Halfway to Golden Week
Today was glorious in Sendai. Wonderful weather, warm, cherry blossoms are still out. Went to jiu-jitsu in the morning and had an okonomiyaki party at the in-laws’ in the afternoon.
We’re halfway to Golden Week. These first couple of weeks of the year are always brutal (classes at my wife’s school started on April 2nd) but we’re starting to get into a rhythm and the stress has eased off slightly.
After Golden Week we should be back to a reasonable standard of living.
And I might have time to work on RetireJapan again 😉
RetireJapan TV
The next episode of RJTV will be today (April 15th) from 20:00. We’ll be talking to Andy Boon about working at Japanese universities, the current job market, academic publishing, the value of a PhD, and publishing textbooks. Join us live on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter to ask questions and join the discussion.
YouTube
Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. We were not able to publish a new video this week.
Life got in the way AGAIN. Please watch some of our older videos instead!
Do you think we will manage to publish a new video this week?
The Forum
The Forum is doing well (34,710 posts so far). Excitingly, we now have over 2,000 registered members (2,146 currently). The forum rules are here. In essense, they are:
- Be nice
- Ask any question you like
- Only answer questions when you have relevant knowledge or experience
Here are the latest active threads:
This week’s books
No new books this week. I’m about to finish City in Ruins. Enjoyed it.
This week’s links
- The backlash has begun: They Praised AI at SXSW—and the Audience Started Booing
- Not all that much. Nice to see a lawyer who agrees with me on this: What can foreign residents do if stopped for questioning by Japanese police?
- I loved the ERE blog back in the day: Early retirement: The extreme method
- Nice. He just needs to survive long enough to work on it: Mr. Kishida goes to Washington
- Japan is… not on this list: Revealed: The country with the most generous retirement in the world (and it’s three times more than Britain)
- I really hope this doesn’t happen: Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war
- Wise words: Eat Sleep Move
- Very interesting way to frame the world: Lucky vs. Repeatable
- Just stop trusting any source of information? ‘Time is running out’: can a future of undetectable deepfakes be avoided?
- Noooooooooo: The Coffee Apocalypse
- Interesting but very wonky: WHAT GLOBAL WITHDRAWAL RATES TEACH US ABOUT IDEAL RETIREMENT PORTFOLIOS
- Carpe lector: How to Lie With Charts
- Just a mind trick: There Is Nothing Special About Dividends
What do you think? Anything interesting in there?
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#12 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics
I’ve found this year really smooth. Last year was the first proper back-to-normal year post-COVID, but I was still in a state. This year has been really pleasant, and I can enjoy the rhythms of the year again. The nice spring weather doesn’t hurt either!
#5 – “Japan is…not on this list” – Japan wasn’t included in the countries they compared.
Well, yes, hence the comment. But it is also nowhere near as generous in its pension provisions. So not on the list twice 😉