Not my experience. I think you are either just parroting what you read online, live in the countryside, or have not been to Japan for 10+ years. I live in Tokyo and none of what you say is true here. I pay all my rent online, and have for 5 years in all places I've ever lived. I never printed out concert tickets. Seals have become less and less common and are almost never necessary anymore except in very traditional B2B settings. I have one and I have never used it despite have various Japanese bank accounts. They are officially being phased out. I don't know about the ATMs because I never have to use those since 99% of restaurants accept digital payments. Yes, there are still a few that need cash, but it's really just 1%.
Japan is definitely technologically behind. I am not arguing against that. But let's not exaggerate here.
It could also be that if you live for 10 years in Japan you may have not seen how good are some of the banks abroad in some countries. That transfers are free and instant, that you do not need to justify anything or fill any form, that you can get virtual numbers, one-time numbers, that you also have additional security (3D secure), that you get cashback, that you do not need to give a paper proving where you live, etc.
Many of the benefits you talk about apply to my Japanese bank account too.
Bank transfers are instant and I don't need to fill in any forms (other than the receiving bank account info) or justify anything, and I get cashbacks both in form of cash and points that I can use at the konbini, etc.
I also don't need to give out any papers showing where I live, instead they send a kind of sealed postcard to my stated address to verify it.
I don't know much about 3-D secure, is that like MFA? If so I guess I have that too, but you're probably taking about something else.
Bank transfers are not free though and I don't get one-time use credit card numbers, mainly because my bank doesn't include a credit card to begin with, but services like Revolut are available here too (just maybe not very popular).
I do agree financial services are generally behind the times here, just maybe not in all the ways some may think.
3DS (Three Domains Secure) means that when you try to buy something online, the merchant sends you to your bank, who then authenticates you in some way. It's usually an SMS code, which means it's technically "MFA for credit cards".
Though keep in mind that 3DS was also rolled out with a liability shift; banks sold it to merchants as "if you 3DS validate a transaction it's never fraudulent and the customer can't chargeback". Which is obviously untrue if you're using SMS 2FA, which can be defeated. Good thing most American merchants forget to turn on 3D Secure...
- Free or instant, pick one. FedNow was supposed to fix that but AFAIK it hasn't rolled out.
- Opening a bank account involves shittons of KYC paperwork. I've never had to prove residency though. In fact in Utah it's the opposite: you can prove residency (for a state ID card / drivers license) by, among other things, having a bank statement with your new address on it. No clue how that works with paperless.
- Virtual/one-time numbers are a thing but not widespread. Credit card companies sell services intended specifically to ensure getting a new number doesn't cancel recurring charges.
- 3DS (Three Domains Secure, not Nintendo 3DS) is technically supported but rarely enforced by merchants.
- Cashback is a gimmick used to justify payment fees.
I agree with you. The person you're replying to is too negative about Japan. Like every country, there's parts of technology that are ahead and behind the curve. Japan is indeed lagging in some areas, but in others it's clearly one of the most advanced countries in the world.
> live in the countryside, or have not been to Japan for 10+ years.
I lived in a suburb city near Nagoya from end of 2022 to beginning of 2024. It's not Tokyo, but definitely not an "inaka" either. We got our Aeon Malls and even a Porsche dealer lol.
I successfully quit Twitter. I used to be on it ~2 hours a day, now I haven't opened in for almost a year. Unfortunately that habit has been replaced by others and I still have FOMO from not being on Twitter when I see colleagues sharing Twitter links.
It's incredibly hard. The only thing that seems to work for me is to create a system to convince myself that I'm not missing out. For example, set aside a fixed 30 minutes a day, or 2 hours on a weekend, to go through the top links of your favorite social media state to satisfy the craving (I use RSS for that). That way at you can at least stop wasting time becoming distracted at random times during the day. Treat it like a cheat meal.
Another thing that has helped me cut some habits are reviews. After you spend a fixed hour on Twitter, ask yourself: What did I get out of this? Was it worth it? How did I feel before and after? Write it down in your journal. If you read your old entries week after week and they're all saying "I spent an hour on Twitter but I didn't feel like I got anything out of it" it makes it easier to quit.
