341–350 of 439 posts
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Probably whatever George Orwell wrote after he picked up a gun and fought on their behalf.
Orwell had been dead for several years when a Catholic priest started those cooperatives.
It's really odd to me that having an advanced ceramics division at Toto is considered such and odd diversified activity, and on top of that making money from the expertise of that division. Deep knowledge of ceramics would seem to me, to be a fundamental advantage if your main line of business is making ceramic toilets. Companies like this with deep interlocking expertise used to be common in the US too when the US a…
What is odd is that a very small side business somehow unrelated to the main activity that is manufacturing toilets, suddenly become the activity providing the main income of the company.
Look at it this way, you need to maintain the expertise anyway, originally for the Toilets, but you only need that expertise sometimes, and to be experts worth anything at all, they need to do things outside of what the company is already doing to deepen and maintain that expertise. If you have a set of highly technical experts operating like mini startups - is it a surprise that one might become a unicorn in the balance sheets from time to time?
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Japanese and American companies have different purposes. In Japan the corporation primarily provides stable income and employment for society, and secondarily returns on capital invested. In America, corporations primarily provide returns on capital invested and secondarily provide stable income and employment. This shows up in the data too. Japanese corporations are less likely to go out of business but provide wors…
If you see how Japanese CEOs live, they live a far more deprived life on the backs of their employees than any billionary CEO in the USA. Japanese companies are centered around treating most employees like indentured servants in a sweatshop so the few bosses can have giant expense accounts, vacation houses, company cars, etc.
It’s always fascinating to see how Westerners idealize Japan on platforms like HN. It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality. This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is tha…
I think it's the density of Californians, and that Japanese culture, food, second language etc. is popular there probably not least due to their relative proximity. If HN was Brit-dominated, while less romanticised perhaps we probably would seem oddly fascinated with say France, to our minority members elsewhere.
I'm not sure I'd say a company that makes ceramic toilets also making a tool for memory chips... which is also ceramic is really 'different things'. They're clearly a ceramic company. Different tolerances, but similar expertise. Now the paper company got into the hotel business seems a far better example. No idea how that happens.
It’s always fascinating to see how Westerners idealize Japan on platforms like HN. It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality. This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is tha…
Thank you for this post. I am a "Westener" who lived in Japan for 6 years. Boy, was that eye-opening in terms of "the map and the territory". Basically nothing is what it seems to be - and unfortunately the positive things mostly turn out to be nationalism-motivated make-believe, wishful thinking, or only made possible by extremely lax attitudes to amassing public debt (any country could make the trains run on time i…
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I'll preface this by saying there are lots of other factors at play, but here's an interesting one I can speak to personally: Car culture. We're a very car-centric society, and the Japanese auto makers have been a part everyday life to 3 full generations of Americans now. Even most Baby Boomers are too young to remember a world without Honda or Toyota. Across all age groups, a lot more Americans grew up with a fondne…
If anything Korean culture might be even cooler than Japanese culture in the US right now.
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>While true for a few, the flip side is that it created a massive 'zombie company' problem—a heavily discussed issue in Korea and Japan that the West seems largely blind to. Oh, we're getting there. It's just a bit fringe right now, but Meta's $90 billion loss on VR and *gestures at various aspects of the Gamestop situation" and a few other incidents have people asking questions that are uncomfortable for the passive…
Really? How much has that hurt Meta shareholder returns? Are most active fund managers delivering better results than passive index funds?
It’s a huge structural flaw in the markets right now, yet it seems a flaw that isn’t really going to break anything which is weird in itself. I can’t help but feel that Wall Street is going to find the right place to kick at some point in order to have the whole house of cards come tumbling down for a while so they can buy cheap and negate/steal years of contributions from people buying index funds. Not sure how or when but I’m sure they’re working on it.
> This is very different from how most wealthy countries operate. American firms, for example, tend to prioritize focus above all else It hasn't always been like that. Western companies, including US companies, used to have lots of diversification as well (maybe not as much as the Japanese, but much more than today's companies still: not that long ago a company like IBM used to make mouses and keyboards, in addition…