PROCEDURAL CONTEXT GENERATOR

As far as I understand it, the main differences come down to:

Japan has freedom of speech and of the press, which is a pretty good thing.

Japan has a lot fewer capital controls and a less regulated financial sector (in particular, a fuller system of financial instruments); China has a highly regulated financial sector, most financial institutions are nationalized, and the available financial instruments are quite limited. Whether this is good or bad is a sticky question.

Japan has done less and less state-directed investment over time, although they still do a lot; China does as much state-directed investment as ever.

China has a ton of SOEs, 25% of China's economy is SOEs, Japan has a few but they're nowhere near as important.

Japan has the keiretsu, which nobody can explain. Horizontally-integrated pseudo-monopolistic conglomerates that form like, a de facto middle layer between the ordinary private sector and the state.

Japan has local democracy.

Japan has gotten significantly less dirigiste and more neoliberal since the 90s; the state-directed investment and state control of industry were highest in the postwar years of Japan's economic boom. How you want to analyze the causality here is up to you.

More to the point, I don't think you put places where one party is dominant democratically in the same category as one where no one not in the party can even legally run; whatever problems I have with New York politics there is an actual democracy there that there isn't in Shanghai. The LDP has actually lost! Twice!

1. Institutionally, Japanese politics tends to be rather "personalistic" in a way that American politics is not. Japan has extremely stringent restrictions on campaigning; candidates are only allowed to engage in political activities for a two week campaign period and cannot buy TV or radio time for campaign purposes, they are allocated a small amount of time by the government and that's it (as a humorous result, one of the main ways politicians campaign is via sound trucks, literally driving around in a truck and advertising themselves via loud speaker; these are a staple of campaign season in Japan). Strict campaign restrictions like this in general do a lot to entrench incumbents; Singapore uses this among other tactics to entrench the rule of the PAP. But more importantly, it means that most campaign-type activities in Japan are conducted unofficially, year-round, by local "support groups" that basically consist of a politician's extended network of personal connections working to generate support in sectors of society they're involved in, in exchange for, essentially, favoritism for them or for those sectors, in a way that often ventures into what would be seen as tit-for-tat corruption elsewhere. These networks are personalistic in that they're aligned with individual politicians and not parties, but I gather the LDP's business connections and [other connections] in general mean that LDP politicians are extremely advantaged in this regard. It's even common for Diet seats to pass down generationally, because these support networks are passed down from father to son.

2. The LDP governs, or at least in the past has governed, more like the CCP than like e.g. the US Democrats or Republicans. In particular, at the height of their power in the 20th century, the actual passing of legislation in the Diet was almost perfunctory, with the internal Policy Research Affairs Committee within the LDP essentially deciding what policies were going to be enacted, often with party members who didn't even hold seats in the Diet but sat on the committee playing a deciding role.

Needless to say it's controversial. That extremely simple definition produces a highly overlapping classification with other common definitions, but it includes/excludes some interesting cases. Japan was considered a democracy under this definition because it had experienced an alternation in power: in 1993. Botswana and South Africa both became democracies last year, I think.

HORATIAN ODE TO THE ILLEGAL SOVIET COOKIE MONSTER MURAL

Barista: Hi, what can I get for you?

YNAR (Yudkowskian New Atheist Rationalist): While caffeine does activate my dopamine receptors, there are obviously four main potential failure states of coffee. A) It can be too hot, B) It can be too cold, C) It can be too bitter, and D) There is a nonzero probability that the creation of this cup of coffee will trigger a complex chain of events which results in the long-run deflation and collapse of the universe into a murderous technological singularity that destroys the human race.

The more extreme feminists in this conversation might counter that there is a fifth failure state, let’s call it proposition E: that the coffee has been unfairly produced by low-wage workers in other countries, such as Namibia [1]. However, this possibility has been exhaustively disproven in many different internet forum discussions [2]. Conditional on your cups of coffee not satisfying any of the predicates A, B, C, or D above, or the many slippery slopes thereto [3], I would most prefer a Grande Dark Roast.

Barista: OK

“The best number is 73. Why? 73 is the 21st prime number. Its mirror, 37, is the 12th and its mirror, 21, is the product of multiplying 7 and 3… and in binary 73 is a palindrome, 1001001, which backwards is 1001001 “

What are the first three details on the Wikipedia article that don’t require some grounding in abstract mathematics to appreciate?

“Seventy-three is the 21st prime number. “

“73 is an emirp, meaning that the reverse of 73, that is, 37, is also a prime number. 73 is also the 21st prime number while 37 is the 12th prime number.”

“The number 21 has prime factors 7 and 3. The number 21 in binary is 10101; 7 in binary is 111, 3 in binary is 11, and seventy-three in binary is 1001001. All of these are palindromes.”

They just lifted the first three details they understood from the Wikipedia article. 

And it would actually have been obvious even without consulting the Wikipedia article, because none of those things are special or interesting. A real version of Sheldon Cooper would not have found any of those details impressive; you could find equally cool patterns on almost any wikipedia page for a natural number, since Wikipedia editors put hard work into tracking down those patterns to make the number’s Wikipedia page more interesting. To someone who has some experience with number patterns and with primes and their factors, the quotation from Sheldon is so inane it’s just silly – which, by the way, is a problem that absolutely plagues the supposed super genius Sheldon Cooper.

Wanted to make a joke about some number being the best number

Googled “best number” and got the Wikipedia article for 73 because it had the word “best” in it

Took the first three facts they understood from the page and cobbled together a profoundly strange and boring joke about how those facts are the best facts about any number

Now step back. It was the process of scientific knowledge-building that taught us to seek mechanistic explanations for the natural world. We discovered that the mechanistic question yields a reliable corps of scientific information while the teleological question yields none. So why did empirical information-yield allow us to judge between the mechanistic and the teleological questions? This question can be analyzed according to the same dichotomy, since it asks “why”. Does it make more sense to ask “for what purposes did the process of empirical information-testing allow us to judge the mechanistic question more appropriate?”, or does it ask “what series of events caused us to be able to use the process of empirical information-testing to judge the mechanistic question more appropriate?”

And there’s the problem. We know from experience that in this situation we should apply the mechanistic question if we want a good hope of usable information yield, as this is a matter which pertains to the real world. But the mechanistic question then becomes recursive. “The mechanistic question worked because it developed testable information, which we learned by testing the mechanistic question”. The mechanistic question developed testable information because (from testing we know that) mechanistic questions develop testable information.