise of "tech" in my opinion. I remember seeing the Apple advertisement from the 80s (??) when a guy gets a computer and then basically spends his afternoon chilling.
Some how I've found myself living in a fairly rural place, and while farming can be hard, I don't want to downplay the effort of it, the type of farming people do around me is fairly chill / carefree. They work hard but they finish at 3pm and log off and don't think about work. Much o my career is just getting crushed by long hours, tight deadlines, and missing out on events because even though my job has always been automation focused, there is just so much to automate.
I agree, but if you enjoy the art, why does it really matter who made it, like I enjoy looking at sea shells, no one made them, but they are nice to look at?
reply