Still, I can't help but feel that optimized social media feeds are the worst thing that has happened to our society in the last 10 years. Our brains haven't evolved to deal with this. And I don't think people have realized just how bad it is. Sure, we see news that social media is bad every day, but I don't think we as a society have truly understood the full implications. I think it's much worse than most think it is.
I'm on Twitter mostly out of morbid curiosity....and I've noticed since Elno took over that:
-The unending doomscroll is now about 6 inches long
-There are times where it's ad | ad | ad | content | ad | content
-IF you look at what IS there and categorize the entries as positive (+) or negative (-) it looks like: - - - - - + - - + - -
It's much easier to see the patterns now.
I heavily curated FAcebook to get rid of any hint of politics. At the worst of the midterms, there was nothing of note there.
Mastodon is a blast of fresh air, I really like the vibe and people...and it's not big enough (on my instance) to overwhelm with content, which makes it easy to disengage.
So, am I using social media? Yeah. But it's not as poisonous when you're AWARE of the poison, and it makes it really easy to disengage.
We're not evolved to deal with it, but it IS learnable. Much like we weren't evolved to deal with pretty much ANYTHING in this modern age...yet here we are.
I don't understand where the bank analogies always come from. Crypto is not a bank. Holding crypto is like holding cash. If you put it under your bed and it's stolen, do you go to the government and complain about reverting the transaction?
If you want a third-party (bank) to secure your cash so you can do that with crypto, but then you're also exposed to the counterparty risk that comes with it. But that has nothing to do with crypto or fiat or whatever. If you don't trust yourself with managing the keys, put it on Coinbase or Kranken, centralized banks. If you want full control, put in your safe, i.e. manage your own key.
There are also decentralized alternatives that offer something in the middle, e.g. smart contract or social recovery wallets.
Banks have federally backed deposit insurance. If crypto was cash, it would be the worst form of it - at least if I bury dollar bills in a drum in a nearby forest, people have to do legwork to guess the location of the drum - they can't just guess numbers on a computer and when they guess right, everyone throws their hands up and goes "too bad".
If crypto was cash, it would be the worst form of cash imaginable.
I posit that crypto isn't cash, or if it is, it's the worst form of it.
Crypto puts every cyber criminal in the world at zero distance from your money. They can spend all the time they need trying to crack into your vault, arousing zero suspicion. The fact that cryptographic protocols are unbreakable (today) is only relevant if we knew there were no other the weaker links.
I guess most reasonable answer is that you should include anything that would transfer a significant amount of money to the IRS. Starbucks points and FFXIV gold may be theoretically included, but the liquidity for those is so small that the IRS just doesn't care and would never enforce it. They don't want that $100. What they're trying to do here is get a cut of the billions of dollars that come from crypto.
I know that's probably obvious to you, but I don't think there's much more to it. It's just another way to make money.
I think the op may be asking the more general question of why it is defined like this. What makes a "digital representations of value that are recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger" so fundamentally different from an MMO currency that it becomes taxable? The fact that it's distributed? Why should that matter? What even is the definition of distributed? And isn't an encrypted database cryptographically secured?
These are important questions that I think aren't super well defined currently. Cryptocurrencies are changing so fast that it's hard for the law to keep up. It will eventually.
Seems like a great field of legal scholarship right now!
If you ask a congress critter, I'm sure they'd love to be able to tax v-bucks too if they were to be told of them. It at least has the ability to become things of lore like requiring a stamp-like fee for emails
MMOs have to go to extensive lengths to prevent and punish trading in game currency in the real world because it would burden them with a long list of regulations. Your WoW gold or whatever it is is not money because it only works in game and despite black markets for it, it is not allowed to be used in free exchange with other currencies.
Honestly everybody actually knows the difference, if you don’t hire a lawyer and go to court and add to caselaw to be sure.
That argument doesn't make much sense. You don't control your bank balance, which are just IOUs, either. It's just an entry in some centralized company's database.
That’s not how bank account balances work. My balance is an entry in a database, sure, but it’s not “just” an entry.
If a video game company decides my points are now worth half as much, or that they’ve expired, that’s their prerogative — and if I don’t like it that’s too bad. If a bank tried to do that, they’d get hit with a ton of lawsuits that they’d definitely lose.
