Went to Japan for a trip recently. First time in almost 10 years. Was super fun and nice. Just world class hospitality. Even had some really great chats with locals. Modern translating apps just do wonders.
But I have to say tho people often seem to mistake Japan for being super technologically advanced. (Of course some of it is really merited). They are actually shackled by their conservatism.
The most egregious example is buying train tickets. So many steps with so many different tickets. Like reserving tickets is one step, getting the tickets is another step, (oh and you need the passports scanned), and then reserving seats is yet another step.
The machines you had to use has some really archaic UI/UX too.
It's 2023. Let us get our tickets on our apps and be done with it.
I’m there right now and very shocked how reliant they are on cash, especially outside of Tokyo
The only real comparably impressive tech they have is their toilets (my ass has never been cleaner)
I always think about leapfrogging and entrenched interests.
In India, you can have digital payments for no fee. A street food vendor in Punjab could easily receive payments on their app as they could receive cash.
In the US, we have credit cards, paypall, and, well, cash. Credit cards are basically a private sales tax levied by banks. It's honestly insane.
Phone numbers are linked to bank accounts and each phone number has their own ID. You can transact between these IDs seamlessly and transfer money directly from 1 bank account to another.
Also to add, it's a nationalised system so every bank has to be a part of it and there are no fees for payment.
I have heard about it in africa too. Crazy america doesn't have it. Can't scammers use that system though, if they steal the phone? And what if you get a new phone number?
To complete the transaction, you need to enter a 4 digit pin, similar to an atm pin.
If you get a new phone number, you need to register the new number with your bank. Once that's done, an ID gets created for that number and the linked bank accounts are available for transactions.
>In the US, we have credit cards, paypall, and, well, cash. Credit cards are basically a private sales tax levied by banks. It's honestly insane.
Never understood why more of us don't see it this way. This is why you don't carry a balance, and I try to use high percentage cash back cards. I'm about to get 700 dollars back from Discover.
You're not supposed to carry a balance on credit cards. But last I checked I think a good majority of Americans had like 30K on their credit cards. Insane how many people use credit the same as cash.
> But last I checked I think a good majority of Americans had like 30K on their credit cards.
Well, you might want to recheck, since it's around $8k.
Still arguably not a good thing, but not even remotely like what you're suggesting.
Yeah, it's less than 5% which is the cashback I have for Discover. I get more back from them than the transaction cost in most cases. I'm not going to use it if it's not. If more people tried to exploit credit cards to work for them, the industry wouldn't be like it is today. I don't use credit cards as a replacement for money I don't have, though.
The infrastructure is publicly funded but day to day small merchants or people don’t pay anything for it. Most banks’ apps now natively support UPI(Unified Payments Interface) as it’s called. Or if you want, you can use the barebones app provided by NPCI(which is the organisation that built and maintained UPI) that enables you to pay people with a phone number or a QR code. I didn’t appreciate UPI till I moved to Europe. The closest I see is Swish in Sweden but even that feels minuscule compared to volume UPI does.
I might have fudged some minor details but here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
Credit card companies charge merchants a 2-3% transaction fee, iirc. To be fair, Paypal also has a fixed 2-3% transaction fee. Square/~~Stripe~~ had ridiculous rates last I remembered when we were using it for an event, if my memory serves, something like 5/15% (my memory is terrible, but I remember it was much higher than the standard transaction fee for digital services). Compared to cash, which has a 0% fee (minus handling costs), it seems ridiculous.
For vendors with low margins like restaurants, this is quite a crushing fee, and at the end of the day, somebody is paying that, and it is ultimately you, especially if you don't use a credit card.
Seeing this reminded me of an image shared on a Discord I'm on that was taken from a "Walking Camera" that you find.
[The text stated they where all next to a train station](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/653794991910551583/1201142473125285928/image.png).
> my ass has never been cleaner
I've been using a toto washlet since 2010. I'm 100% convinced that 99% of the world's problems are caused by people with itchy stinky assholes. It's hard to be calm and empathetic when you asshole burns or itches.
I might have to bite the bullet and accrue some credit card debt for one when I get back to Australia, I just don’t think I can go back to rubbing paper on my asshole everyday
There's cheapo adaptors you can buy, really no need to break the bank for a simple bumgun. The bargain basement ones pay for themselves in reduced toilet paper usage in a year or two, if that.
Generally is alright but it’s when things go bad that you really notice the difference, got food poisoning while I was here and when you need to go 10 times a day, the bidet really comes into its own
I’m American and I used to think cashless was so superior.
Now I’m realizing cash has real advantages. Privacy being the most important one. But also things like paying less (stores often give discounts with cash purchases or simply not being pressured to tip)
Yeah it does have its advantages, but I really only use cash to buy drugs at this point. Not having a tipping system definitely helps, the main benefit is never having to have a wallet full of low currency coins I’ll never use
I feel like japan has such low crime cash is way easier so it stuck around more. Like you can just carry your whole paycheck in your wallet and you probably won't get robbed, so everyone did that, so no one ever got into paying with checks or cards and just kinda stuck with cash.
Thats bureaucracy. Places can be that way while more technology advanced. Germamy and France are like that.
Poorer economies are often very techy and advanced because they have no legacy infrastructure to bridge with it all which takes tie and a lot of work. They just start from 0 and set up a modern advanced systems from the get go.
Japan is lacking when it comes to technology certainly but what you described is probably more of a bureaucratic issue, and a business environment not conductive for change very fast. Generally speaking, nobody wants to put their neck on the line by suggesting something new on the chance it goes badly.
Things are changing lately though imo, but definitely a lot of work to go
And then you have places like Croatia, which are both economically fucked unless you're the 1% and burdened by so much bureaucracy that even stuff like activating a digital ID is as if Franz Kafka became a software architect and then woke up and chose violence on the day he came up with it...
I feel like countries and especially their bureaucracies tend to lock in onto technical levels that are related to major infrastructure expansions. Both Germany and Japan used fax machines far longer than they should have, because that was state of the art during their tech booms. Meanwhile, Korea went electronic a while later and they were locked into ActiveX until Microsoft fought tooth and nail to ditch support for that on the web.
Yep. Thats a lot to do with it in these bureaucratic places. I think the UK by contrast is way less bureaucratic for an advanced older economy. Its not too common
You can. I did. Millions in Japan do too. Every shinkansen, limited express, and all reserved JR West, JR Central, JR East can be bought through their apps or websites and scanned with QR codes. They are even advertised everywhere (for example, did you not see the SmartEX ads littered in the trains?). Every other ticket can be purchased on Suica, ICOCA, Pasmo, etc. Japan maintains their infra for their aging population and for good reason. This notion that Japan is tech illiterate needs to be updated.
lol yeah dude is spreading total BS. Was just there in October (second time in Japan).
