At present this explicitly does not include a "lockdown such as we have seen in countries abroad."
I would recommend you not make plans which are contingent on that state of affairs continuing.
"What's the biggest change we're likely to see?"
Every public and private org in Japan will have a conversation tomorrow, and in lamentably many cases for *the first time* tomorrow, on what their coronavirus strategy should be. Some will act; some will start planning to act.
"Every" is a bit of an overstatement for effect here, but as of tomorrow it's hard to imagine e.g. a large corporation or city not having several hundred people working on this issue.
That is, unfortunately, not terribly hard to imagine as of last week or even this morning.
The press conference includes the first time I've heard the acknowledgement from on high (in Japanese) that asymptomatic people can be infectious, which is one of the most important facts for the public health response and which will likely surprise a lot of decisionmakers.
Request from the government to avoid moving from Tokyo/Osaka/etc ("as we've seen abroad during lockdowns") to regions of Japan because a) risk in Tokyo/Osaka/etc "if living life as normal" is low and b) high at-risk population in the regions.
(Both quotes approximate.)
Government clarifies that while compliance with government requests to avoid e.g. operating businesses considered at high risk to spread coronavirus is at the discretion of the business owner, that request could be made directly, by police, in the course of their official duties.
I will note for the benefit of Japanese speakers searching the transcript that the word 職務質問 was used by the questioner, and think your friendly neighborhood legal professional can explain why that is an important word choice.
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This week on Complex Systems, a continued discussion of credit card rewards, interchange, and what I believe is a persistent misconception about how society should want justice done via payments systems.
It ends with the following, which the team took the liberty of putting into a short clip. (Sound on if you like hearing my voice, but video is subtitled.)
Last week the Atlantic published an opinion piece which argues that the poor are subsidizing the rich's receipt of credit card rewards. This view has wide currency among certain advocates and among opinion writers.
It is not true.
Credit card rewards are actually funded by interchange, a cost which is ultimately paid by card-accepting businesses for a combination of services they get from the payments industry.
Rewards have a few equilibria globally; the U.S. is in a high rewards, high interchange one.
An argument I have had with some credit card enthusiasts for a very long time, paraphrased.
Enthusiasts: I’m robbing the bank blind!
Me: Doubtful? They are probably pretty happy to have a portfolio of you.
E: Oh by carefully layering promotions and making a spreadsheet and…
Me: So checking my understanding: you spend a lot of money on credit cards.
E: Yes, that’s the whole point.
Me: And in a nation which makes it illegal to underwrite using an IQ test, you have self-constructed an IQ test.
E: Yes and I pass it obviously.
Me: Right. Tracking.
Me: You sound like a very desirable bank customer.
E: Oh no I’m not! I take them so hard.
Me: Your income and net worth are likely to be quite higher in ten years right. You predict that too?
E: Oh yeah.
Me: Yeah you’re going to continue consuming lots of financial services.
There is a general feeling in some quarters that the payments industry functions as a tax on everyone, and that the incidence of this tax must be highest on the poor, because they're least likely to have a rewards card.
Last up at #microconf, Marcos Rivera from Pricing I/O on pricing.
"How to avoid stupid mistakes in SaaS pricing"
(I am likely to have some thoughts.)
As always, quotes are Marcos (lightly paraphrased; real time is hard), anything attributed to Marcos is a heavy paraphrase, anything unattributed is me.
Marcos was previously Head of Pricing for Vista Equity Partners (hoohah; noted PE firm in software space).
This is a useful enough specific observation that I'm promoting the general observation to text:
Organizations don't make decisions. People at organizations make decisions. Very often, there is one lynchpin person who must hypercommit to an org doing something for that to be.
From this follows any number of corollaries, including:
1) If you desire change in an org, it is really useful to understand who, specifically, is the lynchpin for the change you want to see.
2) You might be offered the choice to be that person at some point in your career.
This will rarely follow someone whose job title is Quest Giver coming to you with a choice of two pills, one of which is failure and one of which is success, with clearly listed of side effects.
One of the cultural quirks of capitalists is that there are many lies that one is allowed or even encouraged to tell in society, and capitalists are members of society, but are in principle not allowed to lie about revenue.
I have jokingly phrased this as “Certain forms of writing are sacred. For example, if you write the word Balance Sheet on top of a list of numbers, those numbers become sacred to capitalists, and a lie amongst them is a sin that the gods of capitalism will punish most severely.”
But this causes a cultural disconnect because society broadly allows many fudgings of numbers. And e.g. conversations between management and investors allow for certain forms of salesmanship.
But about revenue: not allowed. We are pretty serious on that.