gonemad's past comments

  • 0

    gonemad

    With all due respect, I would notice. You see I'm mildly allergic to high levels of SO2 and have trouble breathing if I drink wine with high SO2 levels.

    My doubts are based on what I know about Italian winemaking and especially so, when we talk about the winemaking of many(?) years ago. Furthermore, you recommended a wine which does contain sulfites, so you can only be mildy allergic. I still don't see any contradiction.

    That the practice is wide-spread does not make it advisable or ethical. At the risk of sounding like your mother, just because the majority of wine makers are doing it does not make it cool.

    There is a market demand for wines without sulfites and there is a large number of organic winemakers which would like to serve that market. Yet there are very few wines without sulfites and I'm aware of just one which you can keep for aging. The reason that they hardly exist is not a lack of ethics. There is a lot of winemakers who try to reduce the usage of sulfites to the minimum. Unfortunately you can't see this from the label.

    Oh, and about price level. If you're paying the same price for what amounts to grape juice that has been treated with chemicals for a month and then rushed onto the shelves as you are for a carefully wood aged wine that represents a half dozen years of painstaking care... well, you're being ripped off.

    Well, I think it doesn't make sense to enter another long discussion of what can be considered a rip-off when it comes to wine... And I don't understand why you think that I'm only referring to the cheapest category of industrial wine. Therefore let me take the opposite range as an example, the top crus from Bourgogne, which are carefully crafted, with no time-to-market concerns and which cost many thousands of Yen (which some people may consider a rip-off again ;-) Making this type of wine from Pinot Noir grapes would be impossible completely without sulfites. At least this is what I understood from personal discussions with one of the top makers and pioneers of organic winemaking in the area. If you like this style of wine, you have to be pragmatic and accept the sulfites. With other grape varieties and under other climatic conditions you have better chances to be able to make wines without sulfites. But still, the style would often be completely different from what has traditionally been produced in those areas, making it much more difficult for makers to sell their wines. Many European wines would even risk to lose their protection of origin and only few makers have the reputation to sell top-grade wines as table wines. This is of course a specifically European problem which does not exist in other parts of the world.

    Posted in: Rising alcohol levels give wine lovers a headache

  • 0

    gonemad

    I helped out at my friend's vineyard in Italy and witnessed every stage of making good old-fashioned wine making from picking the grapes to drinkinging the result 5 years later. They did not add any sulfites.

    Probably you just haven't noticed. The traditional way is not to add sulfur to the wine directly but to burn sulfur in the barrels before filling the wine. Before or during fermentation the natural levels of sulfites may indeed be sufficient in mediterranean climates.

    I get headaches from nouveau vintages

    This leads to the suspicion that the wine contains high levels of acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is produced when alcohol gets in contact with oxygen can get into the bottle in larger quantities when the wine is filled too quick after the fermentation. Sulfites in the wine absorb it.

    Whatever caused your headache, it is almost certain that sulfites are not the reason. That does not mean that I'm advocating the use of sulfites. But reality is that almost all of the wines we can buy today would not be possible without the use of sulfites, independent of their price level. That especially includes the wines you and other have mentioned here.

    Posted in: Rising alcohol levels give wine lovers a headache

  • 0

    gonemad

    With the changes proposed by Abe once is already too much.

    Posted in: The constitution is not something given by God, it was written by human beings. It should not be frightening to change it so I'd like the people to consider trying it once.

  • 0

    gonemad

    while the legal limits are so high (as high as 400mg per liter) that your wine could be 40% SO2 and all that would be required would be a little "contains sulfites" label.

    Certainly not :-)

    As a result of rapid aging further sulfites need to be added as a preservative to arrest the aging process

    No, just the opposite. You can't keep a wine for aging which hasn't been treated with sulfites. The wine would go off. Sulfites serve different purposes in wine making and one of them is as a antimicrobial agent during storage.

    When you want to drink a wine with a low level of sulfites, you should buy wine from "northern" areas which have a lot of natural acidity. They have lower levels of alcohol as well.

    By the way, when you get headaches from wine it is due to certain bacteria, which develop when the level of sulfites is to low. Or, more often, because you didn't drink enough non-alcoholic drinks to compensate the dehydrating effects of the alcohol itself.

    Posted in: Rising alcohol levels give wine lovers a headache

  • 0

    gonemad

    But the reports on the names on those lists at the Shrine that I have found state that the names cannot be expunged because of Shinto rules.