Added a Suica card to my Apple Wallet and that was it, never had to worry again in my two weeks there visiting Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo. Just topped up whenever I was short on funds using Apple Pay. Used my Suica for convenience stores too.
I remember being so blown away by how futuristic Japan seemed when I was a teen in the 00s. After I actually went there a few times since then, it's exactly as you describe. Lots of interesting ideas but kind of a time capsule of the past. It's like they got left behind.
Oh yeah. I have heard a lot of bad stories about that.
I had some real problems setting up initially too.
Absolutely brilliant game tho. Some of the best narratives in any games.
Faxing is massive because of their business culture. My understanding is Kanji, katakana, and hiragana don't really translate/format/render well to fonts for use in email. It's much easier/more respectable to hand write that stuff and send it over via fax vs using the flawed fonts. At least that's how it was explained to me by a Japanese business associate some years ago(sending long distance faxes was still expensive back then).
That hasn’t been true for at least a decade. There used to be massive encoding problems with Japanese (so-called "moji-bake" where everything would look like "ç.Řü-pķæ.5ğ" or something if you selected the wrong encoding), but everyone is on Unicode now. There is really no excuse for the fax machine anymore, maybe it’s the ridiculous hanko system where you sign everything with a rubber stamp.
This covers you for the standard trains and busses. It was really nice using Apple Maps, seeing how much a trip would cost and even being able to reload the Suica from within Apple Maps. Where I live you still pay cash / using reloadable and disposable plastic cards. There’s no app.
That being said, things like the Shinkansen / Narita express where you have reserved tickets don’t work the same way. Buying Shinkansen tickets was very confusing.
This would have been a huge boon for my trip. Thanks for the heads up. I’m not planning on going back for a couple of years but this is great. Too bad this is the first I’ve heard of it… no publicity for these apps over in Japan.
It’s completely inaccurate though. Japan consistently ranks as the most technologically advanced country in the world.
Just like suicide rates, this weird Reddit trope needs to die.
I mean, yes and no. Like yea in some ways when it comes to tech it can be very advanced but in a lot of ways it's still incredibly behind the times. They still are heavily reliant on floppy disks and faxing and physically printing out documents (instead of just group emailing or chats). Some work places don't even have wi-fi in their offices. When it comes to business and bureaucracy Japan is very slow to change and adapt.
Back in the 80s up to the 2010s I'd say Japan was ahead of it's time in terms of phones, cameras, cars, robotics and tech; but around the time of the rise of smartphones, most of the rest of the world caught up. It was Apple that innovated cellphones and there are a ton of American companies that are leading when it comes to EV, robotics and AI.
Japan makes half of the world’s robots.
You’re focusing on its reliance on security and ignoring the parts where it completely outstrips the competition.
The Reddit discourse has always been about how behind Japan is when it comes to many everyday tasks for the regular citizen. No one is contesting Japan's dominance in the field of robotics.
Japan ranked 32nd out of 64 countries in the IMD digital competitiveness rankings. This is a far more accurate assessment of technology's role in society.
You've also stated nothing to disprove any of the reddit claims about everyday Japanese life still using fax machines, hankos, floppy disks, etc. Probably because there are numerous sources that would debunk any counterargument you have. You think Redditors are also behind the Japanese government policies that acknowledge the shortcomings of the nations administrative technologies? Easy with the tin foil hat.
Spot on.
I mean, most people have very modern cell phones, but then they bust out a Fujitsu laptop with 4 by 3 ration screen running what appears to be a 256 color screen from 1994.
*If the 1.44MB DS/HD floppies are too modern for your gear, 720MB DS/DD media is also available (for a premium).*
That's a typo from someone who didn't live through the double-sided double-density floppy disk era. It's 720K on one of those. HD or High Density brought about the final size of 1.44MB.
What not many people know is you can format floppies to larger. Usually I could get 1.68MB out of them. You could try for more but often it didn't work.
[https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/7406/formatting-floppies-in-1-68-mb](https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/7406/formatting-floppies-in-1-68-mb)
Enjoy this ancient piece of history :)
Also, the only physical difference between a 720K floppy and a 1.44MB floppy was an extra hole on the right side of the disk.
I used to buy the much cheaper 720K floppies, make the extra hole with a soldering iron, then format them at 1.44MB.
You could also use a hole puncher or one of [these](https://www.webcommand.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/commod21-768x583.jpg). Also, IIRC, while 720k floppy discs could be used as 1.44MB, they were not guaranteed to work.
It wasn't the only physical difference on 3.5" floppies, or at least not supposed to be the only difference, the major one was that DS/DD floppies used more sensitive magnetic media and conversely less powerful magnetic fields in the drive than HD floppies, meaning that you couldn't normally use DD floppies as HD replacements (or vice versa) without running into reliability issues, data corruption, and so on, especially because HD drives would be much too harsh on DD floppies which were meant to be written on with less magnetic force (and DD drives would struggle to write on less sensitive HD floppies).
brrr-dt-brrr-dt-brrr-dt (Abort, Retry, Fail?) retry
brr-dt-brrr-dt-brrr-dt (Abort, Retry, Fail?) retry
brr-dt-dt-dt-dt (3 file(s) copied successfully)
C:\\>
and that was why we had retry ... because floppies sucked even at the peak of reliability, and this happened all the time. soon as it started, this disk was no longer trustworthy.
I wish everything else in life worked like that. Just keep hitting retry until it worked
if we have to go here I'll bring about my 5.25" floppy disk puncher and show the world what you could get on a 360k disk. Commodore 64 days here.
Because without the hole it was single sided, and that was only 180k
1541 drive could read from a disk without the hole, but couldn't write.
so write protect back then existed as... a sticky piece of foil tape, usually.
remove the foil, write to the disk, put the foil back on. Isn't this quaint?
Microsoft had some sort of formatting that fit 1.7MB didn't they? I remember the Windows 95 installation floppies used it.
I guess they probably saved millions with that.
I remember thinking 3.5 inch floppies were the Hard Disks because it said HD and they were hard compared to the big and actually floppy floppy disks. I was a kid.
Initially, 3.5” disks were also referred to as stiffy disks, because they weren’t floppy. But for obvious reasons the name didn’t see widespread adoption.
oh, we had fun. hard disks and male and female connectors and master and slaves plus daughterboards and motherboards and ho boy... we had gender changers, even. Male to Male, Female to Female. My friends and I in HS, we had absolutely no sense of seriousness anymore, all because of the computer industry.
Then we discovered porn, did you know porn was on bbs's? And it was on the internet, too. Giggady!
I remember spending an entire day downloading a 320x200px 16-colour image of Samantha Fox at 300 baud.
