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' basement~~Traveling 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?
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...
Look at this very fine and distinguished gentleman
Tommy is now judging the weight of your soul
(Sorry for the bad lighting)
Tommy is built different he likes to eat just about everything & anything aside from meat
Edit: thanks you all for making me one of the lucky 40,000s today and knowing what the fuck Goya's CEO was up to... Guess I'll get Hispanic goods elsewhere (dead inside)
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