Wow, Dec 2009 is literally when I had launched the MVP of VWO. So cool to hear this story from you! Brings back so many memories of anxious excitement and working till 3 am :)
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Note that if you don’t go during the festival, the downtown is pretty much dead. There is a nice knife shop that caters to tourists (刃物センター blade center) but the festival is definitely the best part of the year.
The big problem I see with being a tourist and going to this thing is that you'll have to pay to have your knife purchases shipped home (or pay a hefty checked-baggage fee), since you can't bring sharp blades in carry-on luggage.
In this hypothetical trip to Japan, with airfare, lodging, food, drink, local transportation, and luxury knife purchases (including duty), a 25 USD checked bag fee is 'hefty' and a 'big problem'?
I don't check bags. It's usually more than $25, and it's a giant pain in the ass dealing with checked luggage. If I can't fit everything in my carry-on backpack, it doesn't go. So yes, it is a big problem. Don't forget, when you change planes in the US, your luggage doesn't even change planes automatically.
And how is "drink" a significant cost anyway, to get in that list of yours? In Japan, they give you free water at every meal.
You can easily buy luxury knives from Seki, Japan at specialist websites like jp-knives.com and have them shipped for free.
They might mean at customs? When you go through customs you have to get your bag and then recheck it but they do have a place to drop them off without having to go through security again so it's not that much of PITA.
Try traveling without checked bags sometime. For part of your stay, get an AirBnB that has laundry facilities.
Only having a single small roller bag (or less, I know people who just have a single backpack!) makes travelling a lot easier. I often miss being able to bring stuff home in checked luggage, but I love getting off an airplane and not having to wait for my baggage, or worry if I'll be in the 1% that doesn't get my bag back!
As an example, I landed early morning in London, walked off the airplane, went through customs, and got right on public transit, then right to a tiny cafe and had some breakfast.
Could I do that with a giant checked suitcase? Sure. Maybe. But it'd suck. And the first thing on my mind would be getting to lodging to drop off my bag. Landing at 9am and having a giant bag I need to drag around until 2pm or whenever check-in time is means a large chunk of my first day is ruined, and I get to repeat all that after a 10am checkout dragging a big bag around until it is time to go to the airport and fly back home.
Bonus: in Japan, with only a small roller bag, taking public transit to/from the airport becomes very doable at any time of the day.
tl;dr smaller bags mean simpler logistics for the entirety of a trip.
Exactly; this is the only way I travel now. I have two backpacks, a large "travel backpack" that fits in carry-on, and a smaller one that holds my laptop and some other stuff and fits under the seat in front of me. The smaller one clips onto the larger one when I need to carry it around, and then when I've left the large one at my hotel/hostel, it becomes my daypack to hold a raincoat, souvenirs, brochures, etc.
In many places, hotels have laundry facilities. Every place I stayed in Japan had them, so it was easy to just bring enough clothes for 4 days and do laundry every so often.
I'll also add that any kind of roll-around luggage is a giant PITA if you're in Europe, because the streets and sidewalks are largely cobblestones.
In Japan, every hotel or hostel has laundry, and you can do a full load for Y400 or less. There's also coin-op laundromats with similar prices. It isn't free, but it isn't expensive by any means, it's probably cheaper than using a coin locker to lock your suitcase so you don't have to lug it around all day until the hotel lets you check in.
In Europe, many smaller hotels have laundry on-site you can ask to use, or again you can use coin-op laundromats which aren't that expensive.
What countries did you visit that were "cost prohibitive" for doing laundry?
China was a no-go, the major hotel I stayed at in Suzhou was incredibly nice, had a great price on the room, and an expensive per-piece laundry service. The tiny hotel I stayed at in Beijing didn't have laundry facilities for guests.
Shinjuku Prince in Tokyo also had the usual high per-piece laundry rates. I don't 100% recall but I think the Ryokan I stayed at was similar.
I AirBnB'd through the UK, so I didn't have to worry about it. Same thing in Mexico, didn't bother with hotels.
It sounds like you're staying at expensive hotels.
I just spent 2 weeks in Japan. The locally-owned hotels had laundry on-site usually. This isn't full-service laundry; this is a coin-op machine on the ground floor that you use yourself. The one I used at a very new hotel in Osaka (Sarasa in Dotenbori) was really nice; you just put your Y400 in and come back in an hour or so, as it does both washing and drying. At hostels, it varies, but one I stayed at just charged me Y100 to wash a load, but they didn't have a dryer so I had to walk down the street and pay Y200 to dry it.
Did you even look at laundromats? If you're expecting hotel staff to do your laundry for you, then you're not going to get that cheap in almost any country, certainly not any industrialized one.
Ryokan are known to be expensive. Business hotels are much, much cheaper. And yes, AirBnB is a good option too. When I was searching for hotels on booking.com and travelocity.com, I was able to see which ones had laundry there too.