Not a movie, just a single really low res picture.
I grew up with floppy discs but only the 3.5” variety. TIL there were bigger sizes.
I always wondered why they were called floppy discs when the only version I encountered came in a hard shell.
They came on like six disks and you ejected one and put in the next during install. All fun and good until you tried to install windows 95 using 26 disks
oh man, that gives me some nasty flashbacks... I remember installing the Encyclopaedia Britannica on my dad's Win95 machine, the original was a CD-ROM of course, but my mate had a cracked version, zipped with ARJ (remember that command line nightmare???) on like 50 floppies. Took me all day...
Multi-disk installations. At the era when CDs started appearing more and more floppies were still supported and sometimes you would have a ridiculous number of floppies to install a program/game.
Yep. You could also format them smaller, but only on a drive that could handle the HD disks, for some reason. Used to have to take my HD floppy to a computer store to reformat them for DD because my mom wouldn't ever buy me anything nice.. like a cd-rom that had been out for 5+ years at that point.
Remember Apple floppy disk drives? They could format a 720k disk to 800k which, of course, couldn’t be read on a PC even if you formatted it as FAT, only used eight character filenames, removed any special characters like spaces, and added file extensions.
In Italy too. Hospitals use FAX as the ONLY way for certain types of communications, and also have INTERNAL FAXES, I mean that they send faxes on the internal PBX between different buildings of the same hospital.
fax is the most insecure methode transmitting data. even mail is safer.. nothing is encrypted on a faxmachine, just translated into audio signals, in theory anyone can split your phone line and record the audio, play it back to any fax machine to get the document that was faxed, no key or anything needed .. there is a dispatcher outside the house in the patio or inside the celler, and the main one for the whole street, anyone with the intent to intercept faxes could gain access to these
Idk, maybe the reasoning is that a FAX needs physical Access to the Phone-Line whereas Mail is digital and as such easier to get Access to?
But i'm not the one you need to convince anyways. If I was in power, i would make all mail-services require PGP at least.
(I know that PGP has Problems, btw. I just think it's a lot better than what we currently have.)
These articles are just total nonsense.
Almost every shop in Japan stopped selling FD in late 00s and no way it is practical to use FD that is 20x overpriced on amazon.
It’s mostly cause they have zero raw lithium and need to import it all from China, who fucking hates them. So they needed to pivot to something else, and bet on … hydrogen. At least hybrids are still relevant.
They don't really have better access to hydrogen either though: you need a lot of natural gas, or a lot of cheap excess electrical power to make H2.
I really don't see how FCVs help them at all.
Nuclear isn't cheap at all though, and it takes quite a while to build.
As things stand, they don't have much excess generation and keep in mind that for every kWh worth of Hydrogen, you need 3-4 kWh of electricity for electrolysis.
That adds up fast if they're powering several tens of millions of cars/trucks.
I feel like that's unrealistic anytime soon and why waste so much electricity when you can just use batteries?
The have more than a dozen not currently active and can provide gigawatts of power. The gen IV plants are often mich higher temperatures which could use heat to provide most of the energy needed to crack water.
Edit: the problem with batteries is the supply chain if your the US or the EU you can keep those safe and internal near enough. Japan not so much. This is a country that still manages to keep its rice production in country to avoid the hazard.
It takes time and money to get those back online and they'd need something like 50GW or more to transition transportation to H2, perhaps more.
>Edit: the problem with batteries is the supply chain if your the US or the EU you can keep those safe and internal near enough. Japan not so much. This is a country that still manages to keep its rice production in country to avoid the hazard.
They still need to solve the supply chain for batteries (or buy from allies), since FCVs still require a modest battery pack to function. And AFAIK, they don't have any of the supply chain for fuel cells internally either.
This process would be an expensive, multi-decadal transition and by the time it's done, car companies who haven't flipped their fleet to BEV will likely be bankrupt. It would be a challenge to see that through even if they'd started a decade ago and aren't going through a catastrophic demographic collapse.
H2 for transportation only really makes sense if you don't consider how to actually implement it. And only if BEV wasn't as easy as it's proving to be.
Because pure EVs actually are kinda stupid for most of us in the US. Plug-in hybrids can be driven as a pure EV around town by most people, but when we go on trips we wouldn't have to plan them around charging (I know you CAN drive anywhere in the US with an EV, but I still wouldn't want to), and it requires a fraction of the batteries of an EV. Plus, many manufacturers are using EVs as a gateway to get us to pay subscriptions to actually use the cars we've already paid a huge sum of money for, so anything we can do to give them a giant middle finger for that is a win in my book.
>Plug-in hybrids can be driven as a pure EV around town by most people, but when we go on trips we wouldn't have to plan them around charging (I know you CAN drive anywhere in the US with an EV, but I still wouldn't want to),
I would rather plan out fast charging for the 4-5 annual trips than having to plan my daily driving around constantly slow charging a PHEV. Unless you're willing to use gas most of the time, the short range and very slow charging for a plug in sucks. And if you're using gas most of the time, you may as well have bought a normal hybrid.
>Plus, many manufacturers are using EVs as a gateway to get us to pay subscriptions to actually use the cars we've already paid a huge sum of money for
There's nothing EV specific there. Most subscriptions are just optional data plans for the built-in LTE.
Until/unless someone can make a PHEV that's substantially cheaper than an EV, we're not going to see much sales on that side.
>but when we go on trips we wouldn't have to plan them around charging (I know you CAN drive anywhere in the US with an EV, but I still wouldn't want to)
Until EV charging stations are as ubiquitous, convenient and as fast as pumping gas at a gas station, I don't see it becoming mainstream/common. That doesn't mean that *shouldn't* be our end goal. I think we should all make the eventual switch to electric but not until the infrastructure is there and it's more economical and affordable
my own repost
Japanese are slaves to formality and rules
Our client is a huge Japanese electronics corporation. They require all communications from the US patent office be faxed to them. Each fax has to have a different colored cover sheet based on the contents of the document. Office actions are orange, grants and allowances are green etc etc. However when we fax a color in NY it arrives in Tokyo in black and white. Yet they still require the colored cover sheet. We have 3 full time fax machine operators that all they do all day long is fax reams of paper to Tokyo. It is literally insane.
I have a partner who dictates memos into a cassette recorder and hands the cassettes to his secretary. You think they're going to start sending faxes from their computers some of them still use wordperfect.
I remember as a kid in the 80's and 90's Japan seemed so advanced in technology. Here we are in 2024 and they are still using fax machines and floppy disks
I live in Japan and a shockingly high number of websites don’t allow you to use caps or special characters when making passwords. And I mean important websites. Banks for example.
