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[return to "Japan will no longer require floppy disks for submitting some official documents"]
1. merryw+0b[view] [source] 2024-01-31 13:54:23
>>thunde+(OP)
This is the kind of intractable bureaucratic inertia people were worried about regarding the EU’s USB-C mandate. It remains to be seen how that plays out (partly given that the current state of USB-C implies it could Frankenstein forward for quite some time), but this is definitely a useful cautionary tale. The floppy mandate was probably a really progressive take at the time it was introduced.
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2. noneth+ee[view] [source] 2024-01-31 14:13:16
>>merryw+0b
Perhaps in a really broad sense of "bureaucracies can be slow which make narrowly focused laws inherently risky because they might become outdated." But the actual constraint is quite different: "the government needs data in this format" vs. "your consumer device must provide this specific power delivery format".

The damage of the former is entirely contained to the act of producing the floppy disk. It sucks for each business when they have to make the 1 floppy disk but then the damage is done. With the USB mandate, the party producing the millions of devices is constrained going back to the design of their core product and then every person using it is constrained.

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