If I had to ask “why is it so fast?” I’d turn it around and ask “Why are western systems so slow?” and posit that Western capital has an ideology that throughout matters by latency doesn’t. (As Fred Brooks puts it, “Nine women can have a baby in one month”). As an individual or a customer you perceive latency directly though, and throughout secondarily. So it comes down to empathy or lack thereof.
aecsocket•2h ago
The magnitude to which FeliCa was faster shocked me as well when I found out. But it's not like the latency is insignificant: it's obvious how much faster people can get through a Tokyo metro gate than a London one. So clearly it must have some kind of financial impact as well, if an entire city's public transport system works slower because of it. Even ignoring empathy for a second, isn't this the kind of thing that a Western capital ideology is supposed to improve? Some food for thought.
PaulHoule•1h ago
It is not just capital but the interpersonal and bureaucratic factors.
Technically the way to think about latency is that a process has N serial steps and you can (a) reduce N, (b) run some of those serial steps in parallel, and (c) speed up the steps.
For one thing, different aspects of the organization own the N steps. You might have one step that is difficult to improve because of organizational issues and then the excuses come in... Step 3 takes 2.0 sec, so why bother reducing Step 5 from 0.5 sec to 0.1 sec? On top of that we valorize "slow food" [1] have sayings like "all good things come to those who wait" and tend to think people are morally superior for waiting as opposed to "get you ass out of the line so we can serve other customers quickly" (e.g. truly empathetic, compassionate, etc.)
Maybe the ultimate expression of the American bad attitude is how you have to wait 20 minutes to board a plane because they have a complicated procedure with 9 priority levels and they have to pay somebody to explain that if you are a veteran you are in zone 3 and if you have this credit card from an another airline that this airline acquired you are in zone 5, etc... meanwhile they are paying the flight crew to wait, paying the ground crew to wait, etc. Southwest Airlines used to have a reasonable and optimized boarding scheme but they gave up on it, I guess the revenue from those credit cards is worth too much.
[1] it's a running gag when I go to a McDonalds in a distant city that it takes forever compared to, I dunno, Sweetgreens, even "fast" food isn't fast anymore. When I worked at a BK circa 1988, we cooked burgers ahead of time and stored them in a steam tray for up to ten minutes and then put condiments on them and put them in a box on a heat chute for up to another ten minutes. Whether you ordered a standard or customized burger you'd usually get it quickly, whereas burger restaurants today all cook the beef to order which just plain takes a while, longer than it takes to assemble a burrito at Chipotle.
PaulHoule•3h ago
aecsocket•2h ago
PaulHoule•1h ago
Technically the way to think about latency is that a process has N serial steps and you can (a) reduce N, (b) run some of those serial steps in parallel, and (c) speed up the steps.
For one thing, different aspects of the organization own the N steps. You might have one step that is difficult to improve because of organizational issues and then the excuses come in... Step 3 takes 2.0 sec, so why bother reducing Step 5 from 0.5 sec to 0.1 sec? On top of that we valorize "slow food" [1] have sayings like "all good things come to those who wait" and tend to think people are morally superior for waiting as opposed to "get you ass out of the line so we can serve other customers quickly" (e.g. truly empathetic, compassionate, etc.)
Maybe the ultimate expression of the American bad attitude is how you have to wait 20 minutes to board a plane because they have a complicated procedure with 9 priority levels and they have to pay somebody to explain that if you are a veteran you are in zone 3 and if you have this credit card from an another airline that this airline acquired you are in zone 5, etc... meanwhile they are paying the flight crew to wait, paying the ground crew to wait, etc. Southwest Airlines used to have a reasonable and optimized boarding scheme but they gave up on it, I guess the revenue from those credit cards is worth too much.
[1] it's a running gag when I go to a McDonalds in a distant city that it takes forever compared to, I dunno, Sweetgreens, even "fast" food isn't fast anymore. When I worked at a BK circa 1988, we cooked burgers ahead of time and stored them in a steam tray for up to ten minutes and then put condiments on them and put them in a box on a heat chute for up to another ten minutes. Whether you ordered a standard or customized burger you'd usually get it quickly, whereas burger restaurants today all cook the beef to order which just plain takes a while, longer than it takes to assemble a burrito at Chipotle.