Re: [tlug] A place to connect my laptop

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

emiddleton@example.com writes:

 > I think in this situation it really worked against both the interest of
 > the users and telephone companies.  When the fixed fee Internet phone
 > services first started to appear, it was clear from there advertisements
 > that they were fighting a user perception of risk, caused by the
 > previous dangerous plans.

Yes.  The point is that the original risk was borne by the users, and
they were not compensated.  This means that the corporations can do
what they want without too much concern for how much they hurt others,
as long as they improve the problem behavior.  But they don't have to
compensate the first-round losers very much as long as it was an
"honest" (including "careless") mistake.

That is the way things have always been in Japan.  Unless you have a
powerful employer, you are quite exposed to various risks.  For
example, did you know that even if a fraudster who tricks you into
making automatic payments to his account flees the country, you may
still have to keep paying into his bank account until his former bank
agrees to let you stop?  Eventually you'll get that money back, but
you lose access until you go through the process with *his* bank.
There is no process for unilaterally stopping it at *your* bank.  This
is nice for the banks ....

So my feeling (I have no numbers to back it up) is that the Japanese
are extremely risk averse (with cause!), so in any case new things
take a while to succeed.  And as long as the companies are perceived
to be kaizen-ing the risks, there's little to lose from overestimating
the ability of consumers to protect themselves from contractual risk.

This has the very important side effect of promoting extreme loyalty
to employers.  Even in the U.S. you can see this effect.  Although
U.S. workers have a reputation for job-hopping[1], this is due to the
fact that the ability to defer worker compensation is basically
limited to things like stock options.  So a non-executive-class worker
with a job who gets another job while still at the current employer
suffers very little risk.

But on the other hand, your health benefits depend on being employed.
For this reason, unions have always been vulnerable in the U.S., and a
rash of union-abetted bankruptcies in the Reagan years simply created
the (correct) perception that the safest course was to keep your
resume up to date and be a valuable employee, because unions in
competitive industries are likely to drag your company down, and you
with it.  Compare the success of unions in countries where most social
security net is provided by the government as a right of citizens.

What's unique about Japan is that through devices that basically limit
the extent to which individuals can amass assets that make them
independent, and devices that defer compensation until retirement,
Japan is able (until recently) to maintain both an excellent socially
provided safety net and a very docile work force.

Footnotes: 
[1]  And this is true even at the "blue-collar" level of factory
workers.