How neat. I'd buy some Actimel too if a sharply dressed lady would show up at my door instead of a suicidal looking grocery delivery guy who carves the local word for "tip" in the elevator every time he doesn't get any.
Well, I'd go for a sharply dressed lady too, but ... what I get is very cheerful Tesco drivers in hiviz, who unpack my groceries and stash the chilled stuff in my fridge. It's a great (UK) service, and they quite often ask if they can do anything else for me (I'm bed-bound) like make a cup of tea. Cannot recommend them highly enough.
The article didn't answer my main question, which is how the economics work. How does it add up to have high-touch home delivery of $5 yogurt packages?
Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets.
The key, I think, is "Most of them are self-employed". Its a gig economy idea. You have to eat. If you're walking home from the store anyway (or kids school or on the way home from work or whatever), you may as well deliver packages for $1.25 each on the way home. You're walking home anyway, you may as well make free money on the walk.
The article says this has been running since 1963 though. The program would’ve been running through the post-war period of economic growth, as well as during the lost decades.
Yakult ladies aren’t classified as full-time employees, but kojin jigyo usha (roughly “sole proprietors”), essentially making them owners of bicycle-sized franchises. They purchase product from Yakult and make a profit based on what they can sell. Yakult says the average earnings of a Yakult lady are roughly $682 USD a month, compared to an average of $1,774 per month for Japanese women broadly. In Yahoo Answers forums, Yakult ladies claim wildly different profits: Some say they work only three hours a day and make more than the company average. Others claim to work far more, selling roughly $2,700 worth of product in a month to take home about $600, roughly a 22 percent cut.
...
As I left the Yakult center, my baby clamoring for her nap, I felt oddly disillusioned — not by the women themselves, or even the no-nonsense manager, but by the corporate trappings of their work. Before I looked into it, I had swallowed the lighthearted, easy glow of Yakult’s promotional videos, which recalled my own experience when I was a kid. I would like to believe selling probiotic milk drinks is just an aside to Yakult ladies’ main mission of maternal care in the community. In the fluorescent lighting of the Yakult center, I saw their labor.
Thank you for sharing that literary and well-observed piece of writing. It is evocative and contemplative, a timely counterpart to TFA, and it is indeed excellent. I’d second your suggestion to others.
I'm so glad I visit different countries to see what they are actually like so I don't get brainwashed into thinking GDP is anywhere near of good measure as people think it is.
It’s not that GDP is a poor measure, just that it is isolated as the only measure most policy is based on improving rather than being one metric in a portfolio of related metrics that balance technological progress, accumulation of wealth, and human thriving.
As Gary Stephenson rightly points out the culture of Economics in modern practice is not one of open query and scientific skepticism, but of proselytizing. More akin to a religion than a science.
GDP just measures the average wealth of a society, on the assumption that production equals consumption. Wealth is unambiguously good, but of course it fails at measuring the full extent of human flourishing.
My take on Economists is that they keep desperately trying to make people understand that prices are set by supply vs demand dynamics, while society keeps refusing to understand it.
Is wealth the right term here? I thought it was supposed to measure production, with the actual measurement usually spending (with qualifiers). And, when comparing countries, you have to account for the different currencies. Currencies are typically trade balanced, which gives a rough equivelence for buying power, but that is not true with the dollar because, as the effective reserve currency, it has international demand outside of trade.
I suspect that the US having better investment opportunities than other countries (tech companies for example) might be more important than reserve currency status.
People tend to pay more attention to trade than investment, but investment flows are just as important. A trade deficit often means that foreign investors are buying and a trade surplus goes along with people investing in foreign countries.
I moved to Japan and have taken what is now almost a 50% wage decrease on account of the collapsing yen, but my life quality easily doubled compared to Norway. For every year I stay, finances will be more painful if I move back. But permanent residency sure sounds a lot more attractive. YMMV if you're from more interesting places
- Nice things are within walkable distance living in a major city. In Norway we live mostly in suburbs. Living in the city is unaffordable. Zoning matters. Being able to just walk out of my apartment and do things spontaneously in my own area is a life changer. I can't describe how much the change in mindset from "I'll do a half day trip into town" to "I'll pop two train stops over" did for me
- private individuals can still afford to run their own stores and cafes. In Oslo it's all commercial "food concepts" and chains. Authentic is unwanted - a Japanese restaurant trying to be authentic was recently kicked out of their place recently for not cutting corners to make a good enough profit - the property owner took a % of every sale + alcohol sales and wasn't happy, so they fabricated reasons to cancel the contract. Eating out in Japan is affordable even on a Japanese salary and I have access to basically any cuisine you can imagine - and the foreign food is often made by immigrants from that country (with some exceptions). In Norway the biggest thing in tacos is currently a Swedish chain. In Japan I can befriend my local restaurant owners.
- niche interests are hard in Norway. Everyone in your circle shows up for the once a year interesting artist that isn't already a huge pop artist on a LiveNation tour. Tariffs are high (yes, watching the whole "who pays tariffs" debate has been mind numbing), effectively 25-50% including fees, so you feel punished for being interested in anything not local. Which is everything.
- public transport in Japan is generally great. public transport in Norway is horrible. The goal is to be rich enough to avoid it and just drive, even if parking in the city is easily 50$ for a few hours if you are unlucky. Delays all the time, but no fixes, just finger pointing. They stopped publishing statistics on how often trains were late, and didn't classify cancelled trains as delayed when they did publish stats. It's all just lies and deception to try to stop the public from being mad.
- I have access to basically all the culture I want, both Japanese and western. Everyone wants to stop by Japan. Not Norway. local culture in Norway is better than before but still pretty dead. Everyone just consumes American culture. There are cool Norwegian bands and a few good movies but that's about it. When I say this I am often asked "isn't Norway a heavy metal country" and yes sure, but it is still a small niche. I don't know anyone my age who partakes.
- the Norwegian hobby is football, walks in nature, or alcohol. I read somewhere that Norwegians drink as much Brits, but in a single weekend instead of averaged over a week. It makes sense to me. All my non tech friends' hobbies were basically going out and getting hammered. There are of course other hobbies and this is slight hyperbole to make a point, but in general everyone just gets drunk. 200 years ago there probably wasn't much better to do during winter, go figure. Alcohol is also a very big hobby in Japan, probably bigger than Norway. But there's more things outside alcohol as well.
- loads of crime in Oslo, recently a lot of youth violence, including random robberies with stabbing. Much less of that in Japan. In Japan I will frequently find myself walking streets at night with women I do but know when I'm heading home. In Norway female friends would often call me in those situations just so they could communicate to the stranger that someone would know if they tried to do something. Never seen that here.
- less individualism is good, to a certain degree. People consider others around them, and it makes things easier. In Norway, watching videos on speaker has almost become normalized on the train post-covid, especially among kids who had their formative years in quarantine.
