Japan Today

edmundintokyo comments

Posted in: Police stop car driving ‘suspiciously’ and find girl’s body in back seat See in context

On why he got pulled over, the story in local news is: There had been some recent thefts of electrical cables from solar panels, so the police are driving around the little roads between the fields at 3am looking out for the thieves. Our hero is driving along in his rentacar with his dead friend in the back and suddenly notices there's a police car in front of him, so he stops. Police think, "aha, that's exactly what an electrical cable thief would do" and go back to check it out.

16 ( +17 / -1 )

Posted in: Tokyo reports 5,534 coronavirus cases; nationwide tally 25,156 See in context

Delta spreads just as fast in vaccinated people. The vaccine protects you from getting a serious case, but does nothing at all to stop the pandemic.

I don't think that's right - IIUC there was a study that found that vaccinated people shed us much virus as unvaccinated people with equivalent symptoms, but if you're vaccinated you're less likely to get symptoms. It also seems likely the infections period won't last as long.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Posted in: Japan's COVID-19 app reaches 4 million downloads in first week See in context

Is that an assumption or confirmed? It doesn't sound right to me.

It's not right. It doesn't show hotspots, the only way for it to give you information is if you're in contact with someone who tests positive, at which point it will notify you.

If you published the whole travel history of anyone who tested positive you'd risk deanonymising them. South Korea has pretty much done that and there's definitely an argument for it, but a lot of people here seem to be worried about privacy, and if too many people are worried about privacy then they won't install the app. So the Google/Apple approach used here is to manage the minimum possible information that will allow you to answer the question "was I in close contact with someone who tested positive".

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Posted in: Japan's COVID-19 app reaches 4 million downloads in first week See in context

@blahblah222

What is the point of this App? There's no follow-up. Even if you know you are exposed, you cannot get testing or treatment.

As the link you posted says, you can get tested without symptoms or returning from overseas if you're consider a close contact (濃厚接触者), defined as close proximity for at least 15 minutes. That's exactly what this app detects, so they'll test people who are identified by the app.

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Posted in: Japan's COVID-19 app reaches 4 million downloads in first week See in context

@indigo

 even without entering your personal info , the matching with imei and phone number will give all info they need. the next patch will take more of your freedom 

I have the android version and it doesn't seem to have the READ_PHONE_STATE permission, so it can't get your phone number or IMEI number. If you want to add permissions to an Android app with an update you have to persuade the user to opt back in.

1 ( +3 / -2 )

Posted in: IOC chief rebuts growing calls for Olympic postponement See in context

Boycott the sponsors.

https://tokyo2020.org/en/organising-committee/marketing/sponsors/

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Posted in: Japan's Constitutional Democrats: A little party with big ambition See in context

@koiwaicoffee Edano was never in the LDP. Maybe you're mixing him up with Ichiro Ozawa or Yukio Hatoyama

or somebody?

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Posted in: Japan may only be able to restart one-third of its nuclear reactors See in context

"the odds are no worse than before the accident. It is illogical to say it was acceptable before 2011 and unacceptable after."

The anti-nuclear people's thought is that the people were wrongly assessing the odds before 2011. If they'd known the actual probability they wouldn't have wanted the nuclear power stations running then, either.

That said, the fact that people have revised their view of the probability of an accident makes the actual probability of an accident (as opposed to the perceived probability) lower after 2011 than it was before, because people will be trying harder to avoid one.

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

Posted in: Mizuho added to class-action suits against Mt Gox in U.S., Canada See in context

@taj, I don't know about the situation when they first opened the account but Mizuho must have known for a long time that they were dealing with a bitcoin exchange, because they were doing huge amounts of remittances for them. I heard (can't confirm it's true) that at one point half of all Mizuho's international remittances were for Gox. But running a bitcoin exchange isn't illegal, and the FSA seem to have said quite clearly, both before and after the bankruptcy, that Gox didn't need a banking license to do what they were doing. Whether or not we think that's the right position for the FSA to take, it doesn't seem unreasonable for Mizuho to take their word for it.

Based on the recording that got leaked it seems like the eventual attempt to shut the account down was prompted by: 1) US banks giving them trouble over their remittances. 2) A minor money-laundering thread that came out of the Silk Road investigation, which involved people with accounts at Gox and resulted in a high-profile arrest.

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Posted in: Yoshinoya to grow rice and vegetables in Fukushima See in context

They should adjust the prefectural boundary to move Shirakawa out of Fukushima into Tochigi, that way all the people who are worrying about eating food from there would be happy and safe.

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Posted in: New immigration laws hinder some married expats returning to UK See in context

@wipeout, if you're directly affected by this you might want to talk to your local paper as well. Every local paper in the UK would probably be quite happy to run a story on the lines of this one, but with the names and pictures changed to those of a local person who went to local school X etc etc etc.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Posted in: New immigration laws hinder some married expats returning to UK See in context

I've thought this all along; the irony of targetting people from a "rich" country like Japan to keep out, married to BRITISH citizen...

