And yeah that's cheating a little bit because absolutely any landscape looks better in sakura season but in the dog days of summer that's still a relatively cool path to take a walk on due to partial shading and the water. (Bring bug spray.)
These also act as a somewhat natural traffic regulator; the two streets adjacent to the canal are less attractive to car traffic than e.g. one street out, due to the constrained-by-bridges turn opportunities, so they're generally walkable *without being closed to traffic.*
Free lunches in urbanism, etc etc.
There is sometimes a question about why Japan is "just so nice" and while there are extremely complicated answers to it, a necessary part of it is simply Will To Have Nice Things.
"We're building a university on the hill."
"Awesome that will help a lot with public traversability at the outer edge of campus. Adding shade?"
"Naturally."
"How about a water feature?"
"Not in the budget."
"It's in somebody's. Ask the neighborhood; some company good for it."
Darn it that isn't on Google yet. I suppose I know where I'm going for lunch now. Give me 90 minutes, Internets, I'll get you a photo.
(Continuing an imagined conversation)
"So we're building a college on the hill and were wondering if you could chip in for a water feature at the edge."
"By the police box?"
"No by the old bamboo grove."
"It gonna be passable now?"
"Yes we're putting in steps."
"Of course!"
The company named on the plaque is some distance from the hill, but they're In The Neighborhood (TM), and when you've been in the neighborhood for a hundred years of course it is proper for you to feel a certain sense of responsibility as far as the old bamboo grove.
A quick walk up the path next to Tokyo College of Music.
Funding for the water feature from Dai-Ichi Life Insurance, which I am doing my level best to repay by not dying while my term life is in force.
They’re a very large company and have some property (not HQ, AFAIK) in the neighborhood.
And in front of the cafe there is a fairly frequent feature of Tokyo developments which is sometimes mandatory: public open space on private property, generally improved with greenery and benches. Functions similar to a park; also eases movement to adjacent parcels via foot.
Anyhow, back to lunch and then the software salt mines. Apologies for the brief foray into urbanism influencer.
Once we’re in more settled times you should come visit Tokyo. It’s the best city on earth.
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(In particular note the cap on cash back and the carveout for particular transaction types which some users are able to generate arbitrarily high amounts of or would naturally have arbitrarily high amounts relative to “normal” CC use.)
“How does this happen?”
Credit card PMs are extremely aware that there are multiple different personas for credit card use out there. One of them has a name in various banks, but you can think of them as Mercenary Financial Enthusiast.
If I can give a slightly more optimistic take on this: much of how commercial software development is done trades some resources for others, in ways that might not be rational for people with very different strengths than e.g. AppAmaGooFaceSoft or BigCo customers.
A lot of AWS services exist so that two teams don't need to have a meeting.
That *is not a criticism of either AWS or those two teams.* That is a preference one can have about time allocation and corporate structure, and capitalism will help you satisfy it.
If you are not constrained on organizational complexity, if meetings with yourself are free, then a lot of the standard stack that BigCo uses is both overkill and underkill at the same time.
So strange that card program managers make such a show of doing this careful balancing act when everyone who reads the Atlantic knows that the real source of rewards is cross-subsidization of elite cardholders by poor people. </sarcasm>
Less sarcastically: it’s a math problem conducted by people who are pretty good at math, and the marching orders they get are “In general and in steady state, all of our card programs should be margin accretive. Make it happen. If you can’t you’ll need a senior signoff.”
(The above is not private information from any particular issuer but rather is a pastiche representing industry standard practice.)
I think the so-called Bitcoin treasury companies have just reinvented exchange tokens: there is an asset with X real world utility but not naturally leverageable. It should flow to place in world where most leverage is bolted onto it; immediately incentive compatible. Repeat 100x
And then “Holy %}*]^ how did so much of it end up in a place with grossly deficient risk management?!”
(I understand that MicroStrategy is the opposite of leveraged exposure from the common shareholder’s perspective but if someone with hands on keyboard believes they are allowed leverage if they hold more exchange tokens then the model happens regardless of whether that is true.)
(n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than authorization or authentication.)
As I've mentioned previously, solemnization is a sociolegal tripwire to say "There are many situations in society and in business where you're Just Talking and up until this exact moment we have been Just Talking *and after this point* We Were Not Just Talking. Do you get it?"
People who are unsophisticated about this think that the signature is somehow preventing someone from retroactively changing the terms of the contract. People who are unsophisticated say thinks like "Oh use digital signatures to PROVE that that has not happened. Sounds great."
Apparently Japan Post is debuting the most obvious improvement in addressing for last two decades: address virtualization.
You sign up with them and get a short alphanumeric code. Their DB holds a pointer to physical address. If you move, you tell them, pointer changes.
And then when dealing with an e-commerce merchant instead of doing the traditional laborious address entry (which in Japanese usually requires redundantly providing the pronunciation of the address as well) you just give them the code.
This follows some more limited experiments with address virtualization, like the double blinding of addresses used in e.g. P2P marketplaces, where neither buyer nor seller strictly need to know where other lives if packages can move between them expeditiously.