JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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Why do Japanese change their attitude when they communicate with foreigners?
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U.S. Navy investigating how parts fell off aircraft near Atsugi
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Confrontation
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California court to decide if SeaWorld whales are illegal 'slaves'
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Kuroki reported pregnant 2 weeks after denying relationship with Akanishi
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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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- Assistant Language Teacher - Kanagawa Prefecture - late-March start
- Interac, Kanagawa
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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gonemad
The security problems are known since more than a decade and the industry has steadfastly ignored them because it would make the chips they use a few Yen more expensive. It's going to haunt them...
Posted in: McAfee warns of hacker threat to autos
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gonemad
The article tries to insinuate that Kan received donation from foreigners yet gives no details on what this accusation is based. Is this group "Seiken Kotai o Mezasu Shimin no Kai" a group of foreigners or dominated by foreigners?
Is connected to, which is linked to a relative of a suspect. What a b*llsh*t! You can construct the same type of accusation for any person on this planet.
The way this article is written is journalism at it's worst!
Posted in: Complaint filed against Kan over receiving 'suspicious' donations in 2007
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gonemad
Use the areas which are already contaminated to a level which makes them unusable for agricultural purposes. This is not necessarily equivalent to the evacuation zone since the hotspots are not evenly distributed.
Posted in: Where should the massive amount of radioactive debris, soil and nuclear waste from the area around the Fushuma Daiichi nuclear power plant be stored?
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gonemad
CrazyJoe, while I don't have any numbers at hand, I think the recidivism rate for other criminals released from prison is in a similar range if not higher. My main concern with this legislation is that it is limited to pedophiles. It should include any other serious crime with a recidivism rate above a certain threshold. And the information should strictly be kept to authorities.
Posted in: Osaka governor wants authorities to keep track of convicted pedophiles
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gonemad
The prerequisite for this to work is that society gives the poor a chance to work themselves out of poverty. Not in terms of money, but in terms of the legal and social environment. For somebody with no funds, the hurdles to set up their own company in modern Japan are almost insurmountable. And if they succeed to take that hurdle, their business will be taxed to death. Somebody who has lost his home will not be accepted by any regular company and so will never get the funds to rent a home again. The single salary of a haken worker often does not allow to support a family yet there is no institution or grandparents any more to take care of the children if both parents or a single parent want to work. There is no free land any more as it seems it was in the Edo period, nor is there any other free natural resource. If we want to get rid of welfare payments, we first have to provide a suitable legal and social environment.
The author seems to assume that Japan’s fiscal crisis is caused by the welfare state. It is not. It is caused by repeated and failed attempts to bail out banks or spend it's way out of recession. It is not the support of the poor which led to the current disaster but the support of the wealthy.
Posted in: Each one of us must be willing to contribute to society
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gonemad
Squidbert, it's even worse. While NISA still had the supervision of plant safety as one of it's tasks, in terms of civil use the IAEA is purely a promotional agency. Please see the extract from the statute of the IAEA:
Posted in: Japan to seek IAEA advice before restarting reactors
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gonemad
Would it help to print some money to pay off the foreign debt with this? If it is used exclusively to reduce foreign debt, the inflationary effects on the inland should be limited. When creditors transfer the funds home, it will help to reduce the yen's exchange rate. If creditors decide to invest the money in other places in Japan, it will help to give a boost to the Japanese economy. It would kill two birds with one stone. Any other side effects?
Posted in: Azumi says yen's strength not economically justified
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gonemad
The post of "senior adviser" is kind of a formal position within the party. If he doesn't want to fail from the beginning, Noda has to select a prominent person from the pro-Ozawa camp. Hatoyama is a logical choice. It doesn't mean that Noda wants to listen to his advice.
Posted in: Noda appoints Kan, Hatoyama as advisers
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gonemad
One more remark about Facebook. Probably all of you know the "like" buttons which are spreading like an epidemic all over the web. These buttons are used by Facebook to track all pages you have visited. You don't need to be logged in to Facebook, you don't need to klick the button and deleting cookies doesn't help either. Facebook can even track you when you're not a Facebook member at all and in some cases the collected data will be enough to identify you personally (whether or not you believe Facebook tries to identify you depends on your personal paranoia. Since they also construct profiles of non-Facebook-members through data delivered by their members, my paranoia level is close to the maximum).
Except cookies, the technique Facebook uses to track you is called fingerprinting. Although not 100% perfect, it can recognize most people. Especially foreigners in Japan are easy targets for fingerprinting. For anybody who wants to test it him/herself, you can do that on http://panopticlick.eff.org . Please note that some of their algorithms are rather crude and they do not use all available information, hence real-world recognition rates are higher.
For those who want to protect themselves and do not use Facebook at all, it is best to filter all it's domains and/or IP addresses in your router of firewall. If you are a Facebook user and do not want to be tracked by the buttons, you can do something like this: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/banish-social-network-buttons-adblock/ All those who want to keep the Facebook buttons, well, now you know that big brother is watching you.
Posted in: Facebook and social interaction in Japan
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gonemad
To all those who feel safer with Mixi in terms of privacy: what will happen to your personal data when Mixi gets bought by another company?