Actually that doesn't quite capture the full irony of it, which is that the policy is keeping out the British citizens too, and the British citizens it keeps out will be counted in the numbers Cameron uses to "prove" the success of his policy...

5 ( +5 / -0 )

Posted in: New immigration laws hinder some married expats returning to UK See in context

@wipeout, You probably have a constituency where you were last registered, or where your family lives. You could write to either of them - they won't know how long you've been outside the UK, and I doubt they'd check the electoral register either, as they have better things to do and people come on and off it between elections in any case. There's no rule about who's allowed to write to what MP, and even if they don't want your vote they'll want your family's votes.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Posted in: New immigration laws hinder some married expats returning to UK See in context

@sushilover, it may not be possible for the UK to close the Surinder Singh route. The ability to move around within the EU with your family is a core part of the single market. The UK can't do anything like that unless it leaves the EU, and probably the EEA too.

As I mentioned up-thread, one of the main reasons the UK government are hitting families from outside the EU so hard is that it's one of the only migration categories that they can actually do anything about.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Posted in: New immigration laws hinder some married expats returning to UK See in context

What's happened here is that David Cameron wanted to look like they were doing something about immigration, so he made a target based on net immigration, ie the difference between the number of people coming in and the number going out. The hitch is that he hardly has control of any of the things he'd made a target about, because the main drivers are British people retiring to warmer, cheaper countries and EU people coming into Britain to work, which can't be restricted because the UK is in the Single Market. People were probably imagining that he'd be stopping low-wage people from poor, non-EU countries moving to Britain to work, but Gordon Brown had already done that back in 2008 when he realized the immigration issue was killing him with working class voters, so there wasn't much low-hanging fruit left for Cameron to pick.

That meant the new rules had to fall on the very limited number of people he could control, people coming in from outside the EU with their families. Cases like the one described here are a big win for David Cameron, because his net immigration numbers include the British person and both the kids, so he's keeping four people out of the numbers he'll fight the election on.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Posted in: Hosono takes to street to seek support for tsunami debris disposal See in context

OK, I'm going to have a go at answering kurisupisu's questions.

Where is the logic in once again sending plumes of radioactive material up into the air,this time over the WHOLE of Japan?

The logic is that they're stuck with absolutely masses of very slightly radioactive debris from the tsunami, which has to go somewhere, and they don't have enough landfill space for it.

Where is it the accepted scientific practice of spreading radioactive material (that is already on the ground) in aerial emissions, after a nuclear disaster to wider areas?

The accepted scientific practice is that you set limits for how much radiation it's safe to emit, and if the stuff you want to burn is below those limits, as it is here, it's OK to burn it.

Why is it necessary for radioactive material to be spread in the air to fall on crops,be ingested and breathed in?

Because the radioactive material is mixed with the debris, which they need to get rid of.

How can it be the duty of the Japanese to allow themselves to become contaminated,become ill and suffer birth defects when there is no need?

That's not going to happen, because they won't put enough radioactive material in the air. The duty of areas that weren't clobbered by the tsunami is to help the areas that were.

In Japan, if I by chance receive a related illness due to radioactivity I may be denied treatment by a hospital! This is happening at present, and will continue?

Citation needed.

If we become sick due to radiation poisoning where are the specialists to treat the people?

You're not going to get sick due to radiation poisoning.

Blending radioactive debris (why?) and then incinerating it will still produce the same emissions into the environment!

Why has the government ignored expert opinion on the dangers of doing this from their own scientists?

Citation needed.

What is the redress for illnesses due to radioactivity spread by these burnings?

You don't need redress for something that isn't going to happen.

-5 ( +4 / -9 )

Posted in: MBAs can help stop the old-boys network See in context

Snarking at the author aside, Olympus's problems seemed to start when their career optics-company managers weren't making enough money making optics products, and let a bunch of financial whizzes from Nomura Shoken through the door.

I wonder if a lot of their problems, and the economic problems the rest of the world has had over the last few years, don't come down to too much power being given to people who are experts in things called "Business" and "Finance" and not enough to people who are experts in the thing their company is actually supposed to be making.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Posted in: MBAs can help stop the old-boys network See in context

At least one of the people who just got arrested for his role in he Olympus fraud went to business school. Hisashi Mori, the guy who took Woodford's phone off him and told him to get the bus to the airport, went to NYU Stern in the US. And somewhere called Hitotsubashi in Japan, which the writer of this article may have heard of.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A3%AE%E4%B9%85%E5%BF%97

But maybe they've revised the curriculum since then?

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Posted in: The course of Japan’s energy policy See in context

Long-term planning is important, but if your renewable targets are based on things happening in 2030 after all the people involved in spending money on them have retired, that's a good sign you're not taking the thing seriously.

Unbundle production and distribution and let solar producers get power to customers? No.

Multi-decade boondoggles to PUT SOLAR PANELS IN SPACE? Of course.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

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