I also live in an area that doesn’t get served by the Al Boraq. We don’t have trains in general over here and I am jealous.
I also learned about the Al Boraq’s existence the hard way, because in the summer of 2022, my family had to drive me from Casablanca to Tangier and back by car, which took us like 3 hours on one trip.
I’d kill for a fast track to New Orleans, Atlanta, Little Rock, Tulsa, Nashville, all that. Ply me with cheap beer, let me chill and ride. What a dream.
Kansas city… what I’d kill for a fast track to Chicago, St Louis, Denver and the like…
I mean fuck, at least we have Amtrak to Chicago and one to St Louis… however only runs once a day, takes as long as driving as long as the priority that goes to freight trains doesn’t delay too much.
Don’t quote me on the exact time but I heard somewhere that they run so close to schedule that a bullet train arrived something like 18 seconds late and the company apologized for the delay. ( might have been a minute or two but I recall it was really, really short. )
Also, the EU just launched a new plan for railroads all across Europe! Ofc Switzerland won’t get any additional upgrades, but they are still somewhat connected because of the proximity.
Switzerland doesn’t really have a high speed rail network. In fact they design against it. Indeed the country is very small so it’s not a huge deal but then again there are flights between Geneva and Zürich so it’s large enough for that.
Their rail system is by far the best in Europe though and one of the best in the world only surpassed by the likes of Japan. They just aren’t really know for high speed rail.
Switzerland is very mountainous and has pretty fast trains too, although not Shinkansen-fast. Swiss trains are expensive and comfortable and the vista is pretty much always great.
On the flipside, something most developed countries consider normal but would blow Japanese minds is the ability to do all “paperwork” on your phone or laptop without any paper ever being printed anywhere. Japan is somehow still a country of fax.
And when it isn’t cash only it’s a completely random grab bag between credit cards, transit cards, QR codes, app payment and e money. Just hope you have the supported option of like 20 options.
Here in the Netherlands you can pay practically everywhere electronically (even the door to door collectors for charities carry a qrcode in addition to their collection box) , but if you go next door to Germany you’d better bring cash if you want to buy anything.
They’ve made a stunning amount of progress in accepting credit cards in the past couple years though. I’m there pretty regularly and the shift has been wild. By spring 2023 I didn’t really need cash anymore. By fall, I used cash maybe twice.
There was one thing I was sure I’d need cash for— nope, the hotel paid them and added it to my tab. Back in the day, that mostly happened only if you skipped out on a reservation and the restaurant wanted to collect the cancellation fee. Which has never happened to me so I guess I’m not sure it worked exactly like that.
I know a lot of people here hate credit cards and only use cash, but it’s honestly a pretty large hassle to get cash in every country you visit. Using the same card everywhere is way more convenient and cheaper (exchange fee + no % back like with a credit card)
Isn’t this because of those special stamps they use in Japan to notorize documents? I heard about them on a podcast: 99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/
I’ve heard it’s just more of a burocracy thing. A friend there once told me he always puts the date wrong on the top of documents because there is a person who’s job is to double check your work. They’re judged on how often they find mistakes, so it’s easier to put something blatantly wrong at the top that easily fixed so they can quickly find it and he can move on.
i do not understand american’s aversion to the bidet. why would i want to wipe my ass with dry fucking paper rather than water? why why why. like it’s somehow ‘gross’ to use water. but scraping at wet shit with fucking tissue paper is hygienic and normal?
Water coming from the nastiest thing in the building in contact with the part of my skin that’s got a low barrier to things passing through it? Get fucked.
Are you just fucking stupid? All water in the building comes from the same fucking place, the water in the toilet and the kitchen sink are the same until they fester.
Is this like a mental locational thing? There is no way the unsanitary water from the toilet bowl can back feed into the water line. They are isolated mechanically via the tank float and by gravity because water can’t travel back up into the tank from the bowl. The bidet and toilet fill valve is piped into the same water line the hand sink is you use to rinse your mouth after brushing your teeth.
I’m less worried about whatever diseases I may already have and more worried about those coming from others. You can have butthole splash time all you want. If you’re toilet is entirely private, maybe that’s even good. I’m not doing it.
