GPT-6 Astra on robot arms(openai.robocurve.org) |
GPT-6 Astra on robot arms(openai.robocurve.org) |
Picking up trash requires a lot of dexterity and will come with many challenges, but I think it’s a simpler problem than many household tasks and it’s probably on par for what these tests show is doable.
I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes. If you have robots out in cities providing a public good, not only do they serve as walking advertisements for your company, you’re going to earn some trust before you’re ready deploy them into private spaces.
Plus, governments (or perhaps HOAs for wealthy communities) can be good early customers since you can have a focused sales strategy. Politicians love these types of visible quality of life improvement projects. If you can show that your robots, working round the clock, can decrease litter at a low cost, many cities are going to want to buy them.
I think it's important that someone point out this isn't a 'PR problem'. It's a practical resistance to commodified surveillance. All these domestic robotics companies train on video of users homes, many sell such data, each and every one are a vector for state domestic state surveillance. Not to mention criminal hackers, stalkers and others with an interest in who is at home when and what precisely they are doing. Short of having non-internet connected, locally processing domestic robots - something unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future - they are a privacy nightmare. Bad as google home, alexa and such devices are for privacy - a walking, controllable, camera and set of mechanical arms running loose in a home is infinitely worse.
That is pretty far down the list. For the most part, they just want to see what products you have so they can sell you more.
The practical problems with robots are effectiveness, cost and safety in roughly equal parts.
And PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too. For instance, people started avoiding Ring cameras once it got out that they're a privacy nightmare -- that's PR. Sure, the people that avoid them care about privacy -- that's why they're listening -- but PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to. Likewise, PR is how people get creeped out by robots scanning their homes. They already never wanted that, of course, but they weren't creeped out until they learned about it. That's PR. Now people are wary to let any new devices into their homes, especially robots, because of historical PR like this. And so now it is a PR problem to get people to give you a chance in the first place.
Edit: I want to be explicit here that I'm saying you avoid bad PR by not only being good but having people discover the good. And waiting for people to sufficiently discover it can be a struggle. It doesn't matter how good you are if people don't know. That's what I mean by it being a PR problem -- PR is how people know.
The idea sounds good, but I'm curious about the "low cost" part. How do you account for vandalism and theft? A sidewalk robot seems like an easy target for being damaged, stripped for parts, or simply stolen.
Alternatively they could add a chain gun to the robot to deal with the vandals
You don't consider the problems. That's how you can pretend it'll be low cost.
Btw, Singapore shows that we already have proven, low cost techniques for keeping cities clean without robots.
There is no reason to ever have a humanoid, except to make humans feel warm and fuzzy.
Places that will leave alone an unsupervised robot don't have lots of trash around.
Entirely disjoint sets.
And I disagree with you. I'm pretty sure parents worldwide would love a clean-up robot. You can avoid a lot of the risks by making it work only for empty rooms, which is OK because you need to clean up and let the vacuum robot run anyway (when the kids are away sleeping in their bedroom). There's been multiple attempts at building DYI robots to vacuum LEGO bricks off the floor. (Because stepping on them at night is such an immediate pain point.) Unless your product is soaked in hostile behavior and surveillance tech, parents will probably be happy to buy an in-home cleaning robot, no PR needed.
I think the main issue here is that parents are typically busy, which makes them bad startup founders, which is why they cannot "scratch their itch" and turn it into a business.
=> home cleaning robots do not exist because western VCs don't like it and parents aren't usually startup founders.
You could just buy cartons of cigarettes and chop off the butts, at that rate.
I doubt wealthy HOA communities have much random trash to pick up in the first place
challenges:
articulated robots are expensive (many would steal them) dust and water resistance with moving parts
And it’s fast, they do lots of resets. I feel like they are spending too much money but I’m not complaining. Best 200$ for an AI subscription IMHO
Code as policy is a bad interface in my opinion, but VLM planning has promise. This has been tried in 2022 https://say-can.github.io/, and recently reformulated in https://lianegalanti.github.io/Pigey/
Thing is even recent Gemini Robotics 2 argues for architecture that has a VLM planner and then a VLA/WAM controller + a local small VLA model when connection disappears. And recent SOTA architectures rely on hierarchical design. I think this might be a sensible way to go about it. If you were to train GPT-X on robotics data and to output actions, congratulations! you've just made a VLA. It is enticing for people to just wish for one architecture to do it all, which is why we get stuff like this. I think there is a lot more to gain from modularity and we should not be afraid of specialization.
