rainyday comments

They won’t, no worries

Amused that you didn't push back on the argument that they were emotionally unstable.

What law did he break?

Being emotionally unstable

Trump, Musk and pretty much all of MAGA are in trouble if that will get you arrested.

I bet people defending the driver in this one have not seen the video.

The diver continued driving, when it was obvious he was driving in the wrong lase, by all the cars around him driving in the different direction, and trying to avoid him.

One thing is getting in the wrong entrance, another is continuing to drive with traffic around you.

Not going to defend him but in fairness the video also shows he was driving extremely slowly, and other drivers describe him as having a look of shock and confusion on his face as he went along, seemingly not sure of what was going on.

This seems consistent with a 90-something with limited physical and mental capacity who absolutely should not ever be allowed behind the wheel of a car, but at the same time there clearly wasn't any malice involved. Possible negligence in letting him have a license in the first place though.....

Video of the incident is here for anyone interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkugRW6I0DM

Destroying America's economy with an erratic trade war against the rest of the world? Check.

Destroying America's security, credibility and power in the world with a foreign policy that consists of little more than a combination of kowtowing to some dictators that he is scared of on the one hand, and openly taking personal bribes from others to do their bidding on the other? Check.

Destroying American civil society by sending the Marines to invade LA in response to a civil disturbance that is about on par with your typical Super Bowl victory riot? Check.

I was almost involved in an accident like this.

Sometimes the entrances to 4 lane highways give the appearance of a 2 lane road to elderly drivers who aren't familiar with what to look for and who may easily miss cues (such as when there is a dividing barrier that only allows them to see two lanes directly in front of them) .

My wife's grandfather (in his 80s at the time) did this with me in the passenger seat - turned onto a 4 lane highway thinking it was a 2 lane road because there was a concrete barrier in the middle that obscured the other two lanes of view. Ended up going the wrong way down the highway for about.....10 metres before the oncoming traffic and everyone in the car screaming caused him to slam on the brakes. Nobody hurt that time but very well could have been.

This is just obscene. The Japanese government is one of the most indebted in the world (in fact THE most indebted by some measures) and these handouts are just loans that future generations will bear the cost of.

"If tax revenue rises (above projections), it has to be returned to all the people," a senior LDP lawmaker told reporters on Tuesday

This is absolute BS. The government is spending about 30 trillion yen more per year than it raises in tax revenue. The cost of just paying the interest on the accumulated debt by itself is now about one quarter of the entire national budget each year and exceeds what gets spent on defence, education and public works projects combined.

I saved mine as a souvenir.

I remember the day they announced it quite well. It was early in the pandemic and everyone was scared because we had no idea how bad or dangerous it was, etc. We were all looking to the government to demonstrate that they were taking it seriously, and Abe responded with an emergency cabinet meeting to formulate the government’s plan to protect us from this disease. We watched with baited breathe as they emerged and said;

”We’ve decided to spend all the money on these useless little masks that you can expect to receive in 2 or 3 months. So, you know, try not to catch it and die before then. That is all.”

I have only been stopped once. Answered their questions and got on with life. Maybe they should stop seeing problems that don’t exist. 

Guys in the article say they have been interrogated 15 and 17 times respectively without having done anything wrong.

Just because you don't have the same problem they do doesn't mean that their problem doesn't exist.

Agree, This should have been A Class Action Lawsuit.

Class actions aren't available under Japanese law. Instead they have a representative litigation system under which a single plaintiff can represent others with the same claim, but those others have to step forward to join the lawsuit. This requirement (which is different from US law for example where everyone with the same claim is automatically added) means that such actions always involve a small number of plaintiffs like this one.

Its not really the top of any significant industries anymore, though in some areas it still has companies that are while not dominant can at least compete globally (autos, video game consoles, niche areas like some types of construction equipment, etc).

No, but it's always better to question a captured system than blindly obey a pharmaceutical conglomerate parrot like a trained seal. 

There is a valid argument to be made against that sort of capture, but what RFK is doing isn't an answer to it.

This is an endemic problem to certain types of expert panels where the subject matter (such as vaccines) is such that you need actual experts who understand it, but there is a pretty limited pool of people who possess sufficient expertise to be able to say anything useful about it. Such people are almost entirely drawn from the industry being regulated simply because that is where the jobs for them are, but those connections pose serious conflict of interest concerns.

The answer to that problem isn't to stack the agencies with a bunch of non-experts chosen solely for their willingness to parrot a pre-desired conclusion that some politician wants them to say ("vaccines are bad!") which seems to be what RFK is doing (though we don't know yet who the replacements will be it seems highly likely this is the plan). The solution is to have rules that weed out conflicts of interest while still having actual independent experts providing advice.

rainyday - hard to feel sorry for the people who voted in the outfit in the first place. The blame lies squarely with the voters, a criticism often levelled on these pages at the Japanese electorate

Not everyone in the US voted for this lunacy. Those people have my sympathy.

Trump voters who brought this chaos onto themselves not so much so.

Not a very good photo of RFK Jr., is it?

He looks like a madman.

Not the photo's fault there.

As the article stated, Biden replaced the entire committee with his own picks.

But that doesn’t count, because he’s on the Blue Team. So it’s okay.

