Things I can do without ♫ In Kvetchalot ♫

I am on the high-performing curmudgeonism spectrum—high-performing so that people don’t think I’m dysfunctional, and spectrum, so that I benefit from the trendy “spectrum advantage.”

I have problems with numerous things. I would have “issues” with them, but I just cannot purge the word problem from my active vocabulary. Such is the cross that must be borne by a person who arrived just about a month before the baby-boomers.

Problems I kvetch about form a list that grows, shrinks, and changes to suit what pisses me off on any particular day. Some of the items remain unchanged, however. Here are some current annoyances, some frequent annoyers and a few targets of annoying opportunity.

  • Foreigners in Japan who know almost nothing about the country, the culture, and language, but who stay here for years, endlessly complaining about Japan
  • Foreigners in Japan who know almost nothing about the country, the culture, and the language, yet are hopelessly and senselessly in love with Japan and everything Japanese and cannot bring themselves to see that, like all countries, some things are awry in Japan too. There is a significant overlap between these people and those who can’t name any Japanese food other than sushi.
  • Foreigners who think that Japanese eat sushi all the time.
  • Foreigners who believe that veganism is common in Japan and that everybody here is a devout Buddhist. Perhaps that’s true in the atypical places they hang out, or what the view of Japan is where they live.”Social media” companies such as Meta, which use information donated to them by their willing victims to make money by helping criminals.
  • People sending spam selling fake goods from China.
  • Spam selling fake goods from China.
  • Fake goods from China.
  • China.
  • Japanese ketchup bottles designed so that, when squeezed, they remain in the squeezed shape unless they are carefully coaxed back to their designed shape. Definitely a candidate for the Japanese government’s Bad Design award.
  • Public toilets in Japan with neither paper towels nor hot-air hand driers. If you expect people to wash their hands after pissing or shitting, please provide means for them to dry their hands. My response is not to wash my hands in such places; no apologies needed.
  • Train station platforms in Japan with no trash bins decades after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin-gas domestic terrorism that prompted railroads to take them away, for fear that they would serve as drop points for poison-gas bombs. Many people have long-since forgotten why they can’t find these receptacles.
  • People getting so drunk in Japan that they need to chuck their noodles in public. To be fair, this has become quite rare, but one is still occasionally treated in the morning to “flower displays” of last night’s noodles on sidewalks and train station platforms.
  • Japanese broadcast media that avoid mentioning cigarette smoking in the same breath (or in the same news story) with cancer or other specific ailments. This is probably either because they are NHK, certainly influenced by the Japanese government, which is the leading shareholder of Japan’s only tobacco company, Japan Tobacco, or because they are private broadcasters making money from JT’s “health-washing” corporate identity advertising.

Desperate and Clueless Spaghetti

Two plates of spaghetti were thrown against my wall today. They were of different flavors but essentially demonstrated the same phenomena of desperation and cluelessness. Neither had a chance of sticking.

This morning, I received two emails at an email address that was formerly listed on the US Embassy website in harvestable form. I have since changed that to just my URL, but it’s been harvested before and anyone can go to directly to my business website to read from the graphic of the email address if they really want it. Two people today really wanted it.

One was a real estate broker wanting to sell me on “unlisted” condominium for about USD 1.7 million.

It was, of course, a non-personalized, shotgunned cold-call email.

Several minutes after that I received an email from a translator in Europe—a place on the Balkan peninsula to be a bit more specific—offering translation services in a variety of European language directions at about EU 0.027 per word.

Amazingly, his selling point was that he uses Trados, and his CV indicates that he does everything. Well, I don’t mean that he claims to “do everything,” but rather that he lists the fields he can do, and it’s, basically, everything, in a large word cloud of totally unrelated fields.

Yes, desperation and cluelessness are the underlying themes in the emails that made it through my server-based spam filtering today.

Why don’t you ask the deponent yourself?

While interpreting one day in the US Embassy in Tokyo in an examination of a Japanese deponent by a US attorney, the attorney turned to me and asked “Could you ask him to describe his educational background?”

My reply was, “No, but you certainly could.” It got a laugh from people sitting around the table, including the other interpreter, and the attorney sort of slapped his forehead in recognition of the problem caused to an interpreter when they are asked to actively participate in an exchange.

Unbelievable? Well, he was new at both examining witnesseses and working through an interpreter. The interpreter should never be asking questions of a deponent or responding to questions from a deponent. Attorneys (and other using interpreters) need to keep in mind that, in this sense, the interpreter must be invisible, even though they are speaking more than either the attorney or the deponent, because they are going in both language directions.

De-AIification

Recently, I had two images on my parent business website that I generated using AI, meaning that I am guilty of causing the associated energy use to create non-essential images. I have taken them down and commit to not using AI-generated images (AI-generated anything) in the future, and there is one such image in another blog post that will be removed shortly.

Oh, and unlike countless people active in cyberspace, I do not steal images of any sort and unlawfully republish them in cyberspace without permission of the owner.

Unlawful use of copyrighted material—including images—is rampant in cyberspace. The almost guaranteed anonymity and unreachability of the offenders has led people to make their peace with, meaning surrender to, this unlawful behavior, and I don’t think a system with accountability is going to appear any time soon.

Cyberspace is a lawless land, and that lawlessness destroys trust and fattens the bank accounts of cyber-oligarchs with no demonstrable socially redeeming qualities.

The enshittification of the Internet and the successful gaming of Google are progressing smoothly.

I have noticed that on my Google Alert settings for “Japanese-to-English translation,” the hits returned recently have been heavily peppered with links to porn sites. In the list of hits, the titles of the hits look like they are related to Japanese-to-English translation, but that could be faked or, I think, even dynamically generated.

The sites have nothing to do with translation, and many of them ask if I am a minor before proceeding. I am not a minor, but I’ve never “proceeded,” so I am not able to give you a blow-by-blow, so to speak, description of the sites.

It looks like the perps have been able to successfully game the Google search engine. This lowers the value of Google for searching, and there are other reasons why Google value should be considered deprecated, but that’s not the topic of this post.

The Internet continues its move away from what was imagined for it years ago, moving closer and closer to just the real world, with cyberspace imitating life as we know it outside of our computer or mobile display screens.