High-speed rail
don’t tell America. pretend it’s multiple automobiles welded together and they’ll like it
I honestly think we should build normal light rail stations with RGB gamer lights and crap and hype it like it’s futuristic tech. it works for musk’s tesla taxi tunnel so it should work for actually good public transit too. maybe make the bodywork on the trains look like some dumb sci-fi movie
Some LED strips, diffuser channels, and an ESP32 are all you need to RGB anything. It’s shockingly simple to do this now.
Just tell them they run on coal.
pretend it’s multiple pickup trucks welded together
Fixed for 'murican tastes
Duh, we have high-speed rail in Morocco. It’s called Al Boraq and is the best way to blast from Casablanca to Tangier.
And it is not overpriced like in France, where the tgv is more expensive than a taxi to the airport, your plane ticket, and then another taxi.
I thought I was the only Moroccan on Lemmy.
I also live in an area that doesn’t get served by the Al Boraq. We don’t have trains in general over here and I am jealous.
I also learned about the Al Boraq’s existence the hard way, because in the summer of 2022, my family had to drive me from Casablanca to Tangier and back by car, which took us like 3 hours on one trip.
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Don’t quote me on the exact time but I heard somewhere that they run so close to schedule that a bullet train arrived something like 18 seconds late and the company apologized for the delay. ( might have been a minute or two but I recall it was really, really short. )
Confirm. That’s Japan. The driver is in trouble when it’s a minute or more
We’re doing fine with that in Switzerland thanks.
Switzerland doesn’t really have a high speed rail network. In fact they design against it. Indeed the country is very small so it’s not a huge deal but then again there are flights between Geneva and Zürich so it’s large enough for that.
Their rail system is by far the best in Europe though and one of the best in the world only surpassed by the likes of Japan. They just aren’t really know for high speed rail.
Switzerland is very mountainous and has pretty fast trains too, although not Shinkansen-fast. Swiss trains are expensive and comfortable and the vista is pretty much always great.
Also, the EU just launched a new plan for railroads all across Europe! Ofc Switzerland won’t get any additional upgrades, but they are still somewhat connected because of the proximity.
I’d kill for a fast track to New Orleans, Atlanta, Little Rock, Tulsa, Nashville, all that. Ply me with cheap beer, let me chill and ride. What a dream.
Private sleeping room. I’d never fly inside the US again.
On the flipside, something most developed countries consider normal but would blow Japanese minds is the ability to do all “paperwork” on your phone or laptop without any paper ever being printed anywhere. Japan is somehow still a country of fax.
I heard Japan described as being “stuck in the year 2000 since the 1980’s”. I think South Korea fits the original question better than Japan nowadays.
Yeah, Japan had a massive tech boom in the 80s and 90s, but then just kinda stopped growing that field. It’s still there and still a strong industry in Japan, but the cultural tech hype isn’t there anymore, it seems.
Part of the reason for the original enthusiasm is that they were enamored by the country’s recovery post-WWII when they managed to barely obtain permissions from transistor patent holders to manufacture in Japan which led to creation of many of the first consumer transistor radio brands among other electronics manufacturing.
They were the cheap electronics labour market before China, as China wouldn’t see notable economic improvement until after the 80s.
I think Shanghai/China fits it even better. The convenience and technological advances are moving crazy fast.
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Meh. They’re head to head for most fields, only thing I can think of that they’ve made noteworthy advances in would be superheated coal burning efficiency to squeeze out more power and at the same time capture more emissions than any comparative western facility. China as a whole has some of the lowest per capita emissions of any nation, though their numbers might not be as accurate for several reasons.
Even their rocketry is kind of pathetic, I think India might even have the edge over them on that front.
That might be true, I have no idea but for day to day stuff, is amazing.
I was there in the last few years and couldn’t believe how much of the country was still cash only!
Germany is very much the same way, in terms of paperwork and cash only.
Germany is the same as Japan in more ways than i could have thought.
I’m there right now from Australia, which is often considered one of the most cashless societies and yeah, it’s really a shock.
To be honest I kind of like it, and the way they manage it.
Here in the Netherlands you can pay practically everywhere electronically (even the door to door collectors for charities carry a qrcode in addition to their collection box) , but if you go next door to Germany you’d better bring cash if you want to buy anything.
And when it isn’t cash only it’s a completely random grab bag between credit cards, transit cards, QR codes, app payment and e money. Just hope you have the supported option of like 20 options.
They’ve made a stunning amount of progress in accepting credit cards in the past couple years though. I’m there pretty regularly and the shift has been wild. By spring 2023 I didn’t really need cash anymore. By fall, I used cash maybe twice.
