Unlike banks, many services, some Rakuten subpages, etc requiring full width, I have found real estate sites (purchase, not rent) to be the most likely to accept half-width roman characters for the name input box.
There's always some wedge issue that means "don't punish the toolkmaker" is not politically viable. You can pick from guns to legal drugs to illegal drugs to all kinds of emotive things.
And once the wedge is in and the concept of maker responsibility is planted, it expands to people's pet issues, obviously.
The actual line of who gets punished just ends up at some equilibrium in the middle. Largely arbitrarily.
I think the classic one is pedophiles and protecting children.
If someone uses ChatGPT to create child porn or worse, to get help tracking down and meeting children, there is NO way in hell the public will accept "don't punish the toolmaker" as a principle.
Almost everything works with Suica, no? Although to be fair I guess tourists are _more_ likely to use the heritage lines with slightly different rules.
Tourists are often buying paper tickets. There's no way for a foreign Android phone to use a digital Suica, so people with Android are stuck with a physical card or paper tickets, and there's a lot of outdated information online that the physical cards are in low supply (They were last year but this year they're not).
When we visited Tokyo last year, what stopped us from even trying was the online information we came across was unclear and suggested we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport... I don't know if that is correct or not, but compare Oyster in London which is advertised at practically every corner store, so even if you get into town not knowing the system, it's hard not to find somewhere you can get a card (or you can just use contactless - I haven't had an oyster card in years).
The UK is completely chaotic ticket-wise on a national level, though.
I wish we'd known that ahead of time... It looks like the only difference is the deposit and expiry? Which seems like it makes the tourist-only version pretty much pointless.
> we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport
Little over a decade ago I did exactly the same. I ended up buying a Suica card at Ueno station from a clerk, which was a bit of an adventure since she was eager to help but barely spoke any English and I barely spoke any Japanese. Together we skillfully massacred both languages with an ad-hoc pidgin and lots of gesturing. Due to an issue with my wireless hotspot I only had an old school phrasebook at my disposal, which was about as helpful as the infamous Monty Python sketch implies. The airport seemed much more convenient as a tourist since everyone there at the very least spoke basic English. At the time it was certainly possible to get a Suica card at a major train station, though admittedly not easy.
We got IC cards (ICOCA) in Osaka for 500 Yen each, and used them for 2 weeks travelling across Japan this March. Worked like a charm, only thing that's annoying for us tourists is how it is a stored value card and needs to be topped up. I think we still had like 500 Yen on our cards when we departed, even though we bought a lot of stuff with it on the last few days.
While we got ours at the Osaka airport (KIX), I am sure I saw the "purchase a new SUICA/ICOCA" options at a few terminals while topping up. I suppose you mixed up the "Welcome to SUICA" tourist card (available at fewer locations) with the normal one? I was under the impression there was a lot of confusing information floating around online.
But I agree, public transport in London is - as a tourist - more straight forward. Just a matter of spotting the terminals at some stations IIRC. OTOH in Japan we found no station with an elevator smelling like someone used a hippie bus as an emergency toilet ;-)
Apple doesn't make regional variants of the phone, so all models have the technology built-in, even if it's disabled by default. Android phones outside of Japan lack Suica support.
TfL can barely build some flats in Zone 2 without the locals rioting like they're destroying a Cotswolds village. Actually, it can barely fix the literal busiest station in the country without a bunch of minor celebrity detractors riling up everyone about how much of a travesty it is that we're doing it.
Without the public or central government support, the efforts you're talking about amount to very little.
It's a good article, but I think the "it's not culture, just good governance" idea is a little hand wavy. The two bleed into each other greatly. The fact that houses are more disposable and wealth is less intergenerational in Japan does a lot to tamp down the NIMBY issues that plague e.g. the UK.
The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.
London is probably the worst-governed, or worst-planned, city of its peers. NYC has famously bad governance but at least it actually has its own government.
The national government controls all London budgets, the Mayor has no power, there's no legislative body for the city (GLA is not one), and there are 33 different borough councils that don't owe the Mayor anything.
>The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.
They just finished a line that traverses the whole city. It's 73 miles from end to end and carries one seventh of the UK's rail journeys (600,000 trips per day).
The Elizabeth Line is basically at the bare minimum for a global Asian city. It's not even that good by comparison. It's really a joke that London only has one line of that caliber and it took them literally decades to build.
So it's touted as some great success but to me it's a sign of failure. They'll say similar things if they ever finish HSR in California. Yeah I'm sure the end product will be fine but the whole process is disgraceful.
Never mind the fact that the Elizabeth Line is only so over-utilized because London completely fails at building density in and around its center. So it has to make its people live in zone 30 and sit on the train for two hours every day.
> Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.
Seems a bit like asking where the bread will come from, if no-one is forced to bake it.
Yes, this is what hysteria about bread looks like. People have been saying a disaster of the kids not knowing how to bake is coming since the 1800's. Yet, we still have bread.
How exactly will the knowledge of creating software be lost when the claim is that an ubiquitous software creation tool is going to take over the world? Is it going to refuse to emit anything less complex than a todo app?
I've never baked bread in my life and yet, with the right motivation, I'm sure I could learn from the literature and some trial and error alone. In the hypothetical world where bread demand massively exceeds supply, we'd form a guild and incrementally improve from there. Same way we learned it in the first place. Breadmaking wasn't gifted to us by aliens.
Well, that is the point :) we don't fret about where the bread comes from too much, or talk about how we need to act now lest we never have bread again. People want bread, and the price goes up until someone is willing to make bread.
The whole setup rests on this, and it seems mythical to me. These guys have basically equivalent products at this point.
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