JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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- Translator
- ZAIHON, Inc. (日本財務翻訳株式会社), Tokyo
- Salary: ¥6.0M / Year Negotiable
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- Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in Kanto region
- RCS (RCSコーポレーション), Kanto
- Salary: ¥180,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month includes performance bonus
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- Assistant Language Teacher - TOKYO - late-March start
- Interac, Tokyo
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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GJDailleult
Klein2, I have no idea why you are on here spouting your myths. Are you a lawyer for TEPCO? This was not even the worst tsunami since the Meiji Restoration, and the event, and impact on Fukushima Daiichi, was predicted by multiple sources, with plenty of documented evidence of that. TEPCO was well aware of the risk they were taking, a risk that could not be justified by ANY risk assessment process. They also were not avoiding spending huge amounts of money, they were avoiding spending the trivial amount of money needed to get in line with IAEA guidelines issued after Indonesia. They did all that because TEPCO is nothing more than an asset stripping operation whose job is to send as much of the cash flow as possible to the shareholders, which they do by not spending required amounts on safety and maintenance.
Also, and I will go REALLY slow here, about this idiotic asteroid thing that comes up all the time. The March 11th earthquake was what is known as a SUBDUCTION ZONE EARTHQUAKE. These quakes are the strongest kind of earthquake, and they occur in a continuous cycle and are the easiest type of earthquake to understand. Not predictable in a human time frame, but inevitable geologically, and that is now understood scientifically. They are not one-off events, the process for the next one on that fault has already started. If you believe that the asteroid, after crashing into earth then gets up, flies back up to space, and whizzes around for a few billion years and then crashes into earth again, then you have a comparison.
Posted in: TEPCO president mulls paying damages; says he won't resign
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GJDailleult
Well, never. If there is no government debt there is no money, no debt there are no billionaires. Where do you think money comes from? Americans used to understand that, now you just have a bunch of rich clowns shouting "oh my God we are in debt!!!" Well, exactly, of course you are. Should have thought of that 30 years ago before you started down this insane road.
Posted in: Obama to lay out spending plan
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GJDailleult
Could everybody stop using this bogus 1,000 year event line, which I suspect originated with TEPCO. A magnitude 9 earthquake in Japan is maybe a 1.000 year event, destructive tsunamis are not, they can be generated by quakes much lower that a 9 and have been over and over. Also, with 21st century scientific knowledge, there is no way any risk assessment analysis could say you don't 100% prepare, design, and engineer for quakes and tsunamis, regardless if they may not actually happen in your lifetime. The only reason that isn't done is that too many people think the way they can protect themselves from scary stuff is by not thinking about it.
Posted in: Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors
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GJDailleult
I see here the same thing I see on many sites, people are really attached to the old thinking that earthquakes are random and unpredictable. No offense but it is that attitude that gets people killed. This isn't 100 years ago when earthquakes were explained as having something to do with mountains and volcanos, and everyone was surprised when they happened. Seismology is really a very new science but they already have incredible knowledge and understanding of how things work. Now can they give you a time and date so you can plan your holiday around the quake, sorry for the inconvenience but they can't. But they know that subduction zone earthquakes are cyclical and predictable on a geological time frame, and they have charted them back 1000's of years using tsunami evidence. Inter- plate and shallow fault quake risk areas are identified and mapped out, and that is the important part, not prediction ability. Your doctor can't tell you when you are going to die either but you still listen to him. Intra- plate quakes much tougher to figure out but they are not the problem here anyway. The point is that in the 21st century we now have the knowledge and technology to prepare for what we now know are inevitable or likely events instead of standing around saying "bloody hell where did this come from ". You engineer and design for it like the village in Iwate where nobody died and you drill it into heads what to do in every situation. Hopefully Tokyo will be ready but Tohoku and of course TEPCO sure weren't. Time to start using what we know.
Posted in: 4 killed, 141 injured after 7.4 quake hits Miyagi Pref, vicinity
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GJDailleult
Don't think there is any great suppression of news about a Tokyo quake going on, it is simply a "dog bites man" story. Common knowledge. Think that also explains why I don't pick up much anger or complaining about the foreign exodus among Japanese people I know. More like just confusion about what were such risk averse people doing here in the first place, I am confused on that one too, I can only rationalize living here by the fact that hometown is in the same or worse boat.
Posted in: 4 killed, 141 injured after 7.4 quake hits Miyagi Pref, vicinity
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GJDailleult
Four weeks on, and I still haven't figured out how people can see 28,000 lives wiped out in an afternoon and then decide they need to worry about radiation. The casualty figures from Chernobyl are a drop in the bucket compared to the earthquake and tsunami deaths just since the Indonesia quake. I don't have time to check figures right now, but from memory I would say that holds true even for the maximum, anti-nuclear estimates.
