That is (hopefully was) a think in some very strict japanese companies. Also, when people had to stamp thing, they would angle their stamps to be "bowing" to the superiors who stamped first. I hope all those traditions are dead
Good. In my wife's day, she had to wear skirts even in awful weather (she grew up in an area in northern Tohoku where they got enough snow to have heated streets in some places) and had to change before entering school or risk getting in trouble. She wasn't allowed to wear tights or leggings under her skirt. Now, at least from the couple of younger people I've seen and talked to, around here some (all?) school at least let all students wear slacks these days. There's definitely pressure that some young women feel to wear skirts even if they don't want to (not just based on gender identity, but pressure to fit in with the group, etc.) but that's probably another topic.
Same. I grew up in rural Ohio (USA) going to churches talking about the "synagogues of satan", people at school saying "that's Jewish" for something lame, lots of words I won't repeat here about a number of ethnic and sexual minorities, etc.
It all basically never sat well with me. I moved out when my mom remarried which was a bit before my senior year of high school. Bigger city, bigger school, more diversity, etc. quickly proved what I had long felt: humans are humans and neither their religion nor ethnicity nor gender identity changed that. This would have been in the late '90s.
I now live on the other side of the world from that place (Japan, of course, having its own issues with things like gender and racism, but that's (a) mostly the older generations and (b) a story for another time). Before I quit facebook years ago, I did catch up with a couple of people. Most of them did not change, but many of the bad ones got worse (this would have been around 2016) and emboldened by far-right groups growing in popularity. Living as a minority in another country also taught me a lot of about privilege and accidental racism.
This headline broke my brain. I know what Spotify is but not "Spotify Wrapped" so I kept reading it like my Spotify had wrapped something but "Place" next to it just would not compute.
Yep. Having worked in the industry for a long time, including trying to transition to EMR and such, I get this. In Japan, one of the reason fax machines are still important that is not often talked about is that they generally have a bank of pre-programmed numbers. This is seen as a way to reduce the chance of exposing PII to others by accident. This is not wrong, but the same could be implemented for other systems such as email (or the host of EDI that exist). I literally just had a training that said we should not even send a fax ourselves, but have someone observe that we hit the correct pre-programmed button for it.
Old SMS had some pretty crappy character limits so they went with the option that didn't is basically how I see it. Now, LINE is king. I've only used text with like two people ever in Japan.
As someone who filled out multiple copies of the same contract by hand to buy a house recently, which had to be stamped with my seal and not signed, AHHHHHHHHHHghgghhg. On average, I only have to fax something once every several years. NTT, the main telecoms provider, STILL requires that you fax paperwork to get internet (at least for NTT East as of two years ago).
Using cash is great (except for my airline miles account), but one of the biggest banks in Japan is notorious for outages. ATMs here also, until very recently, had business days and hours. That's finally mostly gone, at least. They can still run out of money at the year-end holiday season as everyone is home with family and they're not always restocked in some locations, but more ATMs also helped to solve this. The problem with things transitioning to electronic payment is also those payment processors take a cut. We have all kinds of payment apps here, but many small businesses I know hate using it. The ones I know that use it most generally have larger foreign customer bases (anecdotal to business owners I know; may not be generally true in all of Tokyo/Japan).
A/B testing clean, minimalist, modern designs common in the West against modern Japanese designs always shows better results for the Japanese designs amongst Japanese consumers. I don't think they're going to cater to the 2.5% of foreign residents and others that might use Japanese sites (though I often wish they would)
Both things can be true, but Vermont doesn't have a giant "We're a high-tech place!" image harped upon constantly that can feel like false advertising.
I was mostly thinking geography for outdated things. Bit of a shakeup going into the early '90s, heh. Yeah, except in a few domains, things were usually current enough.
I mean, some houses had encyclopedias before this as well. The problem with those is they got outdated quickly for anything current and near past and were expensive. Occasionally, a big archaeology find could shake up a section as well.
I drove from Houston to San Diego once. It was 26 hours and a ton of it was within Texas. You can drive for 8 or more hours and easily still be in Texas.
Also, out-of-state license whilst residing in Texas is illegal. You only have so many days (14, IIRC) to change your address on your Texas license if moving within Texas. I got hit with that at a traffic stop.
Some flip-phone from Sprint, though I can't even recall the name now. It had the ability to play text-based games and even snake! I think I was carrying a Palm Pilot near the end of that. It was an upgrade from the first brick I kept in my car for emergencies only. In 2004ish, I upgraded to a Siemens SX66 (Windows-based smartphone) and ditched the Palm Pilot. I continued to use Windows phones (I think I ended with an HTC Hero or something similar), until finally being convinced by borrowing a friend's old iPhone to get one of those. Was on iPhone from 3gs until 6plus. I made the jump to Android when Pixel 6 Pro came out, and that's what I still have today.
That is (hopefully was) a think in some very strict japanese companies. Also, when people had to stamp thing, they would angle their stamps to be "bowing" to the superiors who stamped first. I hope all those traditions are dead