jpatokal

The one month period was already a major concession by traditionalists: historically, the era name was announced the day it started.

Then again, this transition is also highly unusual because the emperor abdicated, allowing time to prepare. It's the first time in the modern era that this happened, as all previous (recent) emperors have died on the throne.

Part of that value prop is predictability. There are a lot of people who like to know exactly what they'll get, even when (especially when) travelling, and this is also why highway rest areas and airports so often have national fast food & coffee chains.

Are you accusing Rocket of any of those? They're famous for cloning business plans, but I wasn't aware they went beyond that.

The big difference is that in Chinese, the written form of the poem is clear and unambiguous (if not terribly sensible), whereas in English that makes no sense without a detailed explanation of how you're supposed to parse it.

Genuine question: are there any foods that go bad in such a way that you can't see, taste or smell it, but it can kill you anyway? (Emphasis on "go bad": things like listeria were there from the start.)

Almost out of date food, which is commoly sold at a discount in the US as well.

H&M, the global benchmark for disposable clothing, also hails from Sweden. And Ikea's cheaper particleboard furniture ranges are also pretty disposable.

The chain is based in China, but one of Miniso's founders is actually Japanese.

I recently ran into a "Yubiso" in KL, meaning there's now a Malaysian clone of a Chinese clone of Japanese stores (Miniso is basically Uniqlo and Muji mashed together).

Pretty much, but Donki's main selling point is the incredible array of completely off-the-wall shit in no discernible order. For example, this pic has rubber chickens, an exploding hat, a helium dispenser for making your voice squeaky, gorilla plushies, retro gaming consoles, sexy maid costumes, a giant robot toy, a RC helicopter and a waffle iron:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/n3Cri8BKUDWyfiAG6

I think they intentionally put these in nightlife districts, so they can be a sort of drunk man's IKEA where you always end up buying more than you planned to.

No discussion about Don Quijote can be complete without the theme song playing in the background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJyYrrDKYZE

This plays on continuous loop at all stores.

Illegal it may be, but there are many states in India where the sex ratio for babies is badly out of whack.

https://scroll.in/pulse/834701/one-step-forward-two-back-ind...

Yes, but you'd think the university could find a way to directly support building the software.

From the friendly article:

Even the ones that do contain wasps can be considered vegan in my opinion. Veganism is about reducing harm and suffering, and these wasps aren’t being harmed. After all, no one is forcing the wasps to fertilize the figs. It’s part of their natural life cycle.

A much more interesting story on the same topic:

https://longreads.com/2019/02/12/the-caviar-con/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19153474

Xiaomi is a luxury brand in the Chinese market.

And rich by Indian standards doesn't mean they can afford to spend over $1000 on an iPhone: in India, a top 1% household earns only about $1000/month.

You're missing my point. All those factors are real, but they set the unit economics of taxi service, which in turn sets the baseline for Uber/Lyft pricing.

So if the market price for taxi service in a city is X, already accounting for all those factors, Uber/Lyft should be able to deliver the same or better service for (say) 0.9X, again accounting for the factors but adding in efficiency gains from bypassing parasitical taxi medallion owners, not needing dedicated vehicles, having much easier ordering, etc. There will be some variance in how big that factor is (eg. NYC's $1 million medallions gave Uber a really juicy margin to exploit), but overall, if a city can sustain taxi service, it should be able to sustain Uber/Lyft too.

There's also a map of Japan's rail system, which is a thing of obsessive beauty:

https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/53640/where-can-i...

Unfortunately the pics of it are tiny, but as a sampler, here's what greater Tokyo looks like:

http://ontheworldmap.com/japan/city/tokyo/tokyo-rail-map.htm...

I'm not so sure about that. Yes, the baseline numbers will be very different, but the economics of ride share are pretty much the same anywhere: there's an existing market price for taxis, which is more or less inflated everywhere due to regulation and inefficiency, and Uber/Lyft/whoever can provide a similar or better service at a profit... except that there's competition fueled by a bonfire of VC money pushing the margin deep into the red.

No. For the next several decades, the rate of people aging out of the workforce will be much faster than the rate of people dying, but they will still need food, healthcare, etc.

In effect, Japan's population pyramid has inverted: the dependency ratio of workers to elderly, which was historically under 20%, is currently around 50% and is projected to increase to ~90% by 2050.

http://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-newest/e/ppfj02/suikei_g_e.html

Most vacant jobs in Japan are the kind of thing that's quite difficult to automate: farm worker, health care, construction, sole person running a convenience store, etc. The comparatively easy stuff like repetitive factory work has generally been automated already.

You're mixing up eras and reigns. The "Edo period" refers to the years when the shogunate ruled from Edo (today's Tokyo), during which there were over a dozen (notionally) reigning emperors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Timeline_of_Japanese_...

The Cloud Billing Catalog API offers programmatic access to all GCP pricing.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-cloud...

Re: pricing changes, I presume you're referring to the Distance Matrix API under Maps? That's rather separate from Cloud, but at the end of the day doing a lookup of all routes between M places and N places is going to cost Google M*N more than a single lookup.

Disclaimer: I work at GCP and used to work at Maps (but before the pricing change, which I was not involved in).

The only problem with that is that the resulting order would be useless for many applications. Say you're looking up your friend Tanaka Tarou, but you're not sure which characters his name is written with. If the sort order is phonetic, you can find the name and likely work out that this is the Tanaka you were looking for. But how do you search for a name in a kanji-indexed list if you don't know the kanji?

Incidentally, this is why kanji dictionaries invariably have multiple indices: one by radical, the other by pronunciation(s).

If all of somebody's contributions are removed, there's nothing to attribute to them.

That only kicks the can down the road a bit: what are the "solar system development" needs that would financially justify a Mars colony?

For reference, Falcon Heavy's max payloads are 63.8T to LEO and 26.7T to GTO, so today's load was quite light. ArabSat would actually have (just) fit in a regular Falcon 9 as well.

If you can use cp to move files around, you can use gsutil to do the same for GCS.

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil

You are mixing availability (access at any given moment) with durability (not losing data). From the FAQ:

Cloud Storage is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9's) annual durability, which is appropriate for even primary storage and business-critical applications. This high durability level is achieved through erasure coding that stores data pieces redundantly across multiple devices located in multiple availability zones.

Disclaimer: I work at GCP, although not in GCS specifically.

Ah, I see what you mean: that's referring to users on the customer's side, not Google's. You also can adjust the number & role of users on the fly, so you can create another production support user if somebody else needs to file a ticket urgently.

From what I've seen, the stories about people having trouble tend to be from Android app developers getting blocked from the Play Store, not GCP users.

If you purchase Google production support, with credits or otherwise, it's available 24/7 and not tied to a single "contact person". In addition, billing support (which includes things like being suspended for fraud or abuse) is free, available to all and also 24/7. All these channels are responded to by real live humans who can see what "the algorithm" did and why, and overrule it if need.

Disclaimer: I work at GCP and used to work in support.