A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That's a Problem

Re:A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That's a Problem by somenameforme on Monday August 04, 2025 @12:16AM (#44782075)

The point of the economic numbers is that what's affordable from a Western perspective is not for a Japanese person. You're talking about a country where 50% of workers earn less than $25,000 per year!

Their housing prices are being further depressed by the fact that they're now dying off fast enough that even Tokyo's population is starting to significantly decline. And that, in turn, is further compounded by a prevalent superstition in Japan against living in a house where somebody died, which helps to further reduce demand for many housing units that 'become available.'

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Re:A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That's a Problem by jncfhnb on Monday August 04, 2025 @09:28AM (#44785506)

shrug. Doesn’t contradict anything I said. Japan is not a developing country.

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Re:A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That's a Problem by somenameforme on Monday August 04, 2025 @10:12AM (#44786037)

We can argue semantics, but I specifically said that "their economy is much closer to a developing country." This contrasts sharply against, what I presume is, our youth - when they were at one point set to become the largest economy in the world, and everything Japanese was state of the art + crazy expensive while quite affordable for Japanese.

Now it's rather the opposite. If you go to Japan on a Western salary (and especially after converting Western currency post ~2022), everything's dirt cheap for a foreigner, yet quite expensive for locals, which is much more akin to the economic state when visiting a developing country.

And so saying housing is cheap in Japan is kind of crass in a way. I mean yeah obviously it is, so long as you don't happen to live and work there.

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