    Yes, but where do these rules come from? Who stated them the first time? Even religious rules don't appear out of the nowhere. The Yasukuni shrine has been established in the Meiji period and apparently no similar institution has existed long before. The other gokoku jinja only appear little earlier around the end of the shogunate. Thus the rule certainly is no older than that time and it should be possible to trace back the origin. I might be wrong, but I can't help suspecting that this rule has been created by the priests at Yasukuni as a convenient excuse. How valid can this rule then be in the overall context of Shintoism?

    Posted in: Abe defends ministers' visit to Yasukuni shrine

  • 1

    gonemad

    Enshrined people cannot be taken out.

    Says who? Based on what? Is a shinto priest infallible? Isn't the enshrinement of class A war criminals some form of kegare? What impact does it have on the judgement when the highest authority in Shinto, the Tenno, refrains from visiting Yasukuni?

    I'd like to understand more about Shintoism, so I hope to get some serious answers.

    Posted in: Abe defends ministers' visit to Yasukuni shrine

  • 3

    gonemad

    How stupid. Do they really believe that somebody who wants to hide something would use plain email and wouldn't set up a dummy account just for the Israelis?

    Posted in: Israel airport security allowed to read tourists' email

  • 1

    gonemad

    Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said law enforcement should have kept a closer eye on Tsarnaev after the FBI spoke to him two years ago.

    And who would be the first to complain about the tax money required for all the 'closer eyes' who have to watch half a million people?

    “After the bomb went off, don’t you think one of the first things the FBI would do is say, ‘Have we interviewed anybody in the Boston area that may fit the profile of doing this?’

    Simple answer: no.

    Can't this smart *ss just keep his mouth shut?

    Posted in: Boston bomb suspect's name was on classified government watch lists

  • 1

    gonemad

    So what was the reasoning of the court? Why is the most important information missing in the article?

    Furthermore, the article uses the term 'injunction'. I'm not familiar enough with the Japanese legal system, but it seems this means that there is no decision yet on the merits of the case?

    Posted in: Court rejects request to shut down Oi nuclear reactors

  • 0

    gonemad

    Agree with Fadamor, it shouldn't be limited to English only.

    What I wonder is how the poor kids should learn communicating in English? I've only met a few English teachers, but none of them was able to communicate properly. You can't expect children to become better than their teachers by miracle. Whatever you think about their qualification, just from a quantitative point of view there aren't sufficient ALTs to compensate it, are there?

    Posted in: What do you think about Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's proposal that universities must adopt the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) for entrance exams. Abe says it is aimed at reforming the English teaching system in schools by shifting emphasis to verbal communications skills.

  • 0

    gonemad

    I don't care whether there are called standards or guidelines. What is important is whether they are mandatory or mere recommendations. Unfortunately the article leaves us in the dark. By intention or has it got lost in translation?

    Posted in: Nuclear Regulation Authority changes 'safety standards' to 'guidelines'

  • 1

    gonemad

    What minorities here in Japan?

    I'm not talking about ethnic minorities only, but anybody who has opinions which deviate from the mainstream. This can be due to ethnic, religious, professional, regional or family background, just to list some examples.

    No single vote should weigh anymore or any else than any other persons vote.

    In a representative system it is mathematically impossible.

    Posted in: Gov't to examine electoral system after lawsuits over vote disparities

  • 0

    gonemad

    They could very easily fix the system. Trash the proportional representation and increase by a small percentage the district votes and actually cut the total number of representatives

    Your "easy" fixes wouldn't fix the problem this lawsuit is about (although I don't understand what you want to say with "increase by a small percentage the district votes"). They would even make it worse, because a system based on single winners has even more problems with vote disparities. The effective weight of votes of minorities is close to zero in such systems and reducing the number of representatives makes it even worse. You have to be careful if you don't want to end up with a dictatorship of the majority.

    Posted in: Gov't to examine electoral system after lawsuits over vote disparities

  • 0

    gonemad

    One Person One vote! How hard is it?

    You haven't understood the problem. The problem is about the effective weight of each vote and look around the world, you will not find a perfect system. Yes, it is hard.

    Posted in: Gov't to examine electoral system after lawsuits over vote disparities

  • -1

    gonemad

    It does. The difference may be slightly less noticeable on a personal level, on a corporate/nation-wide level the difference is huge. Say a company is planning a $100 million project. If there's 1% yearly deflation, waiting a year will save them $1 million in costs.

    They will save some cost and lose much more in business. Next year they will again shift their investment by one year and lose even more business. Until they are broken, because the competition was not afraid to invest... Apart from that, a 1% difference in cost is typically much below the uncertainty margins of any investment planning. As such alone, it is irrelevant.