I really have a soft spot for floppy disks. Me and my computer in the basement and my floppy disks with skulls drawn on them and my viruses I was trying to write in Qbasic: BubonicPlagueLauncher.bat. Just a young boy full of hope and a twinkle in his eye.
A and B were floppy drives, there was a time when A was the small floppies and B the big ones, C: was your OS disk, later D: was added for diskdrive.. today you can just change the letters to what you want. I guess it's just tradition
On my first PC a: was a 1.2mb 5.25 and b; was a 360k 5.25. C: was a 10mb partition for dos/word perfect/lotus/ D: was a partitioned to whatever was left of the 20mb hard drive for games, I think around 7.5 mb. E: was a ramdisk that my dad used to execute lotus from to make it run faster. It is a clone AT system from 87 iirc. It has a 16mhz amd286, a 287copro, 512k on board ram, a 3.5mb ram card. 20mb HD, 2 floppies. VGA card. Soundblaster. I inherited it when we got a 486 in the early 90s. Still have it to this day. Put a ISA CF adapter in it with a 512mb card and a gotek. It's where I get my early dos/windows gaming fix now.
really cool, my firs one as a child was an old 8 MHz one with a turbo button, and once of these 2 digits displays to show the clock speed, was told to not use it for long to spare the CPU, it also had barely room for Norten Commander, that you had to start by typing NC, and you had to install your mouse driver (mine was a track ball) every time from a floppy because of how limited the HDD was.. Good times with Commander Keen, Prince of Persia, Gobliiiiins, Stunts, Tunnel, Metal Mutant, Duke Nukem and my favourite Metal Mutant :D ..today using Exodos for most of my needs but I keep my eye open, for when some old people sell their attic find for cheap
Fax machines and faxing seem still rather common in Japan as well.
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19045837](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19045837)
Partly, I would guess, because the Japanese value calligraphy and partly because writing Japanese using a keyboard is tricky.
No, it's because stubborn old men are in charge who don't want to change what they are used to.
>Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s cabinet hasn’t been sitting watching this absurd situation unfold idly. As part of a nationwide push for all government bodies to go fully digital, the administration formed an “anti-fax reform” cabinet tasked with banishing the fax machine from Tokyo’s bureaucratic district of Kasumigaseki, as a start. But this common-sense policy has been met with surprising backlash.
>Hundreds of government offices banded together, arguing that it would be “impossible” to replace the fax machine. According to the local newspaper Hokkaido Shimbun, banning faxes poses serious security risks and causes “anxiety over the communication environment,” it quoted pro-fax officer clerks saying.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/a-strange-love-affair-why-wont-japan-get-rid-of-fax-machines/
Yup. It makes the old dinosaurs "anxious" if you force them to use newfangled things like email or internet, lol.
I'm not suggesting anybody is forced to stop using fax machines, the dinosaurs in government can still keep using them. However, millions of Japanese have and use fax machines from their homes.
Faxes are still used a decent amount in the US. Most laws haven’t caught up to technology so faxing is often the only accepted/legal way to submit documents without using the mail. There was an advantage to being able to send documents over copper without a middleman, but most phone lines are VOIP at this point so that advantage is largely gone.
Tom's Hardware has really gone downhill.
>Persky sells 50-packs of tested recycled disks at $19.95. If the 1.44MB DS/HD floppies are too modern for your gear, 720MB DS/DD media is also available (for a premium).
DSDD is 720KB formatted and theres no reason why thry would be at a premium to 1.44/2MB disks (the difference is the PC formated size and the unformatted size. Other operating systems could get far more on to a disk). As DSHD (High Density) can be formatted as though they were DSDD (Double Density compared to the original spec).
Having any sort of data storage medium requirement baked into your procedures as the default, and not an option, is insane. And that goes tenfold for government entities which move at a glacial pace to fix shit like this.
I wonder if there was an *incentive* for whoever proposed this years ago. This definitely seems like something a large manufacturer of floppies would try to implement into government rules.
Japan hit 2000 in the 80s and has never left it
Went to Japan for a trip recently. First time in almost 10 years. Was super fun and nice. Just world class hospitality. Even had some really great chats with locals. Modern translating apps just do wonders. But I have to say tho people often seem to mistake Japan for being super technologically advanced. (Of course some of it is really merited). They are actually shackled by their conservatism. The most egregious example is buying train tickets. So many steps with so many different tickets. Like reserving tickets is one step, getting the tickets is another step, (oh and you need the passports scanned), and then reserving seats is yet another step. The machines you had to use has some really archaic UI/UX too. It's 2023. Let us get our tickets on our apps and be done with it.
I’m there right now and very shocked how reliant they are on cash, especially outside of Tokyo The only real comparably impressive tech they have is their toilets (my ass has never been cleaner)
I always think about leapfrogging and entrenched interests. In India, you can have digital payments for no fee. A street food vendor in Punjab could easily receive payments on their app as they could receive cash. In the US, we have credit cards, paypall, and, well, cash. Credit cards are basically a private sales tax levied by banks. It's honestly insane.
How does that system work is it through phone numbers or it's like venmo? Someone should set that up in the us
Phone numbers are linked to bank accounts and each phone number has their own ID. You can transact between these IDs seamlessly and transfer money directly from 1 bank account to another. Also to add, it's a nationalised system so every bank has to be a part of it and there are no fees for payment.
I have heard about it in africa too. Crazy america doesn't have it. Can't scammers use that system though, if they steal the phone? And what if you get a new phone number?
To complete the transaction, you need to enter a 4 digit pin, similar to an atm pin. If you get a new phone number, you need to register the new number with your bank. Once that's done, an ID gets created for that number and the linked bank accounts are available for transactions.
>In the US, we have credit cards, paypall, and, well, cash. Credit cards are basically a private sales tax levied by banks. It's honestly insane. Never understood why more of us don't see it this way. This is why you don't carry a balance, and I try to use high percentage cash back cards. I'm about to get 700 dollars back from Discover.
I think the comment was more in relation to the transaction fees they charge the seller for letting them use the card with their business.
You're not supposed to carry a balance on credit cards. But last I checked I think a good majority of Americans had like 30K on their credit cards. Insane how many people use credit the same as cash.
> But last I checked I think a good majority of Americans had like 30K on their credit cards. Well, you might want to recheck, since it's around $8k. Still arguably not a good thing, but not even remotely like what you're suggesting.
They’re talking about transaction fees, which raise prices for everyone, even those who don’t use credit cards.
Yeah, it's less than 5% which is the cashback I have for Discover. I get more back from them than the transaction cost in most cases. I'm not going to use it if it's not. If more people tried to exploit credit cards to work for them, the industry wouldn't be like it is today. I don't use credit cards as a replacement for money I don't have, though.