There was one thing I was sure I’d need cash for— nope, the hotel paid them and added it to my tab. Back in the day, that mostly happened only if you skipped out on a reservation and the restaurant wanted to collect the cancellation fee. Which has never happened to me so I guess I’m not sure it worked exactly like that.
I know a lot of people here hate credit cards and only use cash, but it’s honestly a pretty large hassle to get cash in every country you visit. Using the same card everywhere is way more convenient and cheaper (exchange fee + no % back like with a credit card)
Isn’t this because of those special stamps they use in Japan to notorize documents? I heard about them on a podcast: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/
Love that show.
I’ve heard it’s just more of a burocracy thing. A friend there once told me he always puts the date wrong on the top of documents because there is a person who’s job is to double check your work. They’re judged on how often they find mistakes, so it’s easier to put something blatantly wrong at the top that easily fixed so they can quickly find it and he can move on.
We are getting more and more stuff, but they often have a really shit UX. We can do some stuff on PC since the “My Number” card system, but that also requires installing all kinds of software, only works in certain browsers, etc.
You can fax at your local public library. It was only about six months ago that my state’s social services dept. stopped requiring faxes.
Are you talking about Japan here?
No, Indiana.
Oh, that’s in the US isn’t it?
Ja
sorry this is gross:
i do not understand american’s aversion to the bidet. why would i want to wipe my ass with dry fucking paper rather than water? why why why. like it’s somehow ‘gross’ to use water. but scraping at wet shit with fucking tissue paper is hygienic and normal?
American with bidet for 2.5 yrs. I hate shitting anywhere else now. Need a shower to get a new ass. Day is ruined.
Same.
My ass is squeaky clean at home.
I think we got our bidets at the same time
Woot deal?
Installed one for my Filipina wife. Never used it myself. I have shit on that pot for months, still forget it’s there. Old habits die hard.
Dude. Do it. Go. Right now. Don’t even need to drop heat. Just go freshen up.
Yeah I gave it a go. Not a fan. Took a lot of drying and I’m not very messy.
I love how you’re being downvoted for having a personal opinion that harms no one but dares to go against the circlejerk.
Yeah 2 of my close friends told me it was the greatest thing they’ve ever bought. I was very disappointed to say the least.
Because dry wiping doesn’t actually clean your ass, it just picks up most of the shit and smears the rest into you.
I understand why you like it. I don’t understand why the other person isn’t allowed to dislike it. Does it harm anyone if he “smears shit into the rest of him”?
I got one with a dryer that makes that a lot better. It does take too long to fully dry it though, so it’s this middle ground of not too wet to dry off, and not waiting forever for the dryer.
OK guys – Think about this – What if you got shit on your hands or anywhere else on your body. Would you make this argument? Would you think that would be OK if someone told you they just wiped it off with a paper towel and went on about their day? no.
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For the sake of your septic system, please don’t flush those! Not even the ones that lie and say they are “flushable”…
Somebody once said it to me like this: “If you faceplant into a pile of shit, would you rather wipe your face with a dry paper, or use water for cleaning”
I think you’re shitting wrong…
Bath tub. With soap. My SO washes his dick every time he pees and his ass every time he shits. After he wipes.
Ok that’s too far. You don’t need to get into the bath just because you pissed wtf.
People don’t wash their ASS after they SHIT??
Sorry let me just wash my ass in the public sink when I gotta take a shit and I’m not home?
I think wet wipe would be best, and it’s my favorite option.
Can’t safely flush them though, no matter how “flushable” they claim to be
they’re afraid they’ll enjoy it…
I enjoy mine…
scary
I don’t understand this either, toilets already require running water and have plenty of room to integrate bidet function. It’s not fancy tech or anything… in North America that’s sort of how they’re marketed though, with an emphasis on the settings, like its something you have to learn to use.
This is also gross. There’s a lot of men in the US that thinks touching there ass is gay so they never clean them.
I have heard this so many times, but I absolutely refuse to believe that it is real.
Surely that’s an urban legend, like truck nutz and decent beer.
It is serious, and don’t call me Shirley.
So they don’t even jerk off?
That’s gay
N O-
It’s not a problem to touch there ass. It’s touching here ass that makes someone gay.
Where ass?
I don’t know! Wherever the there ass is that the other guy was talking about, I guess
I’d argue anything past the first knuckle is on the spectrum.
Why are we getting my ISP inolved in this imaginary ass play?
$5/mo credit on your bill if you let them install a toilet cam.
Is that $5 per knuckle?