- there is less enshittification, app-ism, and x-as-a-service in my everyday life. It doesn't feel like people are trying to cut corners to squeeze a larger profit from me. Japan is a very capitalistic country, but it doesn't feel as doomed as the west. Yet.
Most of these problems "fixed" by Japan are related to economy of scale. Some are policy related, and some is culture. In Japan I have any hobby I want at my fingertips because there are enough people to support anything. Ordering online doesn't cost a fortune in fees. Public transport is good for many reasons, and still affordable because there are many paying for it. Even when I was a student here I could afford to live in a relatively dingy but completely ok apartment where I could be most places I wanted to go within 30 min.
I feel fulfilled and that i have no excuse not to check out anything I'm curious about. Norwegians are told they live in the best country and are the best their entire life, and I suspect this is why if you complain many Norwegians ignore it assuming it can't get better than this. If anything my takeaway is that going abroad and seeing other cultures really made me see that the worldview I grew up with was incomplete and prone to make me satisfied with what I had.
Don't get me wrong, Norway is a great place to start a family or grow old. It's a good place to live a life that's centered around a family. The nature is beautiful, and frankly I like the snow and freezing weather - it's cozy! But Japan offers almost all of the same, only with all the benefits of scale :D.
Finally. Biases:
- IT job makes my life comfortable by Japanese standards, but not by much. I don't work at an international company. Japanese people also seem to generally live very fulfilling lives, although the rumours regarding black companies and similar are definitely true.
- I have a nice and mature work environment that doesn't make me hate waking up
- I have only lived in cities orders of magnitude bigger than Norways Capitol while in Japan
- I have put a lot of (mostly passive) effort into learning about the country I moved to, and I know people who didn't who have had nasty surprises. You also should do your best at adjusting to how things work here and embrace it. I have had 0 surprises since I moved here. It doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. I make tonnes.
- I was also somewhat into the culture, so it's not like I was transplanted into a completely foreign culture. I had things I wanted to see here. You can tell Japan has done a good job soft power-wise.
- my Japanese reading isn't as good as it should be and so I don't have a habit of following local news, which makes me blind to a lot of smaller issues that are a more more visible to me in Norway
The biggest thing I personally miss is Norwegian friends, and the European hacker culture. There are tinkerers and hackers here but it's not really the same.
I know/knew a bunch of Scandinavians in software engineering who moved to Japan 10-15 years ago. They loved it as long as they worked for the Scandinavian company's Japan subsidiary. They didn't love it so much a few years later when they ended up having to find jobs at Japanese companies because of a downsizing. Some ended up at companies like Rakuten. Heard some horror stories of insane company "culture" that would make Amazon execs blush.
But you seem to be happy at a local company. Do you think you're lucky, have very low demands or have working conditions changed?
Ah, yes, as you've figured out, the secret is that a lower GDP is actually better than a higher GDP. When Japan did (really) well economically, it was a literal hell to live in.
That's entirely luck driven and not guided by data though. You could visit a foreign country, go out for a drink, meet a) nobody but still have a decently pleasant evening and b) get pickpocketed/mugged and have terrible time c) make some new friends and have a wonderful time d) eat some food that gives you anything from a delicious time to a mild case of indigestion to stomach bug that kills you. Or some other variation, but it's entirely up to luck who you'd meet visiting a foreign country on an individual basis.
It's very effective if you have just a few of these, but are able to get lots of press from doing so that causes many other consumers to go and buy yourself through normal grocery outlets.
I heard about those from parents/grandparents and it was interesting in contrast to MLM meetings I had people trying to con me into participating. I fell for one invite once and they are pure sleaze.
Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem.
Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me.
Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pathological dependency on it is.
I mean, the first part of their comment got my hopes up:
> Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem.
But then I realized we differed on what the root problem/solution were.
What economic/social forces are making it so that the elderly get their emotional needs met through gig workers instead of their own families?
Another point the article doesn't mention is the emotional toll this likely has on the workers. Having once worked a role where I regularly helped the elderly and got to know the same individuals over some years, it was a constant churn of disappointment when they'd inevitably die.
>Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic...
you're reading the title wrong, they aren't "trying to solve the loneliness epidemic," they are trying to sell yogurt at a profit. In so doing, their sales force is ameliorating some of the loneliness their clients feel as a side effect. You could say that they are monetizing loneliness if that's the reason people are buying their products, for the visits and not for the yogurt.
Exactly. This need to be social is being used against us. Not just to sell yoghurt, it’s weaponized by the social media networks to manipulate entire countries.
Yes, how do we optimize social interaction out of our lives, maybe we can all live in VR with simulated girlfriends and never have to interact with another human again.
Absolutely wrong, of course. At the risk of engaging with apparent rage bait: social interaction is one type of human yearning. So are learning, creating, and growing. Each of them requires other humans. Learning requires studying the knowledge created by other humans. Creating requires materials and methods created by other humans. Growing requires learning, so by extension, other humans.
>Learning requires studying the knowledge created by other humans.
You can learn from AI. Just because it comes from another human you doing have to socialize with that human.
>Creating requires materials and methods created by other humans.
You can AI generate these materials. And even if you don't, downloading an image or using a method from someone else does not require socialize with them.
Um...no...I meant actual material things that you use to create what you want. The supply chains that manufacture the materials necessary for you to "create" all require social interaction at multiple levels throughout the process.
Sorry, your depressing anti-social hermit paradise can't exist.
On some level I agree, but I don't think most of my fellow humans would agree.
Either way, editing away the need for social connections from humans seems to be quite a long way from our current level of technology, so it's not really worth considering as something that can actually be done. There's a philosophical discussion worth having despite that though.
The framing of human sociality as a flaw to be eliminated invites the dangerous notion that we can—or should—simply re-engineer ourselves. However, the ambitious project of "rewiring" human nature to eliminate our spontaneous connections and dependencies is not a path to liberation, but the ultimate goal of totalitarianism and oppressive social engineering.
Hannah Arendt explicitly notes that the true aim of totalitarian ideologies is not merely to change political structures, but to achieve "the transformation of human nature itself". When regimes seek total domination over a population, human spontaneity and the unpredictable nature of our social relationships become the greatest obstacles.
To achieve total control, these systems attempt to fabricate a new kind of human species. Arendt observes that concentration camps functioned literally as "laboratories" to test these changes in human nature. The objective was to eliminate human spontaneity and transform the human personality into a mere "thing," reducing individuals to a predictable "bundle of reactions". Arendt compares the success of this psychological rewiring to Pavlov’s dog, noting that conditioning a creature to abandon its natural, spontaneous instincts creates a "perverted animal".
James C. Scott traces a similar impulse in "high-modernist" ideology, which champions the "mastery of nature (including human nature)" through the rational, scientific design of social order. This kind of extreme social engineering requires stripping people of their distinctive personalities, histories, and organic community ties, treating them instead as abstract, interchangeable "generic subjects".
