Heh, this is *exactly* why I ended up in Japan.

“No future for engineering in the US. The WSJ said so and they would know.”
It worked out for me, but, be careful which major life decisions you delegate to the zeitgeist and/or high-status organizations that are not scored on predicting the future accurately.
I worry, a lot, that the tech industry does not do a sufficiently good job of communicating “Despite what you may read in the paper: you can get a job here, your work will likely be in the cause of righteousness, you will be well compensated, and you will do well by your values.”
The “techlash” is the Big Lie. It shows up nowhere in the data via the public at large and is not substantially informed by reality as experienced by people who actually work in tech, except to the extent they care about what the Twitterverse says about them.

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More from @patio11

5 Jan
Not to bang on a drum, wait a second seems like this is most important drum in the world: administering vaccines is *actually not hard.*

We are *choosing* to administer them slow.

We should *stop* choosing to do this.
It is suboptimal to have one single dose of this sit in a freezer overnight and unconscionable to throw one out.
Grumble grumble none of this requires having the vaccine in hand to accomplish and could have been done months ago grumble grumble. Image
Read 5 tweets
4 Jan
Descript (descript.com) is a little bit mindblowing. It's... I'd say "text-based video and audio editor" but that doesn't nearly do it justice.

See this demo. It has audio, which is the point of the exercise. The "audiogram" visualization is also through Descript.
Apologies for the white noise in the background; my new microphone is great at picking up the air conditioner in this room.

Anyhow, I bet you caught "demonstration." Catch the other words highlighted in blue? Image
Read 5 tweets
4 Jan
This is simultaneously one of the best arguments for pedagogy *actually working*, since Europeans and Koreans successfully acquire language proficiency via formal schooling but Japanese and Americans mostly do not.
“Those are gross stereotypes.”

I know that it is extremely uncouth in the US to compare educational outcomes but the stats for e.g. scores on the Japanese Language Proficiency Test are available on a per test site basis, and they say what they say.
(About 90% of US majors in Japanese who are not heritage speakers deserve a refund, or at least they did prior to the YouTube generations.)
Read 6 tweets
4 Jan
The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.
Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.
A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.
Read 15 tweets
4 Jan
A good discipline to get into with regards to any form of sales or account management:

*Write down* "If we lose this deal, it will be because of X." in advance.

If you lose the deal/account/etc, ask why you lost it.

Check against your prediction, and get better at predicting.
This naturally applies to e.g. seeking investment, trying to hire someone, trying to get a job, etc etc.

You write things down in advance, ideally with a confident number attached to them, because it defangs the risk of 20/20 hindsight and helps you synthesize insights.
"Looks like we were correct over 80% of our time that in competitive situations with AppAmaGooBookSoft candidates would explicitly cite total comp as the reason they are declining to take our offer. OK, that's reality. What strategic decision do we make now that we know it?"
Read 5 tweets
2 Jan
1) This hospital should receive zero doses in the future, until competent healthcare providers have had need satisfied for a critically limited resource.

2) If you are told you that choices are throwing out a vaccine or losing your license, strongly consider losing paperwork.
Or even "Damn it I slipped and administered a covid vaccine. So clumsy of me. I filed an accident report per the usual procedure. Luckily, since the covid vaccine is safe, there was no medical impact aside from the vaccination to covid."
"Sorry boss it happened 372 times again yesterday. I take full responsibility for the errors; just been pulling a lot of overtime recently with the holidays and all. Here's the accident forms."
Read 5 tweets

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