Its a sliding scale.
Pretty much every thread we have in this community, someone comes along to say “you should pressure-wash your asshole”. I’m mildly bemused that this is what Lemmy obsesses over.
It’s not just Lemmy, the sentiment is on Reddit and such as well.
I’ve always heard it explained like this (which I wholeheartedly agree with). Imagine you’re hiking a trail in the forest, and you trip on a rock and fall. By chance, you land on turd of excrement, luckily it only smears part of your arm and elbow with shit. Would you be fine just taking a piece of toilet paper and scraping it off? Or, would you feel compelled to wash it off with water, perhaps also soap?
Why wouldn’t you just use paper, if you scrape hard enough it wouldn’t even smell and be just as clean, arguably?
If you would at least use water, why do you extend to your elbow a courtesy that you don’t extend to your anus?
The point is that there’s a lot of people who walk through life with a dirty asshole, but then try to act morally superior regarding personal hygiene, and I think that that’s not right.
Dude, you think I haven’t heard that explanation before? Did you forget where we are?
I was in Asia and got pretty horrible food poisoning. My wife suggested we head over to this Japanese mall. Spent the day there. Use the toilet, walk around, buy something, use the toilet. That was the ideal toilet to have in that situation.
I live in Japan. My wife and I recently went to visit my family in the US and I hated every minute of the toilet situation.
I own a BioBidet 2000. My friend Brian has one at his house and he convinced me to just try it. I did. And then I ordered one for myself before I left the bathroom.
What makes it better than my luxe bidet that I got for $20
I’ve never used your $20 Luxe bidet to know the difference, but I’m going to assume it doesn’t have a heated seat, heated water, variable pressure settings, massage settings, and an enema setting. If those features don’t interest you, then nothing at all makes it better. Use what you like. My wife just really loves the heated seat in the winter time.
Tell Brian thank you. I just used his and ordered one too.
Edit: I really did order one though, my current bidet needs an upgrade.
Completely agree. I was raised with bidets/ water cleaning. TP That’s just a dry off or catch those last few drops
They’ve become increasingly common in recent years. I don’t think there’s as much of an aversion as you appear to imagine.
Cultures who use bidets and not the bum gun will always confuse me. Ones a robot strapped to the toilet that does a medicore job at one thing, then other is a cheap water gun you can use for all sorts of shit (pun intended).
I used them while visiting Europe. They made my ass incredibly itchy. I’m good with the paper and washing my hands.
Uhhm, I’m not a doctor and this is not medical advice, but. You should talk to a proctologist about hemorrhoids or other blood circulation issues. Anuses are not supposed to itch when lightly sprayed with water, or ever for that matter, and that sensation might be a sign of tissue inflammation. Don’t ask me how I know this.
This was many years ago. The itching didn’t happen immediately. Good advice to not take medical advice in social media comments.
The itching didn’t happen immediately
That’s worse.
It’s like having a second toilet seat. Takes more room.
Not from the US and live in a condo, so I’m speaking from a purely practical standpoint. My condo is not that big and having a bidet would mean that I have no place to put my washer and dryer at.
the bidet is an attachment to your toilet, not a separate thing
That’s not really traditionally true. Modern ones are integrated into the toilet seat, but they used to be a standalone fixture.
Yes, I was thinking about the old designs, haven’t brushed up on new designs.
Sure, in that case, I would consider it, why not.
Oh… well, it was a sparate thing back in the day, haven’t looked up new designs.
Check out the new ones. They fit right between the toilet seat and the bowl lip. Super slim. Plus, always clean ass.
You know those poops you take when you wipe once and it’s already clean? It’s like that but ALL THE TIME.
Damn… this does seem like the way to go.
I will most definitely look this up, seems like a real time and money saver 👍.
Water coming from the nastiest thing in the building in contact with the part of my skin that’s got a low barrier to things passing through it? Get fucked.
Are you just fucking stupid? All water in the building comes from the same fucking place, the water in the toilet and the kitchen sink are the same until they fester.
There is nothing more hygenic than a bidet
Yeah bruh, it’s fine until it’s at the toilet. Then it’s not fine. Get over yourself.
Do you… Do you think that the water in the bowl is what gets sprayed on your ass?
Obviously not.
Is this like a mental locational thing? There is no way the unsanitary water from the toilet bowl can back feed into the water line. They are isolated mechanically via the tank float and by gravity because water can’t travel back up into the tank from the bowl. The bidet and toilet fill valve is piped into the same water line the hand sink is you use to rinse your mouth after brushing your teeth.
Motherfucker, you just shat out of your delicate asshole. Tap water ain’t gonna hurt it.