When human beings are placed in environments designed to severely restrict their organic social interactions and enforce rigid functional control, they suffer. Such environments foster a kind of "institutional neurosis" characterized by apathy, withdrawal, and a loss of initiative.
Paulo Freire similarly observes that the drive to completely control people—to "in-animate" them and transform them from living beings into inanimate "things"—is the essence of oppression. He argues that attempting to turn men and women into "automatons" directly negates our fundamental "ontological vocation to be more fully human".
If we were to successfully "rewire" ourselves to no longer need others, we would be executing the very project that authoritarian regimes have historically attempted through terror and indoctrination.
Our "flawed" social dependency and spontaneous need for one another are exactly what guarantee our freedom. To engineer that vulnerability out of the human psyche would not solve the problem of loneliness; it would simply reduce us to isolated, predictable mechanisms, destroying our humanity in the process.
The problem is, even if we somehow could do that, it's not possible to predict the consequences. Being social is exactly the one specific trait that gave humans massive advantage over other species, and was the backbone of our evolution.
There are plenty of things to live for, but that’s not even the point. There is a difference between choosing to be social and having to be social because you will get depressed if you aren’t.
I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social interaction.
Imagine how many communicable deceases we could eliminate by simply having a 3 month lockdown every other year.
I'm not a big fan of eating, so yes please? Even if I then want to indulge in something tasty every now and then, the option to just 'top up' without actually eating is hugely attractive.
You live for others? As in remove those others and you lose whole purpose of life? I am not trying to be rude, seems like retirement homes house plenty of such people but it doesn't make sense for younger folks... although this is hardly a choice, is it. But - I believe one can work on this and move themselves quite a bit if wanted.
My 2 cents - mountains and nature and activities in them are always beautiful, as in it doesn't get boring or mundane, not for anybody I know. Working out on oneself, experiencing various adventures, backpacking around the world, sports, adrenaline/risky activities that make you feel alive, seeing cultures and history and food... those are done for oneself and they are absolutely 100% fulfilling that no career could ever deliver.
Saying above as one such person, and also father of 2 amazing kids (and a pretty decent wife to complement) whom I love more than anything. But I don't live for them despite doing various hard sacrifices for them, I live for me and do those things for me, to be happy, content, recharged, better father and husband and when looking back at my life being fine with various choices made.
Haha! I really like your comment though I couldn't disagree more[1]! I think I understand a little of the view and I think it's not all wrong. Here's the part where I think you're right: not all kinds of social contact is useful. One thing I have found very useful for discussion is Opus 4.6. You have to apply the usual tricks ("a somewhat foolish friend of mine said" / "a junior intern who's not doing so well thinks" / etc.) but it's pretty good at engaging with a variety of ideas and disagreeing and so on. It still has the LLM glazing but it is possible to drag ideas out of it.
By contrast, many humans can't even understand the thrust of an argument and so discussion is wasted on them. There's nothing more frustrating than making an argument of some meaning and having someone misunderstand it entirely. Avoiding that requires some degree of rhetorical skill and communication and a sufficiently receptive audience. I have no problem talking to my friends like this, but there is a time-subject-partner matching problem. I want to discuss Analects 13.18 now, and my friend who can give me context is putting his son to sleep[0]. So I talk to Opus 4.6 and DeepSeek about what I think it is and I get quite far in understanding why my (seemingly novel) interpretation is unlikely to be correct.
So machines are very useful in discussion and so on. However, I don't think they serve much of a purpose in assuaging loneliness. The reality of life is that it is most successful when it can organize into larger blocks: the cell, the organ, the body, the community, the state. And so I think our eusocial nature is strongly adaptive[1]. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced AI, a single person could exert sufficient power. Nothing in theory stopping that but I have other opposition to that (monocultures are non-adaptive, etc.). So removing our dependence on social connections will probably weaken us.
So given that that is the case, I think people over-prescribe solutions in a way that is razor-targeted to themselves[2]. As someone who is not lonely and quite socially fulfilled, I find that a lot of these prescriptions turn out to come from some other axioms which I feel are unnecessary. For instance, one trend is "why do they have to get their needs met from delivery man?" and I think that's silly. When I was a child, we kids "had a relationship with" or "had some of our needs met" by the school guard in that he was a civic ally of ours. He was usually opposed to our actions tactically but ultimately aligned. Our final exams in India are very important and one day one of my classmates, who was particularly scatterbrained, was late for one and he took him to the exam hall on his bike.
I don't think there's any reason to proscribe that social interactions should be within one's own immediate sphere. Our apartment building in San Francisco has social interactions that I think are normal in a civil society[3] - for the most part I interact there with strangers. Some I have helped or been helped by without ever having seen their faces. I think there is a joy I get from my direct family, and then my extended family and friends, and my communities, and my society, and as someone whose life is fairly joyful I'd say that looking around, (and with apologies to Tolstoy), "Happy people are all alike; each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way".
0: He did respond in the morning and it was very helpful. Turns out I misread the relationship Shen Zhuliang and Confucius had.
1: In fact, I'm of the opinion that pro-sociality is probably The Adaptive Trait. I recently picked up Darwin's Cathedral and am approximately 3 pages in and I already feel a kindred spirit behind that book.
2: Can we help it? Almost everyone has heard an expert or professor go "I believe that X is the most important thing that everyone should learn" and X always happens to be what they're studying - well obviously they believe that, otherwise they wouldn't be studying it.
Not everybody is wired in same way. Some have 'pathological' need, some see it as beneficial but optional item. Same folks definitely don't enjoy loud parties or bars full of strangers yelling on each other, and find a bit of lonely time healing/recharging.
I am one such person, and there are others. I consider it a personality strength, although of course it comes with side effects. Minority but not tiny.
> The thinking child is not antisocial (he is, in fact, the only type of child fit for social relationships). When he develops his first values and conscious convictions, particularly as he approaches adolescence, he feels an intense desire to share them with a friend who would understand him; if frustrated, he feels an acute sense of loneliness. (Loneliness is specifically the experience of this type of child—or adult; it is the experience of those who have something to offer. The emotion that drives conformists to "belong," is not loneliness, but fear—the fear of intellectual independence and responsibility. The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.)
Another variation on this is La Poste in France have a paid service "Watch over my parents" where you can get the postie to do a short regular visit to them (presumably alongside any deliveries) for distant children who can't.
The BBC is not state funded, it's a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system. Although the media output for the UK is non-commercial, it does have commercial operations and interactions though and they are mostly centred around the content produced for overseas consumption. As this post is on the .com domain where the international content exists (and which runs ads), I presume it is part of the paid content side of things.
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
Public broadcasting is usually only partially publicly funded, and also funds itself with ads and content licensing. And one normally speaks of public funding in that context, not of state funding. There is furthermore an important difference between public broadcasting and state media, where for the latter it may be more common to use the term state-funded.
