Johannes Weber comments

Posted in: TEPCO / KEPCO shareholders vote to keep nuclear power See in context

My god(s), another proof of money and common sense being impossible to join in one person. I still cannot believe why there are still people around believing nuclear power was cheap... (it has been proved wrong more often than not that it is more expensive than almost any other source of power after taken secondary costs into account). No whatsoever government in the world will have any other choice but present the bill for nuclear wastes to the producers (which will be saved by state money as it would drive them to bankruptcy).

But as the system works, their decision was obvious. It's back to the banking crisis - any institutions, which are considered "too big to fail" are bailed out with taxpayer money, which is then emitted in large amounts to their shareholders immediately after. Kind of insider trading - waiting to be bailed out by the state after the meltdown occurs (either stock market or reactor), which is certain to happpen in some not too distant future. Society at its best...

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Posted in: Japan is likely to default before Europe does, which could be in the next five years. See in context

If Europe steered closer towards default, the ECB could start printing Euros in the same way as Federal Reserve or the BOJ. Further, even though the majority of the Greek debt is not held by the Greeks - by now it is mostly helf by the ECB and German banks and the German state (and the ESM, which is again, mostly Germany). Thus, with a European tweak of perspective, the situation is a bit similar to that of Japan.

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Posted in: Skype jacks ads into free Internet phone calls See in context

And another reason why smart users avoid the commercial operating systems and go for GNU. This could have severe implications. Just imagine the usual trend towards "find [specific type] singles" based on the personal info about You available on the web (whether it is actually related to reality or not) in a chat with Your partner. Don't really want this on personal phone calls. Furthermore, do both sides see the same ads or do they see different ads? This might severely damage realtionships in some cases. You might even try to fine Microsoft for it, when it is compared to other famous US law cases.

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Posted in: Why can't somebody invent a battery for cell phones that doesn't need to be recharged so often? See in context

Actually, the central problem in battery development is the balance of charging speed and capacity. Either can be done very well, yet, but a rapidly charging battery with decent storage is still rather new. They use a crystal lattice of Lithium-Iron-Phospate, have been developed at MIT and - guess it - they are neither ready for market nor will they be very cheap.

As Zichi pointed out, for mobile phones, the key lies in using their mobility. Small photovoltaic chargers for mobiles are accessible everywhere. Japanese USB kettles can be used. Cars can be used as well. And charging by walking should work as well.

Furthermore, the central issues in power consumption of smart phones are probably the display and the transmission source strengths. Looking at a shiny iPhone I see a lot of wasted power. With a display based on intelligent application of the Piezo-electric effect (like in Kindle), there could be a lot of power saved, since these displays need only electricity to change the configuration. Furthermore, transmission source strengths can be reduced by putting up more mobile network antennas (as a denser network of recipients allows weaker senders).

Actually, the idea of nuclear batteries is extremely old. Voyager 2 had a big chunk of Plutonium on board as a so-called isotope battery (which made use of the decay heat for power generation, if I'm not mistaken). However, due to the thermal neutron radiation (and lots of funny other things), this is obviously not suited for hand-held devices carried in the proximity of one's family jewels. And no - they can't be made small with their requirements of radiation shielding. And the pure horror of dumb people opening their nuclear batteries or breaking them by dropping their phones... I don't even want to think about it.

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Posted in: The government must work to prevent passive smoking and help victims. See in context

A few years ago, the German government decided a ban of smoking in restaurants and bars which did not offer separate rooms for smokers and non-smokers. Of course, the gastronomy cried out, how much customers they would lose. Now, a few years later, there are almost no complaints left, since they realised that smokers still keep coming in most cases and the number of non-smoking customers, who enjoy restaurants and bars wihtout reeking like hell afterwards has significantly risen. Sometimes, governments have to force the right choices down through the throats of their people. Things wouldn't be any different in Japan.

Not to mention the beneficial health effects for the employees, who had to wade through all that smoke before the law...

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Posted in: Selecting the right university See in context

Cos is somewhat right. You need an awful amount of luck to get a decently paid white collar job without university degrees. There are exceptions though. E.g. German nurses are extremely popular around the world, even though they do not study at a university. Instead, they have a long training and education at hospitals (don't remember how many years). And many of them, if they really want it, can easily study later on and get a medical degree. They are however, far more practical and savvy with patients than university grad nurses who wasted away multiple years in stupefying lectures.

