Narita airport + more news

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Narita Airport dumping squat toilets in restroom reform:The Asahi Shimbun – OMG makes Heathrow seem even more barbaric by comparison. Both Haneda airport and Narita airport are a pleasure to fly into. More Japan related content here

Media

Some thoughts on #SMWLDN – Matt Muir nails the ephemera that passes for thought leadership in social circles

Technology

There’s Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley | Buzzfeed – Tech is manifestly unready for this new era. They’ve been playing small-ball politics of regulation, and coasting on incredibly high approval ratings. But there are signs they feel the winds changing. You can usually detect a political figure’s problems from their overcompensation, and Zuckerberg’s Midwestern tour had all the hallmarks of a classic reaction to a specific political polling question: “Does he care about people like me?” The move was widely misinterpreted as some kind of beginning to Zuckerberg’s political career. But Zuckerberg is Facebook, and his image is his company’s. His mission was to fix the company’s image, and I’m just not sure this one is fixable.

You can see the shape of how this plays out in a recent exchange between Mark Halperin and Rep. Adam Schiff, in which Halperin asked of Facebook: “Did they put profits ahead of patriotism in their conduct during the campaign?”

Wall Street Journal Reports on SoftBank Offer for Uber….Yet No Other Press Outlet is Picking the Story Up | naked capitalism – at a lower than expected market value

Web of no web

As Amazon Pushes Forward With Robots, Workers Find New Roles – NYTimes.com – great example of what Kevin Kelly talked about in his book The Inevitable that we only preserve jobs by working with rather than against robots

The Smart Watch Market is Headed for a Boom | Park Associates – not so sure about the rationale on this, I often forget to wear my smart watch for the same reasons that they give for fitness bands