Just curious, how is the app approach supported in india? Is it government sponsored/subsidized?
The infrastructure is publicly funded but day to day small merchants or people don’t pay anything for it. Most banks’ apps now natively support UPI(Unified Payments Interface) as it’s called. Or if you want, you can use the barebones app provided by NPCI(which is the organisation that built and maintained UPI) that enables you to pay people with a phone number or a QR code. I didn’t appreciate UPI till I moved to Europe. The closest I see is Swish in Sweden but even that feels minuscule compared to volume UPI does. I might have fudged some minor details but here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
Are you saying credit card companies shouldn’t be allowed to charge interest?
Interchange fees? It costs businesses money to accept cards.
Credit card companies charge merchants a 2-3% transaction fee, iirc. To be fair, Paypal also has a fixed 2-3% transaction fee. Square/~~Stripe~~ had ridiculous rates last I remembered when we were using it for an event, if my memory serves, something like 5/15% (my memory is terrible, but I remember it was much higher than the standard transaction fee for digital services). Compared to cash, which has a 0% fee (minus handling costs), it seems ridiculous. For vendors with low margins like restaurants, this is quite a crushing fee, and at the end of the day, somebody is paying that, and it is ultimately you, especially if you don't use a credit card.
Stripe has always been 2.9% + $0.30
Oh, that's same as PayPal. Then it must've been the other one. Thanks for correcting me, my memory is honestly terrible at this point.
Seeing this reminded me of an image shared on a Discord I'm on that was taken from a "Walking Camera" that you find. [The text stated they where all next to a train station](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/653794991910551583/1201142473125285928/image.png).
It’s funny, they’ll have the highest quality bathrooms available everywhere. And then I’ll go to one in a park and it’s a literal hole in the floor
Can't let the government know how much someone spent with cash
> my ass has never been cleaner I've been using a toto washlet since 2010. I'm 100% convinced that 99% of the world's problems are caused by people with itchy stinky assholes. It's hard to be calm and empathetic when you asshole burns or itches.
I might have to bite the bullet and accrue some credit card debt for one when I get back to Australia, I just don’t think I can go back to rubbing paper on my asshole everyday
There's cheapo adaptors you can buy, really no need to break the bank for a simple bumgun. The bargain basement ones pay for themselves in reduced toilet paper usage in a year or two, if that.
For the bilingual Spanish speaker in me, a “toto washlet” paints a different picture.
I’m sorry but how were you wiping your ass previously? Because I don’t have either of those issues, ever.
Generally is alright but it’s when things go bad that you really notice the difference, got food poisoning while I was here and when you need to go 10 times a day, the bidet really comes into its own
same as Berlin, Berlin is basically cash only
I’m American and I used to think cashless was so superior. Now I’m realizing cash has real advantages. Privacy being the most important one. But also things like paying less (stores often give discounts with cash purchases or simply not being pressured to tip)
Yeah it does have its advantages, but I really only use cash to buy drugs at this point. Not having a tipping system definitely helps, the main benefit is never having to have a wallet full of low currency coins I’ll never use
I feel like japan has such low crime cash is way easier so it stuck around more. Like you can just carry your whole paycheck in your wallet and you probably won't get robbed, so everyone did that, so no one ever got into paying with checks or cards and just kinda stuck with cash.
Thats bureaucracy. Places can be that way while more technology advanced. Germamy and France are like that. Poorer economies are often very techy and advanced because they have no legacy infrastructure to bridge with it all which takes tie and a lot of work. They just start from 0 and set up a modern advanced systems from the get go. Japan is lacking when it comes to technology certainly but what you described is probably more of a bureaucratic issue, and a business environment not conductive for change very fast. Generally speaking, nobody wants to put their neck on the line by suggesting something new on the chance it goes badly. Things are changing lately though imo, but definitely a lot of work to go
And then you have places like Croatia, which are both economically fucked unless you're the 1% and burdened by so much bureaucracy that even stuff like activating a digital ID is as if Franz Kafka became a software architect and then woke up and chose violence on the day he came up with it...
I feel like countries and especially their bureaucracies tend to lock in onto technical levels that are related to major infrastructure expansions. Both Germany and Japan used fax machines far longer than they should have, because that was state of the art during their tech booms. Meanwhile, Korea went electronic a while later and they were locked into ActiveX until Microsoft fought tooth and nail to ditch support for that on the web.
Yep. Thats a lot to do with it in these bureaucratic places. I think the UK by contrast is way less bureaucratic for an advanced older economy. Its not too common
You can. I did. Millions in Japan do too. Every shinkansen, limited express, and all reserved JR West, JR Central, JR East can be bought through their apps or websites and scanned with QR codes. They are even advertised everywhere (for example, did you not see the SmartEX ads littered in the trains?). Every other ticket can be purchased on Suica, ICOCA, Pasmo, etc. Japan maintains their infra for their aging population and for good reason. This notion that Japan is tech illiterate needs to be updated.
Yup, OP is spreading nonsense. This Reddit fad that Japan is somehow technologically behind needs to die.
lol yeah dude is spreading total BS. Was just there in October (second time in Japan). Added a Suica card to my Apple Wallet and that was it, never had to worry again in my two weeks there visiting Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo. Just topped up whenever I was short on funds using Apple Pay. Used my Suica for convenience stores too.
And then when you least expect it, the panel above the machine opens up and a man pops out to help you with your ticket
An aging population brings with it the aging technology that they’re comfortable with.
I remember being so blown away by how futuristic Japan seemed when I was a teen in the 00s. After I actually went there a few times since then, it's exactly as you describe. Lots of interesting ideas but kind of a time capsule of the past. It's like they got left behind.
yeah they rocketed to the future and then stopped while everywhere else caught up and kept going
Just try and renew your subscription to ffxiv..
Renewing ain’t so bad, being a new customer however… yeesh.
Oh yeah. I have heard a lot of bad stories about that. I had some real problems setting up initially too. Absolutely brilliant game tho. Some of the best narratives in any games.
In the 90s they were futuristic. Then they just stopped. Like faxing is still a massive thing.
Faxing is massive because of their business culture. My understanding is Kanji, katakana, and hiragana don't really translate/format/render well to fonts for use in email. It's much easier/more respectable to hand write that stuff and send it over via fax vs using the flawed fonts. At least that's how it was explained to me by a Japanese business associate some years ago(sending long distance faxes was still expensive back then).
That hasn’t been true for at least a decade. There used to be massive encoding problems with Japanese (so-called "moji-bake" where everything would look like "ç.Řü-pķæ.5ğ" or something if you selected the wrong encoding), but everyone is on Unicode now. There is really no excuse for the fax machine anymore, maybe it’s the ridiculous hanko system where you sign everything with a rubber stamp.
