My friendly neighborhood cafe installed one of the battery rental stations (ChargeSpot) and says it’s the best thing ever.

Eliminates people asking for an outlet (which they don’t have) and since it finally prices the 31st minute at a table it encourages people to drink and go.
(The cafe will, naturally, let you stay and enjoy your coffee for a socially acceptable amount of time, and would not dream of having a countdown clock until a 180 yen charge hit your credit card, but if your battery pack did then well that is their business isn’t it.)
“Also sometimes people drop off a battery from 7/11 at our cafe and then stay for a coffee!”
“But nobody comes in and just gets the battery and leaves because can you imagine how rude you’d have to be to walk into a cafe past everybody and not have a coffee.”

“Is that why it’s in back?”

“They suggested it!”
“They said ‘Don’t put it by register if you have a morning rush. Put it right by where you put the creamer/etc, ideally away from the door. High visibility, low direct access from street.’”
I love that this both implies that ChargeSpot has some PMs who *really* grok cafe economics and that those PMs have somehow communicated that understanding to onboarding teams.
(It would be my expectation that this product is sold not bought and that literally every installation is done by someone walking you through process over a telephone.)
(Facts in favor of this: the one time friendly local conbini had a transaction error on it they called a 1-800 number and someone walked them through a remote hands initiated diagnostic after answering on second ring.)

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More from @patio11

4 Jan
Ruriko, on how she chooses payment methods:

"I like using Paypay because there's the feeling of striving for the higher cash back next month!" (30 transactions + 50,000 JPY spent = 1% next month, else 0.5%)

Me: "So you like that more than the 1% rewards card you have?"

"Yes!"
Not a comment on rationality or irrationality, just a comment on user behavior in payments. Here is Paypay discovering that gamification is worth +/- $30 at 100% margin to this user per year.
That makes them, oh, ~10X more effective at selling her video games than the entire Japanese gaming industry, which is sort of impressive when you think about it.
Read 6 tweets
30 Dec 21
The number of U.S. government systems which are not accessible by Americans and other legitimately interested individuals abroad is disgraceful.
Most of the time it isn't even a conscious decision, it is "Check this box to use recommended security rules" by someone with no independent rulemaking authority to say "We don't let you operate corporations from Japan anymore."
Note that this will, very predictably, not be accepted as a mitigating factor if e.g. the person who happens to live in Tokyo but who is extremely unambiguously subject to the laws of the United States or a jurisdiction therein can't comply due to web application firewall rules.
Read 5 tweets
30 Dec 21
Goodness do I have so many thoughts about this exchange, which is more worth reading than most gossipy exchanges because there are large portions of economy that operate this way and you may want to select out of working for them.
One: it’s healthy that the economy have a mix of jobs where people can both be expected to drop everything the week after Christmas if required and where approved time off is sacrosanct, and it is important both sides of each job understand what agreement they’ve struck.
Two: if you’re a manager, and you have a critical business process which absolutely positively requires a particular person and will SPOF without them, you have at least two problems and should start fixing them with some urgency.
Read 14 tweets
29 Dec 21
Interesting grants program from Slate Star Codex:

astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-r…
One interesting thing the last few years has been observing that there are classes of very valuable things needing very small amounts of money, and some very large pots of money seeking valuable things, and sometimes market doesn’t clear.

Worth thinking why this is true.
I wonder if part of the problem is that if you have e.g. $500k to give away and you would even consider 100X $5k grants this implies either a personally irrational amount of time investment or hiring the minimum viable foundation staff, which is probably $1M a year++.
Read 4 tweets
28 Dec 21
Took kids to a dinosaur park. At souvenir shop, Liam was eyeing a paint set.

Clerk: Great choice! I did that triceratops.
Me: That’s really excellent, how do you say in Japanese, dry brushing?
Clerk: *startles*
Clerk: 40k?
Me: Fantasy.
Clerk: The Emperor protects, bro.
Globalization is wild.
Wonder which of the two of us would have said this interaction was less likely to ever happen, as of this morning.
Read 5 tweets
28 Dec 21
Oxygen Not Included is a fun base building game where the primary source of challenge is your own resource requirements and pollution output as you grow. Has about three fun and novel physics systems, which aren’t real-life simulators but fun analogs

It occasioned the following:
Me: This colony is going to die within weeks without a solution to two pressing problems: 1) lack of potable water 2) we’re expelling far too much waste heat and the backwash from it will make our air uninhabitably hot.

Lead explorer: Bad news, sir. Instead of useful things, …
… the next biome over included a mountain of -50C ice.
Me: What?
Explorer: A solid block of ice. At least kilotons worth, sir. It will take days to cut through.
Me: … Months, certainly. Excellent!
Explorer: Sir?
Read 9 tweets

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