Kohei Nozaki's general blog

Basically, I oppose such kind of website blocking because it conflicts with my point of view of a software engineer.

I remember a project for an investment bank in my former job. I worked in a building of my customer which blocked many useful websites of technical stuff such as references, blogs or discussion forums, as well as social media networks while software engineers have to surf tons of websites to solve their problem every day.

Also the customer blocked any installation of additional tools for software development while every software engineer has tools that they prefer. it maximizes their productivity but the customer didn’t allow engineers to use them.

Restricting those things means something like forcing us to be a fish out of water. their intention was to prevent information leakage and computer virus infection. I understand that it’s quite important and they should take care of it, but their countermeasure for it was just an overkill. our productivity suffered from those restrictions pretty much and nobody gained a profit from that.

Also, every employer should understand that overly strict security policies may cause an opposite effect. In such a situation, employees may start finding how to cheat those policies. It reminds me about a silly story of a company which has overly strict security rules of usage of computers for work. Eventually, many of their employees started bringing their own personal computer to their workspace for work!

Physical appearance is one of the most important factors in expression of personality, whether you like it or not. No matter how good you are as a person, everyone tends to judge other people by physical appearance according to their preferences, especially in the short term.

Forever and ever, physical appearance is a big concern of people of all generations but perhaps teenagers are the most sensitive generation about their physical appearance. I remember my classmates in high school who tried hard to make their appearance better.

As for Japanese teenagers, their single-edged eyelids are a typical source of headache. They try to make their single-edged eyelids double-edged ones so their eyes look attractive. There is a best-selling product for Japanese teenagers called "Eye Putti" which helps make their eyelids double-edged. Their desire for double-edged eyelids is quite strong - some people even have a cosmetic surgery to get them.

Personally, to be judged by physical appearance is a negative factor to me because I’m not so good at physical appearances all the time. But it’s not such a big matter to me because I work as a software engineer - I believe that I will be judged by my skill and knowledge, not my physical appearance.

Basically I disagree with the statement "not beneficial at all". it’s beneficial for societies which consist of people who understand its proper use and have good information / media literacy, at least.

I’ll show you a good example of benefit from SNS, one of the most well-used modern technologies - it directs politics a better way.

In early 2016, a blog entry was published and widely spread in entire Japan. the blog criticizes the harsh situation of child rearing in Japan which has a very poor public support for it. there are many mothers who have to quit their job due to the shortage of nursery schools.

The blog is emotional and not well-written, but it evoked a huge amount of people’s sympathy, widely spread via SNS. eventually, the parliament quickly started to discuss how to improve the harsh situation.

Usually, the Japanese parliament don’t pay attention to the younger generation who have small children because the number of them is relatively small and they tend not to go voting, compared to senior generations.

On the other hand, there are some bad examples as well. I see many ignorant people who spread terrible things such as fake information or racial statements via SNS.

Recently I have seen widely spread information without any evidence which states people of a particular race have stolen things from damaged houses in the time of a huge earthquake. many racists spread it with pleasure.

Modern people should learn how to check if information is true or false because sensational fake information tends to be spread widely without verification. that fake information is very hard to correct and sometimes very dangerous.

If there is a society which consists of many ignorant people, SNS is not beneficial for them at all - it would be a straight way to a catastrophe or genocide. modern people should be smart enough as technology evolves, and exploit benefits of the two-edged sword.

There are a lot of interesting places to visit in Tokyo. I’m sure you can find the ones that you’ll love regardless of what kind of person you are. I’m a computer geek and seldom visit attractions, but I found some. In this entry I’ll introduce some of them.