If you don't use the first couple of paragraphs from the linked article and instead write your own synopsis, they'll just reject your submission.

You know Google sold Motorola to Lenovo almost a decade ago, right?

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

Genuinely, if I need the services, I'll happily pay pretty large amounts per incident. At the same time, I cannot imagine a world where sufficient numbers of people will actually pay for this service as a subscription, unless the prices are absurdly low. I'd hope they'll charge on a per-incident basis.

I've lived in both US and Japan, travelled to Europe and Canada. I think I can bring a reasonably global perspective to this discussion. It's also clear you have no idea what's going on in Japan.

In Japan, almost all payments above a certain amount is via wire transfers, and has been since 1990s. In contrast, the US only relatively recently moved to that model, via the much more opaque online bill pay. In Japan, the payer pushes the money, like when sending monies to your friend in Venmo. I'm not 100% sure, but in the US, the payee pulls money.

Things like rent/mortage payments, credit card payments, salaries, utility bills, etc., are almost always have been paid via electronic means. This, in contrast to the US, where checks were, and are used, especially with smaller landlords. In Japan, it's quite customary with even smaller landlords to pay them using wire transfers.

It's typically the much smaller purchases -- up to about USD 200 -- that gets paid in cash. Think of paying for meals at a restaurant, paying for a cab or buying groceries. Here, cash becomes king because a lot of the smaller merchants do not have payment processing terminals.

I left paying for public transport out of this though -- primarily train operators use their own electronic payment networks. JR East started with Suica, way back in 2002 or thereabouts, as a RFID payments system. Others quickly followed, and interop was becoming a thing sometime around 2004 or 05. They added payments as a thing too, first in the convenience stores and newsstands owned by JR East, and later, probably, others.

I believe what BoJ is trying to do is to create a unified system of these disparate systems, to unify under one umbrella. If you travelled beyond the regional reach of your home system, very frequently the other systems were incompatible.

These rules were created after the flash-crash, and are designed to prevent systemic failures from causing chaos in the market. The 15 minutes of trading halt is designed to let market participants reevaluate what their algorithms are doing and see if they're performing correctly.

I had Sierra Leone and also Lithuania numbers call me. I answered the Sierra Leone number because it continued to ring and I was curious. Nothing but static on the other side, sadly.

That's basically the retailer hopefully having done the risk analysis and saying "losing out on X sometimes because of fraud is better than slowing everything down by requiring signatures".

I've been asked to sign for a latte, and not asked to sign for $50 purchases. That's all up to the retailer.

That would be awesome, but let's standardize to the 60Hz, not 50 as it's in the eastern part.

What's staring me in the face? A fucking TGI Fridays.

You tellin' me they don't have knives in the kitchen?

To be fair, the last time I was in O'Hare in the American Airlines terminal, the Wolfgang Puck restaurant's kitchen knives appeared to have been affixed to the workstation with fairly heavy-duty steel cables.

This is not to say getting knives and explosives into the "secure" areas aren't trivial. Security theater indeed.