An innovation in Japan which I think will arrive everywhere: double-blinded shipping, where neither the sender nor receiver know each other's address.

This was negotiated by a large marketplace (Mercari), which didn't want to have to walk so many users over the privacy hump.
"How does this even happen?"

Mercari gives you a number, which they've arranged via API with the logistics company. You give the number to your local convenience store or post office; they put a machine-readable label on it.

It contains a pointer to a DB record.
This enables a *much more important* innovation than double-blind addressing, which is virtual addressing. DNS for mail.

You should be able to send @patio11 a package or letter. I'm at where I'm at; I should not need to update every company in world every time that changes.
(Somewhat incredibly to me, Kuroneko will definitely let me redirect any package to @patio11 to my office or local convenience store via the web app, and I think they may eventually extend that to a virtualization layer, bootstrapping off the physical address they know I control)

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More from @patio11

21 Dec
This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.
I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.
Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.
Read 9 tweets
19 Dec
The government periodically maths out what is required for the standard middle class life in Tokyo. For a family of four in their thirties, it is 54万円 (approximately $5.2k) per month, assuming one child in public school and one in private kindergarten.
On the one hand, this is rough relative to traditional expectations for the earnings power of Japanese 30-somethings; you can get there, barely, with one salaryman, the wife working part time, and a bit of government support for educational fees/childcare expenses.
So if you read the comments in Japanese, you'll see quite a bit of worry about what the cost of family formation will do to the choices of people in the future, whether employers aren't keeping up their side of the social compact, etc.
Read 5 tweets
18 Dec
One more thread on surprisingly good Japanese logistics:

I had another package to mail and couldn’t wait even two hours for Kuroneko to come to my door, so I thought “I will take it to the convenience store.”

But this got much better in last few years!
Previously if you went to convenience store you had to fill out a paper shipping label then wait while the employee measured and weighed your package then charged you for it.

But now we have computers!
So I signed into my Kuroneko account on my phone and it was about twelve taps start to finishing

Sending prepaid:
1 package
To: address book -> mother in law
From: me
Contents: coffee
Pickup: convenience store, yes locate me, yes that one

“OK take box there and show bar code.”
Read 5 tweets
18 Dec
> FDA received a citizen petition from the ABA asking us, in part, to revoke the frozen cherry pie standards of identity and quality (Citizen Petition from the American Bakers
Association, dated August 18, 2005, Docket No. FDA-2005-P-0435 (“petition”))
I have no opinion on the proper level of prudential regulation for the contents of a cherry pie.

I have a pretty strong opinion on which projects should take the United States of America fifteen years to execute.
You could sensibly have an opinion on how much corn you want in your cherry pies, and if you have that opinion you're now going to have to be a more health-conscious consumer of frozen cherry pies than you were previously, but this didn't need to take 15 years.
Read 4 tweets
17 Dec
I don't usually buy individual tech stocks but made an exception here, partly because automated marketmaking for housing clearly wants to exist, and partly because its the one software-eats-world thesis I don't have to worry about using credit cards anytime soon.
(That last clause is partially a joke, given that our conflicts of interest policy isn't literally "Don't do anything that touches our business" and as time goes to infinity I mean sure why wouldn't we have products they could consume; it's a software business that moves money.)
"What individual tech stocks do you own?"

For publicly traded companies: Twilio (bought it on IPO day), Airbnb and Dropbox because "If your LTV from me is $X0k+ I want to own a bit of you on general principles", and Hubspot (mostly because we came up on same message board).
Read 4 tweets
17 Dec
In "extremely interesting infrastructure improvements that it takes a startup to do", see OhmConnect.

ohmconnect.com/how-it-works/w…

It is, effectively, negative surge pricing for electricity usage to virtually expand grid capacity w/o requiring a capital upgrade.
This takes advantage of some quirks of electricity generation and usage, which is that baseload power is consistently available but very expensive to store relative to provide, but actual usage is not consistent throughout day/week.
So Ohm's business model is "I am going to contract with you, the power company, to buy X,000 homes worth of electricity, which I intend to resell near retail. I will also use *much less than that* when the grid is stressed. So, quote me aggressively on the rate please."
Read 9 tweets

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