    But we don't have to look at simple theories, we can look at very practical examples. Take the electronics industry, which is a long-term deflationary market. No company holds of investments because they can get the same equipment cheaper (much more than 1%) the next year. Experience shows it simply doesn't happen, as long as deflation is stable. Investments will only be delayed or pulled-in when there is a prediction of a change of deflation.

    The beautiful thing about economics is theories that appear top be very simple have huge predictive power. The unfortunate side of that is that people who know nothing about economics think that because "one time I saw this thing that was different than you said," they can completely discredit an entire system of thought.

    The problem is not that the underlying system of thought is wrong but that it is mostly used incorrectly. This is because we humans are very bad at analytical thinking which goes beyond simple linear if-then constructs. Often what we call guts feeling is much better at handling complex predictions.

    The most beautiful thing about economics is that when you make enough people believe a wrong theory, the wrong theory turns to become true...

    Posted in: New BOJ chief pledges all-out efforts on deflation

  • 0

    gonemad

    Don't mix up the different meanings of deflation. One is a decrease in prices, as opposite to inflation. The other is a decrease in GDP, as opposite to growth. Both are not necessarily related.

    I don't think that a stable inflation/deflation of prices in the lower single-digit range has any measurable impact on spending at all. People will only change their purchasing behaviour when there are sudden changes, especially changes in the relation between prices and salaries or in their future predictions of such changes. Simple textbook theories do not consider the different time lags and the psychological factors which influence people's predictions and thus are probably even less reliable than the fortune teller around the corner.

    Posted in: New BOJ chief pledges all-out efforts on deflation

  • 2

    gonemad

    There is no reason to believe that a democratic government would be better than any other form of government. The key point is that you have a chance to get rid of a bad government again.

    Posted in: Do you think democracy is the best form of government?

  • 2

    gonemad

    The 777.5 billion yen deficit in February reversed a surplus of 25.9 billion yen in the same month a year earlier, finance ministry data showed.

    To all those who claim the trade deficit is due to energy imports. In February 2012 only 2 reactors were left online and Japan still posted a trade surplus. What has changed since then are drops in exports and the decrease of the value of the Yen. Energy imports have changed only marginally over that period, except that they became more expensive - just like any other imports.

    Posted in: Japan posts Y777.5 bil trade deficit in February

  • 2

    gonemad

    But resolving sensitive issues, including Japan’s heavily subsidized agriculture sector, could prove tricky. Acting U.S. Trade Representative Demetrios Marantis told the Senate Finance Committee hearing that Japan would have to put “all goods on the table” for negotiation.

    Some numbers for the part of subsidies of the income of agricultural producers:

    Australia: 2.98%

    Canada: 14.20%

    Chile: 3.51%

    USA: 7.66%

    Mexico: 11.56%

    New Zealand: 0.79%

    Japan: 51.63%

    OECD average: 18.83%

    The numbers are for 2011. I couldn't quickly find numbers for the other countries participating in the TPP negotiations.

    Does Demetrios Marantis mean that the US is also putting all goods on the table and willing to reduce its agricultural subsidies to the level of Australia or New Zealand? Or does he only want Japan to come down to US levels? I remember that the US had steadfastly refused to reduce its agricultural subsidies during the Doha rounds of the WTO. A change in that stance would be good news, but I can't believe that yet...

    Posted in: U.S. senators want no exemptions for Japan over TPP

  • 3

    gonemad

    That is not a trade barrier, it's a safety issue.

    It is both, a safety issue and a non-tariff trade barrier, depending on your perspective. The problem with free-trade agreements is that industries will not stop complaining about non-tariff trade barriers until the agreement settles on the lowest common denominator. In the end, it is the consumer who loses. Countries won't have the possibility any more to legislate raises in safety or environmental standards unless they renegotiate the FTA agreement with all parties involved. The fact that all countries without any exception have legal standards for vehicle safety shows that a free market cannot solve the underlying problems. Corporations try to use free-trade agreements to undermine the legal authority of their respective governments.

    While a mutual adjustment of legislation is certainly welcome to some extent, I don't think we can or even should address all non-tariff trade barriers in free-trade agreements. Free markets are a utopian concept. We rather have to find criteria to level the impact on foreign trading partners, such as minimum transition periods for enacting legislation which deviates from the common legislation of all trade partners.

    Posted in: U.S. senators want no exemptions for Japan over TPP

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