You are at a far, far greater risk of being on the beach and then not knowing what to do or where to go, than from any radiation. But some weird psychological stuff going on, the same people obsessed with radiation refuse to think about earthquakes. Denial is pretty powerful.
Posted in: U.N. expert: Fukushima not as bad as Chernobyl
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GJDailleult
The edge of their risk tolerance I mean, not their sanity!
Posted in: CNN mobilizes its news gathering troops for Japan, Middle East
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GJDailleult
Nobody is saying there are not foreign reporters in Japan doing excellent work, there have even been some excellent exposes the last few days of TEPCO's handling of the tsunami risk (ie. real news). The complaint is with how the major foreign news outlets have approached and framed the Japan situation. Also, this idea of the "passive" Japanese media, true as it may be, seems increasingly to be used to justify the reactions of many foreigners the last two and a half weeks. Myself, I find it bizarre that people who willingly (or more likely unknowingly) accept the risks of living in this country (as opposed to Japanese people who have them imposed on them), can see almost 30,000 people killed in a single afternoon and then are pushed over the edge when they hear the word "radiation", but hey that is just me!
Posted in: CNN mobilizes its news gathering troops for Japan, Middle East
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GJDailleult
If we are going to compare co-workers, I have one who lives in constant terror of his telephone ringing. He knows it will be a sobbing family member begging him to save himself from imminent death from radiation poisoning. Wonder where they get their news from???
As for the preparedness angle being heavily covered, of course it hasn't been, because it doesn't match with the nuclear disaster theme dreamed up back in New York and London. You would not be having an insane world debate over nuclear safety if people understood that the problem really was that some morons took an insane gamble that there would be no tsunamis before the plant was de-commissioned. They simply did not cover the factual story because it was not the story they wanted to cover. If they then managed to get a few details right that were not in the Japanese media, whoopee for them.
Posted in: CNN mobilizes its news gathering troops for Japan, Middle East
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GJDailleult
Sorry, but anybody who pulls out the meteor line, the hindsight line, or the why didn't the experts do anything line, has zero understanding of the situation.
What happened on March 11th was a natural, cyclical event. TEPCO was warned repeatedly by those experts that there was a high risk that it would happen again soon. The senile old codgers decided "hey this plant has only a few years left, so let's save the money and not do anything" when any kind of risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis would have screamed let's do this YESTERDAY!!!. The result is they have destroyed the reactors, destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of people, and maybe in the long-run destroyed the Japanese economy and financial system. How anybody can defend that level of stupidity is beyond me.
Posted in: TEPCO dismissed important scientific evidence in planning nuclear plant's defense
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GJDailleult
There is a lot of back patting and back slapping going on in the international media about how they are "exposing things that the passive Japanese media has avoided". Really? Then why have I learned nothing from them that I didn't know before March 11th. TEPCO is a corrupt company that uses dangerous practices!!! Oh my! That is not investigative journalism, that is cut and paste journalism. Reporting on things that have been ignored by the Japanese media? Then why did I come home on the 12th to see nonstop reporting and pictures on Japanese TV from Fukushima about the nuclear crisis?
They came to Japan with the story they were covering already decided, the angle that would work best for them, and didn't bother finding out what the real story was. That story is that the world's supposedly most prepared country wasn't prepared at all, and not only at the Fukushima plant. They missed it, and now, having seen first-hand how useless they are, I have no time for them in the future.
Posted in: CNN mobilizes its news gathering troops for Japan, Middle East
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GJDailleult
Moondog has it correct. They were presented a number of times with the latest seismological information (a science now far more advanced than the average person realizes),informed of the high level of risk, but refused to make the necessary changes. Didn't want to spend the trivial amount of money involved to move the generators and eliminate the risk, because the plants were not going to be in operation much longer. Pure criminal stupidity.
Posted in: TEPCO dismissed important scientific evidence in planning nuclear plant's defense
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GJDailleult
@yabits- you are not going to win an argument with molenir by using logic, as he is a logical and bright guy. And you are not going to win an argument against Tea, as he will simply deny that he has lost.
Go back and look at the 1:29 PM post. The hole in the argument is a million miles wide. "If you build it they will come." That is what you are up against, 31 years of it.
Or to be more clear, reality is not ideologically based. It is just RealiTea.
Posted in: Wisconsin governor rebuffs Democrats' request for meeting
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GJDailleult
This is the kind of nonsense I was talking about. Unions must be broken up because the USA is financially broke. Building a shikansen will lead to "financial oblivion". Money is being stolen from hardworking people.