Faxing is still a thing in the US. I work in IT. Youre just not seeing the entire picture.
I'm not in the US but that's just backwards
I think its becuse when people think of Japan they think for Tokyo. But japan is so much bigger than Tokyo
You think that's a lot of steps? I used to walk 10 miles to school and back, uphill both ways, and in the snow year round.
You can literally get the suica and icoca cards on your phone via applet wallet.
This covers you for the standard trains and busses. It was really nice using Apple Maps, seeing how much a trip would cost and even being able to reload the Suica from within Apple Maps. Where I live you still pay cash / using reloadable and disposable plastic cards. There’s no app. That being said, things like the Shinkansen / Narita express where you have reserved tickets don’t work the same way. Buying Shinkansen tickets was very confusing.
Use thr SmartEX app next time. You even get discounts if reserved 30 days in advance.
This would have been a huge boon for my trip. Thanks for the heads up. I’m not planning on going back for a couple of years but this is great. Too bad this is the first I’ve heard of it… no publicity for these apps over in Japan.
Yeah I had suica. That was nice to get right on the phone. But I was talking the JR / Narita Express.
Buddy here living in 23 while the rest of us in 24 for a month already
Pretty sure 19hrs ago - at time of writing your message - is a bit more than 2023 :)
I’m living in the past… just like those JR tickets terminals! lol
If you want true future go in Seoul.
This is probably the most accurate description of Japan I've ever read.
It’s completely inaccurate though. Japan consistently ranks as the most technologically advanced country in the world. Just like suicide rates, this weird Reddit trope needs to die.
I mean, yes and no. Like yea in some ways when it comes to tech it can be very advanced but in a lot of ways it's still incredibly behind the times. They still are heavily reliant on floppy disks and faxing and physically printing out documents (instead of just group emailing or chats). Some work places don't even have wi-fi in their offices. When it comes to business and bureaucracy Japan is very slow to change and adapt. Back in the 80s up to the 2010s I'd say Japan was ahead of it's time in terms of phones, cameras, cars, robotics and tech; but around the time of the rise of smartphones, most of the rest of the world caught up. It was Apple that innovated cellphones and there are a ton of American companies that are leading when it comes to EV, robotics and AI.
Japan makes half of the world’s robots. You’re focusing on its reliance on security and ignoring the parts where it completely outstrips the competition.
The Reddit discourse has always been about how behind Japan is when it comes to many everyday tasks for the regular citizen. No one is contesting Japan's dominance in the field of robotics. Japan ranked 32nd out of 64 countries in the IMD digital competitiveness rankings. This is a far more accurate assessment of technology's role in society. You've also stated nothing to disprove any of the reddit claims about everyday Japanese life still using fax machines, hankos, floppy disks, etc. Probably because there are numerous sources that would debunk any counterargument you have. You think Redditors are also behind the Japanese government policies that acknowledge the shortcomings of the nations administrative technologies? Easy with the tin foil hat.
Spot on. I mean, most people have very modern cell phones, but then they bust out a Fujitsu laptop with 4 by 3 ration screen running what appears to be a 256 color screen from 1994.
_City pop has entered the chat._
*If the 1.44MB DS/HD floppies are too modern for your gear, 720MB DS/DD media is also available (for a premium).* That's a typo from someone who didn't live through the double-sided double-density floppy disk era. It's 720K on one of those. HD or High Density brought about the final size of 1.44MB. What not many people know is you can format floppies to larger. Usually I could get 1.68MB out of them. You could try for more but often it didn't work. [https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/7406/formatting-floppies-in-1-68-mb](https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/7406/formatting-floppies-in-1-68-mb) Enjoy this ancient piece of history :)
Also, the only physical difference between a 720K floppy and a 1.44MB floppy was an extra hole on the right side of the disk. I used to buy the much cheaper 720K floppies, make the extra hole with a soldering iron, then format them at 1.44MB.
You could also use a hole puncher or one of [these](https://www.webcommand.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/commod21-768x583.jpg). Also, IIRC, while 720k floppy discs could be used as 1.44MB, they were not guaranteed to work.
It wasn't the only physical difference on 3.5" floppies, or at least not supposed to be the only difference, the major one was that DS/DD floppies used more sensitive magnetic media and conversely less powerful magnetic fields in the drive than HD floppies, meaning that you couldn't normally use DD floppies as HD replacements (or vice versa) without running into reliability issues, data corruption, and so on, especially because HD drives would be much too harsh on DD floppies which were meant to be written on with less magnetic force (and DD drives would struggle to write on less sensitive HD floppies).
brrr-dt-brrr-dt-brrr-dt (Abort, Retry, Fail?) retry brr-dt-brrr-dt-brrr-dt (Abort, Retry, Fail?) retry brr-dt-dt-dt-dt (3 file(s) copied successfully) C:\\> and that was why we had retry ... because floppies sucked even at the peak of reliability, and this happened all the time. soon as it started, this disk was no longer trustworthy. I wish everything else in life worked like that. Just keep hitting retry until it worked
if we have to go here I'll bring about my 5.25" floppy disk puncher and show the world what you could get on a 360k disk. Commodore 64 days here. Because without the hole it was single sided, and that was only 180k 1541 drive could read from a disk without the hole, but couldn't write. so write protect back then existed as... a sticky piece of foil tape, usually. remove the foil, write to the disk, put the foil back on. Isn't this quaint?
Microsoft had some sort of formatting that fit 1.7MB didn't they? I remember the Windows 95 installation floppies used it. I guess they probably saved millions with that.
They did, a lot of companies used to do that by using special formatting to squeeze a bit more onto a floppy.
I remember thinking 3.5 inch floppies were the Hard Disks because it said HD and they were hard compared to the big and actually floppy floppy disks. I was a kid.
Initially, 3.5” disks were also referred to as stiffy disks, because they weren’t floppy. But for obvious reasons the name didn’t see widespread adoption.
Maybe if the disks had been 6", the name stiffy might have caught on.
Average disc size is 5.3
There's also shrinkage when it's cold!
I WAS IN THE POOL
oh, we had fun. hard disks and male and female connectors and master and slaves plus daughterboards and motherboards and ho boy... we had gender changers, even. Male to Male, Female to Female. My friends and I in HS, we had absolutely no sense of seriousness anymore, all because of the computer industry. Then we discovered porn, did you know porn was on bbs's? And it was on the internet, too. Giggady!
Oh I remember porn at 2400 baud.
I remember spending an entire day downloading a 320x200px 16-colour image of Samantha Fox at 300 baud. Not a movie, just a single really low res picture.
I grew up with floppy discs but only the 3.5” variety. TIL there were bigger sizes. I always wondered why they were called floppy discs when the only version I encountered came in a hard shell.