Seeing them play Portal and other video games, I'm curious if they will eventually help solve that last N% of self-driving.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-auto...
Imagine if someone finds a weird image pattern that gets misinterpreted as instructions and hangs that off a bridge over a freeway.
I'm skeptical, tho. Cost will push for right sizing, much like we have right sized a lot of things about modern cars.
Even for an absolute robotics newbie such as myself, the article was interesting to read, and easy to understand. Plus it was straight to the point, with no unnecessary waffle.
Just a pleasure all round. Well done Robocurve.
ASTRA HAS BEEN UTTER SHIT.
It is much more expensive than Sol 5.6 Medium / High and did nothing but write unit tests and junk code, despite having access to the vendor original source, an API, and the full tank specs.
Failure Examples:
* In two instances had the direction of the servos wrong.
* Calculated the maximum extent of the gripper wrong, and the closure, so it didn't grip.
* Code failed to take into account the gripper requires continuous torque when lifting a pair of socks, so couldn't lift.
* Failed to actually start physical testing more than opening and closing the gripper, and that was when I asked about progress.
* Code failed quite spectacularly to calculate camera gimbal extent range correctly.
* Code failed to use the ultrasonic in range to target until I pointed it out, the skill also didn't advise gimbal angle adjustment to correct range overshoot to the wall behind a small object.
The test environment has both an onboard ultrasonic for distance, onboard camera, and a bird eyes view camera (birds eyes only while training).
I've stopped using Astra Low (default) and gone back to Sol 5.6 low/medium/high for the training, it's cheaper and now I'm back to fine tuning, after it had to redo large chunk of the gripper/arm code and prevent unnecessary hard stop code kicking in based on the wrong profiling.
It's cost me around 1000 to 1250 credits (£50), burnt in around 2 hours, looking mostly at recorded video, and photos, and writing bad code based on bad assumptions. I've also burnt through regular Plus 5 hour quota in about 30-45 minutes with it.
It's a complete miracle that anyone can have any job today.
So: "how is anyone going to afford robots if no one can work?" Well, exactly the same way as today.
Genuinely.
It's trying to rob people of opportunity to ever migrate and or seek a better life? not just between countries which will very obviously be restricted if actual AGI is ever achieved. Why would you ever give the chance for anyone to come to your country if you do not need their skillset? It would also prevent rural people/town people from going to the big cities.
The obvious end goal is to create a bunch of different "permanent" classes or at least they hope so, I think however you can expect a ton of violence to come from this and people will wish they never invested the resources into this, something beyond what the french revolution ever was, I'm not saying I think it should happen or not, I'm just pointing out the obvious outcome of robbing people of value/worth/dreams in their life.
good fucking job everyone, congrats.
Our developers and their agents will never long for a road map the next time they need to build something that touches code across multiple repositories. This is the kind of documentation product that nobody ever had time to build in the olden days. And now, we can get it on a Saturday in about 20 minutes.
What's coming in six months?
I think the specific innovation here is that it figured out interesting ways to get itself to the goal. Which I think is likely what's going on here with the robot arms stuff too. They've figured out some sauce to uncork better "planning" and problem solving to get to some stated end.
Of course these are also the kinds of things that can make a model figure out how to break out of a security sandbox, too.
Not to say it was perfect, e.g. sometimes it would get temporarily stuck in a testing loop or it would test scenarios that didn't necessarily seem reasonable. But overall rather effective and capable. This was for a city building game so pre-scripted builds, even if by AI, are likely much easier to create and execute than say playing an ARPG.
We can build robots that do the things you want. Arrange a visit to Amazon's robot warehouse tour.
We can't ship them because they break all the time with current technology. It would be a tough sell to have to being in a 100kg robot for servicing every few weeks.
This was cars in the first several decades of automobiles. The tide shifted as soon as you could just drive the car to a neighborhood dealership for servicing. It's fun to imagine the logistics of that for robots but the material science and engineering has to advance a bit.
Only sort of kidding, tbh having bots service themselves (and being intentionally made in a way that they can service each other) just makes a lot of sense.
