I know a good number of Japanese cultural stuff (including video game companies) do! Not sure specifically in cases like “hey let’s give SEGA money so they can make the funny laundromat game more popular” though. Hence why it is my low-stakes conspiracy… Would be pretty cool if things like DDR really gets a subsidy though, it is genuinely a good means of cardio

Arcade rhythm games (DDR, Pump It Up, maimai, etc) are subsidized by the Japanese government to get Otakus/NEETs to go out, touch grass, and exercise

Have you ever wondered why you can have 10-15 minutes of game time for the same amount of money as one (sometimes half) a pull on a claw machine?? /puts on tinfoil hat

If I recall… I have gone on at least 7-10 days without any beyond-surface-level human interactions and fared just fine (if not better than normal), so yes

Is there a bright side?

To be fair I might have exaggerated a bit… I can navigate my way around pretty advanced statistics/machine learning stuff, it’s just that I don’t have enough fundamentals to call myself a programmer; I assume most of my classmates are similar. But on the positive end, there are a lot more advanced methods in biomedical research now. People used a lot of cutting-edge machine learning in biomedical research (case in point: IBM and DeepMind had biomedicine in mind when they are trying to diss chess champions with AI models). Also there are some very competent programmers/research groups who ended up building open source bioinformatics tools that everyone could use, even though it seems against the hyper-competitive trend of biomedical research. So even if individual labs couldn’t do much, there are indeed better tools/pipelines available now

Are there jobs out there?

I… think a lot of research labs/pharmas are still pretty desperate for competent (or just any) bioinformaticians? Not in computational biology/methods development though, that field is too competitive even for me (and there are a surprisingly large amount of AI/ML/LLM slop)

Locked in my parents’ basementTraveling in Thailand at the moment; Chiang Mai seems to only hit 90F/32C tops, which is… almost strange for a tropical area like this. A lot of places in China much more up North are way hotter than this at the moment

About those genomics stuff… most biomedical researchers still couldn’t code worth shit. It is bad enough that there are even dedicated computational biology programs now (I was in one), and from personal experience I confirm that even comp bio graduates can barely code worth shit and are also somewhat bad with biology

Pay is still shit. So… yeah.

Second this, and I also agree that this comes with a lot of caveat…

Biology as a field has an issue with looking down on anyone without a PhD and sometimes people can get weird over it; there are also LLMs and machine learning bullshit (I’ve dealt with some personally); and frankly the most in-demand skill is bioinformatics, not traditional CS… but yeah it is not a bad field

Personally though… I might be giving bad advice here, but I find some bioinformatics tools rather poorly maintained. This is FastQC which is one of the more important tools in bioinformatics data processing, and… yeah its GitHub records look like that, most are way less maintained. I always wonder if some of these projects could use some help with maintenance

Chinese. I… don’t think China accepts immigration, so I don’t think it matters what most Chinese people think of Americans. Not that I think China would be an ideal expat destination for most Americans anyway… China also have most of the problems US have. Maybe for some highly accomplished scientists/business executives who can be offered a job (since China is spending a lot on R&D), but that’s probably it

As someone who lived in the US for a long time and actively considered this?

• Northern European countries are nice for anyone who doesn’t mind living like a vampire; there is basically no sunlight in winter, but they are probably the best in terms of providing what an “average person” wants and needs
• There are countries here and there which have low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life, assuming that I only want to be an “expat” who wants to live temporarily and am not trying to find work there (remote work, savings, or something else). My parents insist that Thailand fits this category; I believe several South American countries fit the bill as well
• Realistically, if I actually want to immigrate, it will probably end up being one of the random EU countries, whichever I can get in via ancestry or find a job in…

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I don’t hate income tax. But from my personal experience, when I was a young lad with no political leaning, seeing a quarter of my first paycheck just… disappear into the void (what I thought back then) definitely made me feel something not great

I mean right now I can see that an income tax system is at the very least a “necessary evil”, but I could also see how ppl without a fuller perspective of things might interpret this as almost theft (the evil guvunment stole muh money!!!)