I'm not an expert in the workings of this committee, but it seems that Biden, like previous administrations, simply replaced individual committee members when their terms expired.

That is substantively different from ignoring the normal process and instead simply kicking everyone off and replacing them in the middle of the term, for explicitly political purposes.

America is really going down the toilet. I'm sorry for everyone in that country subjected to the whims of this clown show playing with your lives.

The future is AI,

What a bleak possibility.

Is trump that bad?

Is that a rhetorical question?

There just isn’t enough popcorn in the world….

When people are making 2+ change of trains a day taking an extra minute in each station can mean losing quite a lot of time, so people will walk on the escalators. Or run on the stairs, which is the part that I see with some frequency causing falls and accidents.

That is a good point.

One possible unintended consequence of this might be to increase the danger, if it has the effect of simply incentivizing people in a hurry to run up/down stairs rather than walking up/down the escalator.

Not sure if that will happen, but its possible.

I still haven’t seen the evidence that walking (as opposed to running) up an escalator is any more dangerous than walking up stairs.

Dont know why these people think the ban is "unconstitutional." Article 11 of the Nationality Act states very clearly that that "acquisition of a foreign nationality by one's own choice results in automatic loss of Japanese nationality."

Just to be pedantic, the fact that a piece of legislation like the Nationality Act says something does not by itself answer the question of whether what it says is Constitutional or not. The Supreme Court is the body that has the power under Japan's Constitution to answer that question.

The appellant in this case was asking the Court whether the rule in the Nationality Act contravened Article 13 of the Constitution which guarantees respect for individuals and the right to the pursuit of happiness (in the article it says "self determination" which is an indirect reference to this).

The question had not been answered before so the Court accepted the case and basically said "no". So now we know.

This is going to accelerate the brain drain from the US, to the benefit of wherever these students end up studying instead.

The short term cost will simply be that all American universities face varying degrees of financial difficulties since they lose the fees that international students pay, which act as a sort of subsidy for domestic students. So the quality of higher education for Americans will deteriorate, as will the level of research.

The long term cost will be a lot greater but difficult to quantify - all the scientists, engineers, doctors, business leaders, etc who would have made discoveries, contributed to research, founded companies or otherwise contributed to the US economy will now be doing those things in other countries (probably mostly in Europe, but a few might even end up in Japan) instead of the US.

This isn't going to be the end of the world for the US of course, it'll just make the US a less prosperous place than it could have been, while boosting other parts of the world.

Not to defend it, but to give some perspective that works out to roughly $4.4 million US, divided by four means they are each getting an average of just over one million US dollars in retirement pay.

That would be a massive windfall for a guy like me, but compare it to the golden parachutes given out to incompetent CEOs in large American companies which are often measured in the 10s or 100s of millions (and sometimes billions) and you do get a sense of the difference in corporate governance in each country. Far all their faults, Japanese executives are nowhere near as insanely greedy as their American counterparts.

Just Googled it for more pictures and its actually pretty lousy as a photo op.

The stairs are ugly, the wall on the walkway at the top blocks out part of the view and prevents a person getting a good silhouette shot, and since the walkway extends diagonally from the staircase to hook up with the rest of the bridge it looks quite awkward.

Honestly they should just take some land in the middle of nowhere that has a view of Mt. Fuji and build a theme park with convenience stores and staircases in it for all the tourists to flock to, problem solved.

And in another article also posted here today:

A senior official of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party has ruled out including talks on an expansion of U.S. rice imports in tariff negotiations between Tokyo and Washington

experts believe people need to see more benefits from choosing the method for it to grow in popularity.

Its notable that nowhere in the article does it actually identify any benefits.

The poster Jay's comment above is a bit hysterical but I share a lot of the same concerns over cashless systems. There are legitimate concerns about control over cashless systems, how access can be limited, how they impinge on privacy, how they concentrate control among a small number of hands, how that control allows for rent seeking behavior and other potentially harmful things. Not to mention whatever cyber security issues exist with them - trying to make the entire economy run on apps is basically putting our eggs in one basket that AI systems controlled by hostile actors will probably be able to hack and bring down at some point in the near future.

I don't ever want my salary to be paid on an app. I want to pay for most things in cash.

Seriously, are we to believe, sitting in America's Oval office, is infested with hoards of mindless sycophants willing to indulge, worship Donald Trump as a "cult of personality"?

Yes.

A problem for Japan is that it has a lot of goodwill and soft power in SE Asia which it wants to maintain but its association with a now hostile US puts some of it at risk.

It can’t compete with China on its own in that regard either anymore, so it has to find its own place in whatever the new order that emerges in east and south east Asia ends up being.

The messaging here is likely not so much directed at Trump as it is to other countries in the region, to demonstrate that Japan is not on board with what Trump is doing with that in mind.

Trump’s erratic and unhinged behavior make it impossible to predict where things are heading, but Japan really does need to shift away from the US and towards greater engagement with countries in the region independently.

the town secured about 2.5 million yen, 

I get that its a publicity stunt, but still in a country where actual green space is in extremely short supply in urban/suburban areas it feels kind of dystopian that this kind of money is being spent on something this useless as a park.

Boomers are all voting for Carney, typical privileged white male over Poilievre with an openly gay biological father and non-white immigrant wife.

LMAO at the MAGA crowd embracing wokeism.