Permanent residency applications are being judged incredibly strictly. Citizenship applications need 10 years of continuous residence up from 5. Business manager visas have gone from needing 5m yen of capital to 30m yen.

It seems pretty clear that the goal is to get workers in for some productive years but make the path for staying difficult. I guess that's one way to solve an aging population problem.

To put things in perspective, Japan is an island and has entry and exit controls on the borders, so it is estimated that 0.05% of the population is illegal immigrants (people not leaving when their visa runs out). And the police can and do stop visible minorities to confirm their residence status on the spot. It is compulsory to carry identification documents if you are a foreigner. (There are questions about the legality of this but it is common and widely practiced).

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/10/27/india-valua...

- Client company address changed 4 years ago and the paperwork wasn't filed within 2 weeks.

- A late pension payment 2 years ago.

- Pension and health insurance were paid on time, but the date stamp on the physical payment slips was smudged and so "did not prove" that it was paid on time.

- City hall workers didn't send out health insurance slips in time, applicant (through no fault of their own) couldn't pay by the deadline.

This level of strictness is affecting people's lives, ability to make plans, get mortgages etc.

To add to this, permanent residency application times are now very long. After you complete your application some people are waiting nearly 2 years to get a response. There is a lot of vagueness about what happens if the rules change during your application period.

Perhaps there has been a communication mix up here?

(also, when I tried to sign up to your service it was impossible to actually log in)

Perhaps there has been a communication mix up here?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47498642

Points: 1

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I find engaging like this helps my memory already on its own, but if I'm ever really stuck with a name I just take a quick look at my phone. The person is usually linked to the event where I first met them or similar.

For maps, I have a folder called Places and each markdown file in there is a place. I add latitude and longitude to the frontmatter and then display them on a map.

[1] https://github.com/pyrochlore/obsidian-tracker

Try to separate out 'ruminating' from 'thinking'. What's the difference? For our purposes 'thinking' has a fixed outcome and an end point. Trying to solve a coding problem. Working out how to make dinner. Calculating your taxes. When you reach your goal, you're done and you stop. 'Ruminating' has no end point. There is not end or action associated with it. The tricky part is that it often masquerades as thinking, so you feel like you're solving a problem.

For example, you do a job interview and you go over and over what happened in your mind. "Maybe I should have answered this differently". "Maybe I should've prepared some more of these questions". Of course, you can't change what happened in the past. You're just rolling the ideas around in your head and probably making yourself feel worse and worse. Rumination can be focused on the past, the future or even some hypothetical, imaginary situation ("What if I lost my job", "What if my house burnt down"). Again, actual preparation (Saving an emergency fund. Getting insurance) has an action associated, but rumination never ends, it just keeps going around in your head.

The other thing is to keep an accurate record of your performance. This will be different for everyone, and varies a lot depending on the job. The key thing is to make the record as close in time to the action as possible. For example, you feel like your pull requests aren't as good as other people's. Don't wait until the end of the week and then reflect on the quality of your work. Instead, every time your make a pull request, write down an accurate, objective assessment of the quality.

People who suffer from imposter syndrome tend to forget their wins and remember their losses again and again (there's that rumination!). By having an accurate record that you made yourself you can cut through this and show to yourself your true performance.

For anyone thinking about trying out Obsidian, here are some problems I have solved with it:

- Remembering where I met someone, what we talked about and then connecting up with them at a later date. My ability to remember names is easily 10x because of obsidian.

- Seeing who in my family's birthday is coming up soon and their address so I can send them a card.

- Graphing how far I've run for each day/week and any quick training notes.

- Showing me friend's restaurant suggestions on a map when I've got a free evening and I want to try something new.

And all of this stored locally and synced onto many devices.

If you're curious I highly recommend starting simple. Don't worry about plugins, just write a quick daily note every day about the information that is important to you. When you feel like you're outgrowing that, adopt a structure that fits you and solves your problems.

The key is using it to solve problems you actually have, rather than problems you want to have.

I was losing track of people's contact details --> I made an addressbook in obsidian.

I wanted to track my exercise to find out how much I was running each week --> make graphs

And so on. Your obsidian should get a bit messy before you try to impose order on it. Use it to solve a problem badly (Just writing down how far I run in a daily diary note) then improve (Writing a query to turn all of those notes into a graph).

Personally I don't use any AI with my knowledge base. Good searching tools and a little bit of organization are the most useful thing for me.

Personally, I think keeping lots of notes/links is a kind of digital hoarding. Just like real hoarding, it's an emotional problem not an organizational problem. If you can work out what emotional need hoarding links is fulfilling for you then you're on the way to working out how to get that emotional need fulfilled by something else.

My experience in learning Japanese pitch accent was eye-opening. At the start, I couldn't hear any difference. On quizzes I essentially scored the same as random guessing.

The first thing that helped me a lot was noticing how there were things in my native language (English) that used pitch information. For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.

The next part was just doing lots of practice with minimal pairs. Each time I would listen and try my best to work out where the pitch changed. This took quite a lot of time. I feel like massed practice (many hours in a day) helped me more than trying to do 10 minutes regularly. Try to hear them correctly, but don't try too hard. I didn't have any luck with trying harder to 'understand' what was going on. I liken it to trying to learn to see a new color. There isn't much conscious thought.

The final piece of the puzzle was learning phrases, not individual words, that had pitch changes. For example: "yudetamago" could be boiled egg or boiled grandchildren. Somehow my brain just had a much easier time latching on to multi-word phrases instead of single words. Listening to kaki (persimmon) vs kaki (oyster) again and again seemed much harder.

Of course, your mileage may vary with these techniques. I already spoke decent Japanese when I started doing this.

I find that students of Japanese often have enough grammar to read widely after finishing a couple of beginner textbooks, but they are completely held back by vocabulary.

The average cyclist doesn't wear a helmet, cycles on the pavement and will probably cycle on the incorrect side of the road fairly frequently. Cyclists also routinely ignore stop signs, traffic lights and crossings. I'm over a decade in the road I have only ever seen a cyclist use a hand signal once

Part of the problem is cyclists get almost no infrastructure, while cars get multiple lanes.

It is genuinely shocking how true this is. Also, it's not a gradual thing. I used to be very nervous about public speaking. I did it a lot and one day it just stops. Very sudden, very unexpected.

Here's another I like:

Give groups of kids 10 identical looking items and a balance to compare the weights. Pre-teach how a balance works to compare the weight of items. Ask them to put the items in order from lightest to heaviest. You're basically asking them to come up with a sorting algorithm. Usually, after much experimentation, someone will come up with an algorithm that works. You can work together to try to write down the steps of the algorithm. You can also explore more mathematical ideas like transitivity when comparing different sorted sets of items.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626728

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

In fact, blocking tools can actually make this worse. Using a blocking tool is tacitly saying "I can't control myself. I need to hand control to something outside of myself" This basically reinforces the belief that you cannot control your problematic consumption.

You need strategies that reinforce the opposite belief: You are in control of your usage.

I recommend looking into books like Feeling Good and Feeling Great. Get a greater understanding of your emotional state and work out how that feeds into your social media usage.

There are some tools that are useful. The first is time tracking tools. They let you look back on your day and work out how you spent your time. What are the patterns of your usage. Do you always end up struggling after lunch? Or in the evening? What are your triggers?

While I wouldn't recommend blocking sites completely, blocking the most distracting parts of sites can be useful. If you're studying from youtube videos, using a plugin that blocks comments and suggested videos is extremely useful. This means you will no longer catch a glimpse of a thumbnail of something interesting and go off task.

Overall, you have to tackle your emotions and your beliefs about yourself.