You do know that toilets are like, the easiest to clean piece of furniture ever invented. Like the thing is designed to withstand being sprayed with chlorine on the regular. It’s literally a porcelain basin that has a built in water flushing system. If it’s your home’s private toilet, no one else but you will ever use it and you can make it as clean as you want it to before using it.
Even then, epidemiologically, in any given public bathroom, you’re several orders of magnitude more likely to catch an illness from the door handle than the toilet.
[About the study that claims changes in vagina’s bacteria] The study would “have to be repeated” for researchers to draw any conclusions, Swartzberg says.
This could go either way, bottom line, we don’t know.
bidet nozzles were contaminated with infection-causing organisms such as Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus spp.
So does your fridge, but no one is advocating against using fridges to store food.
You need to regularly clean it.
Uhh? duh. Such a radical concept, hygiene, that’s surely too much for most people. You also have to regularly clean your whole bathroom. What’s the con?
It’s also important to pay attention to your bidet’s water pressure and temperature
The level to which some articles infantilize adults is the really scalding issue here. Top water temperature of a typical household heater should be no higher than 120 F (48° C), unless you do something seriously wrong, my guess is you’ll be fine.
It’s like having a second toilet seat. Takes more room.
Not from the US and live in a condo, so I’m speaking from a purely practical standpoint. My condo is not that big and having a bidet would mean that I have no place to put my washer and dryer at.
I understand why you like it. I don’t understand why the other person isn’t allowed to dislike it. Does it harm anyone if he “smears shit into the rest of him”?
I got one with a dryer that makes that a lot better. It does take too long to fully dry it though, so it’s this middle ground of not too wet to dry off, and not waiting forever for the dryer.
I own a BioBidet 2000. My friend Brian has one at his house and he convinced me to just try it. I did. And then I ordered one for myself before I left the bathroom.
I’ve never used your $20 Luxe bidet to know the difference, but I’m going to assume it doesn’t have a heated seat, heated water, variable pressure settings, massage settings, and an enema setting. If those features don’t interest you, then nothing at all makes it better. Use what you like. My wife just really loves the heated seat in the winter time.
I don’t understand this either, toilets already require running water and have plenty of room to integrate bidet function. It’s not fancy tech or anything… in North America that’s sort of how they’re marketed though, with an emphasis on the settings, like its something you have to learn to use.
Uhhm, I’m not a doctor and this is not medical advice, but. You should talk to a proctologist about hemorrhoids or other blood circulation issues. Anuses are not supposed to itch when lightly sprayed with water, or ever for that matter, and that sensation might be a sign of tissue inflammation. Don’t ask me how I know this.
Somebody once said it to me like this: “If you faceplant into a pile of shit, would you rather wipe your face with a dry paper, or use water for cleaning”
Pretty much every thread we have in this community, someone comes along to say “you should pressure-wash your asshole”. I’m mildly bemused that this is what Lemmy obsesses over.
I was in Asia and got pretty horrible food poisoning. My wife suggested we head over to this Japanese mall. Spent the day there. Use the toilet, walk around, buy something, use the toilet. That was the ideal toilet to have in that situation.
I’ve always heard it explained like this (which I wholeheartedly agree with). Imagine you’re hiking a trail in the forest, and you trip on a rock and fall. By chance, you land on turd of excrement, luckily it only smears part of your arm and elbow with shit. Would you be fine just taking a piece of toilet paper and scraping it off? Or, would you feel compelled to wash it off with water, perhaps also soap?
Why wouldn’t you just use paper, if you scrape hard enough it wouldn’t even smell and be just as clean, arguably?
If you would at least use water, why do you extend to your elbow a courtesy that you don’t extend to your anus?
The point is that there’s a lot of people who walk through life with a dirty asshole, but then try to act morally superior regarding personal hygiene, and I think that that’s not right.
Cultures who use bidets and not the bum gun will always confuse me. Ones a robot strapped to the toilet that does a medicore job at one thing, then other is a cheap water gun you can use for all sorts of shit (pun intended).
