Viewing profile — landedgentry

Why would a Canadian who has options stay when the government shows time and time again that real estate should make more money than productive members of society, and that capital…

I don't think success directly translates into high trust. I think of China as a hypercompetitive place, which to me should mean lower trust.

This data conflicts with my image of Japan and China, and I wonder where the discrepancy lies.

I think the 2008 recession and its aftermath redirected many "Wall Street people" to Silicon Valley.

S.Y. Lee wrote an excellent series on the privatization of Japan National Railways (JNR). This is part 4 of 4: https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-japans-... If I …

This tweet finds that US systems like BART and MTA have more employees, when adjusted by number of riders or miles of track, than JR East, which seems to contradict your comment. h…

When merit is easy to define and measure. I have a lot more respect for athletes than tech leaders.

Youtube premium is not claiming AGI to justify a certain valuation.

I think those tickets are for people who train watch on the platform or see off friends/family from the platform.

Pachinko

> The amount of transparency over government Can you describe how transparency over government has increased (by social media)?

Correct, Fidelity has a list of 25 Program Banks[1] of varying quality, so I prefer sweeps into a money market fund instead of a bank. I also use Schwab _Bank_'s checking account i…

Agreed. > I have given poor reviews to people who invested lots of time and energy in projects and probably even did good work on them, because they were _completely_ off strategy …

Some employers will have healthcare concierges that help with resolving such issues. An example is HealthAdvocate[1] (no relation). I believe some of these services will take a cut…

These alert systems could definitely be abused. In January 2024, the Taiwan government issued an erroneous "presidential alert" to the entire country of 23 million people, warning …

Well, you're supposed to read the code and figure it out. And if you can't, you're not good enough an engineer. According to people at Meta.

I have had enough problems with USPS, both sending and receiving, that I no longer rely on them, and I'm just an average person who doesn't use USPS much. Whether it's first-class,…

Agree. Bandwagon behavior seems to indicate aversion to (perceived) risk.

I'm a big fan of this blog: https://atadistance.net/2023/04/04/final-frontiers-how-suica... The author understands Japanese sources and writes about how the various Felica-based sy…

Hong Kong's Octopus card uses the FeliCa standard, not MIFARE.

The MIFARE protocol (which Oyster cards use) takes 300ms to 500ms per tap. EMV (i.e. contactless cards) take ~500ms, which slows down normal walking speed. Here's a good summary of…

I certainly believe so. Most executives (heck, most professions) are just pattern-matching and regurgitating cargo cult fads of the day. When's the last time someone had an origina…

This is what worked for me. (In my case the insurance company and provider were the same - Kaiser - so YMMV.) Write a letter to your insurance company to dispute the explanation of…

Problem is, with growing inequality, the 80th-percentile school and the 20th-percentile school is vastly different, whether that is in school resources or the life trajectories of …

There is a huge asymmetry in costs. When an issue arises, the customer has to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to fix it, but for the company, the problem actually ben…