I’m less worried about whatever diseases I may already have and more worried about those coming from others. You can have butthole splash time all you want. If you’re toilet is entirely private, maybe that’s even good. I’m not doing it.
I don’t understand why you’re so angry. Do you not get how bidets work?
Angry? Don’t project. I’m grossed out.
Do you also avoid brushing your teeth on the bathroom? Because I have some news about poop particulate and toothbrushes for you.
No, but I don’t keep my toothbrush in the bathroom for that reason.
Excellent public transportation
WITCHCRAFT
As I understood, lots of Japan is rural, and travel between places outside of the main cities and tourist spots is limited. It’d be like saying the US has good public transport because of the NY subway…
I got out to the middle of fucking nowhere on a mountain by taking the Shinkansen, then a local small train, then a bus, and finally a taxi because I didn’t want to wait 20m for a shuttle bus
Compared to California (home, comparable size and layout tbh) it’s way easier to get to remote places period thanks to the public transit system
Quite literally to do the same trip I did in Japan in CA I’d have Maybe a slow ass Amtrak line to get me close-ish in twice the time of the Shinkansen and still have an hours drive of my own rented car to get there
I’ve traveled from tiny towns in northern Japan to major cities like Tokyo. All on public transportation. Bullet trains, local trains, they’re very well connected to each other.
We have trains out to hubs in the countrysides here as well. Generally, they only run hourly the in a lot of the countryside.
Japan’s current fiber-optic commercial internet connections use optical fiber transmission windows known as L and C multi-core fiber (MCF) bands to transport data long distances at record speeds. Meanwhile we (USA) have fiber back to copper and Cat3 for the last few hundred feet in most cities at best making the entire idea into a bottle neck.
There are a lot of very good reasons to switch back to copper for the last portion of a run. I highly doubt that consumer internet in Japan is terminating fiber directly into peoples’ computers. Fiber is a lot more expensive both for the line, to run it, more prone to breakage, the network cards are more expensive, etc. It’s really not needed for most purposes.
Also no one uses cat3 for data and it can’t be run for ‘hundreds of feet’. And LC fiber IS used in the US - that’s a kind of connector not the kind of fiber.
This is like arguing that SMS is still a good messaging platform.
No it’s not? Fiber is a bad solution for short runs for residential use inside people’s homes. Copper can pull 10 gig speeds or more.
Well, almost all apartments in the city I live in has fiber. They all have a box in a corner somewhere.
Then we pull a standard ethernet cable to our router and we run full speed.
Maybe I’m not knowledgeable enough on the area, but why is that bad?
They are arguing that inside the nlhouse ople don’t use fiber, they use the ethernet copper cable from the router. Which is like, fine, okay, that’s true, but also not at all what people are arguing and not something that should be required to be pointed out in this context.
People are arguing that in some US cities the Internet distribution is done through copper for the whole building/complex, and just like you, in my home there’s a fiber port into my router, which then I use cat7 copper cables for my stuff. But up until my router there’s fiber, which is awesome.
Anyway I hope this clarifies it.
I have fiber to home in Canada
Yeah, it’s not terminated in your computer though for all the reasons I said.
And so what? I have 1.5 Gb symmetrical with latency to many sites and game servers under 10 ms (on Wi-Fi!)
And you would be wrong.
Typing from my Tokyo fiber-to-the-home connection now. They ran it off the pole, installed a little thing in my house, ran the fiber to the modem they make me rent, and it works like a charm.
Yeah, it’s not terminated in your computer though for all the reasons I said.
I don’t think I understand unless you’re expecting me to buy some router and network cards that natively support fiber to go from the modem (which is fiber in from the pole outside).
Sweden is also quite well connected with fiber.
Yes, but nowhere compared to the Netherlands and Denmark
Ofc the size of the countries makes it easier.
They have a device which progressively shines a light on a piece of paper while moving across the page and converts the brightness of the reflected light into an audio signal. Once it reaches the edge the paper is incremented and the process repeats. Each of these segments of sound are sent via a standard telephone connection to a similar device on the other end which uses the sounds to reproduce the image on the original paper on a new sheet of paper. This can be used to send forms, letters, black and white pictures, and even chain letters. It also forms the basic underpinning of a significant fraction of formal communications with landlords, employers, medical systems, government offices, and so on.
Fax machine?
I think he’s saying that, for as futuristic as Japan may seem, they also still rely on outdated methods for certain things, just like every other country.
I’ve sometimes heard it phrased that “Japan has been living in the year 2000 since 1980.”
