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Interpreting jokes in real time is murderously difficult. Here’s a classic Japan story and then one from me:

A contractor said something during this project which I thought was both compassionate and the sign that he was a skilled professional, and I thought I’d share: Scene: My mother, who has some mobility challenges, is sketching out what she wants in her kitchen. He listens.

"So great to know my code has been accepted into your codebase. I charge very reasonable rates for IP assignment. You'll receive an invoice shortly."

I miss Japan. Anyhow, as someone who was a professional translator for a few years, if I had written this card it would have been among the best work of my career. It is a work of art two sentences in length.

This sounds like a trivial observation and it isn’t: No organization which makes its people pay for coffee wants to win.

Friendly neighborhood Dangerous Professional advice: If you are ever at a meeting taking notes, and someone at the meeting expresses umbrage that notes are being taken of the meeting, and this is routine notetaking for this genre of meeting, …

Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before. In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

(n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than authorization or authentication.)

Apparently Japan Post is debuting the most obvious improvement in addressing for last two decades: address virtualization. You sign up with them and get a short alphanumeric code. Their DB holds a pointer to physical address. If you move, you tell them, pointer changes.

It occurs to me that my hobby in writing letters about the Fair Credit Reporting Act is suddenly topical! So some quick opinionated advice:

In honor of someone’s bad bug today, I will retell a story of my worst bug: Once upon a time I was the CEO and entire engineering team of a company which sent appointment reminders. Each reminder was sent by a cron job draining a queue. That queue was filled by another cron job

Ruriko: Why did the train stop? Me: Freight trains have priority over passenger traffic in America. This will happen a lot in next two hours. Ruriko: Haha this is your American humor. Me: No. Ruriko: Wat.

Tokyo has positive population growth of about 100,000 people a year, and rents and home prices are roughly stable for last decade. How? Outconstructing NYC. And LA. And SF. And Boston. And Houston. Combined. Every year.

I like this anecdote of a CEO directing a particular “If you’re making this phone call we’ve already lost a shed load of money and the priority is not to lose more” decision, recounted by Matt Levine today.

It’s a bit uplifting, and terrifying, to think “What other graphs do we have which are one (1) competent executive from hockey sticking?”

In the “Japan does a better job at hotels” and “Japan does a better job at taking children seriously”, for ~$12 our hotel had a 20 minute cooking class for children where they got dressed up as patisserie chefs and, under the instruction of a staffer, made themselves dessert.

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A contractor said something during this project which I thought was both compassionate and the sign that he was a skilled professional, and I thought I’d share: Scene: My mother, who has some mobility challenges, is sketching out what she wants in her kitchen. He listens.

Apparently Walgreens is testing, in Chicago, a “new” concept: almost all goods (save two aisles of “essentials”) behind a barrier, passed over it to the customer in response to an order entered on a kiosk. This is almost a return to the retail experience of the late 1800s.

1Password continues to be the largest gap between what I’m invoiced and how terrible life would be if the service went away.

This sounds like a trivial observation and it isn’t: No organization which makes its people pay for coffee wants to win.

It’s a bit uplifting, and terrifying, to think “What other graphs do we have which are one (1) competent executive from hockey sticking?”

Apparently Japan Post is debuting the most obvious improvement in addressing for last two decades: address virtualization. You sign up with them and get a short alphanumeric code. Their DB holds a pointer to physical address. If you move, you tell them, pointer changes.

Show of hands: how interested would people be in an essay about software private equity?

Tokyo has positive population growth of about 100,000 people a year, and rents and home prices are roughly stable for last decade. How? Outconstructing NYC. And LA. And SF. And Boston. And Houston. Combined. Every year.

I feel like the video game industry has not really evolved with the consumer group, still pitching "100+ hours of gameplay!" when what many of us really want is "An engaging play session wrapped up in 30 minutes while the baby is sleeping."

Lots to like here. Above all, the candor.

I learned a bit about fracking today and even relative to my prior expectation holy cow does it sound like sorcery. As one example of many, how do you think they get information from bottom of the well to top of the well while drilling?

One of the reasons that professional legal, medical, and financial advice services are expensive is you are buying the right to sue someone. That is a reasonable thing to want. Another reasonable thing to want is responsive answers on a best effort basis for one thousandth cost.

I got about ~40% faster solving sudoku after casually watching an hour of YouTube (turns out sudoku YouTube is a thing) and now I’m wondering how many other things in life are shaped like this.

Friendly neighborhood Dangerous Professional advice: If you are ever at a meeting taking notes, and someone at the meeting expresses umbrage that notes are being taken of the meeting, and this is routine notetaking for this genre of meeting, …