They have a device which progressively shines a light on a piece of paper while moving across the page and converts the brightness of the reflected light into an audio signal. Once it reaches the edge the paper is incremented and the process repeats. Each of these segments of sound are sent via a standard telephone connection to a similar device on the other end which uses the sounds to reproduce the image on the original paper on a new sheet of paper. This can be used to send forms, letters, black and white pictures, and even chain letters. It also forms the basic underpinning of a significant fraction of formal communications with landlords, employers, medical systems, government offices, and so on.
I think he’s saying that, for as futuristic as Japan may seem, they also still rely on outdated methods for certain things, just like every other country.
Ironically, I just noticed this morning that the pizzaria on the corner (here, in the US) can take orders via fax (as well as in person, via phone, and on the Web).
I don’t know about today, but back around 2000, stuff on the Japanese market was quite a bit ahead of the US in small, portable, personal electronic devices, like palmtop computers and such. I remember being pretty impressed with it. But then I also remembered being surprised a few years later when I learned that personal computer ownership was significantly lower than in the US. I think that part of it is that people in Japan spend a fair bit of time on mass transit, so you wanted to have small, portable devices tailored to that, and that same demand doesn’t really exist in the US.
Then everyone jumped on smartphones at some point after that, and I think things homogenized a bit.
Yeah, PC games are a nothing market in Japan as virtually no one owns a gaming PC; they’re much more likely to own a console (Sony and Nintendo are domestic companies) or a mobile device.
I think it’s because the country did not significantly recover from the 90s financial crisis, and their society is so conservative that they literally could not try anything modern again afterwards
They literally went “industrial society and it’s consequences have been a disaster for Japanese society”
The impact of the financial crisis reverberates to this day, and that drives a huge proportion of the issues, but the crisis in my opinion was inevitable. From my perspective, the Post-War Economic Miracle, as it’s called, catapulted Japan through all the stages of economic development into an almost accelerated version of the same problems that are afflicting the U.S. and other Western countries.
The dream of infinite growth in the Japanese context fell flat for the same reasons it is falling apart in other developed countries. A rise in standard of living and wages led to offshoring and outsourcing of production, the hollowing out of the middle class, a work culture at odds with family life, and so on. The country’s land and businesses were valued in the late 1980s as though it could remain competitive internationally with a mostly domestic supply chain, even as the production costs of its goods continued to rise along with the needs of its population, which in a globalized economy turned out to be a pipe dream.
We see the same thing in the U.S., where every president promises to restore the American manufacturing base, then comes up against the reality that U.S.-produced products made by U.S. workers paid U.S. wages cannot be competitive with something built in Southeast Asia and shipped overseas for less than $100 per ton. But the conservatism of Japanese society certainly plays a role, in that the country is highly resistant to change, and also due to a rigidity that stifles innovation, making it hard to start new businesses outside the keiretsu/conglomerate structure. The U.S. has somewhat mitigated its manufacturing decline through the creation of new service sector and especially tech businesses that operate internationally, which path is less available to Japan due to the rigidity of its business structure.
But the part I disagree with is the idea that Japan has rejected industrial society. Japan is still extremely proud of its culture and the impact it’s had globally. They love that people in western countries eat ramen and sushi, play Nintendo games or watch anime, and they have a deep reverence for their globally successful businesses and particularly the auto industry. They have no desire to reject or withdraw from industrial society, they just haven’t been able to figure out amidst external economic barriers, and internal cultural and financial barriers, how to move forward.
We see the same thing in the U.S., where every president promises to restore the American manufacturing base, then comes up against the reality that U.S.-produced products made by U.S. workers paid U.S. wages cannot be competitive with something built in Southeast Asia and shipped overseas for less than $100 per ton.
That is the lie they tell us. Meanwhile we do everything we can to make we don’t have an industrial base.
We zone factories far away from everything instead of allowing them to be in normal commuting range
We tax the land they are on the same way we tax commercial property. Which you might think is fair but we don’t do that to farmers. Especially considering how easy retail gets it, with governments willing to give plenty of free roads and police protection to them
We treat inventory as taxable which punishes factories that want a buffer and rewards the quick turnover of fast fashion places. Ever wonder why they never have your size and you have to go to the website to get it?
Thanks to our shit medical system any workplace injury is going to be devastating which means that the insurance as a whole will be very high.
