... and delivered?
That all formal diplomatic letters are still sealed with to this very day, without exception.
Maybe it’s just a mental shock that HQ would demand that level of formality for more mundane things?
That thing I see on podiums and backdrops?
That all formal diplomatic letters are still sealed with to this very day, without exception.
Why would anyone here know this?
We've probably all seen media depicting a medieval king pressing a seal into wax, but it doesn't mean we're familiar with it as a modern legal or procedural thing. Japan has what I assume is the same thing: hanko, a personalized, carved stamp. It's always a subject of surprise and novelty for North Americans who go there to teach English.
Or do you think literally every such piece of paper has identical importance and priority?
Many sources including government sources like to pretend that the president must sign a bill into law but it is not the case. Most of how the "news" reports on this stuff is purely political and has no connection to reality.
I'm really quite curious about the inverse of this from the US. HNers who don't live in the US but have worked for a US company trying to do business in local markets: what weird US-centric idiosyncrasies have you seen companies and US-based leadership foisting upon local markets?
My boss wanted to investigate some sinkholes on the runway at LaGuardia to calibrate a device, and was confused that I (the token American) couldn't just call up the Port Authority of New York and get our truck of equipment onto a runway the same week. I tried to explain to a coworker that American airports and the Port Authority in particular are very sensitive about what they allow airside, and he said "oh, so we don't get hit by a plane." I had to explain the last 25 years of American history to him.
That sounds pretty corrupt. I've recently commented that countries with lower corruption perceptions probably have more corruption, and New Zealand is one of the lowest.
Unless you're some kind of competitively approved supplier that's chosen by default because you consistently do good work.
Why are you randomly wanting to go to an airport to measure sinkholes to calibrate a device? Why can't you make an artificial calibration sinkhole for your sinkhole meter, why do US airports have sinkholes, and why do you expect the airport to pay you for calibrating your sinkhole meter?
The sinkhole thing is a really long story, and a lot of it is that my boss is an old, eccentric, PhD who has zeroed in on this.
LaGuardia has sinkholes because it's built on a crazy substructure of rotting wooden pilings and metal framework.
We don't expect them to pay us, my boss (remember, 70 year old Kiwi) thinks you can just call airports up and get on the runway. To be entirely fair, if a sinkhole opened up at Invercargill airport, we could be on the runway tomorrow, and probably next week at Christchurch. He just doesn't realize that NYC is not the South Island.
8,600,000: Population of New York City (where LaGuardia is)
5,400,000: Population of New Zealand (where Christchurch is)
I live in Australia and Australia is not New Zealand... but this sounds exactly like what would happen in rural Australia - people in small towns still do handshake deals because you know and trust most people in town.
Not related to business deals but a family member was flying rurally in Australia maybe 15 years ago and joked about stabbing the pilot with a 4cm nail file. The airport security guy had a good laugh too.
Unrelated but Finnair's requirements for flying with doctoral swords are wonderful.
Similarly, a friend who works in engineering went to tender to a country council. Working for a big city firm they had no expectation of getting the job because they were up against a company from another nearby country town. Got to try and tender in case the shoe-in company really blows it, but no expectation of actually getting the job.
The scene was Tokyo Disneyland at the time of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Shelter in place was a requirements, and there were school age and younger children who took refuge in a gift shop. As a help to keep the youngest children comforted through a scary time, the staff there took the initiative and let the children hold stuffed anials from the gift shop inventory.
Now, think about this from the US Disney Corp. viewpoint. They did what?? They gave away what amounted to pretty much the entire inventory of stuffed characters?
How fast would the manager taking that action be 'unhired' at L.A. or Florida?
But, this was Japan and things are different.
The managers have a cultural standard of hospitality and responsibility of care, even though this is a Retail Location, these children and parents are still guests in the venue.
The children and their parents also knew that these weren't "gifts" from Disney, but, without getting explicit or formal assent at the time of handing them out, everyone just understood that when the shelter in place period ended, the stuffed characters were to be returned.
Staff didn't even have to ask for them back, and the parents had managed childrens' expectations to prevent meltdowns when that happened.
All the children who needed some extra comforting in a stressful situation had a favorite character, and the Retail Location lost exactly zero product.
I could go on with many other intrinsic differences, but this one is a pretty clear example.
So, the US business realities neither were necessary nor appropriate in that situation.
Why stay there even ONE week, unless you were very senior?
You can sustain a month of 996 if your project is under fire (it may happen in a startup). But more than that is unsustainable: you have less social life and get more tired. Which means that you get more irritable, make more mistakes, eat more calories, and have more chances of depression or burnout. There is nothing heroic or productive about 996
Someone had an opinion calling something cool and I am not allowed to have an opinion questioning said coolness?
You do realise this is a discussion board right?
The fapiao system has improved but still exists unfortunately.
I remember back when I lived in China some of my flatmates slept in work overnight since it was encouraged, you save time on commuting.
I worked also on OP project which was handled separately from O/Rm and V/IQ, but I find in general approach of these companies very amateurish when it comes down to providing reference materials, though it could be even worse, unnamed company selling mostly in India is disaster, now they use AI to localize their phones, you are suppose to check it with no screenshots, no description, so clearly can't even check it properly, so apparently AI is doing fine since you can't really report worries anyway. And if you will drive EV from the biggest CN EV company expect same, they are not better.
The most professional are H/H and X, no complaints there. They are at Nokia level professionalism from back in the days.
The culture leaned heavily toward 996: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. I was there during a particularly tumultuous period, and by that point a lot of the staffing had already been hollowed out.
That said, the OnePlus 11, 12, 13, and 15 are great phones. The 13 and 15 in particular have insane battery life. I have never managed to drain either one to zero in a single day.
As far as I know, OnePlus and Motorola are also the only major companies selling phones with silicon-carbon batteries in the United States. It is ridiculous that Samsung and Apple still have not adopted them.
One of my biggest frustrations at OnePlus was how much of the internal tooling remained in Chinese or used poor English translations. Most of the management was also based in China and often did not seem to understand the US market very well.
Probably the most ridiculous example was an internal invoice or payment-submission portal. It was awful to use, but the terminology was even stranger. A submission apparently needed to be “signed” and then “sealed.”
I never asked anyone what the original Chinese term was, but I assumed it referred to the use of a Chinese name chop or company seal. Name chops are stone stamps bearing a person’s or company’s name that are pressed into ink and applied to documents as a form of authorization.
It was a small thing, but it captured the broader problem pretty well: internal processes designed around Chinese business practices were translated literally and then handed to US employees with very little localization.