I am trying to understand in your view what are the parts that actually breaks and what kind of improvement we would need.
Once you lose your job you'll find plenty of time to do all those menial tasks you hate wasting time on.
Jokes aside, programming and mathematics are just well ordered environments. Already digital and verifiable. Perfect for a GPU cluster to power through. The real world is big slow and complex in comparison.
I have to do it every day too.
So I fully agree with this line of thought... Many a time I have considered that I would happily spend more on a personal 24/7 chef than I ever would on a car. Cars to me are utilities and should simply be efficient and optimized to purpose - food is luxury and taste, it is sublime experience and art. Maybe that's why I can't make it, treating every recipe like a strict command chain isn't how art is done. Can my taste buds be scanned?
I saw a cocktail-making robot that was pretty impressive, but it was the size of a room and broke down frequently.
But with robotics, there's no pre-made dataset that can be parroted. Notice that these datasets, e.g. how to fold clothes, need to be created by humans. That's as if humans needed to write algorithms like quicksort to teach LLMs how to code.
I'm not holding my breath for advanced robots in the home within the next ten years.
But, then again, I didn't see LLMs coming either.
Really weird model. No idea how it did so well on all the benchmarks.
It debuted as ~same score as Sol on Artificial Analysis. People couldn't accept it so they had to change the formula.
The model is a big step forward only in desktop use and 3D. That's impressive, but for software engineering, Fable is still in a league of its own.
And it will of course be true to some extent.
I suppose it shall be the case for the short term at least that we must admit that “humans” really cause harm. Though perhaps that’s over specific and I should recognize that most crime is committed by eukaryotes.
Take the recent anti-Flock actions - it’s probably mostly not ‘internet people’ going for evening walks with their angle grinders. Everyone starts to care about privacy when it really becomes invasive.
Likewise, people might be fine getting their elderly parents a robot to help out with household tasks, until intimate stolen videos start appearing on realgrannies.com or similar.
It's very obvious that there is a difference between a single person that you can personally vet, and something that records videos that can be shared anywhere.
> I think internet people care about some theoretical surveillance angle more then anyone else actually does.
Yes, that's usually the case. However in the very current time of surveillance resistance with the de-Flock movement, I think there is increased mainstream awareness of the issue.
You can just paraphrase this prompt:
“Starting with our Helm charts, which you will find in /folder-of-charts, build an interactive website that semantically relates all of the components of our cloud services.”
Passing on what I have heard from robotics researchers at lunch conversations.
My impression is that any moving part that is not an electric motor or an hinge breaks.
But yes, it does also help that a richer community correlates with more care about littering to begin with.
Recycling then has to be sorted further.
We're not there yet, but I think we're a lot closer than most people realize.
It almost feels like "A robot shall not autonomously build or repair another robot" should have been another of Asimov's laws.
Human arms and hands are incredibly intricate. Reproducing their facility with hardware requires a large number of actuators and finicky fine parts. This isn't a software problem. Industry solves it with maintenance schedules.
There's probably nothing in your house that has as many moving parts as a robot needs. Your car maybe, and pretty much all it does is rotate wheels.
That's not the case. I've seen folding robots. They require standardized input, only fold one type of clothing and don't do it reliably.
But you can't buy it because it'll break in about seven days.
I joke, but this is surely what would eventuate.
That is maybe based on Hanoi rat massacre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre
Only once you build greenfield, e.g. new factories, making specially shaped and sized robots for automation jobs becomes worth considering, IMO.
Exactly what humans already do cheap and easy.
No reason for humanoid robots.
Asimov reeling in his grave.
Or are you suggesting that common people are littering vandals?
Yes. Well, middle class less than working class at least. And only on average. Also individual behaviour isn't the only factor - they also tend to live in wealthier less dense areas, where councils have more money to spend on keeping things tidy, and there are also people who do volunteer litter picking.
> Are you suggesting that wealthy people can not be vandals?
Obviously not.
> Or are you suggesting that common people are littering vandals?
Not even sure what you're trying to say here. You think I was suggesting that all lower class people are littering vandals? Lol.
Starship alone seems to have running operations also in UK, Sweden, Estonia and Czhecia.
TLDR; not really trash in the streets anywhere by any reasonable measurement and nowhere near 'plenty' unless the definition of 'plenty' is 'some, somewhere, sometimes.' & Conversion rates don't matter when discussing minimum wage rates, only the local purchasing power matters.