However, the place where professors teach doesn't state very much about their qualifications. The only big difference is, how much money they and their subordinate researchers have to spend. That can be quite a big difference, even if the source of funding and the university is the same.

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Posted in: Selecting the right university See in context

Choice of subject is far more important than a fancy name of a fancy university, where professors are too busy wiht admiring themselves. And even the best professors in the world have limited amounts of time for their students. The better they are, the less time they tend to have.

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Posted in: While we respect the wishes of Oi, given what happened at Fukushima, you can't just decide to restart the reactors based on the judgment of the local community. See in context

The problem is the range of locality. For a nuclear plant, the benefits and subsidies are restricted to a some ten or twenty kilometers of range, but the negative side effects in case of an accident extend much further. I guess he thinks of the ultralocal communities, who profit as well as taking the risks, which should not be able to decide on their own. In that case, this is not about less but more democracy.

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Posted in: The grammar-translation method: Is it really all that bad? See in context

timtak brought up a very good point. The same approach is used in many other subjects as well. That is the reason, why the majority of people on this planet suck at math or science and are not more capable than a clever ten year old child. You can even see it, when you teach at universities, as I have been done for more than three years. Students mostly learn the primitive examples that we use to teach them by heart, but lack the ability to see their knowledge in a greater context. The "grammar translation method" doesn't teach application in context.

Now, from where do we get the application in context? From exercising the things we have learned in difficult and lengthy exercises. These exercises must be based on the new materials and they must be done inside of the system. This means in terms of science that you do not need to refer mostly to older references, but that based on a few hints in addition to what you studied recently, everything should be solvable. In languages that means writing in casual as well as formal style, writing about conversations of characters and getting the corrections for what you have written without open criticism in front of all and with suggestions about how to improve. And direct conversation, of course. Which means extra work for teachers, which is why they don't want to change the method.

Everything starts with some kind of "grammar translation method", but it doesn't stop there. That's the difference between good and bad teaching.

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Posted in: Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson arrested in Germany See in context

It is good that he was arrested in Germany, since he'll at least get fair and decent treatment according to a fair constitution there. Imagine if he had been arrested in Japan...

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Posted in: Congratulations to the voters in France and Greece See in context

@gaijinfo:

These free markets would necessitate the descent of society into anarchy and violence as I have outlined. This can be directly inferred from the general properties of chaotic systems, since strife and civil war are allowed states of the configuration space of the society-market system. Nothing would become better without regulation. If you want to see the consequences of free market wait a while for the next killing sprees of frustrated US citizens. And that is what the tea party is about - free market at gunpoint. These are natural parts of the free market mechanism. The free market doesn't allow the protection of private property, since its main mechanism is the accumulation of property in the hands of a few until the violence breaks out.

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Posted in: Congratulations to the voters in France and Greece See in context

There is a very interesting paradigm in the political arena, which many people on this forum seem to adhere. This paradigm suggests that the free market was a stable system. Even though volatile locally, in the general picture, some people assume that the free market is a self-stabilising system in general. Since the market is highly chaotic system, we can compare it with other chaotic systems and see how it works.

The free market includes necessarily anarchy, strife and civil war, since the entirety of these actions have economic aspects and therefore are part of free market movements (they are allowed points in the configuration space of the the society-market system). Since the free market is a chaotic system (and ergodic, if one neglects the finiteness of ressources), it will reach every possible state if one waits long enough.

Since these outcomes are undesirable, it is obvious that the market has to be regulated. Regulations can be considered as exterior forces applied to the society-market system. Regulations are usually applied in a way that they stabilise market trends, which point towards local concentration of economical and political power. We could call this time evolution a local time evolution in configuration space and it moves the system towards the next local minimum.

When the transition to the anarchy (or revolutionary) phase happens, it causes a restart of the free market cycle. This is a large step in configuration space. Like in any other physical system, such large steps in configuration space require large conjugated momenta, which must be generated by large generalised forces, which will accumulate over time by the imbalance of the system, when it is moved out of the central region into outlying local stationary points.

The anarchy phase is a necessary part of the free market mechanism. If the conjugated momenta due to the inner forces of the system grow too large, they cannot be compensated anymore by external forces (which are limited due to their nature as being imposed by a society in consensus). This will cause lgross changes in the society-market system, which will imply severe damage to many people.