Factory investments take longer to pay off which doesnt mean much when we all think quarterly. A tax on rapid stock trading could probably fix that but that isn’t going to happen.
There are other factors as well. We don’t hire women to do factory work which limits the labor pool. There is still a lot of discrimination against Latinos and African Americans. Which again lowers the labor pool and kinda leaves us with…well the kind of people who feel only comfortable only working with white Christian men.
If you have a large suitcase or other parcel it may be unwieldy to walk around Tokyo or another city with it. Subways only allow one suitcase of a certain size, so you might have to take a much more expensive taxi.
Instead you can go to a desk at the airport and have your luggage delivered same day or next day to ~any hotel, subway station, or convenience store. It will be insured and kept safe for you there to pick up. And at the end of your trip, you can send it back. The price for this convenience? Around $10.
This is not only a good demonstration of Japanese trust and customer service, it’s also a legitimately hard logistics problem. I daresay that such a business could not succeed in the US both because of our defensiveness and sprawling cities.
There’s definitely a huge difference in service work ethic in Japan, which probably leads to those reliability stats. I don’t even know if I consider it a good or bad thing, because it’s super-nice when you’re relying on them there, but I can also tell that waiting on people hand and foot wears on people’s mental health, and it often shows across that country.
Wow that is fantastic. I’m surprised no one “imported” that one to the states in “make everything a start-up!” days early-mid 2010s.
As a tip, it’s not quite as convenient but most hotels will let you check a bag with them, even if you’re not a guest. I’ve done that at different conferences (usually 1st day and/or last day) when I had a day left, didn’t want to haul my bag, but couldn’t go to from my hotel. I think I got turned down once and it was simply because they were full.
Japan’s current fiber-optic commercial internet connections use optical fiber transmission windows known as L and C multi-core fiber (MCF) bands to transport data long distances at record speeds. Meanwhile we (USA) have fiber back to copper and Cat3 for the last few hundred feet in most cities at best making the entire idea into a bottle neck.
Cat 3 is a thing and is basically unshielded twisted pair. You can abuse it quite a bit from its voice grade days to cram a few hundred megabits of VDSL over it if it’s only from your house to the curb.
Automatic opening doors but they don’t open by a proximity sensor, they open when you press the button. This is the optimal solution as the door doesn’t open needlessly but still allows for ease of access.
Ordering machines, where all your menu options are clearly listed and priced. Pressing on a combo of buttons will print a receipt which you can sit down and show the staff/cook your order.
Water (hot and cold) tapped straight to your dining table for self serve drinks.
Unfortunately becoming less applicable with the smartphone domination finally reaching Japan, but their flip phone technology.
taco bell in particular is embracing the kiosks and it’s wonderful. they have signs in the lobby saying ‘order at the kiosk’ even. and why wouldn’t you? why do people in the US have this pig-like stubbornness where they must have a human stand there and ‘PeRsONaLIze tHE iNtERacTion’ or some shit
i just want to pay cash, otherwise i prefer kiosks… but i see a future of hostile, nagging UI design…
like at some stores self checkout, you have to click 80 different confirmations and give your phone number, email and social security number…
Because I don’t want to be bombarded with ads and “did you consider this offer” shit and take 5 minutes to use some usability nightmare? Because I do not want to touch a greasy screen that 362 people used today without washing their hands after taking a shit? Because I do not support corpo greed that will not rest until every employee has been fired?
Why should I have to do everything myself when I’m at a commercial establishment? Why is interaction with a human a bad thing? I absolutely hate self checkout for the same reasons. Quality of service is valuable and humans benefit from interaction.
There was an article published last year, maybe the year before, where they tested the touch screen kiosks in McDonald’s. Every single one of them has traces of faeces on it.
Even if that wasn’t true, it takes me significantly less time to tell someone my order than to scroll through however many sub menus the restaurant has decided to put their food into, and then select the options for each item and add it to my basket, then check out.
Everything has traces of faeces on it, this fixation on it seems irrational when you put it into context. The burger meat comes from a dead animal that spent it’s life wandering in a field and trampling it’s own shit. The fries come from the root of a plant grown in the dirt. The bun is made from wheat which was probably infested with mice. You yourself are a biological machine that turns food into energy and discards the waste. Your body has a tube filled with faeces right now.
