Author: William Lise

I am a long-term (50-plus years) resident of Japan, and former electrical engineer, and I have been translating and interpreting for over four decades here in Japan.

Don’t expect any change.

It is seriously mistaken to think that even having to pay billions of dollars in fines because of harming children is going to substantially change Meta’s business model of surveillance, manipulation, and promotion of addiction.

What will happen is that it will look like Meta will do something, but they will do nothing effective to protect children—it’s difficult, workarounds are already available, Meta will resist and lie about it, and doing anything effective would trash their business model, and you can be assured that Meta will not allow that to happen.

And since this legal action was with regard to what Meta does to children, it will act as an effective distraction from Meta’s harmful effects on billions of adults.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I don’t think there’s much chance of it effecting any real changed.

No holds barred, no assholes tolerated.

Here are some people who should be hit over the head 17 times with a heavy metal instrument and then locked in a porta potty and dropped into a polluted river.

  • Those trendy motherfuckers who post multicolor, absolutely text-packed AI-generated infographics several times each week. These typically have five to eight boxes with extremely tiny, difficult-to-read text. Oh, and many of these infographics promote absolute nonsense.
  • The brain-dead turds who think it’s artistic to create webpages with gray font. They get extra credit (and extra strikes over the head) if each line of their text has more than 90 characters.

And last, but certainly not least:

  • The misguided assholes who think they’re being kind to visitors to their website by sniffing the IP address or language setting of a visitor and forcing the website into a language that might not be the one the visitor wants to read. They deserve extra hits over the head if they also don’t allow the visitor to change the language after it has been kindly changed for them, and special punishment is also needed for people who pretend that they’re giving their visitors a choice of language, but force them to make that choice on every single page they access, with each page causing a language setting or IP address sniff to cancel out the user-made setting that was just made by the visitor on a previous page.

Yokohama beat Kasumigaura at Koshien. 

Seeing Kasumigaura reminds me of things wartime. People who know about the Japanese military might pick up on the connection. There is a well-known wartime song that mentions Kasumigaura in the first verse. 

I remember it from among the numerous war songs I learned back in the 1960s. 

When I was in a yakitoriya one time—I’m always in some yakitoriya, right? Lot’s of stuff going on there—a right-wing thugmobile sound truck drove by blasting that song at a level somewhere over the pain threshold and with about 35 percent distortion.

Feeling mischievous, I commented to the guy sitting next to me (a regular I knew to speak to) “I know it’s wrong. I really do know it’s wrong, but when I hear these rousing war songs, I’m overtaken by an urge to go to China and stab babies.”

The fellow immediately launched into all the reasons why I should not repeat the horrible mistakes made by the Japanese military during World War II, apparently feeling compelled to warn me of making the same mistakes.

Sarcasm and black humor are difficult in Japan.