> The BBC is not state funded, it's a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system.
How is that different from being state-funded? Everything state-funded is paid for by the general public, through taxes. That's part of what being a state is: an organization that forces people to pay taxes and directs them to various programs.
Are you claiming that the TV license fee isn't a tax? It's money that the state makes you pay so that it can fund something.
The state doesn't make me pay it because I don't watch live broadcast TV, therefore I don't have to pay it. It's not a general tax it's a hypothecated tax and is administered by the BBC not the UK government.
Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it, that doesn't make it "state funded" or a "state broadcaster".
> The state doesn't make me pay it because I don't watch live broadcast TV, therefore I don't have to pay it.
There are plenty of taxes that only some people have to pay, for example, the fee to register a car.
> Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it
I'm trouble understanding how this doesn't make it part of the state? It is a 100% state-owned entity to which the state has granted (in a "Royal Charter") the ability to collect taxes... the distinction you're trying to draw seems meaningless to me.
Sure there may be two separate entities, one called "The UK Government" and one called "The BBC" where neither is part of the other, but structurally I don't see how you can claim that they're not both part of "the State" in general.
The state has changed it from a criminal offence to a civil one. They also have to apply for a warrant to enter a home which takes time is legally difficult.
The enforcers work for neither the BBC nor the government but are subcontracted out.
This isn’t true. The content of the BBC is independent of the UK government. Even for the royal family and for foreign policy.
I am not British so I could be wrong however. If you have evidence that the BBC lacks autonomy when it comes to foreign policy or to the royal family please share it with the rest of us.
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
There was a case where UK based influencer got into FTC trouble for the CSGO Lotto gambling site. He was promoting it without disclosing he had a stake in the site.
Yakult is a Japanese company? I always assumed from the name it came from mainland Europe somewhere. They did a Häagen-Dazs on me. Especially as the Japanese often come up with Western names like this that aren't even spellable in kana.
> Yakult (ヤクルト, Yakuruto) is a Japanese sweetened probiotic milk beverage fermented with the bacteria strain Lacticaseibacillus casei Shirota. It is sold by Yakult Honsha based in Tokyo.
With the automation of some customer service labor in japan, maybe this shows people value at least a bit of customer service interaction as a customer
I think most feedback I've seen regarding automation of customer service labour has been along the lines of "no! Get it away from me! I want to speak to the human!". With approximately that level of frustration.
I thought it was well established that interacting with an actual human was generally preferred to whatever we have to use now.
The automation exists to save money on labour, not to make our lives more convenient
That trope only applies if the non-Japanese version of the thing exists. Which, if you live in the US, it doesn't. I would be just as interested in an article about Minnesota yogurt delivery women, but they don't exist, so...
Sometimes news like this is upvoted, because it involves Japan, towards each a lot of Western techies have an unhealthy obsession on, but the moment when those techies are advised to not use the self-service thing at the super-market they start going bananas.
Japan is a very interesting country for Western people (US and Canada, Western Europe) because it is by far the most developed country that is not Western. In this regard, it is unique and intriguing.
The annual consumption of ice cream in Japan was 6.7 litres per person in 2021 (compared to 10 litres/person in Canada and 20 litres/person in the U.S.). For all dairy, Japanese people each ate 94 kg in 2022.
They eat less dairy, but hardly none. I have heard people say that a scoop of ice cream or a glass of milk each day is not a problem, but more can be. Intolerance also seems to increase with age, so younger people can consume more dairy.
A 1975 study in Japan puts intolerance (unable to drink 200ml of milk comfortably) at 19% of the population. I would suspect that massive exposure over the past 50 years has lowered that percentage significantly.
How come Yakult is a nearly 100 years old Japanese company?
Most yogurt cultures reduces lactose content of the milk base during fermentation. Some cultures like the one Yakult uses supports increased lactose digestion in humans. At the same time lactose intolerance is not binary but a spectrum.
We used to have Yakult Ladies in Singapore too — I remember my parents buying from them to please their kids (me) decades ago.
Surprisingly enough, I just looked the scheme up for this comment, and it's still active:
- https://yakult.com.sg/yakult-lady-agent/
- https://sg.news.yahoo.com/memory-makers-singapores-first-yak...
The Yahoo article could help explain some of the economics behind it.
I still see them going door to door these days!
How neat. I'd buy some Actimel too if a sharply dressed lady would show up at my door instead of a suicidal looking grocery delivery guy who carves the local word for "tip" in the elevator every time he doesn't get any.
Well, I'd go for a sharply dressed lady too, but ... what I get is very cheerful Tesco drivers in hiviz, who unpack my groceries and stash the chilled stuff in my fridge. It's a great (UK) service, and they quite often ask if they can do anything else for me (I'm bed-bound) like make a cup of tea. Cannot recommend them highly enough.
The article didn't answer my main question, which is how the economics work. How does it add up to have high-touch home delivery of $5 yogurt packages?
400 yen for a ten pack is more like $2.50 than $5
Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets.
The key, I think, is "Most of them are self-employed". Its a gig economy idea. You have to eat. If you're walking home from the store anyway (or kids school or on the way home from work or whatever), you may as well deliver packages for $1.25 each on the way home. You're walking home anyway, you may as well make free money on the walk.
Low salaries/wages. Decades of deflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
The article says this has been running since 1963 though. The program would’ve been running through the post-war period of economic growth, as well as during the lost decades.
It also mentions that it was done to drive sales.
https://www.eater.com/dining-out/916976/yakult-lady-japan-yo... goes into more detail. (I recommend reading the entire article, it's excellent and covers a lot.)
Yakult ladies aren’t classified as full-time employees, but kojin jigyo usha (roughly “sole proprietors”), essentially making them owners of bicycle-sized franchises. They purchase product from Yakult and make a profit based on what they can sell. Yakult says the average earnings of a Yakult lady are roughly $682 USD a month, compared to an average of $1,774 per month for Japanese women broadly. In Yahoo Answers forums, Yakult ladies claim wildly different profits: Some say they work only three hours a day and make more than the company average. Others claim to work far more, selling roughly $2,700 worth of product in a month to take home about $600, roughly a 22 percent cut.
...
As I left the Yakult center, my baby clamoring for her nap, I felt oddly disillusioned — not by the women themselves, or even the no-nonsense manager, but by the corporate trappings of their work. Before I looked into it, I had swallowed the lighthearted, easy glow of Yakult’s promotional videos, which recalled my own experience when I was a kid. I would like to believe selling probiotic milk drinks is just an aside to Yakult ladies’ main mission of maternal care in the community. In the fluorescent lighting of the Yakult center, I saw their labor.
Thank you for sharing that literary and well-observed piece of writing. It is evocative and contemplative, a timely counterpart to TFA, and it is indeed excellent. I’d second your suggestion to others.
