Every one of Japan’s 47 prefectures posted a population drop in 2022, while the total number of Japanese people fell by nearly 800,000. The figures released by the Japan’s internal affairs ministry mark two new unwelcome records for a nation sailing into uncharted demographic territory, but on a course many other countries are set to follow.
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Wednesday’s new data showed deaths hit a record high of more than 1.56 million while there were just 771,000 births in Japan in 2022, the first time the number of newborns has fallen below 800,000 since records began.
Even an all-time high increase in foreign residents of more than 10%, to 2.99 million, couldn’t halt a slide in the total population, which has declined for 14 years in a row to 122.42 million in 2022.
Day: 5 August 2023
WSJ »
Nationwide, just 52,000 people arrived to mainland China from overseas on trips organized by travel agencies during the first quarter, the latest period for which national data is available, compared with 3.7 million in the first quarter of 2019. As in past years, nearly half of the visitors came from the self-ruled island of Taiwan and the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, rather than farther-away places like the U.S. or Europe.
“The number of visitors from Europe, America, Japan and Korea are all dropping, substantially,” said Xiao Qianhui, a director with the semiofficial China Tourism Association in a speech in May.
WSJ reviews the book ‘Random Acts of Medicine’ »
In one intriguing study spanning a decade and involving 200,000 patients, a surprising revelation emerged. Patients who happened to have a heart attack during a week when hot-shot cardiac surgeons were away at national conferences were found more likely to survive. It sounds like a joke—stay away from hospitals because that’s where lots of people die—but the statistics are solid. The heart surgeons most likely to attend the national meetings also tend to be the go-getters, eager to cut and demonstrate their prowess in the operating theater. When these surgeons are away, mortality rates decrease by about 12.5%, a decrease “similar in magnitude to some of the best treatments we have available for heart attacks.” (Emphasis in the original). The president of the American Heart Association breezily dismissed the study’s findings, saying, “there’s nothing in this study that we see that would lead us to recommend a change in clinical practice.” Such dismissal in the face of significant evidence feels akin to malpractice.
Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo »
He invokes the Declaration of Independence and says quite clearly that yes, we were trying to overthrow the government and argues that they were justified because of the sheer existential threat America was under because of the election of Joe Biden.
Jan 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.
And they haven’t stopped trying, have they?
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was awarded compensation worth more than $225 million in 2022, which marked a staggering 3,474% increase from the previous year, making him the nation’s highest-paid CEO, according to Equilar data.
Near the outset of 2023, Alphabet announced plans to lay off 10,000 workers.
At Microsoft, which initiated plans to lay off 10,000 workers in January, CEO Satya Nadella received compensation worth nearly $55 million in 2022 — a 10% jump from the prior year, the data showed.
Meta, Uber and Salesforce are also among more than a dozen tech companies that gave their CEOs a compensation increase last year, despite announcing layoffs at some point since the start of 2022, according to the ABC News analysis of the Equilar data.
Roughly 389,000 tech workers have been laid off since the beginning of 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks layoffs. The job cuts have befallen some of the nation’s most well-known and large companies.
TechDirt »
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