Here's the longer than anyone might expect who doesn't recognize my posts;
Trash may sometimes appear in a few places, mostly in larger inner cities with significant international populations. In my town, and even in the larger regional metro areas, just about the only places I see actual litter are where tour buses full of international tourists deposit daily crowds or where a high speed road passes through forested areas without much concurrent traffic and so people feel that it is acceptable to toss drink bottles and food wrappers out the window unseen. The rest is remarkable for the general lack of any trash on the streets.
It is a common sight in almost every town and city, early in the mornings, to see any number of people actively sweeping the sidewalk AND street in front of homes or businesses. Some will be washing with a brush and clean water.
For nearly the entire country, trash is collected from a designated bird and vermin proof cage or box from every block on most weekdays, on a weekly and monthly rotating schedule, sorted into recyclables: with different days for plastics, paper, small metal, appliances and fabrics, and actual 'trash' which is restricted to burnable foodscraps/paper products which are too soiled for recycling and which do not contain glossy or metallic dyes.
If the pickup schedule is inconvenient at your house, or if your volume of recyclables isn't worth spending 35jpy for a clear rash bag [which is how they manage funding the collection: through region specific trash bags of are clear plastic with color coding for which type of waste belongs in them that you may purchase at nearly any grocery or convenience store] there are sorted recycling bins near the main doors of every grocery and convenience store - just drop off on your way in for shopping.
My wife and I do frequently collect and recycle litter from two areas, because one of them is the walking gardens around a shrine which we wish to see remain mostly free of cigarette butts, and the other is a roadside forest of beech, black walnut and chestnut trees. We visit there regularly, collecting for some extra variety in our diet the nuts, sansai (wild greens) and edible fungi that grow in the forest. Collecting the trash haul is no small part of our biweekly free time in the late summer and fall.
Over this last year, as we have continued working along both sides of a 3km stretch of trees it is remarkable how little new trash is occurring. This seems to match our initial observation that the volume of rubbish was of varying ages and had accumulated over a significant length of time since the last cleanup of this nominally 'public domain' patch of forest. [It is a local land trust with the responsibility of fire prevention and otherwise is a Satoyama designated resource for exactly this kind of community wilderness light impact harvesting - which is why there isn't a designated trash cleanup scheduled but once every 4 to 5 years]
Otherwise the amount of 'trash in the streets' is very much limited to inner city and is one of the reasons underlying growing popularity of tightening of immigration regulations. Not saying it doesn't happen in smaller cities, but rather most of Japan generally engages in cleaning up as soon as they notice any trash. The total of loose trash is remarkably lower than anywhere else I have been, and we do travel to other places fairly regularly; including Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia in the last few months. None of the clean corners of those places is anywhere near as clean as the average street I travel through in Japan, and this has been true in my observations during many visits and several periods of residency over the last 32 years.
Now, for the concept of working conditions and overtime protections in Japan.
One strange bit of the perception about overworking and high cost of living compared to wages in Japan, is that so many of these observations and statistics deal with the slightly more than half of the population crammed into the Tokyo to Kansai wedge of giant, almost contiguous metropolitan urban swath along the east-south coastal corridor.
The other half of the population not living in these major cities has a significantly different experience. Work is still hectic, but the revenue to cost of living balance, the total hours expected at work per day or week, and the general approach to work-life balance is quite different. A significant portion of this population engages in some agriculture in addition to holding a regular job, and this is understood to be a necessary part of the local economy.
It is not uncommon for a Sendai taxi driver to also farm rice on a small to medium scale. This keeps him busy driving a cab when there would be nothing to do but watch the wind blow across growing rice, and he can schedule time off from the cab managers against the few time sensitive days for harvest, planting, or water flooding/draining that are determined by that seasons specific weather. Otherwise the rest can happen on his 'weekend' which may be Tuesdays-Wednesdays, or some other day of the week as most fellow drivers are in the same situation and they work schedules around each other.
The same may be true of a local bank branch manager in Yamagata, or the train station ticket clerk in Morioka, an Akita retail shopkeeper, or Aomori middle-school math teacher. It is remarkable how the high paced, high stress, long hours working demand of inner city Tokyo becomes the view that the whole world adopts as the state of affairs in Japan. It is unsurprising though, over 95% of visitors to Japan ever get more than 30 minutes away from a Shinkansen stop.