Well, the knives at Seki are surprisingly affordable, if that helps! I’ve shipped knives back to the US before. It’s a luxury, but not an extravagance.
It's valuable to be next to useful places. This value of proximity could be increasing so rapidly that it would wash out the value of any particular residential building you could put there.
As the article points out (but does not emphasise), the houses in Japan are by design transient. They are built to fit need, and demolished to make space for something new in their due time.
This makes the land much more valuable - a plot can be repurposed when necessary, especially when the zoning rules and taxation encourage it too.
Houses and buildings are extremely valuable. Sure, sometimes the land is more valuable in some locations, but it still costs the average American a small fortune to build a home on it regardless of the land cost.
Still not correct. Materials and labor costs dwarf regulatory costs, even in hot markets.
The market does not inflate price, the market assigns value. In a hot real estate market, prices are value-driven, not cost-driven. In quieter markets, where supply of land is high, and builders are not booked out 1-2 years in advance, prices are cost-driven.
Artificially restricting supply seems to be the function of zoning laws and similar. If laws governing a property preclude the building of and usage as, say, high-density housing, then the supply of high-density has been restricted by regulation. Consequently, prices for property that has been enabled for high-density goes up. And because the demand for high-density housing is driven by the greater pool of demand for housing of all kinds and there's less housing overall to go around, the price of low-density housing also goes up.
I don't know what's going on in any particular place but the potential for regulations to affect supply and demand is clearly there.
So, interesting workaround for Netflix:
If the language of your account is set to something other than English, it unlocks subtitles and dubs for that language that you wouldn't normally have access to.
My wife and kids have their Netflix UI set to Japanese, which allows them to access Japanese language and subtitles for movies that support it, even though they're not available on my English-language Netflix.
> If the language of your account is set to something other than English, it unlocks subtitles and dubs for that language that you wouldn't normally have access to.
Thank you for the hint, but don't you think this is a way ridiculous? Why can't people that prefer English UI (e.g. I do, although it's neither my native language nor the official language of the country I've moved to, I am fluent in all the three but am interested in content in other languages too and I always strongly prefer all the apps UIs to be in English) access content in other languages?
I checked it right now: no support for my native language at Netflix. Netflix is not interested in me, so I will continue to support pirates, which will translate Netflix shows into my language.
I'm heading back from Japan today, and my family got a bunch of checkups and medical stuff done while we were here.
Even without insurance all our procedures cost total less than ~$100 apiece.
The most expensive thing I've ever had in japan was my full body workup last year for $500.
It included: stomach ultrasound, 5 blood tests, eye exam, MRI(brain) and barium scan. All without insurance.
By comparison, in the US I was charged $1200 to get my daughters arm cast changed (no xray, just a nurse changing the cast), and $800 for an ultrasound.
It is literally cheaper to fly to Japan and get treatment without insurance than to use my health insurance that I pay $1300/month for.
Also, as a bonus, because of the set prices of medical procedures in Japan, insurance is super cheap. For a family of 4 it was costing me around $500/month when I used to live here.
I'm in the middle of nowhere, so in my case I would need a smattering. However, almost all doctors can read/write English, even if they can't speak it. I've had 80 year old doctors proudly write down the word rheumatism, where I can barely get by with spellcheck.
In bigger cities, you'll definitely be able to find doctors who can speak English easily.
Generally when I'm building a UI on top of bootstrap, I import all the LESS files into my project, and then compile them together with my project LESS files.
This lets me, for example, change the brand-primary color, or the base font size, etc, without having to override every component that might use that variable.
However, this UI Kit, as well as a number of other kits I've seen take in the pre-compiled Bootstrap CSS and override each item individually.
Is this the preferred way to do UI Kits? If so, what's the reasoning behind it? We build a lot of themes and UIKits for internal use, and would love to know if we're doing it wrong (tm).
There are 2 ways of working with Bootstrap. 1: the one that you specified where you change the variables directly in LESS/SASS (BS4). You need to know LESS/SASS for those changes. And 2: the one where you don't know LESS/SASS/CSS and you just want a different design for the default bootstrap. You download a UI Kit that has a new design and it is also containing new elements/example pages. Using the UI Kit/Theme/Template, you don't have to dig deeper into the variables if you don't want or you don't know how to do that. You just start to work with the backend and you are covered on the front end. Now the reason for us, here I'm talking just about our company, don't know why other do it in this way or another way, we want to overwrite the bootstrap and keep bootstrap as a separate file so we can easily migrate from v3.3.0 to v3.3.5 or from v3.3.5 to v4 alpha 4,5,6 etc, without doing major changes in our UI Kit. Makes sense?
I just checked when I started using VWO, and found a really nice exchange between you and me from Fri, Dec 11, 2009.
VWO is still the absolute best split testing tool out there. You deserve all the success.