I'm so glad I visit different countries to see what they are actually like so I don't get brainwashed into thinking GDP is anywhere near of good measure as people think it is.
The case against GDP, by its own creator: https://gnhusa.org/gpi/the-case-against-gdp-made-by-its-own-...
It’s not that GDP is a poor measure, just that it is isolated as the only measure most policy is based on improving rather than being one metric in a portfolio of related metrics that balance technological progress, accumulation of wealth, and human thriving.
As Gary Stephenson rightly points out the culture of Economics in modern practice is not one of open query and scientific skepticism, but of proselytizing. More akin to a religion than a science.
GDP just measures the average wealth of a society, on the assumption that production equals consumption. Wealth is unambiguously good, but of course it fails at measuring the full extent of human flourishing.
My take on Economists is that they keep desperately trying to make people understand that prices are set by supply vs demand dynamics, while society keeps refusing to understand it.
Is wealth the right term here? I thought it was supposed to measure production, with the actual measurement usually spending (with qualifiers). And, when comparing countries, you have to account for the different currencies. Currencies are typically trade balanced, which gives a rough equivelence for buying power, but that is not true with the dollar because, as the effective reserve currency, it has international demand outside of trade.
I suspect that the US having better investment opportunities than other countries (tech companies for example) might be more important than reserve currency status.
People tend to pay more attention to trade than investment, but investment flows are just as important. A trade deficit often means that foreign investors are buying and a trade surplus goes along with people investing in foreign countries.
I moved to Japan and have taken what is now almost a 50% wage decrease on account of the collapsing yen, but my life quality easily doubled compared to Norway. For every year I stay, finances will be more painful if I move back. But permanent residency sure sounds a lot more attractive. YMMV if you're from more interesting places
That's really surprising, I was under the impression that Scandinavian QOL was also quite high. What are the major contributing factors to the 2x QOL?
- Nice things are within walkable distance living in a major city. In Norway we live mostly in suburbs. Living in the city is unaffordable. Zoning matters. Being able to just walk out of my apartment and do things spontaneously in my own area is a life changer. I can't describe how much the change in mindset from "I'll do a half day trip into town" to "I'll pop two train stops over" did for me
- private individuals can still afford to run their own stores and cafes. In Oslo it's all commercial "food concepts" and chains. Authentic is unwanted - a Japanese restaurant trying to be authentic was recently kicked out of their place recently for not cutting corners to make a good enough profit - the property owner took a % of every sale + alcohol sales and wasn't happy, so they fabricated reasons to cancel the contract. Eating out in Japan is affordable even on a Japanese salary and I have access to basically any cuisine you can imagine - and the foreign food is often made by immigrants from that country (with some exceptions). In Norway the biggest thing in tacos is currently a Swedish chain. In Japan I can befriend my local restaurant owners.
- niche interests are hard in Norway. Everyone in your circle shows up for the once a year interesting artist that isn't already a huge pop artist on a LiveNation tour. Tariffs are high (yes, watching the whole "who pays tariffs" debate has been mind numbing), effectively 25-50% including fees, so you feel punished for being interested in anything not local. Which is everything.
- public transport in Japan is generally great. public transport in Norway is horrible. The goal is to be rich enough to avoid it and just drive, even if parking in the city is easily 50$ for a few hours if you are unlucky. Delays all the time, but no fixes, just finger pointing. They stopped publishing statistics on how often trains were late, and didn't classify cancelled trains as delayed when they did publish stats. It's all just lies and deception to try to stop the public from being mad.
- I have access to basically all the culture I want, both Japanese and western. Everyone wants to stop by Japan. Not Norway. local culture in Norway is better than before but still pretty dead. Everyone just consumes American culture. There are cool Norwegian bands and a few good movies but that's about it. When I say this I am often asked "isn't Norway a heavy metal country" and yes sure, but it is still a small niche. I don't know anyone my age who partakes.
- the Norwegian hobby is football, walks in nature, or alcohol. I read somewhere that Norwegians drink as much Brits, but in a single weekend instead of averaged over a week. It makes sense to me. All my non tech friends' hobbies were basically going out and getting hammered. There are of course other hobbies and this is slight hyperbole to make a point, but in general everyone just gets drunk. 200 years ago there probably wasn't much better to do during winter, go figure. Alcohol is also a very big hobby in Japan, probably bigger than Norway. But there's more things outside alcohol as well.
- loads of crime in Oslo, recently a lot of youth violence, including random robberies with stabbing. Much less of that in Japan. In Japan I will frequently find myself walking streets at night with women I do but know when I'm heading home. In Norway female friends would often call me in those situations just so they could communicate to the stranger that someone would know if they tried to do something. Never seen that here.
- less individualism is good, to a certain degree. People consider others around them, and it makes things easier. In Norway, watching videos on speaker has almost become normalized on the train post-covid, especially among kids who had their formative years in quarantine.
- there is less enshittification, app-ism, and x-as-a-service in my everyday life. It doesn't feel like people are trying to cut corners to squeeze a larger profit from me. Japan is a very capitalistic country, but it doesn't feel as doomed as the west. Yet.
Most of these problems "fixed" by Japan are related to economy of scale. Some are policy related, and some is culture. In Japan I have any hobby I want at my fingertips because there are enough people to support anything. Ordering online doesn't cost a fortune in fees. Public transport is good for many reasons, and still affordable because there are many paying for it. Even when I was a student here I could afford to live in a relatively dingy but completely ok apartment where I could be most places I wanted to go within 30 min.
I feel fulfilled and that i have no excuse not to check out anything I'm curious about. Norwegians are told they live in the best country and are the best their entire life, and I suspect this is why if you complain many Norwegians ignore it assuming it can't get better than this. If anything my takeaway is that going abroad and seeing other cultures really made me see that the worldview I grew up with was incomplete and prone to make me satisfied with what I had.
Don't get me wrong, Norway is a great place to start a family or grow old. It's a good place to live a life that's centered around a family. The nature is beautiful, and frankly I like the snow and freezing weather - it's cozy! But Japan offers almost all of the same, only with all the benefits of scale :D.
Finally. Biases:
- IT job makes my life comfortable by Japanese standards, but not by much. I don't work at an international company. Japanese people also seem to generally live very fulfilling lives, although the rumours regarding black companies and similar are definitely true.
- I have a nice and mature work environment that doesn't make me hate waking up
- I have only lived in cities orders of magnitude bigger than Norways Capitol while in Japan
- I have put a lot of (mostly passive) effort into learning about the country I moved to, and I know people who didn't who have had nasty surprises. You also should do your best at adjusting to how things work here and embrace it. I have had 0 surprises since I moved here. It doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. I make tonnes.
- I was also somewhat into the culture, so it's not like I was transplanted into a completely foreign culture. I had things I wanted to see here. You can tell Japan has done a good job soft power-wise.