I think it’s because the country did not significantly recover from the 90s financial crisis, and their society is so conservative that they literally could not try anything modern again afterwards
They literally went “industrial society and it’s consequences have been a disaster for Japanese society”
I agree with the first part, but not the second.
The impact of the financial crisis reverberates to this day, and that drives a huge proportion of the issues, but the crisis in my opinion was inevitable. From my perspective, the Post-War Economic Miracle, as it’s called, catapulted Japan through all the stages of economic development into an almost accelerated version of the same problems that are afflicting the U.S. and other Western countries.
The dream of infinite growth in the Japanese context fell flat for the same reasons it is falling apart in other developed countries. A rise in standard of living and wages led to offshoring and outsourcing of production, the hollowing out of the middle class, a work culture at odds with family life, and so on. The country’s land and businesses were valued in the late 1980s as though it could remain competitive internationally with a mostly domestic supply chain, even as the production costs of its goods continued to rise along with the needs of its population, which in a globalized economy turned out to be a pipe dream.
We see the same thing in the U.S., where every president promises to restore the American manufacturing base, then comes up against the reality that U.S.-produced products made by U.S. workers paid U.S. wages cannot be competitive with something built in Southeast Asia and shipped overseas for less than $100 per ton. But the conservatism of Japanese society certainly plays a role, in that the country is highly resistant to change, and also due to a rigidity that stifles innovation, making it hard to start new businesses outside the keiretsu/conglomerate structure. The U.S. has somewhat mitigated its manufacturing decline through the creation of new service sector and especially tech businesses that operate internationally, which path is less available to Japan due to the rigidity of its business structure.
But the part I disagree with is the idea that Japan has rejected industrial society. Japan is still extremely proud of its culture and the impact it’s had globally. They love that people in western countries eat ramen and sushi, play Nintendo games or watch anime, and they have a deep reverence for their globally successful businesses and particularly the auto industry. They have no desire to reject or withdraw from industrial society, they just haven’t been able to figure out amidst external economic barriers, and internal cultural and financial barriers, how to move forward.
We see the same thing in the U.S., where every president promises to restore the American manufacturing base, then comes up against the reality that U.S.-produced products made by U.S. workers paid U.S. wages cannot be competitive with something built in Southeast Asia and shipped overseas for less than $100 per ton.
That is the lie they tell us. Meanwhile we do everything we can to make we don’t have an industrial base.
- We zone factories far away from everything instead of allowing them to be in normal commuting range
- We tax the land they are on the same way we tax commercial property. Which you might think is fair but we don’t do that to farmers. Especially considering how easy retail gets it, with governments willing to give plenty of free roads and police protection to them
- We treat inventory as taxable which punishes factories that want a buffer and rewards the quick turnover of fast fashion places. Ever wonder why they never have your size and you have to go to the website to get it?
- Thanks to our shit medical system any workplace injury is going to be devastating which means that the insurance as a whole will be very high.
- Factory investments take longer to pay off which doesnt mean much when we all think quarterly. A tax on rapid stock trading could probably fix that but that isn’t going to happen.
There are other factors as well. We don’t hire women to do factory work which limits the labor pool. There is still a lot of discrimination against Latinos and African Americans. Which again lowers the labor pool and kinda leaves us with…well the kind of people who feel only comfortable only working with white Christian men.
Clever! I missed that.
And we’re still trying to eliminate fax as a channel we take orders in. We made a big dent a few years ago but we still get a handful a week.
I heard it’s to do with how secure tax actually is compared to email or something.
it’s not, it’s just institutional inertia
“McFly! Read my fax!”
YOU’RE
FIRED!!!
So simply put, it is a facsimile machine?
Bro you actually got me so hard until I read the comment below. I was blown away.
Takkyubin.
If you have a large suitcase or other parcel it may be unwieldy to walk around Tokyo or another city with it. Subways only allow one suitcase of a certain size, so you might have to take a much more expensive taxi.
Instead you can go to a desk at the airport and have your luggage delivered same day or next day to ~any hotel, subway station, or convenience store. It will be insured and kept safe for you there to pick up. And at the end of your trip, you can send it back. The price for this convenience? Around $10.
This is not only a good demonstration of Japanese trust and customer service, it’s also a legitimately hard logistics problem. I daresay that such a business could not succeed in the US both because of our defensiveness and sprawling cities.
Well, airports already manage to lose up to 0.9% of bags, it would certainly be difficult to convince the average American to trust this service.
There’s definitely a huge difference in service work ethic in Japan, which probably leads to those reliability stats. I don’t even know if I consider it a good or bad thing, because it’s super-nice when you’re relying on them there, but I can also tell that waiting on people hand and foot wears on people’s mental health, and it often shows across that country.