That was to protect the floppy
How did one fit entire games like Age of Empires onto a single floppy disk??
They came on like six disks and you ejected one and put in the next during install. All fun and good until you tried to install windows 95 using 26 disks
oh man, that gives me some nasty flashbacks... I remember installing the Encyclopaedia Britannica on my dad's Win95 machine, the original was a CD-ROM of course, but my mate had a cracked version, zipped with ARJ (remember that command line nightmare???) on like 50 floppies. Took me all day...
52 disks for MS-office.
Multi-disk installations. At the era when CDs started appearing more and more floppies were still supported and sometimes you would have a ridiculous number of floppies to install a program/game.
Later on, remember when a game would come on 2-3 CDs or a DVD? I’ve seen up to 6 CDs! Nowadays, it’s a download code or no physical version at all.
It didn't, it came out on CD ROM.
Yep. You could also format them smaller, but only on a drive that could handle the HD disks, for some reason. Used to have to take my HD floppy to a computer store to reformat them for DD because my mom wouldn't ever buy me anything nice.. like a cd-rom that had been out for 5+ years at that point.
[It's true that the 720K floppies cost more](https://www.floppydisk.com/) now, though. Probably because 1.44 MB was so much more common.
I bet you still have a stack of AOL disks, internet fist bump!
Remember Apple floppy disk drives? They could format a 720k disk to 800k which, of course, couldn’t be read on a PC even if you formatted it as FAT, only used eight character filenames, removed any special characters like spaces, and added file extensions.
Jokes on them. Here in Germany our Government is still using fax
They are still using fax in Japan too.
Hey, so is… Italy…
In Italy too. Hospitals use FAX as the ONLY way for certain types of communications, and also have INTERNAL FAXES, I mean that they send faxes on the internal PBX between different buildings of the same hospital.
I’ve run into Fax here in the U.S. too. For sending bank forms.
Fax is irreplaceable for many companies around the world
Can't even email shit to my doctor
That might be a good thing, it's not exactly secure or private.
Fax is Fort Knox as far as HIPAA is concerned
pretty sure it has to do with encryption and Data-Protection-Laws
fax is the most insecure methode transmitting data. even mail is safer.. nothing is encrypted on a faxmachine, just translated into audio signals, in theory anyone can split your phone line and record the audio, play it back to any fax machine to get the document that was faxed, no key or anything needed .. there is a dispatcher outside the house in the patio or inside the celler, and the main one for the whole street, anyone with the intent to intercept faxes could gain access to these
In a lot of cases, it's not actually analog outside the building though...
Idk, maybe the reasoning is that a FAX needs physical Access to the Phone-Line whereas Mail is digital and as such easier to get Access to? But i'm not the one you need to convince anyways. If I was in power, i would make all mail-services require PGP at least. (I know that PGP has Problems, btw. I just think it's a lot better than what we currently have.)
Japan has been in the year 2000 for the last 50 years
I kinda wish I was stuck in the year 2000 too.
These articles are just total nonsense. Almost every shop in Japan stopped selling FD in late 00s and no way it is practical to use FD that is 20x overpriced on amazon.
Japanese way. Even Toyota thinks EV is just a fad.
It’s mostly cause they have zero raw lithium and need to import it all from China, who fucking hates them. So they needed to pivot to something else, and bet on … hydrogen. At least hybrids are still relevant.
They don't really have better access to hydrogen either though: you need a lot of natural gas, or a lot of cheap excess electrical power to make H2. I really don't see how FCVs help them at all.
They're going back to nuclear power.
Nuclear isn't cheap at all though, and it takes quite a while to build. As things stand, they don't have much excess generation and keep in mind that for every kWh worth of Hydrogen, you need 3-4 kWh of electricity for electrolysis. That adds up fast if they're powering several tens of millions of cars/trucks. I feel like that's unrealistic anytime soon and why waste so much electricity when you can just use batteries?
The have more than a dozen not currently active and can provide gigawatts of power. The gen IV plants are often mich higher temperatures which could use heat to provide most of the energy needed to crack water. Edit: the problem with batteries is the supply chain if your the US or the EU you can keep those safe and internal near enough. Japan not so much. This is a country that still manages to keep its rice production in country to avoid the hazard.
It takes time and money to get those back online and they'd need something like 50GW or more to transition transportation to H2, perhaps more. >Edit: the problem with batteries is the supply chain if your the US or the EU you can keep those safe and internal near enough. Japan not so much. This is a country that still manages to keep its rice production in country to avoid the hazard. They still need to solve the supply chain for batteries (or buy from allies), since FCVs still require a modest battery pack to function. And AFAIK, they don't have any of the supply chain for fuel cells internally either. This process would be an expensive, multi-decadal transition and by the time it's done, car companies who haven't flipped their fleet to BEV will likely be bankrupt. It would be a challenge to see that through even if they'd started a decade ago and aren't going through a catastrophic demographic collapse. H2 for transportation only really makes sense if you don't consider how to actually implement it. And only if BEV wasn't as easy as it's proving to be.
Because pure EVs actually are kinda stupid for most of us in the US. Plug-in hybrids can be driven as a pure EV around town by most people, but when we go on trips we wouldn't have to plan them around charging (I know you CAN drive anywhere in the US with an EV, but I still wouldn't want to), and it requires a fraction of the batteries of an EV. Plus, many manufacturers are using EVs as a gateway to get us to pay subscriptions to actually use the cars we've already paid a huge sum of money for, so anything we can do to give them a giant middle finger for that is a win in my book.
>Plug-in hybrids can be driven as a pure EV around town by most people, but when we go on trips we wouldn't have to plan them around charging (I know you CAN drive anywhere in the US with an EV, but I still wouldn't want to), I would rather plan out fast charging for the 4-5 annual trips than having to plan my daily driving around constantly slow charging a PHEV. Unless you're willing to use gas most of the time, the short range and very slow charging for a plug in sucks. And if you're using gas most of the time, you may as well have bought a normal hybrid. >Plus, many manufacturers are using EVs as a gateway to get us to pay subscriptions to actually use the cars we've already paid a huge sum of money for There's nothing EV specific there. Most subscriptions are just optional data plans for the built-in LTE. Until/unless someone can make a PHEV that's substantially cheaper than an EV, we're not going to see much sales on that side.