Therefore, there is an obvious need to prevent this anarchy phase by preventing the accumulation of power, which is the trigger for the anarchy phase. The only way to do this is by introducing exterior forces to the society-market system, which drive the configuration instead of the local stationary points towards the central region, where the global minimum and relative stability against perturbations can be found.

Thinking about the market as a physical system, the conclusion that a certain extent of socialism is the only reasonable policy is obvious. The question how much socialism and how to apply it properly remains open to debate. By the way, true communism would be fixed-point of the system. While that might be possible in a system with infite ressources, it can be basically excluded by the dissipative nature of the finiteness of ressources.

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Posted in: S Korea cracks down on human flesh capsules from China See in context

Pure horror. I can't imagine reading anything more terrifying than "humans" mail-ordering baby powder for consumption. Another hint that a world without "humans" might be better off. This story makes me sick.

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Posted in: Crisis-hit Japan debates shift to renewable energy See in context

We have the technological know-how. Japan can do anything that Germany can.”...... no they cant cos they have hard headed politicians who cant see the future otherwise they would have done it a long time ago and they also would have done something about the aging population...

It goes beyond that. To the same extent that the Japanese society is indoctrinated to be infatuated by Keidanren and Denjiren and the nuclear industry, Germans are raised from an early age (since about 30 to 40 years) to be sceptical of everything which bears the word "atom" or "nuclear". The mindset of the mostly uneducated parts of the populace are completely different.

Furthermore, Japan is not as dynamic as Germany is, since it isn't part of something greater like Germany, which is more or less one of the two or three core countries of Europe. This interconnectedness allows Germany an economic flexibility and adaptivity (even though sometimes at a very high price), which Japan can never dream of. Lastly, Germany is basically undisputed world leader in almost all fields of large scale renewable power generation since they started the shift of paradigm one or two decades earlier than the rest of the world. As long as Germany is not punished with neoconservative governments for a full decade or more, it is practically impossible for the rest of the world to catch up.

Germany already has achieved a change in the mindset of the population, which is far more important that the bare numbers of renewable kilowatt hours or certain aspects of thin, organic or multicrystalline solar cells - whether it is the way how Germany tries to deal with waste reduction and recycling, whether it is insulation and energy efficiency or whether it is a diversification and decentralization of energy production..

there was shocking footage of one turbine spinning so fast in the winter storm that it exploded... these things are massive and the damage was frightening.

Modern wind power plants are almost completely accident free. They might have some shutdowns due to strong winds, but clever German makers (like Procon) have developed technologies to deal with that and keep the plants operating safely. They have ridiculously low insurance premiums (of about 100 Euro per year), since it can be almost excluded that they take severe damage or inflict severe damage to anything if operated properly. And last but not least - an honest full cost calculation of all kinds of electric power reveals that the only energy source, which is cheaper than wind is conventional hydro, which is restricted, since there are not enough potential sites.

2 ( +3 / -1 )

Posted in: Defusing the Iran crisis See in context

No one should interpret up the words of "Ahmadinedschad" as general official Iranian policy. He is just a madman, who can't be reelected for a third term. Since he doesn't have proper economic results, he needs a foreign enemy to put the blame for his failed economic policies. An evil US or Israel comes in handy for occluding a record of failures. In that sense, if nothing extremely bad happens in the next few years, the situation should become better. The majority of Iranians probably don't give a penny on whether Israel exists or not.

Since even a lot of senior Israeli security experts say that there is no real proof yet that Iran actually tries to obtain nuclear weapons, the crisis (which mostly exists in the heads) is something of a virtual crisis, which could become real, if the hawks on either side have their way. There is no way any nation can deny another nation the right to develop nuclear power plants, if they cooperate with the IAEA as the international watchdog. Nuclear arms are a different affair though. But there is not proof (yet), that Iran's ambitions for nuclear arms are more real than the WMD in Iraq used as a justification for the last war in Iraq.

The article is quite good since it avoids inflammatory calls to arms which are all too common nowadays and which serve no purpose but make things worse. Having nukes pointed at your country is not the end of it all.

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Posted in: Why you must learn kanji See in context

The rest of the world has used Greek, Latin, French and now English for the last couple of millennium. One could argue that Mandarin may replace English, but then, no one really likes doing business with Chinese to being with, so it's probably the Chinese who will be learning English rather than the rest of the world learning Mandarin.