Wow that is fantastic. I’m surprised no one “imported” that one to the states in “make everything a start-up!” days early-mid 2010s.
As a tip, it’s not quite as convenient but most hotels will let you check a bag with them, even if you’re not a guest. I’ve done that at different conferences (usually 1st day and/or last day) when I had a day left, didn’t want to haul my bag, but couldn’t go to from my hotel. I think I got turned down once and it was simply because they were full.
Good livestock conditions so that food is actually edible raw
There are places in Japan that actually serve chicken sashimi.
I’ve tried it, and I ate the whole plate, but I wouldn’t do it again.
Raw chicken tastes like it smells, and it’s just inferior to every other sashimi - not outright repulsive, but just not as good.
I honestly don’t understand how those specialty chicken sashimi places stay in business. I guess there must be an audience for it, but I can’t imagine why.
That’s nasty and I ate bad sushi from Publix last week.
You have to be in the South. Now that I think about it, Florida sushi sounds like a euphemism for gator roadkill. Florida gas station sushi sounds terrifying.
Haha I did get some gator from a truck stop tiki bar, it was not good either… I’ve lost control of my life.
It’s completely normal for stores to keep cooked, deli style chicken on non-refrigerated shelves all day. I don’t trust it.
Then I think I would like to try cookie dough sashimi
What if you get salmonella!?
Automatic opening doors but they don’t open by a proximity sensor, they open when you press the button. This is the optimal solution as the door doesn’t open needlessly but still allows for ease of access.
Ordering machines, where all your menu options are clearly listed and priced. Pressing on a combo of buttons will print a receipt which you can sit down and show the staff/cook your order.
Water (hot and cold) tapped straight to your dining table for self serve drinks.
Unfortunately becoming less applicable with the smartphone domination finally reaching Japan, but their flip phone technology.
taco bell in particular is embracing the kiosks and it’s wonderful. they have signs in the lobby saying ‘order at the kiosk’ even. and why wouldn’t you? why do people in the US have this pig-like stubbornness where they must have a human stand there and ‘PeRsONaLIze tHE iNtERacTion’ or some shit
Every US McDonald’s I’ve been to for the last…5+ years has had the kiosk system.
There was an article published last year, maybe the year before, where they tested the touch screen kiosks in McDonald’s. Every single one of them has traces of faeces on it.
Even if that wasn’t true, it takes me significantly less time to tell someone my order than to scroll through however many sub menus the restaurant has decided to put their food into, and then select the options for each item and add it to my basket, then check out.
Everything has traces of faeces on it, this fixation on it seems irrational when you put it into context. The burger meat comes from a dead animal that spent it’s life wandering in a field and trampling it’s own shit. The fries come from the root of a plant grown in the dirt. The bun is made from wheat which was probably infested with mice. You yourself are a biological machine that turns food into energy and discards the waste. Your body has a tube filled with faeces right now.
Yes, we try to keep waste separate from food, but the world is not a clean-room.
All of those things are cleaned before being consumed. The touch screen menus are one of the last things you touch before touching and eating your food.
The world may not be a clean room, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to deliberately interact with someone else’s faeces, especially when I’m about to eat.
Doesn’t matter. There’s feces everywhere. When you smell a bad bathroom, a fart, your own poop it is because it is in the air all around you. You’re nose is actually detecting the particles of shit in your nostrils. It is on your clothes, on your skin, on your face, on your hands.
The test used to detect trace amount of feces would likely find feces on door knobs, stove dials, clothes or anything else often touched in your house right now.
Please be one of those people that washes their hands instead of this functioning as some broad, sweeping excuse because “it’s already everywhere.” I don’t know how else fecal matter would be expected to travel to a stove dial.
I wash my hands all the time. I’m not voluntarily gross. The tests will find trace amounts but if you don’t wash your hands after going to the bathroom, you are a gross person passing on loads of bacteria that is exponentially more than the testing will find.
I appreciate the distinction though. There are definitely people that live like that. There used to be a guy at a place I used to work who used to dig in those big trail mix jars people put out sometimes instead of dumping them into something or even dumping them into their hands. Once I was in the bathroom (washing my hands) and saw him leave the stall and just walk straight out. Now I can’t see those without thinking about that. I’ll never touch those things again.
Hope you’re not touching cash
Strangely enough, you’ve made me realise that I haven’t for a while. Not a deliberate thing, it’s just that everything I’ve bought in person recently has been with a contactless method.