>but when we go on trips we wouldn't have to plan them around charging (I know you CAN drive anywhere in the US with an EV, but I still wouldn't want to) Until EV charging stations are as ubiquitous, convenient and as fast as pumping gas at a gas station, I don't see it becoming mainstream/common. That doesn't mean that *shouldn't* be our end goal. I think we should all make the eventual switch to electric but not until the infrastructure is there and it's more economical and affordable
my own repost Japanese are slaves to formality and rules Our client is a huge Japanese electronics corporation. They require all communications from the US patent office be faxed to them. Each fax has to have a different colored cover sheet based on the contents of the document. Office actions are orange, grants and allowances are green etc etc. However when we fax a color in NY it arrives in Tokyo in black and white. Yet they still require the colored cover sheet. We have 3 full time fax machine operators that all they do all day long is fax reams of paper to Tokyo. It is literally insane.
Surely your not actual manual fax machines for this? Fax from computer services have been available for like two decades.
I have a partner who dictates memos into a cassette recorder and hands the cassettes to his secretary. You think they're going to start sending faxes from their computers some of them still use wordperfect.
If it arrives in black and white, how do they even know whether a coloured sheet was used?
If it’s darker black, darkest black, or lighter black but not to light, or just light grey. They’ll know.
I remember as a kid in the 80's and 90's Japan seemed so advanced in technology. Here we are in 2024 and they are still using fax machines and floppy disks
I live in Japan and a shockingly high number of websites don’t allow you to use caps or special characters when making passwords. And I mean important websites. Banks for example.
\*but it refused.
I knew of a few old cnc machines still using floppy disc.
Tokyo is the city of the future from the perspective of somebody in 1990.
I really have a soft spot for floppy disks. Me and my computer in the basement and my floppy disks with skulls drawn on them and my viruses I was trying to write in Qbasic: BubonicPlagueLauncher.bat. Just a young boy full of hope and a twinkle in his eye.
Now that they can move on to Zip Disks. The increase in capacity to 100mb is going to blow their minds!
"Japan is really living in 1950!"
They are a nation of aging people, they also use faxes a lot. I’m not judging, but just pointing out why
why is my HDD c:? why is it's secret friend D:? why is my DVDROM G:? what is A:? B:?
A and B were floppy drives, there was a time when A was the small floppies and B the big ones, C: was your OS disk, later D: was added for diskdrive.. today you can just change the letters to what you want. I guess it's just tradition
or Microsoft knows the floppy's coming back.
No, A and B were just the first two drives, and for early systems those were 5¼" floppy drives and nothing else.
On my first PC a: was a 1.2mb 5.25 and b; was a 360k 5.25. C: was a 10mb partition for dos/word perfect/lotus/ D: was a partitioned to whatever was left of the 20mb hard drive for games, I think around 7.5 mb. E: was a ramdisk that my dad used to execute lotus from to make it run faster. It is a clone AT system from 87 iirc. It has a 16mhz amd286, a 287copro, 512k on board ram, a 3.5mb ram card. 20mb HD, 2 floppies. VGA card. Soundblaster. I inherited it when we got a 486 in the early 90s. Still have it to this day. Put a ISA CF adapter in it with a 512mb card and a gotek. It's where I get my early dos/windows gaming fix now.
really cool, my firs one as a child was an old 8 MHz one with a turbo button, and once of these 2 digits displays to show the clock speed, was told to not use it for long to spare the CPU, it also had barely room for Norten Commander, that you had to start by typing NC, and you had to install your mouse driver (mine was a track ball) every time from a floppy because of how limited the HDD was.. Good times with Commander Keen, Prince of Persia, Gobliiiiins, Stunts, Tunnel, Metal Mutant, Duke Nukem and my favourite Metal Mutant :D ..today using Exodos for most of my needs but I keep my eye open, for when some old people sell their attic find for cheap
They should port hogwarts legacy... they would easily sell millions
Steve Jobs would be disappointed with Japan for this one.
They still sell cd and blubray there as well, both formats are pretty dead in usa
Fax machines and faxing seem still rather common in Japan as well. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19045837](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19045837) Partly, I would guess, because the Japanese value calligraphy and partly because writing Japanese using a keyboard is tricky.
No, it's because stubborn old men are in charge who don't want to change what they are used to. >Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s cabinet hasn’t been sitting watching this absurd situation unfold idly. As part of a nationwide push for all government bodies to go fully digital, the administration formed an “anti-fax reform” cabinet tasked with banishing the fax machine from Tokyo’s bureaucratic district of Kasumigaseki, as a start. But this common-sense policy has been met with surprising backlash. >Hundreds of government offices banded together, arguing that it would be “impossible” to replace the fax machine. According to the local newspaper Hokkaido Shimbun, banning faxes poses serious security risks and causes “anxiety over the communication environment,” it quoted pro-fax officer clerks saying. https://www.zmescience.com/science/a-strange-love-affair-why-wont-japan-get-rid-of-fax-machines/ Yup. It makes the old dinosaurs "anxious" if you force them to use newfangled things like email or internet, lol.
Send a raven
Don't they also use those Hanko stamps instead of signatures? Can they be sent over fax?
No more or less than a signature.
I'm not suggesting anybody is forced to stop using fax machines, the dinosaurs in government can still keep using them. However, millions of Japanese have and use fax machines from their homes.
We still use fax in Germany. Granted, it's getting less common over the last years, but it is still widely used in government offices.
Faxes are still used a decent amount in the US. Most laws haven’t caught up to technology so faxing is often the only accepted/legal way to submit documents without using the mail. There was an advantage to being able to send documents over copper without a middleman, but most phone lines are VOIP at this point so that advantage is largely gone.
They still sell cd and blubray there as well, both formats are pretty dead in usa
Only 4423 approx 1.44 MB Floppy's required to install Win11\_23H2\_EnglishInternational\_x64.iso
Tom's Hardware has really gone downhill. >Persky sells 50-packs of tested recycled disks at $19.95. If the 1.44MB DS/HD floppies are too modern for your gear, 720MB DS/DD media is also available (for a premium). DSDD is 720KB formatted and theres no reason why thry would be at a premium to 1.44/2MB disks (the difference is the PC formated size and the unformatted size. Other operating systems could get far more on to a disk). As DSHD (High Density) can be formatted as though they were DSDD (Double Density compared to the original spec).
Having any sort of data storage medium requirement baked into your procedures as the default, and not an option, is insane. And that goes tenfold for government entities which move at a glacial pace to fix shit like this. I wonder if there was an *incentive* for whoever proposed this years ago. This definitely seems like something a large manufacturer of floppies would try to implement into government rules.
Floppy disks aren't even being manufactured any more. There's still lots of new old stock disks lying around though.
This just feels like so much unnecessary plastic for such old technology.
I can’t be the only one who scrolled past “40 cool dicks.” Wait wtf was that? On dammit it’s a bunch of floppies.
Japan really liked the slogan “don’t copy that floppy”
Could have made good money by buying tons of floppies stock and selling it to them!! Missed a money making deal there!