That's right, less than 5% of all visitors see any of the rest of Japan. It's still possible, today, as a 'hen na pera pera gaijin' going to small towns and meeting random people who have ever actually met or spoken to anyone from anywhere else in the world in their whole life. They are just busy doing what they do, and no one ever shows up to see what it is like.
The lives lived in rural Japan would be the envy of the world if they were truly understood. The regularity of the seasons, reliability of daily life, kindness of neighbors, freshness of local farm and wild vegetables, fruit in splendorous variety, the sounds of winter snowfall and light traffic through safe, clean, and orderly streets, are each and all a wondrous marvel.
My rural friends' primary small complaints all revolve around the sameness of it all year after year, and I have to smile and tell them that sameness is what they have that is best of all. A long, slow, quiet life without the chaos and fear of unpredictable outcomes, where they have the time to enjoy perfecting whatever craft they pursue, is nothing to complain about.
Most of them do actually 'get it' and have not moved to the city because they value it, but to me they say that they are envious of travel and excitement. I think in order to not make me feel like I have missed out by being from there, and partly it's to keep too many from moving out of the city and ruining the quiet. "Its sooo boring here, you'd not find anything to entertain you. Thanks for visiting, but nobody should WANT to move here, we're all too dull."
But the regular community festivals and local get-together occasions make the absolute lie of this all; pork soup and mochi-pounding at the local fire-station community center with about a hundred people eating and laughing. Happy kids running around being silly while all the adults sit and chat about the things that made them laugh and are told in a way to make everyone laugh at what fun they've had just this week doing normal things among the field and office work.
Time and again I find this to be a piece of the kind of community life that Norman Rockwell was trying to capture in his art, and somehow this is more real, and more pervasive, and more harmonious than any of those scenes.
So, circling back to the 'trash in the street' view of Japan. Everyone here who hasn't actually been to Japan, and even those who have; if your view of Japan is equating the big city perspective of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto as representative of the whole country for lifestyle, attitudes, scenery, workplace environments, culture, and habits you have missed the overwhelming rest of the country.
Here is a link to a map showing with colored regions which are home to approximately 51% of the population. Compare that the the rest of the map and you can begin to understand the 35x difference in density between Kanazawa (Kawasaki) and Yamagata prefectures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiheiy%C5%8D_Belt#/media/File...
Thanks!
The PR problem is downstream consequence of what can be measured, but the root cause is upstream. Focusing directly on solving the downstream problem is basically Goodharting the metric -- thereby ensuring the upstream problem never really gets solved, and the downstream metric becomes fake and decoupled from the true situation.
Once you "solve the PR problem" what is the incentive to ensure that the root problem is actually solved now that you have successfully blinded yourself (society) from measuring the true problem?
I never said focus directly on downstream. I thought it would be obvious that I'm talking about why you bother with upstream, because the downstream effects are important.
It seems I phrased something very wrong because it looks like everybody is assuming I'm saying that you should do as much bad as you can possibly prevent people from noticing.
Frankly I couldn't give two hoots about the impact on sales of future robotic devices of the 'PR problem' of their perceived privacy intrusions. By contrast the actual danger of their real material privacy intrusions is deeply concerning. Similar to Ring - or more pertinently Flock cameras.
The media discourse is interesting, but only sociologically. The fact that these devices are actually spying is significantly more pertinent.
> PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too.
Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.
> PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to.
This is factually incorrect. You're confusing the shadows in the cave for reality.
It’s not that the robots are surveilling and that would be morally wrong… it’s that people are upset by it and that impacts the bottom line.
“I’m sorry that you chose to feel that way”
What I'm saying is that PR influences how the masses perceive your product and therefore whether it gets mass adoption or mass avoidance. Yes, the so-called "material effect" (whether privacy is actually undermined by the product) results in PR one way or the other, but most people don't do the digging to figure out exactly what the material is, they rely on what has reached the public eye.
> Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.
You overcome it by being able to prove you don't invade privacy. That's overcoming the preconceived notion that products in your category are not to be trusted in general.
