
Florian Simmendinger
2.2K posts

Florian Simmendinger
@simmenfl
Founder, CEO & Head of Design at @soundbrenner. Seeking truth & beauty.


Japan has the world’s best railway system. 28% of Japanese passenger-kilometers are by rail. Germany manages 6.4%, and the USA manages 0.25%. Just one Japanese company, JR East, carries more passengers than China’s entire railway system, and four times as many than Britain’s. What is the secret of its success? worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japa… Part of the answer is that Japanese railway companies don't just operate trains. They run hospitals, supermarkets, department stores, amusement parks, office complexes, and retirement homes around their railway stations. One of them co-built Tokyo Disneyland. Another owns a baseball team. A third created its own all-women musical theater in 1914, which is still running today. The logic is elegant: a railway increases the developable value of land around its stations, but normally that value accrues to landowners, not the railway operator. Japanese railway companies captured this value by owning and developing the land themselves. About half of the revenue of Japanese railway companies comes from ‘side businesses’ like these. Allowing railway operators to capture more of the value they created meant that more lines were profitable, making a far larger system financially viable. This may sound like a radically novel approach. But in fact, an exactly similar system existed in nineteenth-century America. The success of Japanese railways does not lie in some unreplicable feature of Japanese culture: it lies in good policy. If they learnt the right lessons from it, many countries could replicate Japan’s success. Read more (much more) in @Borners1's & @carto_graph's new piece for @WorksInProgMag Issue 23.













Inspect element never looked so good






This is another level of wholesomeness





After yesterday's outage, based on past experience with similar issues, I would expect Meta to pay out refunds in 4-8 weeks, but if you want to increase the likelihood of a refund for you and for everyone, you must report the issue to Meta reps and/or support. To make it simpler for you, I've put together instructions, screenshots, and what you can say to support. Please bookmark and share this! Meta does not read these tweets or care what's happening in the community. The only way Meta can understand the scope of this issue is if we all report it. If you have a rep, complain and demand a refund. If you don't have a rep, please go through the support channel. The only way Meta can understand this issue is if we all report it. Paste in this bit (or something like it) here: "My campaigns overspent their budgets and seemed to ignore their cost caps yesterday due to a confirmed widespread Meta ad delivery outage, causing campaigns to spend more than expected and did so extremely inefficiently, causing me to lose money." You should then see this option to "claim refund for ad spend": Then you choose your ad account, and pick "other ad issue" You'll then be able to write another message, where I would just paste the same blurb from earlier and then include this screenshot of the Meta Status Page: Start the chat with support where you should confirm your ad account ID and again paste the same blurb from above, and I would also include something like this: "I understand that spend and performance can naturally fluctuate, however this was a widespread outage that caused significant financial losses for every advertiser I know. I expect my accounts to be refunded for the amounts of overspend and inefficient spend." Start uploading any screenshots of evidence of your bad performance. If you have multiple accounts, you might want to provide all of the account ID's in case they can help for more than just one. Then politely answer any questions support asks and remember that they probably are not as familiar with Meta ads as you are and are likely not aware of the outage yesterday. Hopefully you'll get to a point where they ask for the amount you are requesting for a refund. If you have estimates of what you think was lost, share that amount, but don't be greedy, use a realistic estimate based on recent past performance. This is our best chance at getting the refunds we deserve. I hope you found this helpful! Please repost or share this with your peers, and if you don't already follow me or @MetaBizStatus (the automated account I set up that reports Meta outages), please do!




