That’s because there’s feces on every person all over them. Your nose works because it detects chemicals of something. If you smell feces it is because it is inside of your nose. Feces is in the air. Smell a fart? It’s now on you. Bathroom smells like shit? It is in the air around you and on you.
Just about 20 years ago when all those soda fountain dispensers tested always had feces detected on them, it wasn’t because some bandit was going around the world smearing shit on them every day, it is because it is always every where.
According to the BBC article that talks about the McDonalds touch screen, they say the same thing.
As someone that has to work in very close proximity to feces, smelling it is a good sign. Not smelling it is the alarm bell.
Having to crawl through multiple menus to order is not that big of a deal for restaurants. They don’t value your time, they value their staff time (because they have to pay for it). There is probably very little ongoing cost to double the number of order kiosks while every additional human taking orders needs to be paid minimum wage. The restaurant owner watches with hate as their money slowly melts away while you decide if you want pickles, fried onions, and jalapenos on your burger.
That’s a good point. I could be in the restaurant for an hour trying to order, and as long as there are other kiosks available, it wouldn’t make a difference to them.
This is not a good point. This is just a company making us their unpaid employees.
Yes, that’s the point that TAG made. It’s something that I hadn’t considered, and it’s a good point.
The fact that it’s something shitty that businesses do doesn’t affect the fact that TAG made a good point.
i just want to pay cash, otherwise i prefer kiosks… but i see a future of hostile, nagging UI design…
like at some stores self checkout, you have to click 80 different confirmations and give your phone number, email and social security number…The auto kiosks in Japan take cash and they are also mechanical and not touch-screen based (at least in most stores). They are tactile buttons. :D
That’s why you have GDPR.
Because I don’t want to be bombarded with ads and “did you consider this offer” shit and take 5 minutes to use some usability nightmare? Because I do not want to touch a greasy screen that 362 people used today without washing their hands after taking a shit? Because I do not support corpo greed that will not rest until every employee has been fired?
“BUt I LiKe tOucHy fLaSHy SCreeNy!!”
What are you, morons?
Why should I have to do everything myself when I’m at a commercial establishment? Why is interaction with a human a bad thing? I absolutely hate self checkout for the same reasons. Quality of service is valuable and humans benefit from interaction.
If you have to push a button, does it really count as an automatic door?
I guess you have a point. What I meant is that it’ll still slide open (like an automatic door does) but you push a button that has a similar feel to a door bell. So, still very accessible and automatic!
Oh yeah, I agree, just needless pedantry on my part :-)
Since I don’t speak Japanese, it was definitely a much preferred setup that made things very simple for me when I visited.
Water (hot and cold) tapped straight to your dining table for self serve drinks.
This in particular sounds awesome, speaking as a heavy water drinker who always feels like a bit of a heel having to pester busy wait staff to come over and refill my water glass a bunch of times.
I love places where you can just get it yourself. Rare here in North America, but all over the place in Korea
I often see buildings in Japan that have a manual sliding door followed by either a push button or proximity automatic door. If I am going to have to open one door myself, I might as well open both. If one is automatic, the other might as well be too.
Automatic opening doors but they don’t open by a proximity sensor, they open when you press the button. This is the optimal solution as the door doesn’t open needlessly but still allows for ease of access.
Ordering machines, where all your menu options are clearly listed and priced. Pressing on a combo of buttons will print a receipt which you can sit down and show the staff/cook your order
I see those all the time over here in my European country.
The hot and cold water thing is not common at all. A few sushi places and bars have it. But it’s quite rare tbh.
Automatic opening doors but they don’t open by a proximity sensor, they open when you press the button.
I think it would be cool to have a hybrid system where you can wave/nod/bow to a sensor to activate it, but also implement an open standard frequency that can trigger it so people with reduced mobility can mount a transmitter on a wheelchair/cane etc. or just use their cellphone. Would eliminate having any external equipment that would be exposed to weather or vandalism and is one less common surface for the public to have to touch.
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The need to push a button everyone else pushed, is how you get covid :p
I work in a pharma research facility, so people can have literally any disease or chemical on their hands, so we have a lot of doors with hand wave sensors.
Just wag your mitts in front of it, and the door opens. They’re on the wall a few steps before the door, so the door is usually open by the time you get to it.
I work in a hospital, we use these long vertical elbow buttons or rfid readers with a badge which is also touchless.
And if I need to push a button like in elevators, I use the knuckle of my ring finger.
Some even have this little touch tool on their Keychain to touch screens or buttons.
A mindset of quality.
