JeffLee comments

making money for the small minority.

Not at all. Their biggest customers are pension funds.

Not a comparison. In the first one, a large country unilaterally invaded its much smaller neighbor to take and subjugate its people and territory. In the other, one was attacked and is now relentlessly pursuing the perpetrators, without such territorial ambitions.

Bring it on! Go, baby, go!

 It's just code for American hegemony

I don’t know where you live, but I’m happy with “American hegemony”: Japan, Singapore, Thailand, S. Korea, Taiwan, etc. Pretty good places to live, I’d say.

But if you disagree, you could always try re-locating to the places most free of American hegemony: China, Myanmar, N. Korea, Russia, Belarus, Iran. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

And Kishida is still Prime Minister. 

Why shouldn’t he be? He doesn’t set our wages, private-sector employers do. The last couple of PMs have been pleading the corporates to hike wages, but they refuse to give any substantive ones. So blame them.

One person was paid to do the explicit job of ensuring the guns were safe. She bears nearly all the responsibility in this incident.

Very useful and yes to the second question. My experience so far shows that the reviews are accurate. Note that I'm quite good at determining the authentic reviews with the planted ones.

Illegal if I run one, perfectly fine when the government does it.

Do you have a printing press that prints a sovereign currency with which holders of that currency can meet all of their financial obligations, from tax bills, to mortgage payments, to investment to grocery bills? If not, then your comparison is ridiculous.

The fund has been a great success since its asset re-allocation. Japan's pension system is well funded. The GPIF was the world's biggest pool of retirement money in the world until very recently.

@rainyday

I was talking about income, you reply with data about savings.

And the story about the stock market. Households normally draw from their savings when they invest in stocks or other securities for retirement planning or education funding.

The link you provided, whose underlying data is behind a paywall to me, doesn't seem to show that. 

If you followed the financial press, you'd be well aware of the recent periodic reports based on govt statistics that Japanese households have a growing amount of financial assets that have hit the highest level in history.

True, inflation tends reduce the savings rate, but one needs to look at accumulated savings in this case. Japanese households continue to hold most of it cash (LOL) and life insurance!

If a significant number of households had reallocated that to moderate risk, diversified and tax protected securities from say around 15 years ago, Japan would be a considerably more affluent nation today.

Zelenskyy should have opted for peace negotiations.

For the same reason that Churchill should have opted for peace negotiations, right?

@rainy

This assumes that most families have surplus income

Yeah, they kind of do, according to the stats (rather than your narrative):

"In 2023, the median amount of savings held by two or more person households in Japan amounted to approximately 11.1 million Japanese yen." -- Statista

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1235679/japan-multi-person-households-median-savings/

@Dango bong

Japan’s household financial assets are at a all-time high, while investing in the Nikkei and other share indexes as never been easier or cheaper, with plenty of tax protection. If those families decided to keep their savings in cash or life insurance rather than investing it, then it’s their fault they’re not benefiting.

Central Fukushima or northern Ibaraki. An hour and half out of Tokyo, and filled with endless forests, rolling hills, waterfalls, hot springs, tiny hamlets, empty roads that meander through it all, and hardly any other tourists.

On our last overnight trip, we didn't see a single non-Japanese person the entire time despite the supposed "inbound" boom. There, I let the cat out of the proverbial bag.

FYI NASA and the US Navy still uses floppy discs.

NASA has some old test data stored on floppies but it doesn't actively use the discs, according to a former engineer there. If a researcher needs to access the data, they put the discs into a device that downloads the data to modern media. NASA's projects go back decades, let's remember.

In Japan's case, the vaccine rollout, the pension records scandals and other incidents have highlighted how Japan was relying on long outdated storage methods.

“Japan worried about Sri Lanka’s debt ;-)”

Apples and oranges. Japan overwhelmingly borrows its own money from itself. Sri Lanka borrows US$ from China.

If China, Japan or the other creditors really cared about the situation, they would let Sri Lanka repay their loans in their own currency – as Japan can do -- instead of foreign ones.

70 percent discount sounds mighty tempting, although I'd never want to be a misery tourist. Maybe there are unaffected regions covered in this program?