Posted in: Facebook and social interaction in Japan
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gonemad
Modern gasoline car engines have a an energy conversion efficiency in the range of 35%, diesel engines in the range of 45%. Power plants fired by fossil fuel reach about 50% efficiency. Taking into account transmission losses from the power plant to the end user etc, electrical cars are less environment-friendly than traditional combustion engines. But still, they can help reducing emissions inside the large cities. Filtering exhaust gases at power plants is also much more effective than filtering at each individual car.
The comparison will change when more alternative energy sources are used. Probably in 10~20 years time frame electrical vehicles will be overall more environment-friendly (not considering manufacturing of the cars and batteries). For car makers, who count in product cycles of several years, this is not a distant future any more.
Until then, electrical cars will primarily serve in large cities. For that purpose, a maximum range of 160km is already enough. I suppose that a large part of the still very high cost of the Leaf is not just due to expensive batteries, but simply owed to low production volumes. Then the cost will quickly come down when electric vehicles gain a certain market share.
Posted in: Can electric cars win over the mass market?
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gonemad
This comment leaves me clearly puzzled. Has this guy ever been to Japan? I can only see a few chains controlling the whole market, which is anything but fragmented, hyper-crowded and competitive. Or does he feel like this because the UK retail market is extremely monopolized?
Posted in: Tesco failed to imprint itself on this fragmented, hyper-crowded and competitive consumer market. Japan's notoriously conservative and fussy shoppers simply had too many other choices.
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gonemad
Oh, the approval polls again. I wonder what the exact questions are. Just before his election, in a similar poll only 11% thought that Noda would be suitable for PM (note: less than the approval rate for the outgoing Kan cabinet!) and now without doing anything else than presenting his cabinet the numbers skyrocket to above 60%?
Posted in: Japan's new leadership wins solid backing in more polls
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gonemad
What is the source of that data? It doesn't match with the figures from the UN and the CIA which are cited on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
Posted in: Japan may soon lose top longevity ranking
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gonemad
Agree with the article. My guts tell me Noda will be the shortest-lived PM after Koizumi.
Posted in: Noda won't last long if he can't unify party, solve problems
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gonemad
From a purely technical point of view, it is entirely feasible with today's technologies to completely replace nuclear power in Japan with alternative energies. It is even possible to replace fossil energy sources. What it all comes down to is cost.
In all the debates about energy supply people take cost as a factor which is given by nature. In this model, cost of a certain type of energy is only determined by the underlying physical processes to generate it. [Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding: please don't confuse cost with price. Price is the result of demand vs supply.] This is how people come to statements such as xxx power is cheap and yyy power is expensive.
What people fail to see is that cost is not a natural factor, but fundamentally a political factor. We can freely change it to whatever we want it to be, within the typical limits of a political process. To make my point clear, just think about some few arbitrary items:
-- what is the cost of a human life? (we tend to consider it infinite, but practically it's not so high)
-- what is the cost of a human health? (higher than human life?)
-- what is the cost of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere? (it used to be zero, but since the threat of global warming emerged we started to increase it)
-- what is the cost of bothering countless generations to take care of our waste? (how do we estimate technical progress or priorities of people in thousands of years?)
-- what is the cost of an untouched landscape as opposed to one which is covered by energy-generating devices? (people pay huge premiums on living or spending holidays in beautiful areas)
-- what is the cost of feeling safe? (the security and insurance industries are huge, so even if it is just psychological this must be expensive...)
-- what is the cost of biodiversity? (still zero, but how long?)
-- what is the cost of land? (for somebody who is not willing to leave his land, market prices do not apply!)
What this means for the discussion about nuclear energy is that first we decide whether or to which extent we want to use it and then define the necessary cost factors to achieve that goal. It's a tedious process because in a globalized world we cannot take the decisions only by ourselves. Don't fall into the trap to believe we need nuclear energy because it's cheap. It is only cheap as long as we think we need it.
Posted in: My debate on nuclear power with Masayoshi Son
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gonemad
Nippon Nation, if only the Japanese would do the same of what you are asking the Chinese. The message which Yasukuni gives is aggressively negating the sufferings of Japan's victims in WW2. Why can't Japan humbly remember the dead without always downplaying all the atrocities it has committed?
What other countries have done to their own or other people is irrelevant for this discussion. This is about Japan's lack of empathy.
Posted in: Noda's election sparks wariness in China
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gonemad
It's not limited to Japan and not limited to women. Good food is more important in Japan than in many other countries, so obviously people talk and write more about it. Nothing wrong with that. But I think there is a large group of Japanese women who do this because they have nothing else to do and to talk about.
Posted in: Why do so many Japanese women take photos of their food at restaurants and post it on Facebook or their blogs?
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gonemad
Glad to see this guy removed from the screen finally. I just hope this is not the first step to start his political career...
Posted in: Comedian Shimada quits show business over reported ties to yakuza
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gonemad
Just one more aspect, although it may not fit Mike's situation. Every language has it's own strength to communicate certain things or feelings, which you cannot easily or concisely express in other languages.Depending on circumstances, I often switch between languages. Language itself has no value, it's the content which we communicate. I find this even more important when writing short mails on the keitai.
Mike, you wrote you don't want to get used by others to learn English from you. But weren't you doing exactly that to your friend, using her to improve your Japanese?
Posted in: Was I a date, a friend or just a potential English teacher?