asiachick

Japan was world-beating in what categories 30 years ago (1993)? It wasn't computers. Cars? Toyota is still #1 in the world. What else? Phones (no).

> Japan has dozens of payment systems but how many of them are competing outside Japan?

Why would they? Japanese companies speak Japanese and make things for Japanese. The exceptions are just that, exceptions.

And to be clear, my point is why is Japan called out for this? Where's the article that Germany is a failure because they don't have a global payments competitor? How about France? India? China? Why is only Japan that gets this special "you're a failing country because you don't have a global payment offering"

someone will turn this into politics at some point. Someone will promote that reds use Android and Windows PCs, blues use iPhone and Macs. Then you'll need to fall in line or get cancelled.

not looking forward to it.

I'm more of a camelCase person than a snake_case, probably because I've been writing lots of JavaScript for the last 10 years. But, .... You could argue that camelCase is culturally insensitive given that plenty of languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Sanskrit, etc) have no concept of case.

Many modern computer languages (JavaScript, Rust, Swift, ...) allow non-ascii identifiers so if you pick camelCase, then someone writing Japanese, Chinese, Korean has no way to obey. That doesn't mean snake_case would be all that better in those languages though.

    var 画面＿幅 = ...;
    var 窓＿縦 = ...;

The point is, both camelCase and snake_case are a thing based around western languages.

It's also incredible and probably one of the many reasons they are so successful in Japan is the don't charge more for products out of a vending machine. A typical vending machine might sell a drink for 100-150 yen. The same drink at the store will at 3-7 yen less. Vs, Here in the USA, most vending machine raise the price 50%-300%

Maybe in your neck of the woods but vending machines a relatively rare in the USA (relatively to Japan) because they will be abused, vandalized, burglarized, and destroyed. You generally only see them indoors.

They generally switch the machines from mostly cold drinks in the summer to 20-30% hot drinks in the winter. It's a well known and common way to warm your hands, buy a hot drink from a vending machine.

every song I tried was hilariously wrong

all I wanna do by Sheryl Crow

saving all my love by Whitney Houston

cecilla by Paul Simon

> dehumanizing

So you effectively just insulted like 1.5 billion asians who've been wearing masks for years?

I'd call it humanizing. I care for others so I put on the mask.

I am curious how much regulation plays a part. I had a friend in Belgium running a 2 person indie game dev company. They needed to hire an artist and mentioned all the regulations in place making is very hard to actually hire.

Basically, it seemed like they were on the hook forever (very long) regardless of how well their company was doing. I don't know all the details and I'm not suggesting in any way that they should have tried to take advantage of anyone. Only that it would seem to me that they should be able to be up front with the artist (we're a small company, we have no income but some funding, there's no guarantee our product will be successful, we can pay you a reasonable and legal salary, but we can't guarantee your employment for more than 3 months. Do you except?)

But AFAIK that was not a option. If it was more like, if they couldn't guarantee employment forever then they were not allowed to hire.

That's an exaggeration as I don't know all the regulation. My only point was it sounded like it made it very hard to run a startup.

it's pretty clear in Japanese if hard to translate. I means "this is all the coffee we will be providing. when it's gone there will be no more" (as in don't ask for more coffee. We made one pot and that's it)