Yes, we try to keep waste separate from food, but the world is not a clean-room.
All of those things are cleaned before being consumed. The touch screen menus are one of the last things you touch before touching and eating your food.
The world may not be a clean room, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to deliberately interact with someone else’s faeces, especially when I’m about to eat.
Strangely enough, you’ve made me realise that I haven’t for a while. Not a deliberate thing, it’s just that everything I’ve bought in person recently has been with a contactless method.
Having to crawl through multiple menus to order is not that big of a deal for restaurants. They don’t value your time, they value their staff time (because they have to pay for it). There is probably very little ongoing cost to double the number of order kiosks while every additional human taking orders needs to be paid minimum wage. The restaurant owner watches with hate as their money slowly melts away while you decide if you want pickles, fried onions, and jalapenos on your burger.
That’s a good point. I could be in the restaurant for an hour trying to order, and as long as there are other kiosks available, it wouldn’t make a difference to them.
I often see buildings in Japan that have a manual sliding door followed by either a push button or proximity automatic door. If I am going to have to open one door myself, I might as well open both. If one is automatic, the other might as well be too.
I work in a pharma research facility, so people can have literally any disease or chemical on their hands, so we have a lot of doors with hand wave sensors.
Just wag your mitts in front of it, and the door opens. They’re on the wall a few steps before the door, so the door is usually open by the time you get to it.
I guess you have a point. What I meant is that it’ll still slide open (like an automatic door does) but you push a button that has a similar feel to a door bell. So, still very accessible and automatic!
Water (hot and cold) tapped straight to your dining table for self serve drinks.
This in particular sounds awesome, speaking as a heavy water drinker who always feels like a bit of a heel having to pester busy wait staff to come over and refill my water glass a bunch of times.
Automatic opening doors but they don’t open by a proximity sensor, they open when you press the button.
I think it would be cool to have a hybrid system where you can wave/nod/bow to a sensor to activate it, but also implement an open standard frequency that can trigger it so people with reduced mobility can mount a transmitter on a wheelchair/cane etc. or just use their cellphone. Would eliminate having any external equipment that would be exposed to weather or vandalism and is one less common surface for the public to have to touch.
Refrigerators that make way less noise than the ones we have here. Japanese more often live in small apartments so noise is a bigger nuisance. But, those refrigerators are ridiuclously expensive by our standards. I had been interested in buying one, oh well.
When I looked into it a few years ago, I found that, contrary to the stereotype, Japanese homes are surprisingly big. Smaller than the US or Canada, which are some of the biggest in the world, but actually bigger than most of Europe.
The result of a quick search: the average Tokyo apartment is 65.9 sq m (710 sq ft). The modal apartment size is 19.7 sq meters (212 sq ft), so maybe that’s what you’re referring to. But that’s only 21% of Tokyo apartments.
Can’t believe noone has mentioned the hot beverage vending machines.
Its so fucking nice to spend $1-$1.50 and just get some hot tea or coffee right there without issue. And they’re everywhere so you can pretty much rely on them.
So much more convenient than having to go to a coffee shop so you can pay $5 for the same thing, and the vending machine version still tastes great.
It’s likely not as cool as Japanese vending coffee, but in the UK there are Starbucks/Costa etc vending machines all over. Do Americans (sorry assuming you are from US) not have those?
the ones at racetrac are pretty great imo. i get the lightest roast they have (more caffeine) and dump a bunch of sugar and cream into it but it’s pretty good black, too
No, not that I’ve seen except for at highway rest stops. They have automated coffee vending machines that sells some brown nasty tasting water. Definitely not coffee
(The link above shows the scene I’m speaking of. I tried to embed the URL into this comment so the picture itself would display, but I couldn’t figure it out.)
Also from the US west, I’ve seen a bunch of hot vending machines! In several hospitals and schools in different states, a few gas stations. They will have coffee, tea or cocoa selections, a cup pops out and gets filled with fresh brewed coffee. They were usually around 1.50 to 2 dollars a cup, maybe more expensive now though.