That's only true in good economic times and non-war periods and places. What you're saying is true in America right now, but not in many other countries [0], and it's also not true across time. Even in America, eventually a time will come where you can't get your money out of a bank account exactly because it's just an entry in a centralized database and because it will be in the best interest of people in power to prevent you from doing so. This, and similar restrictions, have happened several times throughout history.
The point I'm trying to make is that it's not fundamentally as different from an in-game currency as you think it is. The cycles just happen much less frequently over longer periods of time (companies go bankrupt and change faster than wars happens) so you may never see it in your lifetime if you're lucky.
I use Hugo [0] and host on Netlify, but anywhere works. Couldn't be happier. I used Wordpress and Jekyll previously, but Hugo has been a good upgrade.
The problem with Wordpress is that it's difficult to export content if you ever decide to move, unless you love dealing with SQL and format conversion. It's also annoying to host since it requires a database. Static site generators like Hugo/Jekyll can be deployed anywhere for cheap without dependencies and since it's just plan text / Markdown it's easy to move between frameworks.
> How do I get back to who I was, in terms of feeling driven to solve problems and make impact? I feel like I’ve lost who I once was and don’t know how to get it back.
This is an interesting statement. I feel the same, but I wonder how much of the optimism and motivation I had in my 20s was unfounded and naive, stemming from a lack of experience. Having seen stuff play out multiple cycles has made me more pessimistic (realistic?) This makes it harder to become motivated, at least about technology. I guess that's a good thing to some extent, but it's also sad that I can't go back to that old naive self who blissfully worked on stuff without questioning. I think you need to deal with the fact that you can't go back to that old self because you have more knowledge that inhibits the naive optimism.
Maybe try something other than technology? How about working out? Playing an instrument? Art?
I agree with you that the Nix language is a problem, and most likely a mistake in hindsight. Even for someone with lots of functional programming experience it's ugly with bad usability. I'm not familiar with Guix, but I am with Nix and
> Guix is an advanced distribution of the GNU operating system
This sounds like it competes (?) with NixOS, but not with Nix. A reason for the popularity of Nix is that it's not only an operating system. Most Nix users probably haven't touched NixOS, but they use Nix as a package manager, build system, development environment, etc on their local machine. That target audience is a lot larger than those who want to adopt a whole new operating system.
This adoption of Nix outside of the operating system context naturally leads to more adoption of NixOS. If you already work with Nix anyway, it's not that huge of a jump towards adopting NixOS.
Guix is also both a package manager and a Linux distro:
> You can install GNU Guix on top of an existing GNU/Linux system where it complements the available tools without interference (see Installation), or you can use it as a standalone operating system distribution, Guix System2.
Interesting, I didn't realize this is the case. Unfortunately it looks like there won't ever be MacOS support, which makes this unusable for me.
I think my point about broader applicability still stands though. Compare the guix [0] and nix [1] homepages. The former mainly sells and operating system (and somewhat mentions a package manager), while the Nix homepage sells a tool, kind of like Docker, with concrete examples: Reproducible builds, trying new tools, declarative developer environments, docker images, cloud images. For a lot of people these are immediate practical use cases, which I think is the reason behind the adoption and hype.
I don't know anything about guix, so I'm not sure what of these you can do with guix, but at least the homepage and manual don't give me the impression that these are the use cases. I don't really need an additional package manger or a new OS, but the Nix use cases speak to me.
I generally agree with you, but it depends on how obvious the semantics of the code are.
In your example, noNameDateFiltered is most likely superfluous. If the filter function is short it's self-descriptive what it does. Adding long variables names makes the code harder to read and adds cognitive overhead. In this case, I would strongly prefer just re-using arr or a.
On the other hand, I have seen long complex function that use single-letter variable names and end up with 20 variables that mean different things. Keeping track of what's what in such a case becomes difficult, and you want something more descriptive.
Taking a step back, the goal of variable names is to make the code easily comprehensible by someone else or you at a later time. You have a few choices to do this, in order of preference:
- The code is self-explanatory, like a simpler filter function - use a short simple variable names. This is always the preferred method. Why make it harder than it needs to be? Reading over-the-top verbose code is just as bad as the opposite.
- The code expression may cause confusion - use a more descriptive variable name, but don't go overboard
- It's difficult to describe the result succinctly even with a variable name - use comments
Japan is definitely technologically behind. I am not arguing against that. But let's not exaggerate here.