No country that has control over the issuing of its own currency can ever become broke. What happens is that when the money is issued in the form of a debt, the system has an upper limit on the size of debt that the economy can support, both through the real economy and speculation. The USA hit that limit, and the speculation bubble popped, but that is not the same as going broke. The USA, through the Fed, creates trillions of dollars all the time. The problem is not that they don't have the money, the problem is what they are doing with it.
Also, governments do not go into financial oblivion because they spend money on infrastructure. That is what the whole purpose of government is, and how money is injected into the economy. Whether they do that productively or not is a separate question. And money IS being stolen from hard-working people, and has been for a long, long time. It's just not going to unions.
Posted in: Michael Moore rallies pro-union protesters in Wisconsin
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GJDailleult
You refuse to accept that the breaking point has been passed already, and that breaking point had nothing to do with unions.
There is nothing "liberal" or "progressive" about anything I wrote. Refusing to understand the true situation is not "right-wing" or "conservative" either. Here is the score. We live in a world where we can communicate by 1's and 0's that magically travel through the air and move instantaneously around the world, we can travel the world in long metal tubes powered by fossils, and we can get blown up by either splitting or fusing atoms. And you expect me to believe that nobody has figured out how money and economics work??? No, the system has been intentionally designed to be faulty, only they overdid it and now you have a system failure. Unions didn't design the system, and didn't cause the failure. Attacking them is a completely pointless political game, and is not going to save anybody's butt.
Posted in: Michael Moore rallies pro-union protesters in Wisconsin
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GJDailleult
This what you call being between a rock and a hard place. The dirty little secret is that US government spending was the smoke and mirrors trick that powered the US economy since 1980. It would be nice to have some adults in the room who would admit that, but none in sight. Just lots of screaming about "getting the deficit and debt under control". Sorry guys, but too late for that, horse already left the barn. Cut spending and you will crash the economy, or continue "borrowing" money that can never be paid back, which won't end well either.
Things should never have been allowed to get to this place of course. In a capitalist system those who lend money that can not be paid back lose the money, and if they lose too much money they go out of business. Capitalism 101, buy hey, the USA stopped having a capitalist system decades ago. Now too late, bubble was built and burst, and can't do that as banks are now too huge and too broke. Next solution is to write down the debts, but can't do that as political suicide. Those not in debt would justifiably rebel. Only solution then is for the US government to give people money. If you have debts it must be used to pay them off, if you don't you can spend it on whatever you want, but can't save it. That money would then flow back to the government through taxes, and the government debt would get paid down as well. But all that can't happen of course, because governments have to "borrow" money from "rich" people who they then pay interest to right? Actually they don't, but that is a secret too, heh heh!
Posted in: Obama offers deeper spending cuts, appeals for budget deal
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GJDailleult
No, Ben Bernanke knows exactly what I know, his job is to pretend he doesn't. Extend and pretend is what it is called.
I agree with chotto's point above. I fail to see the point of all this nonsense. Scapegoating solves nothing, just means you are going to have to find the next scapegoat. What we have here is an incentives problem, not a political one, and nothing will get fixed until those change.
Posted in: Michael Moore rallies pro-union protesters in Wisconsin
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GJDailleult
Man, this Harry Potter magic stuff is getting really boring. The USA does not have a "liberal vs. conservative" problem. Americans have a problem because they have suicidally trashed their economy and financial system, creating a money junkie class that thinks the answer to everything is not sharing the "money". Get it through your heads folks, money is not a collectible, that is not the point of money.
Liberals believe "yada yada yada". Conservatives believe "yada yada yada" How about some reality. Reality is this, there is no such thing as "taxpayer" dollars, and there is an endless supply of dollars. Economics and money work how they work, there is nothing political about it. That is how it works, fantasies are irrelevant except for how they screw things up even more.
Posted in: Michael Moore rallies pro-union protesters in Wisconsin
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GJDailleult
There are a lot of things that society unfortunately glorifies and glamorizes, having a child "out of wedlock" is a long, long, way down the list of importance of them. Huckabee's friendly, nice guy, right-winger schtick is getting pretty stale, and personally I find his parroting of the usual "Hollywood" cliches and sticking his nose in other peoples' business to try and score some cheap points offensive.
Posted in: Huckabee denies criticizing Portman's pregnancy
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GJDailleult
"Zenga Zenga", if you don't know what it means, look it up. Bizarro world when a video seems to have more effect than the words of an American president, I mean is anybody still listening? Interesting times indeed.
Posted in: Obama declares Gadhafi must leave Libya now