But are those like a hot coffee dispenser, where you grab a cup and put it under a spout, push a button and it pours out a hot drink? Because we do have those in Australia.
But in Japan they have vending machines for canned drinks and cans of soup that are heated.
This comment made me remember that the tech school in my (US) hometown of ~4000 people had a machine like this roughly 20 years ago and I’ve never seen another one since.
I used to see these more often in Canada but now they’re pretty unusual. Not heated cans like some Japanese machines, just cups of coffee and sometimes lattes and shit.
Now you’re forced to pay $3+ for muddy garbage at Tim’s/McDonalds and you have to wait in line to get it too. Alternatively drop $7+ at Starbucks for ok coffee? I can make better tasting coffee with a drip machine, let alone my French press.
They also have much more popularized versions of canned coffee than us; I occasionally see bad overpriced Starbucks coffee bottles in grocery store checkouts, but not something small, quick, and convenient like BOSS.
You could put giant billboards warning for the risk and it would still become a recurring event. Even if it said “warning: this is capable of grinding a human being to pulp”.
I’ve heard of it posted on high voltage electrical panels, but never seen it myself (I’m not an electrician). I don’t know if I got the wording exactly right, but it sounds good.
I’d imagine it’s got weight and pressure sensors, so I don’t think a person would get very far. I can definitely see the mechanism getting jammed by garbage or some shit, especially if someone’s trying to jam it.
US here… it has less to do with the 1% being fucking morons and more to do with the only infrastructure we actually pay any attention to is cars. Sure we’re having a bit of a bicycle revolution but at least in my area the bikes aren’t being used for transport but for fun, but then that’s with a metro that’s sprawling with a city that’s only 100 sq miles smaller than NYC, with 8,000,000 less people in it. Add that the auto companies were allowed to buy out things like the streetcar that was local and able to tear up the tracks to get rid of competition, it really isn’t a shocker.
But we’re now stuck in a cyclical spiral, of no investment for things like this are happening because it’s not seen as profitable enough. Which means a constant problem of using something like a bike for commuting is “But then I have nowhere I can put my bike where it won’t get fucked with.” so people don’t commute with it, which leads to no investment to the infrastructure.
$40 for the basic ones. They still work great, (I have them on all my toilets at home!) but they definitely aren’t as flashy as the Japanese toilets. Self-cleaning seats, heated seats, heated water for the bidet, etc…
We have plenty of bidets here in the States, they just install them outside the bathrooms and they mount them kind of high so they’re kinda awkward to get a good clean angle, though.
I still think about how Blizzard originally made their WoW expansion, Panderia, to include Samurai and sushi. And someone had to explain them the difference between China and Japan.
That’s not even necessarily mixing the two up so much as failing to distinguish cultures within “Asia” in the first place. A lot of people think of the whole region as one place. Put some soy and garlic on something? You’ve got an “Asian” dish. Never mind that there are numerous regional culinary traditions within China alone.
Yes, but not to mention Asia as in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh! 1.5 billion people living on the Asian continent, but “Asian” in popular American usage seems to only refer to China/Korea/Japan, and maybe Southeast Asia to a slightly lesser extent.
Ye-es. And then SE Asia is not the same as CJK, and then Middle Asia is not the same as West Asia/Middle East, and then India in itself has Dravidic parts, and then …
Though, returning to the example above with “Asian” dish, in Russia people usually refer to cuisine by country, not by continent. But may make a few diplomatic errors (possibly mistakes) this way, like saying that Armenians and Iranians drink Turkish coffee, etc.
This has absolutely nothing to do with xenophobia. This was based on a documentary of chinese economic waste and the people that fall into poverty because of it.
Fast my ass. Once they finally start maybe… But it takes ages to lay the first stone. There’s not enough people available to build everything they want to build. It’s a serious issue
Ok, well maybe they have a long pipeline of projects ready to be built, but they are getting things built. I went with a friend who was there like 5 years prior and he said everything looked totally different since the last time he was there. I don’t know about the planning process but even if that’s slow that’s still way better than most places where it also takes ages to get something started, takes ages to get something built, and they don’t have enough projects going through the planning process in the first place.
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