throwaway197812

In their case, they had fairly specific location requirements and thus restricted themselves to Ibaraki prefecture. So fairly close to Tokyo (1 hour train ride I believe?), but they paid much more than $500 -- more like $20-30k if I recall. Once you go through the bureaucracy of buying it (making sure it doesn't have a tax lien, etc.), you're basically faced with a falling-down hoarder house that you have to clean out and likely tear down and rebuild completely. Theirs was also a quite large lot and a nice traditional Japanese farmhouse called a minka or kominka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minka). So, not typical of these $500 houses -- those are probably going to be further out from the cities, much smaller lots, and complete teardowns. But do expect to invest significant time and money to get it to a habitable state. And you'll likely need to speak much more than tourist Japanese to deal with the local bureaucracy and builders.

But if you're willing to put in the effort, and you do like the quiet Japanese country life as a getaway, it could well be a good investment. This is pretty much my plan for (semi-)retirement in a few years.

Just tell them that whoever gets the prototype working first picks the tech stack.

Also, I would challenge your suggestion that "The expansive definition of 'sequencing cost' to envelope downstream analysis and storage here is also a mistake." I would argue that it's the opposite: delivering valid and useful sequencing results to a broad population would require even more resources directed toward analyzing the results and also interpreting them for the patients.

There are at least two reasons: it's still expensive, and we still don't really know what to do with it.

The "$1000 genome" is a bit of a myth, or rather PR hype from Illumina. Sure, they proved it could be done if you juke the numbers the right way. But I believe a clinical-grade whole-genome sequence still costs several times that much (see https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...). Even at $1000/genome, sequencing the entire US population would still be $330 billion, for unclear benefit.

I'd love to be corrected, but the science just isn't there to show us what to do with WGS data except in limited applications like cancer or "rare diseases". It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that sense, and it's being worked on. There are pharma companies and public consortia sequencing hundreds of thousands of genomes, and mining them alongside medical records and other phenotypic data. So the value may come eventually, but it will probably be less about preventing illness so much as curing disease in a much more targeted way. And even then, you won't need to have your whole genome sequenced just to know if you should take drug A or drug B -- a cheap targeted test will suffice.

Anyone else weirded out by this article being illustrated with a picture of fucking chickens in a cage? Real subtle (not subtle) message there about how CEOs (and VCs like Hunter Walk) view their employees.

Sounds like a shit CEO.

The paternalistic tone here is also way off-base. Many Japanese are quite tired of being told what to do by Americans for the past 75+ years.

In at least one Google building I worked in, for a while conference rooms were in such short supply that if you didn't start the VC, after a few minutes some calendar bot would decide that the room wasn't being used, remove your reservation from the room, and five minutes later someone else would show up and try to kick you out.

(Also possible that the offices that were opened were more heavy on hardware / "lab" roles, so while maybe it was officially "voluntary", those people effectively had to choose between coming back to the office or doing fake / busy work at home.)

I've been wondering lately if there isn't a model of care that goes beyond just a psychiatrist (to prescribe the meds) and a therapist (to administer therapy along with the standard advice about exercise and eating well). Something more like a "nanny" or a caretaker who could help the patient with those things: bug the patient daily to make sure they're taking their meds (and/or supplements, if you're going that route); buy and cook that nice healthy food; get you out of the house and into the gym; etc. Something more than just seeing a therapist once a week, but less intensive than any form of institutional care (even on an outpatient basis).

Asking for a friend... :(