There is a very simple background for that. The European period of enlightenment and industrialisation is the foundation for the prominence of western languages. Greek and Latin have been the languages for education during the last two millenia in the civilizations that shaped the recent five centuries.

The question, whether anyone wants to do business in a language or with certain people is irrelevant. There is a simple answer why no other language will ever surpass English as lingua franca for common people around the globe and that answer lies in the Internet and the operating systems, system languages and so on, which are based on English. This is due to a historic background - the majority of these technologies were initially introduced in western countries - and for practical reasons - since English has an exceptionally small character set, which is completey covered in basic ASCII code. For everyone who is using computers beyond the pure user or application level, English is unavoidable.

Learning Kanji is neither more nor less of an issue than learning basics of Latin and ancient Greek for western people. These skills are required to understand the working principles of languages on a higher, abstract level. For daily life, you can get quite far without deeper and structured knowledge of the underlying principles. In that sense, 500 to 1000 Kanji are already a very good start for Japanese fluency.

I further must support the notion that Katakana is the disease that keeps the Japanese majority from fluency in other languages. Katakana should be banned from all kinds of foreign language training in Japan, because it interferes with the ability of children to learn new phonetic systems. The most severe deficiency in educated Japanese people is their ability to handle different phonetic systems and pronunciations. Furthermore, it is nearly impossible to understand foreign names onces these names have been brutalized to fit into the Japanese Katakana scheme. It is absolutely beyond me why the Japanese mainstream cannot leave foreign names in the appropriate characters.

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Posted in: Why you must learn kanji See in context

The author is completely wrong about English and its difficulty. The majority of "difficult"English words is based on either Latin or ancient Greek. People with some level of classical education at school can use this to derive the meanings of plenty of words in almost all western languages from their basic education. Furthermore, since these words pervade all western languages, they contribute a lot to understanding most western languages.

Meanings of words like telephopne, television, telecommunication and telescope are plainy trivial for educated people. Oops, all that "tele"(Greek for distant) wihtout Kanji. How is that possible? Complicated words in western languages are easiest for language learners. I'd say Latin and ancient Greek play the role of Kanji in western languages. This acutally compares well to the Kanji usage in Kango in the Japanese language that are often formal ways of expressing simple things. Japanese people suck at this very often because they don't have any classical or multilingual education at school.

Kanji on the other hand cannot be learnt without available imagery, since they are abstracted too far. Unlike "tele" which is extremely simple, as it is everywhere. Either you have to memorize the Kanji by rote learning or by one or two particularly memorable examples of use or by some mental image - kind of a mapping between the Kanji's form and the space of meanings and images. This can be created artificially (which is the Heysig method), this can be clobbered into the brain (which is the Japanese method) or this can be picked up in passing once you have learned the basics of the language, lived in Japan for a while and once you have stopped bothering about perfect and full knowledge of the language.

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Posted in: Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' to return to Bavarian schools See in context

There was a good reason for "Mein Kampf" being banned from sale in Germany over a long time and it was a completely legal process, since the Bavarian state simply held the rights. And I seriously doubt that anyone (with a sane mind) would want to read it in German, since everyone knows that the language is horrible. It might actually be an "lighter read" if a translation is used. But that isn't its purpose. By the way, I often hear that it is quite popular in Britain and the US. I'd say most Germans simply don't care about the book, which is probably the best possible mindset.

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Posted in: From late primary school to middle school, girls develop faster than boys both physically and mentally. So it's inefficient for boys and girls to take the same classes together because their mental ag See in context

Putting two different things into one pot. There is a Difference with capital "D" between "emotional age" and "intellectual age". And while girls on average surpass their male fellows in "emotional age" for a few years, this cannot be claimed for general "mental age", since it also includes "rational" and "analytical" features, which do not depend on gender, but on socialisation (and a bit on genes as well).

Physical deveopment shouldn't be a problem in class either. After all, class is not about physical contests (and even there boys fare better most of the time) or about showing off how far your body has developed towards adulthood.

The main reason why girl school students might be more successful is because there is less distraction at a girls-only school. But this reasoning would lead in the final consequence to private teachers for all students, whose parents can afford it. And the girls-only school students miss important aspects of social learning (like getting along with the other sex). There is no overall advantage of one system over the other.