CNC Machines that are built in Japan are so much Mount Betterest than their ‘Made in America’ counterparts. Even under the same company name.
Visit any shop that requires quality around the world and you’ll see Japanese made machines almost everywhere.
I remember touring a Harley Davidson factory in Milwaukee and noticing that, while the tour guide continued to repeat the “made in America” mantra, all the machine tools were either Japanese or German.
more better
ಠ_ಠ
Thanks to Demming…
Wow, that’s fascinating! What do you think would be the best thing to read from Deming from an lay engineering or lay civic perspective? What’s most accessible, I guess?
A place I worked had a noodle machine made in Japan. The manufacturer had us send noodles to them from our shop in the US to ensure the machine was working properly and that our noodles were good, I had never heard of any other sort of company doing that. Where I work now has top quality machinery and they are mostly made in Japan.
I work for an OEM and we will request photos after installation and samples of raw material before sale for anything unusual, so I got to say that is more impressive
Refrigerators that make way less noise than the ones we have here. Japanese more often live in small apartments so noise is a bigger nuisance. But, those refrigerators are ridiuclously expensive by our standards. I had been interested in buying one, oh well.
Japanese more often live in small apartments
Cries in NYC
Another big difference is the apartments are actually very affordable. Two minimum wage earners could afford a
32 bedroom apartment in 6 of the 23 wards in Tokyo.EDIT: 2 bedroom, not 3.
Yeah that’s honestly insane.
You do realize a 3 bedroom appt is like 40-60m2 over here right?
40m^2 seems small. 60m^2 is 645 sq ft, so a bit smaller than we’re used to, but not enough to make up the price difference.
An average apartment in Tokyo is less than 200sq. ft, less than a third of New York’s average apartment size of ~700sq. ft.
When I looked into it a few years ago, I found that, contrary to the stereotype, Japanese homes are surprisingly big. Smaller than the US or Canada, which are some of the biggest in the world, but actually bigger than most of Europe.
The result of a quick search: the average Tokyo apartment is 65.9 sq m (710 sq ft). The modal apartment size is 19.7 sq meters (212 sq ft), so maybe that’s what you’re referring to. But that’s only 21% of Tokyo apartments.
There are tons of silent and near-silent refrigerators in the US
Got a url? Not the very inefficient ammonia type, or the Peltier type that won’t freeze stuff. Thanks.
Doesn’t anyone check the dB an appliance makes? It’s one of the first things I check, as I hate loud devices.
Those crazy toilets
New band name
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No, I meant the ones with all kinds of buttons that has 5 different bidet settings and heated seats and plays music when you flush
plays music when you flush
Please tell me this is something you can customize. I didn’t realize until now that I need a toilet that plays John Williams’ “Olympic Fanfare” when I take a dump.
I saw an ad for the Squatty Potty and decided to put 2 phone books in the bathroom instead. it worked well enough
I use my kids’ step stool.
Automated underground bike storage
We got a few of bike towers on the ground in Czechia. Very neat.
Why does this remind me of Death Stranding?
Their ability to actually build things. The amount of construction projects I saw while visiting was insane, and they get it done fast.
Fast my ass. Once they finally start maybe… But it takes ages to lay the first stone. There’s not enough people available to build everything they want to build. It’s a serious issue
Ok, well maybe they have a long pipeline of projects ready to be built, but they are getting things built. I went with a friend who was there like 5 years prior and he said everything looked totally different since the last time he was there. I don’t know about the planning process but even if that’s slow that’s still way better than most places where it also takes ages to get something started, takes ages to get something built, and they don’t have enough projects going through the planning process in the first place.
They had a lot of practice with all their empty scam apartment buildings.
Are you thinking about China?
Oh ye. Sorry.
When your xenophobia is eager but bad at geography.
Pretty common unfortunately in America.
I still think about how Blizzard originally made their WoW expansion, Panderia, to include Samurai and sushi. And someone had to explain them the difference between China and Japan.
It’s so stupid.
That’s not even necessarily mixing the two up so much as failing to distinguish cultures within “Asia” in the first place. A lot of people think of the whole region as one place. Put some soy and garlic on something? You’ve got an “Asian” dish. Never mind that there are numerous regional culinary traditions within China alone.
See also: Africa.
There are people on the Web unable to distinguish between Asia as in “China, Japan, Kamboja, Vietnam …” and Asia as in “Iran and Saudi Arabia”.
There’s a reason “USA doesn’t know geography” is a worldwide joke
This has absolutely nothing to do with xenophobia. This was based on a documentary of chinese economic waste and the people that fall into poverty because of it.
Well can’t fault honesty
Useable transit