Free rent/mortgage if basic necessities are allowed. If not… a Michelin Inspector permit (and associated training courses), I do like some good culinary experiences

Nothing, and it’s not because I don’t play mobile games. I have a GrapheneOS phone that is so insulated from modern technology that it can barely run Uber/Lyft… so I keep games on my computers and tablets. Me having a bunch of gadgets (I have a Steam Deck and a dedicated tablet for mobile games) helps too

And… speaking of this topic. I am slightly competitive on a mobile gacha game at the moment; almost no serious players for these “mobile game” play on phone because screen too small, so they end up using the PC clients anyway…

Got a second-hand Walmart folding table + chair set at the beginning of my PhD, I think the entire set was like $15 or $20; it was the only furniture I had that lasted my entire grad school

If I count everywhere in the world… When I was growing up, me and my parents ended up renting some absolutely atrocious apartments that were close to where I went to school. The worst one was my middle school apartment… it was a tiny 1-bedroom for the three of us, don’t think it had a real kitchen, AC barely works (actually I couldn’t recall if it even had an AC), toilet clogged every other day, and once in summer the hot water broke down for an extended time and I had to take showers at the swimming pool I visit… To be fair, my parents grew up when China was a 3rd world country, so I guess the 3rd world country haven’t left them at that time

If I only count in the US… It was not that bad per se, but I lived in a shady 500 sqft tiny house next to the one bar in my college town for two years. It definitely felt quite shady and wasn’t exactly quiet at night. I’ve also had issues with the AC/heating and the metal pipe bursting once in winter. This place also gave me a peculiar core memory in college… I used to have a bucket by the front door to wash my car; once my school’s football team had a big victory, and the next morning the bucket was just gone

Also honorable mentions to my AirBnB adventures when I was younger… which includes once when I saw my landlord being put under house arrest as I was returning to the bnb, once when I think I shared a place with a drug dealer, and once I managed to get myself homeless in NYC at 3am in the morning because the host didn’t give me the room code & I couldn’t get in the building

… sorry, you asked the wrong person for it, I’m as clueless about Chinese social media/young people culture as any regular American is, and my parents being in their 60s don’t help.

If it is just my observation, I do think Chinese society seems… 1) a bit behind culturally compared to most of the Western world despite China’s technological advancements, and 2) seem to be almost emulating Japan’s contemporary culture (which is culturally very conservative)? If these two points hold true, I guess the logical answer is that LGBT is pretty bad. I will have to go to some bars/clubs and underground scene to check for myself though, I could be very wrong

No idea about Musk though. Although China does have several Chinese companies making a ton of domestically-produced electric vehicles so… I guess he was kind of a savior??

In short, I was on F-1 and yeah it was US politics. In long… see below. I guess I don’t care about accidentally doxxing myself anymore

Oh boy… first of all sorry to hear that.

I guess by your metric the censorship is pretty harsh here as most of the popular “foreign sites” are not accessible without a VPN/Tor connection/etc. Not having YouTube is indeed quite annoying, I watch a lot of edutainment and silly videos for relaxation… and for the past two weeks I am mostly limited to my copy of modded Skyrim (which doesn’t require internet)… aaand maybe the two gacha games I’m playing if my VPN plays nice (I think I have to drop one of them now, the game server keeps refusing to log me in)

I haven’t been in China long enough to try things out yet, but I think the philosophy seems to be block all foreign sources and create Chinese versions of them. So for locals there are stuff like Bilibili and Youku which in theory would offer similar levels of entertainment/edutainment so… I’m still planning to stay in the EU as a next step, but if that doesn’t pan out then I will try to adapt to Chinese culture a bit more

On the topic of statelessness… I honestly don’t know. I am sure the PRC does not like ppl who openly speak against the government though, so I guess that is no longer an option… maybe, just maybe even Vietman and Thailand would be better places to live, they might also be authoritarian in naming but at least they are not this ridiculous

Yes! The site is named after Misaka Mikoto, since funny coin flip goes bilibili (Japanese onomatopoeia) I’m not joking

Oh boy on the point of Black Myth Wukong and Beijing’s loss of culture…

I don’t even know if ppl in China can play Black Myth Wukong without going to a specialty arcade due to the nature of its release, which IMO would feel so wrong for ppl who live here…

On the part of Beijing losing its culture, my parents decided to take me on an extended trip to Southern China, and I’m so surprised to find ancient Chinese temples and stuff here… Beijing tore all of those down… I guess Beijing is just miserable to live in now lol

I’m still using a VPN (Mullvad nontheless, I think it is as private as it gets) to browse Lemmy even though it is not blocked; I’ve literally set up a selfhosted Matrix instance so I don’t have to video chat with my parents a year or so ago; there are surveillance cameras everywhere and a lot of things scan my facial data. So… I guess the answer is “very”