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Posted in: Suggesting single poverty-stricken women should seek job opportunities abroad or try to establish their own businesses sounds fine ... but this is extremely difficult in practice. See in context

As far as I know, poverty is also very common among unmarried young males in Japan. Young single males are the social layer with the 2nd highest rate of poverty (after single mothers). It is fully true that the Japanese company system is to blame in both cases.

However, I truly wonder which qualifications even the average Japanese employee (or unemployed worker) has that would make her (or him) fit for seeking a well-payed job abroad. It's not just English (or any other foreign language skill) that is missing, they also lack basic qualifications in many cases (Japanese university education is rather poor in many cases). Why hire someone from another country, who expects a high salary, if you can get a worker fluent in the local language and similarly compentent for a cheaper price, as it is the case in most places around the world?

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Posted in: The skill of speaking fluent Japanese See in context

I can personally confirm that 6 months was more or less the time (in Japan) it took me to start to blather in Japanese. And to have Japanese interfere with my previous third language, French. I guess, once one foreign language pops up in the mind involuntary when searching for another, that can be conisdered as fluent.

However, I had some different experiences from what the author describes. The most important ones are the following:

First, fluency (as I experience it) is obtained by the absence of conscious thought about the fact that you're speaking a foreign language. Once You stop bothering about mistakes, your fluency improves faster than you can realise it yourself. The task is not to think at all.

Second, vocabulary doesn't matter. You can always resort to using nouns from one language in another language, since You will have a description at hand if You need it. It makes no sense at all to translate "conbini" or "nikuman" to another language. Instead, I treat it as a name and explain its meaning. Otherwise, saying "sushi" (instead of sliced raw fish on rice, which had been put on rice-based vinegar before) in English or my native German would mean that I'm not fluent. And that's rubbish.

Third, the popularity. I never experienced popularity due to being a foreigner who speaks fluent English. Instead, I grew more popular with people once my Japanese improved significantly. Maybe that's due to the fact that most of my dealings were with either young Japanese (below 30 years) or those with a scientific background who actually knew that their Englisch was rather acceptable.

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Posted in: DPJ's Sengoku compares closing nuclear plants to 'mass suicide' See in context

@nandakandamanda:

They have to have routine shutdown at least once in every 13 months. Thus, since March last year, each and every one had to go through it at least once. And the safety situation does not allow a restart. Some were already in shutdown in March. Some went into emergency shutdown. The rest regularly.

Every country tries to have sufficient energy supply to cope with failure of parts of it. And Japan reduced its dependence on fossil fuels by building nuclear plants. However, since the companies in principle know about the lack of reliablity of nuclear power, they could not afford to remove their old fossil fuel plants, which would be required in times, where nuclear energy is not available. I think this is applicable to electricity companies globally.

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Posted in: Policeman in schoolgirl uniform arrested for flashing See in context

As if a 37 year old cop in a Sailor-style school girl uniform wouldn't be disturbing enough by himself...

Naively, I'd have expected that Japanese people would have behaved at least decently on the anniversary of the disaster. But maybe it was his way of coping with the outcome of things beyond control.

Poor schoolgirl...

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Posted in: Languages and a switch in my head See in context

This is indeed a very interesting thread. And it is one of the best pieces from Makoto (up to now). I wouldn't dare to call myself truly multilingual in Japanese, since I had been in Japan only for 20 months and never, ever to a native English speaking country. I stil use Japanese-"whatever else happens to be handy"-dictionaries (meaning my native German and English) after the first reading swipe, since I use these dictionaries to figure out more precise meanings of academic terminology or simply to extend my vocabulary (which is still too small that I could feel happy with it). I am at the level where I can blather quite a lot in Japanese, but my written Japanese is still rather poor.

Furthermore, I need these translations to memorize conjunctions and adverbs. Though I know that a proper impression of when and how these should be applied can be obtained only from the context in the language itself, I first need the international dictionaries to memorise these. Ask me again after I've read a few dozen volumes in Japanese about my written and formal language.

Nevertheless, it happened rather often to me (while living in Japan) that I found Japanese words and expressions in my brain and I really had to think hard to find the best translation to either German or English. Furthermore, on a vacation in France, when searching French, which I learned at school more than ten years ago and where I knew quite a lot, but never reached the "French thinking" level, I find Japanese words and Japanese grammar and it interferes with my French. So what am I? Definitely not bi-(or tri-)lingual, since I still lack vocabulary. Nevertheless, I know enough Japanese to use it without thinking that I speak a foreign language.

