There's also a service where you can hire somewhere to apologise for you/your company's fuck ups. I actually had a roommate that ran such a business. His clients will even issue him official name cards and an email address so he looks like a real employee, which they'll promptly burn once the case is over. Then they get to say that the guy that caused the issue has been fired and everythings all good now. Amazing guy, extremely resourceful, probably would've been running a successful start up if he ever found a way into SV.
I don't mean this as a joke, but I thought people generally hated car salesmen?
Here in Japan, the manufacturers do actually set a recommended retail price that is slightly higher that what dealers often sell at. Example using the Subaru Outback mentioned up top, shows three available grades sold starting at 3,410,000yen. Roughly us$30k.
I used to be of the opinion that it doesn't affect me directly so I don't care. But as more of us don't care, it becomes more common place, and then our (more gullible) relatives start taking in this information and will not listen to you because everyones knows it works! Whatever "it" is.
So no, I believe that we must actively fight false information. Not "we" in an individual sense, but "we" as a society, and that means regulation.
Yes, emoji is literally Japanese. 絵文字 meaning 'picture as words'. Invented for use in Japanese pagers, later proliferating to mobile phones long before smartphones even existed [0].
Yes, the worst thing is the huge amount of decision making even over very minor details that has to be done all the time. Coding and maintaining the servers isn't even that difficult. It's all the little stuff like scheduling with clients/vendors suppliers, wondering when is a good time to chase that invoice, which words to change in your proposal for this client, and so all. If you have employees, how to manage them, how to review their work, how to mentor them. It really is death by a thousand paper cuts.
Let me preface this by saying that I have no idea who Epstein is except that he's some rich, white guy that got caught up in some kind of sex scandal, was arrested and is now dead. I'm not belittling his acts nor ignoring his accusers, I'm saying that I did not know. Now let me explain why.
Over the past couple of years, there have been non-stop stories of one powerful white man after another being revealed doing heinous sexual things to women. The reports are non-stop and it has come to the point that I have tuned them out. A good number of us here are in the tech industry, we're busy enough as it is. Whatever free time we have is focused on things that are more immediate. A large number of people in my immediate bubble have no idea who Epstein is. I'm not even sure if his first name is Jeff or James, except that it starts with J.
I'm likely not the only one.
So according to the HN guidelines, please assume good faith when people ask why.
Jeremy Clarkson's surprisingly positive review[0] of the i8 made me want to take a second look at it, which I did. It was just as nice and pleasant as JC said it'd be, but there were two problems.
It was twice the price of an M3/M4. 20 million yen for the i8 versus 10million for a top of the line M3 or M4. Prices in Japan for foreign makes are already marked up, because they're perceived as a luxury good. The i8 was marked up even more. At that price, I'd rather get an Aston.
Next one is a subjective thing, it's looks are a bit too flashy doesn't it? Nice thing about the M cars (and Teslas), they blend in.
In Japan during the 3/11 earthquake, the only way people were able to stay in touch was via Twitter and other online chat apps (LINE, Viber, etc). The phone lines couldn't handle the load.
Maybe the proliferation of more 5G towers could make the internet more resistant?
The industry is filled with hugely interesting technical challenges even if you're not at FAANG scale. Trivial things like building a cost efficient delivery infrastructure to reducing the number of steps between receiving that first page load to ad delivery and then on to analytics. A lot of it is just math and it's fun when you structure your challenges that way. It's like inverse Pinky and the Brain everyday. We're not scheming to erode everyone's privacy, we're just lab rats looking for the shortest route from one end of the maze to the other.
I also left after a few years because all that maze running got boring eventually and I decided I'd like something with a little bit more meaning. Or, from another point of view, those years eroding everyone's privacy has enabled me to climb high enough up on Maslow's pyramid such that I now have the comfort to worry about self actualisation.
edit:
There were a few people that totally drank the kool aid, and believed that what we were doing was enabling people to gain a livelihood by running a popular website. Usually the really young ones or those at management level.
Those from a developed country were mostly interested in the technical problems and improving their engineering skills.
Those from developing countries were most definitely in it for the money.
There's also the little problem where when your eyeballs are up for auction, the ones putting in bids don't have any relevant inventory targeting you so all the network can do nothing is default to whatever fallback ads they have, which are usually low cost brand building ones. That's where all the almost-porn and dating ones pop up because they're desperate for eyeballs of any kind.
I stopped paying to attention to politics about 5 years ago and am very surprised to learn that the major opposition party (DPJ?) has essentially fractured into multiple, smaller parties, all using a variation of the same name.
At this point, I'm not even sure who to vote for anymore.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/28/642597968/for-450-this-japane...
You want something even weirder?
There's also a service where you can hire somewhere to apologise for you/your company's fuck ups. I actually had a roommate that ran such a business. His clients will even issue him official name cards and an email address so he looks like a real employee, which they'll promptly burn once the case is over. Then they get to say that the guy that caused the issue has been fired and everythings all good now. Amazing guy, extremely resourceful, probably would've been running a successful start up if he ever found a way into SV.
https://www.tokyoweekender.com/2018/11/never-say-youre-sorry...