So imagine you’re an industrial designer of milk cartons in Japan.
You design a carton with a weird shape which is 100% full on packaging. The carton intentionally deforms when the user breaks the vacuum seal.
Some users report this as a production quality issue. So what do you do? Roll back to the previous standard carton design?
No, you write a brief and simplified explanation on how air is the enemy of milk taste and the carton deforms because the vacuum that you were extremely intentional about putting in has been broken.
And you put it on every box.
“The bulging [of the package] is the proof that the aroma and essence [of the milk] was [adequately] sealed.” (My freehand translation.)
I also love the brand strategy meeting for this product.
“What’s competitive positioning?”
“We’re competing on taste.”
“But milk is a commodity. Do you mean on perceptions of taste?”
“No we are going to science the }^{*} out of this. I do not accept milk has stopped improving.”
(It’s おいしい牛乳 brand, literally “Tasty Milk”, and while I have done no rigorous double blind study it is definitely the milk of choice in my household.)
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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.