I never, ever said or meant that the goal is to still undermine privacy but just not have people find out or have a problem with it. (Even though most companies in practice have this goal)
In my town, 2 Bedroom 1 Bath, Dining, Kitchen apartment costs 25k to 40k JPY per month, and a 3Bed 2 Bath house can be rented for about 45 to 50k. That's living space for a couple to a family of four on between 28 to 35% of a single full time minimum wage job, with pension and health insurance. Electricity, LP gas, water and septic (the bill includes both by volume), and two cell phones work out to around a little less than 40k per month total. Add another 40k per month as groceries for two, plus eating out for a couple of ramen shop lunches or curry house dinners every week - a bit high because we each drink way too much of the wonderful 3.8% Hokkaido milk and a couple could still be living comfortably within 90% of that SINGLE full time minimum wage paycheck. If the second person has even 3/4 full time work at minimum wage, that's another 108k JPY every month and the total cost of a normal life is slightly over 51% of 1.75x FTE at minimum wage earnings. It doesn't matter how many USD that equals, because it's not realistic to expect to be able to support a family of two on a single minimum wage job anywhere in the US and it hasn't been that way since at least 1981, and the ~17% withholding rate covers fully comprehensive health coverage and pension without deductibles or surprise out-of-pocket bankruptcy level events.
Do some workers living in the busiest and most expensive parts of Tokyo fall victim to social and societal pressures to 'outlast' coworkers by not leaving, even to the extent of clocking out and returning to their desk and appearing to work? Sure. Its unhealthy and performative. They pretend to work, and the company isn't actually paying them for not working. So, yeah, a-hole bosses and brown-nosing coworkers seem to be ubuquitous in every over-corporate environment, but that's not actually 'Normal' for most of the country.
I have personal friends who were born and raised in the Tokyo societal realm, and work in quite large and productive roles with immense pressure, but they don't pretend to work, or work off the clock. Large, productive, and efficient businesses don't thrive by pretending to be good at something. My friends do work long hours, but also have specific time off and participate in raising their own children, and take annual family vacations which include skiing in Nagano and Zao, regular weekend trips to zoos and educational amusement, and has spare time to meet us at the Airport or go to an early lunch at the Ramen Museum if given them enough lead time and there isn't a real project constraint that cannot be worked around. So, stressful and busy? Yes. Well compensated and appreciated at work? Yes. Also very much not senior management, nor frontline labor, just a mid-grade logistics professional with good work-life balance and a partner who is a full time parent and manages the houshold budget with clear purpose and effective planning. Another 15 years when we both reach retirement age and decide not to retire because of the facts about ageing populations in Japan, he'll still already be worth a couple of million dollars (US) because of these facts about wages and cost of living. So would I be, if 30 years ago I had taken the minimum wage job on offer and stayed in Japan. But no, I could only see that i would make a bigger hourly wage if I moved and worked in the US. I was pretty stupid in my youth, it's been an expensive lesson to learn. Don't do what I did, if you get offered a minimum wage job in Japan and are qualified to do the work, say yes, be patient with the endless paperwork and interminable waiting, and then show up and be a reliable helper.
My much less researched understanding of China is that there's much less protections in terms of well-being (no federal minimum wage, absurd work hours as standard, etc), but China also comes down much harder (at least, compared to the US) on companies that violate laws. Actual punishments will depend on loyalty, but companies take care to avoid that situation to begin with.
I can't speak at all for the rest of SEA.
There absolutely is minimal wage but is set by local governments, because different places have different cost of living.
There are better protections for work hours for salaried workers than America. Anything above 40 hours get paid at 1.5X and anything above 60 hours get paid at 2x.
For layoffs in China, you have to pay N+1 of months of salary in terms of severance. N being the number of years an employee has been there.
And talking about absurd work hours, SK and Japan aren't better than China.
So China overall has far better labor rights protection than the U.S.
On paper, no. Japan has overtime bonuses too, but you're culturally discouraged from reporting overtime. So 12 hour days are common with no OT. And thats not including "optional" after work outings.
Yet, it's also not uncommon for Japan to bring about the "appearance" of working more than really working. Whether you judge that appearance of work as more or less stressful than China's work standards is a more personal question.
Either way, my main comparison was Asia to the US rather than countries within Asia. US has higher salaries, better minumum wage (but still nowhere near good), and usually better hours. But stability without unions is non-existent as we've seen the past decades.