- my Japanese reading isn't as good as it should be and so I don't have a habit of following local news, which makes me blind to a lot of smaller issues that are a more more visible to me in Norway
The biggest thing I personally miss is Norwegian friends, and the European hacker culture. There are tinkerers and hackers here but it's not really the same.
Thank you, interesting insights.
Do you speak japanese well? I assume without you only get by in certain bubbles in big cities?
I know/knew a bunch of Scandinavians in software engineering who moved to Japan 10-15 years ago. They loved it as long as they worked for the Scandinavian company's Japan subsidiary. They didn't love it so much a few years later when they ended up having to find jobs at Japanese companies because of a downsizing. Some ended up at companies like Rakuten. Heard some horror stories of insane company "culture" that would make Amazon execs blush.
But you seem to be happy at a local company. Do you think you're lucky, have very low demands or have working conditions changed?
Ah, yes, as you've figured out, the secret is that a lower GDP is actually better than a higher GDP. When Japan did (really) well economically, it was a literal hell to live in.
/s
Guys look I used /s and like to be snarky. Updoots to the left.
Edit: guy has now edited his comment like 5 times as a response.
What is your answer to the question?
(Edit: "How does it add up to have high-touch home delivery of $5 yogurt packages?")
I don't see a question.
If you're asking about what's better than looking up GDP, they already said visiting the countries.
That's entirely luck driven and not guided by data though. You could visit a foreign country, go out for a drink, meet a) nobody but still have a decently pleasant evening and b) get pickpocketed/mugged and have terrible time c) make some new friends and have a wonderful time d) eat some food that gives you anything from a delicious time to a mild case of indigestion to stomach bug that kills you. Or some other variation, but it's entirely up to luck who you'd meet visiting a foreign country on an individual basis.
It's very effective if you have just a few of these, but are able to get lots of press from doing so that causes many other consumers to go and buy yourself through normal grocery outlets.
They don’t have just a few, they have 81,000 people doing it.
I wonder how many suburban housewives in the 60's combated loneliness through TupperWare® Parties?
I heard about those from parents/grandparents and it was interesting in contrast to MLM meetings I had people trying to con me into participating. I fell for one invite once and they are pure sleaze.
They existed well into the 80s in rural Missouri.
And the Avon cream products in the 90s!
Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem.
Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me.
Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pathological dependency on it is.
This is the kind of detached from humanity viewpoint that I come to hacker news for. Keep it up.
Lots of startup opportunities here. Instead solving the problem, just make a product that convinces people it’s not actually a problem.
So... every popular platform we're already on
I mean, the first part of their comment got my hopes up:
> Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem.
But then I realized we differed on what the root problem/solution were.
What economic/social forces are making it so that the elderly get their emotional needs met through gig workers instead of their own families?
Another point the article doesn't mention is the emotional toll this likely has on the workers. Having once worked a role where I regularly helped the elderly and got to know the same individuals over some years, it was a constant churn of disappointment when they'd inevitably die.
>Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic...
you're reading the title wrong, they aren't "trying to solve the loneliness epidemic," they are trying to sell yogurt at a profit. In so doing, their sales force is ameliorating some of the loneliness their clients feel as a side effect. You could say that they are monetizing loneliness if that's the reason people are buying their products, for the visits and not for the yogurt.
Exactly. This need to be social is being used against us. Not just to sell yoghurt, it’s weaponized by the social media networks to manipulate entire countries.
Yes, how do we optimize social interaction out of our lives, maybe we can all live in VR with simulated girlfriends and never have to interact with another human again.
End goal: Asimov's Solaria, where everything is done by robots and the mere thought of breathing the same air as another human becomes repulsive.
Then, like, what's the point of even being a human instead of a robot?
I'd rather be a robot than a human, so from my perspective, the answer is clearly clearly none. I just don't have the option of turning into a robot.
Nothing wrong with being a robot.
To learn, to create, to grow? None of these things necessarily involve other humans.
Absolutely wrong, of course. At the risk of engaging with apparent rage bait: social interaction is one type of human yearning. So are learning, creating, and growing. Each of them requires other humans. Learning requires studying the knowledge created by other humans. Creating requires materials and methods created by other humans. Growing requires learning, so by extension, other humans.
>Learning requires studying the knowledge created by other humans.
You can learn from AI. Just because it comes from another human you doing have to socialize with that human.
>Creating requires materials and methods created by other humans.
You can AI generate these materials. And even if you don't, downloading an image or using a method from someone else does not require socialize with them.
> You can learn from AI.
Try learning to box from an AI.
> You can AI generate these materials
Um...no...I meant actual material things that you use to create what you want. The supply chains that manufacture the materials necessary for you to "create" all require social interaction at multiple levels throughout the process.
Sorry, your depressing anti-social hermit paradise can't exist.
But why if no-one is around to see it, admire it, comment on it, use it?
If a human lives and no one noticed that human, did that human really live or have a life?
Much like a soundless tree in the forest.
a human can not be brought into this world without being painfully noticed.
You would be free to decide, instead of having it being biologically required that you socialize.
On some level I agree, but I don't think most of my fellow humans would agree.
Either way, editing away the need for social connections from humans seems to be quite a long way from our current level of technology, so it's not really worth considering as something that can actually be done. There's a philosophical discussion worth having despite that though.
https://fablesofaesop.com/the-fox-who-lost-his-tail.html
The part of the brain that needs human contact could be chemically or surgically neutralized.
> we can fix the human condition by removing humanity
wild take.
The framing of human sociality as a flaw to be eliminated invites the dangerous notion that we can—or should—simply re-engineer ourselves. However, the ambitious project of "rewiring" human nature to eliminate our spontaneous connections and dependencies is not a path to liberation, but the ultimate goal of totalitarianism and oppressive social engineering.
Hannah Arendt explicitly notes that the true aim of totalitarian ideologies is not merely to change political structures, but to achieve "the transformation of human nature itself". When regimes seek total domination over a population, human spontaneity and the unpredictable nature of our social relationships become the greatest obstacles.
To achieve total control, these systems attempt to fabricate a new kind of human species. Arendt observes that concentration camps functioned literally as "laboratories" to test these changes in human nature. The objective was to eliminate human spontaneity and transform the human personality into a mere "thing," reducing individuals to a predictable "bundle of reactions". Arendt compares the success of this psychological rewiring to Pavlov’s dog, noting that conditioning a creature to abandon its natural, spontaneous instincts creates a "perverted animal".
James C. Scott traces a similar impulse in "high-modernist" ideology, which champions the "mastery of nature (including human nature)" through the rational, scientific design of social order. This kind of extreme social engineering requires stripping people of their distinctive personalities, histories, and organic community ties, treating them instead as abstract, interchangeable "generic subjects".
When human beings are placed in environments designed to severely restrict their organic social interactions and enforce rigid functional control, they suffer. Such environments foster a kind of "institutional neurosis" characterized by apathy, withdrawal, and a loss of initiative.