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Posted in: Revisions to the inheritance tax in Japan See in context

@tkoind2:

The best thing parents can do for their children is to provide (and finance) their education. Parents can empower their children to build their own lives. This is worth far more than any inheritance money. It is true that the money has been taxed (but which extent is another question, however) when it was income of the (now deceased) parents, but it is again income for the children without them doing anything for their right to earn it. I am a firm beleiver in meritocracy. Consider it a "family company". A company must also pay taxes for expenses and revenues.

I am not against inheritances - but I am against people receiving benefits which they feel entitled to without working hard. If the inheritance tax allows delayed payment, then people can decide how to deal with the cost. And never, ever forget - it was the state that provided the background for the parents to earn their wealth and keep their wealth safe. If it is about property for living and so on, a tax at the level of less than 10% for average families is completely fair.

The state provided the conditions that they could build up a company, that they had workers who were able to commute to their place, the state paid for protecting the place from fires, tsunamis, earth quakes and banksters as good as the state could. It is just fair to give something back. The state has to balance out chances for people wherever it can.

Furthermore, if I think of a family-owned company - those workers who kept the company going for an entire generation have certainly more moral rights as heirs than some spoiled child who has no plan of the company and who is going to ruin it. The state has the duty to protect these people as good as the state can. Therefore, the state should be in a position to control (for a while) that a heir doesn't destroy his inheritance, if the lives of others depend on it.

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Posted in: Revisions to the inheritance tax in Japan See in context

Taxing inheritance is one of the fairest taxes in existence. You tax people who did nothing to earn these assets (if they did, put them in jail, since that would mean they killed their parents). However, inheritance tax payment should be delayed payment (a few years). In that case, inheritors could still decide in a reasonable time what they want to do with their inheritance and sell it under better conditions or keep it operating, if its a profitable business. Higher inheritance tax is far better than higher income tax.

-2 ( +2 / -4 )

Posted in: Nursing exam rules for foreigners to be relaxed in response to low pass rate See in context

Something which they miss is that even these arcane Kanji can be picked up quite well in a few years on the job without too much effort if the basic knowledge is available. They should relax the test insofar that those who do not reach the full level but maybe 70-80% of it are kept on probation with continued training, where they can still continue learning the arcane kanji and repeat the test one or two times, before deciding if they fail. They'd get far more competent nurses with such a system.

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Posted in: Europe faces jihadist threat See in context

Extremism is on the rise almost everywhere. Look at the tea party in the US. These guys are as scary as islamists. An increase in extremist tendencies or dangers is definitely not a "European phenomenon".

-3 ( +2 / -5 )

Posted in: 2001-2010 warmest decade on record: WMO See in context

People with basic knowledge in geosciences know that Europe has mild winters due to the Gulf Stream's warm water, which becomes disrupted due to chances of ocean currents, which are caused by global warming. Yes, global warming means a drop in winter temperatures in Europe.

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Posted in: What's wrong with Japanese education? See in context

@GaroJ:

I think the rote learning of English is wasted time. It is enough to know the basics of English. The rest is learned by using it. Other languages are more complex and need more time, therefore they have to be started earlier. By that I don't say that "good English" is easy - but almost no one speaks "good English". And no one needs it (except linguists). By "good English" I mean Oxford English. The virtue of learning other language at an early age is that one gets used to the different levels of pronunciation on an intuitive level. Memorizing vocabulary and grammar can be done at any age, but training one's hearing and vocal chords for other languages should start as early as possible.

With fluency in Spanish, communication in South America becomes very easily. Even Portugese is mostly understandable. Thus, with regard to the growing economies there, I is more important to know a bit of Spanish instead of getting five points more on a TOEFL score. That's the core of what I said.

@Smithinjapan:

I know fully well about other nations with multiple official languages and I envy the kids growing up in such environs. Still, by "intelligent" I mean that learning a language on a higher level by self-study requires metal capacitiies, which only a minority has. But - this is the point I wanted to focus on - the majority never needs language skills at this level. The majority needs basic communication abilities (instead of high scores in exams). These abilities are reached in a rather short time if the language is actually practiced. I never intended to criticise "non-intelligence" or judge anyone.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

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