https://css-tricks.com/dropdown-menus-with-more-forgiving-mo...

> 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"

> That (gerontocracy) in turn has caused Japanese companies to fall behind foreign rivals as they miss technological revolution after revolution — microprocessors, smartphones, semiconductor foundries, battery-powered cars, etc.

smartphones: Japan led the world until iPhone then everyone was catching up. Nokia, Ericsson, Microsoft. Japan didn't lose here because of anything unique to Japan.

Battery-powered cars: Same as above. Tesla won (for a while) and everyone else Ford, Chevy, BMW, Mercedes, etc all lost. Japan arguably led for years with the Prius. But again, looking at the all car companies there's nothing special about Japan here

Microprocessors: Is this even market? There's 3, Intel, AMD, Arm (I know ARM is a standard) but I don't get what makes Japan's "failure" here special.

semiconductor foundries: Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country? Is it just because they're in Asia and Taiwan, Malaysia, and China have been the winners?

There's also this idea that there's a lack of startups. I have no idea about the numbers but living in Tokyo before the pandemic there was no shortage of startup meetup and incubators. Yahoo Japan has an open cafe with lots of people "starting up"

https://lodge.yahoo.co.jp/

Amazon and Google both have places (I know, not Japanese companies but they are targeting Japanese entrepreneurs)

https://www.campus.co/tokyo/

https://aws-startup-lofts.com/apj/loft/tokyo

And the Mercari meetup

https://www.meetup.com/ja-JP/MercariDev/

Of course it's my anecdotes vs someone else's, I have no numbers but I went to tons of startup meetings, trade show like events, etc.... I watched several large bitcoin startups um, startup. I saw what must have been 11 different payment system appear (PayPay, D-Pay, ...), as just 2 categories.

not looking forward to it.

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 = ...;

all I wanna do by Sheryl Crow

saving all my love by Whitney Houston

cecilla by Paul Simon

https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater

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.

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.

Not quite the same but there was even a commerical vector illustration app that tried to add a bunch of "smart" programmable features back in the early 90s. It failed: https://www.google.com/search?q=intellidraw+adlus

Of course that doesn't mean someone won't get it right and compelling eventually. Me, I'd guess it would take some serious ML and maybe voice/gesture recongintion for it to really work for more than a few geeks.

if companies are forced to pay for the time commuting people will choose to live 20 hours away

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/4/9095213/police-stops-heien-v-no...

Here's 12000 apartments the same size or smaller within a 40 minute commute of Shibuya Tokyo

https://www.chintai.net/list/?cf=0&ct=0&m=0&m=1&m=2&m=3&jk=0...

People live in them just fine because their expectations are different. It's like most students don't complain when living in dorms. Yes it's not the same, but the point is the expectation is different so it's fine. Similarly, I lived in hotels for 1~3 months at a time several times, often one after another (no larger place in between). Not a problem because my expectations matched.