Paulo Freire similarly observes that the drive to completely control people—to "in-animate" them and transform them from living beings into inanimate "things"—is the essence of oppression. He argues that attempting to turn men and women into "automatons" directly negates our fundamental "ontological vocation to be more fully human".
If we were to successfully "rewire" ourselves to no longer need others, we would be executing the very project that authoritarian regimes have historically attempted through terror and indoctrination.
Our "flawed" social dependency and spontaneous need for one another are exactly what guarantee our freedom. To engineer that vulnerability out of the human psyche would not solve the problem of loneliness; it would simply reduce us to isolated, predictable mechanisms, destroying our humanity in the process.
The problem is, even if we somehow could do that, it's not possible to predict the consequences. Being social is exactly the one specific trait that gave humans massive advantage over other species, and was the backbone of our evolution.
What’s there to live for otherwise? Can you flesh this idea out more?
There are plenty of things to live for, but that’s not even the point. There is a difference between choosing to be social and having to be social because you will get depressed if you aren’t.
I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social interaction.
Imagine how many communicable deceases we could eliminate by simply having a 3 month lockdown every other year.
So is food. If we switch to IV feeding you can also avoid many harms food and drink brings. We can do a soylent green as a stopgap.
I'm not a big fan of eating, so yes please? Even if I then want to indulge in something tasty every now and then, the option to just 'top up' without actually eating is hugely attractive.
You don't go far enough, every flu season should be lockdown and social distancing protocol should be followed on pain of death.
It would be up to you. These people who are lonely otherwise have lives.
You live for others? As in remove those others and you lose whole purpose of life? I am not trying to be rude, seems like retirement homes house plenty of such people but it doesn't make sense for younger folks... although this is hardly a choice, is it. But - I believe one can work on this and move themselves quite a bit if wanted.
My 2 cents - mountains and nature and activities in them are always beautiful, as in it doesn't get boring or mundane, not for anybody I know. Working out on oneself, experiencing various adventures, backpacking around the world, sports, adrenaline/risky activities that make you feel alive, seeing cultures and history and food... those are done for oneself and they are absolutely 100% fulfilling that no career could ever deliver.
Saying above as one such person, and also father of 2 amazing kids (and a pretty decent wife to complement) whom I love more than anything. But I don't live for them despite doing various hard sacrifices for them, I live for me and do those things for me, to be happy, content, recharged, better father and husband and when looking back at my life being fine with various choices made.
So if your wife and kids vanished the next day would the solo adventures be enough?
Having gone through divorce/empty nest and working remotely it's been quite challenging to avoid depression.
Techbros are thinking: "Don't eliminate their need! They need a subscription AI app!"
Daily AI conversations for seniors: (there are a few of these products...)
https://intouch.family/en
Haha! I really like your comment though I couldn't disagree more[1]! I think I understand a little of the view and I think it's not all wrong. Here's the part where I think you're right: not all kinds of social contact is useful. One thing I have found very useful for discussion is Opus 4.6. You have to apply the usual tricks ("a somewhat foolish friend of mine said" / "a junior intern who's not doing so well thinks" / etc.) but it's pretty good at engaging with a variety of ideas and disagreeing and so on. It still has the LLM glazing but it is possible to drag ideas out of it.
By contrast, many humans can't even understand the thrust of an argument and so discussion is wasted on them. There's nothing more frustrating than making an argument of some meaning and having someone misunderstand it entirely. Avoiding that requires some degree of rhetorical skill and communication and a sufficiently receptive audience. I have no problem talking to my friends like this, but there is a time-subject-partner matching problem. I want to discuss Analects 13.18 now, and my friend who can give me context is putting his son to sleep[0]. So I talk to Opus 4.6 and DeepSeek about what I think it is and I get quite far in understanding why my (seemingly novel) interpretation is unlikely to be correct.
So machines are very useful in discussion and so on. However, I don't think they serve much of a purpose in assuaging loneliness. The reality of life is that it is most successful when it can organize into larger blocks: the cell, the organ, the body, the community, the state. And so I think our eusocial nature is strongly adaptive[1]. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced AI, a single person could exert sufficient power. Nothing in theory stopping that but I have other opposition to that (monocultures are non-adaptive, etc.). So removing our dependence on social connections will probably weaken us.
So given that that is the case, I think people over-prescribe solutions in a way that is razor-targeted to themselves[2]. As someone who is not lonely and quite socially fulfilled, I find that a lot of these prescriptions turn out to come from some other axioms which I feel are unnecessary. For instance, one trend is "why do they have to get their needs met from delivery man?" and I think that's silly. When I was a child, we kids "had a relationship with" or "had some of our needs met" by the school guard in that he was a civic ally of ours. He was usually opposed to our actions tactically but ultimately aligned. Our final exams in India are very important and one day one of my classmates, who was particularly scatterbrained, was late for one and he took him to the exam hall on his bike.
I don't think there's any reason to proscribe that social interactions should be within one's own immediate sphere. Our apartment building in San Francisco has social interactions that I think are normal in a civil society[3] - for the most part I interact there with strangers. Some I have helped or been helped by without ever having seen their faces. I think there is a joy I get from my direct family, and then my extended family and friends, and my communities, and my society, and as someone whose life is fairly joyful I'd say that looking around, (and with apologies to Tolstoy), "Happy people are all alike; each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way".
0: He did respond in the morning and it was very helpful. Turns out I misread the relationship Shen Zhuliang and Confucius had.
1: In fact, I'm of the opinion that pro-sociality is probably The Adaptive Trait. I recently picked up Darwin's Cathedral and am approximately 3 pages in and I already feel a kindred spirit behind that book.
2: Can we help it? Almost everyone has heard an expert or professor go "I believe that X is the most important thing that everyone should learn" and X always happens to be what they're studying - well obviously they believe that, otherwise they wouldn't be studying it.
3: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
Not everybody is wired in same way. Some have 'pathological' need, some see it as beneficial but optional item. Same folks definitely don't enjoy loud parties or bars full of strangers yelling on each other, and find a bit of lonely time healing/recharging.
I am one such person, and there are others. I consider it a personality strength, although of course it comes with side effects. Minority but not tiny.
> The thinking child is not antisocial (he is, in fact, the only type of child fit for social relationships). When he develops his first values and conscious convictions, particularly as he approaches adolescence, he feels an intense desire to share them with a friend who would understand him; if frustrated, he feels an acute sense of loneliness. (Loneliness is specifically the experience of this type of child—or adult; it is the experience of those who have something to offer. The emotion that drives conformists to "belong," is not loneliness, but fear—the fear of intellectual independence and responsibility. The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.)
https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/loneliness.html
Another variation on this is La Poste in France have a paid service "Watch over my parents" where you can get the postie to do a short regular visit to them (presumably alongside any deliveries) for distant children who can't.
https://www.laposte.fr/services-seniors/visites-du-facteur
This is an ad
From the BBC no less. We were just discussing how uncommercial they are.