It's the typical knee jerk reaction to blame all a country's problems on illegals and migrants.

yeah it would be if that was what most of the critics are doing. They're not. They're the blaming the policy and the those who made it -- who are the govt.

Canada is in a very similar situation, and Trudeau has had to put big limits on quotas and restrict students' permitted working hours after a strong backlash concerning a dire housing squeeze and employment.

Clearly, it's a very bad policy. And, no, criticizing flawed public policy does not make people racist or xenophobic. It's actually essential in a healthy democracy. sorry you don't like it.

I had a pair of Adidas Climacool shoes that were made of recycled plastics. The support and comfort were awful and the soles wore down very quickly. These companies won't be able to use the recovered material for anything requiring a modicum of quality.

the new development will rival top waterfront spots in places like Sydney and Singapore

It won't rival Singapore's landmark waterfront district. That area is filled with century-old carefully restored buildings, from the Boat Quay district of former warehouses to the grand colonial structures across the river with museums, art galleries and a concert hall, beyond which is a large expanse of greenery.

Destroying old buildings and replacing them with new ones with occasional turf-life grass with stunted trees is the modern Japanese approach. This project does not seem to be any different.

I signed up with a bunch of them when I first came to Japan and put up with the hassle of stuffing my wallet and backpack with decks of cards thinking they'd save me money. Nope! When I later tried redeeming or using the points later, there was some reason why I was rejected and got nothing in return in about 4 out of every 5 times. Usually points had expired. Others had certain restrictions or conditions. For my D-point Club, I was given a long-winded rapid-fire keigo-infused explanation why the years of points I had accumulated were inaccessible or worthless or something. The lady at Tower Records took my card out of my hand, scanned it and threw it in the trash when I presented it, saying it was worthless.

So I ditched all my cards, and am a happier person because of it. The only points plan I use is Delta Airlines, whose points never expire, while 90% of my shopping is on Amazon.

Even before the tourism boom, Kyoto's bus transport was awful. Weekend crowding was insufferable on board those vehicles. So many of the bus stops are nothing but a metal pole in the ground where big crowds of people have to stand along the sidewalk, blocking pedestrian flows. This was 10 years ago. They had a chance to fix these problems but chose not to.

Here in Tokyo, I'd like to sue the so-and-sos who aggressively cut off the shade-producing tree branches in public areas at the start of every spring and the civil planners responsible for covering more and more ground with concrete that has replaced the grassy and wooded areas.

The Democratic Party's executive and other organizations should have half-expected this. He is far too old to be president. Even healthy people in their 80s tend to lose certain cognitive abilities. They need to get a replacement ASAP.

Three bodies separately got inside inside the crater around the same time? That sounds bizarre.

As for the professional climber, if you've got a heart disease, then you should find another profession.

 the amount of raw, untreated sewage dumped in the countries rivers these days is a national disgrace.

The salmon that regularly migrate and spawn there, including the stretch through central London, don't seem to mind.

That's an ambitious claim in this day and age - that urban families in a developed economy can actually lead normal middle-class lives. Tokyo, with its low living costs, is relatively doable.

That's not the case in nearly all the other big cities in the developed world: London, Vancouver, SFO, New York, Paris, etc. One needs to be a multi-millionaire to be middle class in those cities.

@rainyday

you are wrong about 90% of freight being transported by trucks.

That would make the Japan Trucking Assoc. wrong, LOL.

https://jta.or.jp/wp-content/themes/jta_theme/pdf/aboutjta2024eng.pdf

"Trucks carry more than 90% of cargo in Japan..."

I often comment on this topic because I once hosted a logistics forum in Tokyo and did a lot of homework beforehand, and tons of people like yourself are misinformed. A common complaint at the event was that Japan doesn't rely enough on rail. Some others remarked on how the US-Canada freight rail network is the world's best.

@rakuraku

The JPY has depreciated against all major currencies not only the USD.

That's mostly because the major economies also hiked their interest rates after covid to choke off their higher levels of inflation, while the BOJ stayed the course and today is stating an intention to stick with accommodative policy.

So, no, the weak yen is not due to "Abenomics" (when the yen was a lot stronger) or any inherent weakness in the Japanese economy, it's due to the large interest rate differentials.

No tests at all for this Canadian! My reverse parking technique in tight spots still needs polishing but otherwise no issues so far.