I thought the BBC was state funded and didn't have to rely on undisclosed sponsorships.
The BBC is not state funded, it's a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system. Although the media output for the UK is non-commercial, it does have commercial operations and interactions though and they are mostly centred around the content produced for overseas consumption. As this post is on the .com domain where the international content exists (and which runs ads), I presume it is part of the paid content side of things.
Correct. The .co.uk version has this disclaimer:
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
> The BBC is not state funded, it's a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system.
If the fee is mandatory, it works similar to a tax, in which case it would be more correct than incorrect to say the BBC is state funded.
Public broadcasting is usually only partially publicly funded, and also funds itself with ads and content licensing. And one normally speaks of public funding in that context, not of state funding. There is furthermore an important difference between public broadcasting and state media, where for the latter it may be more common to use the term state-funded.
To add, public broadcaster often is collective (state) funded, but it is supposed to be independed from state.
How much media can or rather may diverge from state opinion depends country to country.
Public funding means essentially the same as state funding, just the connotation is more positive.
> The BBC is not state funded, it's a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system.
How is that different from being state-funded? Everything state-funded is paid for by the general public, through taxes. That's part of what being a state is: an organization that forces people to pay taxes and directs them to various programs.
Are you claiming that the TV license fee isn't a tax? It's money that the state makes you pay so that it can fund something.
The state doesn't make me pay it because I don't watch live broadcast TV, therefore I don't have to pay it. It's not a general tax it's a hypothecated tax and is administered by the BBC not the UK government.
Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it, that doesn't make it "state funded" or a "state broadcaster".
> The state doesn't make me pay it because I don't watch live broadcast TV, therefore I don't have to pay it.
There are plenty of taxes that only some people have to pay, for example, the fee to register a car.
> Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it
I'm trouble understanding how this doesn't make it part of the state? It is a 100% state-owned entity to which the state has granted (in a "Royal Charter") the ability to collect taxes... the distinction you're trying to draw seems meaningless to me.
Sure there may be two separate entities, one called "The UK Government" and one called "The BBC" where neither is part of the other, but structurally I don't see how you can claim that they're not both part of "the State" in general.
The state has changed it from a criminal offence to a civil one. They also have to apply for a warrant to enter a home which takes time is legally difficult.
The enforcers work for neither the BBC nor the government but are subcontracted out.
The BBC is a state broadcaster which claims to be autonomous, but that doesn't apply when it comes to foreign policy or the royal family.
This isn’t true. The content of the BBC is independent of the UK government. Even for the royal family and for foreign policy.
I am not British so I could be wrong however. If you have evidence that the BBC lacks autonomy when it comes to foreign policy or to the royal family please share it with the rest of us.
From the footer:
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
In the UK, the bbc.com link redirects to bbc.co.uk and the notification footer auto closes before even have a chance to read it.
And if it is an ad, doesn't the FTC require it to be labelled as such?
Why would the US FTC have any jurisdiction?
Because of US audience.
There was a case where UK based influencer got into FTC trouble for the CSGO Lotto gambling site. He was promoting it without disclosing he had a stake in the site.
CSGOLotto Inc. was registered in the US.
BBC.com is a commercial service aimed at people outside of the UK
They probably aren’t even getting paid for it, they’re just falling for shill posts for free.
I'm not sure which would be worse.
Yakult is a Japanese company? I always assumed from the name it came from mainland Europe somewhere. They did a Häagen-Dazs on me. Especially as the Japanese often come up with Western names like this that aren't even spellable in kana.
> Yakult (ヤクルト, Yakuruto) is a Japanese sweetened probiotic milk beverage fermented with the bacteria strain Lacticaseibacillus casei Shirota. It is sold by Yakult Honsha based in Tokyo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakult
The plaid trim on the official uniform definitely gives it a Scottish aesthetic.
English is not my main language but this title confuses me
Yoghurt delivery women is the subject of the sentence and it's about women who deliver yoghurts.
With the automation of some customer service labor in japan, maybe this shows people value at least a bit of customer service interaction as a customer
I think most feedback I've seen regarding automation of customer service labour has been along the lines of "no! Get it away from me! I want to speak to the human!". With approximately that level of frustration.
I thought it was well established that interacting with an actual human was generally preferred to whatever we have to use now.
The automation exists to save money on labour, not to make our lives more convenient
Is this a PR piece, with product placement clearly front and center?
This seems to be a submarine article - all the images and quotes seem to be directly sourced from Yakult Honsha's strategic comms department.
Edit: yep, appears Yakult has just kicked off an ad campaign putting Yakult Ladies front and center [0]
[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u8HNY7Ta4dA
Completely unclear what "submarine article" could mean.
Referencing this PG article: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Sometimes I forget that this place is a cult.
“The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Minnesota”
HN’s interest in this article is so “thing vs Japanese thing”
That trope only applies if the non-Japanese version of the thing exists. Which, if you live in the US, it doesn't. I would be just as interested in an article about Minnesota yogurt delivery women, but they don't exist, so...
Sometimes news like this is upvoted, because it involves Japan, towards each a lot of Western techies have an unhealthy obsession on, but the moment when those techies are advised to not use the self-service thing at the super-market they start going bananas.
I also find it odd that there’s daily top ranked Japan related articles on HN.
HN is the breeding ground of the Thing Japan meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thing-japan
Japan is a very interesting country for Western people (US and Canada, Western Europe) because it is by far the most developed country that is not Western. In this regard, it is unique and intriguing.
Japanese have lactose intolerance, almost universally.
They don't eat yogurt or dairy in general.
The annual consumption of ice cream in Japan was 6.7 litres per person in 2021 (compared to 10 litres/person in Canada and 20 litres/person in the U.S.). For all dairy, Japanese people each ate 94 kg in 2022.
They eat less dairy, but hardly none. I have heard people say that a scoop of ice cream or a glass of milk each day is not a problem, but more can be. Intolerance also seems to increase with age, so younger people can consume more dairy.
A 1975 study in Japan puts intolerance (unable to drink 200ml of milk comfortably) at 19% of the population. I would suspect that massive exposure over the past 50 years has lowered that percentage significantly.
So does Thailand but we also have Yakult ladies here, they just sell the drinks though.
A video on how it’s possible for lactose intolerant peoples to still eat lots of dairy.
Case in video: Chinese and milk tea
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=At_WjGosTNM
How come Yakult is a nearly 100 years old Japanese company?
Most yogurt cultures reduces lactose content of the milk base during fermentation. Some cultures like the one Yakult uses supports increased lactose digestion in humans. At the same time lactose intolerance is not binary but a spectrum.
The first line is true, the second line is false.
Lactose intolerance is not absolute.