MiuraAnjin comments

Ford could have done so much better in Japan if they'd concentrated on higher grade Fiestas and Focuses (ST, RS etc.) thus taking the fight to VW, Renault, Citroen and Peugeot, rather than trying to go head to head with the locals with base models. Importing US designed and built cars was always a non-starter for obvious reasons.

However the F-150 will keep on trucking in the USA (but nowhere else) thanks to the outrageous 25% Chicken Tax that still protects it from far better vehicles imported from overseas. That bit of overt protectionism has done more to stymie American vehicle development than any other piece of global legislation in the past 60 years.

As much as I despise the groundless Chinese ban,

To ease the pain of losing that seafood demand, Japan will spend more than 100 billion yen to support the domestic fisheries industry.

this is the LDPs solution to everything.

Just sell the stuff to new markets! Japan has free trade agreements with Australia, Brunei, Chile, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States and Vietnam. And we all like sushi.

Well, it was not a 9.0 magnitude in Tokyo....

It was a magnitude 9.0 tremor full stop. Magnitude is the amplitude of the seismic waves at the epicentre. You're thinking of Shindo - a very different measure.

I've never understood the idea that shooting a warning shot straight up can kill folks on the ground.

A bullet leaves the muzzle of a Japanese police revolver at 850kph - a very lethal velocity. If fired straight up it will slow down due to wind resistance and gravity until it reaches its apogee, about 1km up. It will then fall at 9.8m/s/s until it reaches a much lower terminal velocity (again due to wind resistance) of about 150kph.

e=mc2 so the bullet now has a lot less energy.

Essentially, if you dropped a small 9g piece of metal off Tokyo Tower, it could certainly hurt someone, but probably wouldn't kill them.

Luddite: Pop in to a pub in Dartford, Romford or Dagenham on Saturday night and express that opinion. See how you get on.

The most appalling aspect is that Khan tried to suppress an independent study from Imperial College London that proved ULEZ has negligible effect.

Personally I’m annoyed that my EU4 compliant Eunos Roadster is liable fir the charge, just because it’s a personal import. And I really don’t think scrapping it and buying a new car will be better for the environment than the emissions caused by daily trips 300m inside the new ULEZ.

Gaijinland, I get what you're saying, and have indeed been threatened in the heat of an argument (Date a Latina, they said. It'll be fun, they said...) however I did not take that threat as real. The young lady in this case however clearly thinks this threat is genuine and, frankly, she knows best.

As above, I'm glad that plod has taken action for once; let's hope they can actually keep this nutcase away from her.

@garypen

You are not alone.

@girl_in_tokyo

I too suspect "all those involved (including men) got caught up in the moment and it spiraled out of control."

This assault was not about sexual pleasure.

My understanding is that Earth is a closed system; nothing except sunlight and the occasional meteorite gets in, and nothing except heat and the odd spacecraft gets out. And the thing regulating the amount of heat escaping Earth is the atmosphere. Millions of years ago Earth was a very inhospitable place with a lot of carbon in the atmosphere, not dissimilar to Venus today. But then something inexplicable (at least to me) happened: life. Carbon based organisms started to thrive and when they died their remains got consumed by the earth. For millions and millions of years this process continued, gradually taking carbon out of the atmosphere and burying it deep underground, until the planet got to a state where mammals could prosper. Then one particular species discovered fire. We spent tens of thousands of years cutting down trees which slowed the rate of atmospheric carbon reduction, but that is a mere drop in the ocean compared with what we've been up to for the last 200 years: actively digging up that trapped carbon and burning it, thus undoing millions of years of progress by pumping that carbon back where it came from - in to the atmosphere. 

That absolutely must be having an effect, and the evidence we have gathered in the last few decades shows that it absolutely is. 

Venus is a nasty place, just look at what happened to the probes the Soviets sent there. And that's Earth's future if we do not stop burning fossil fuels.

My personal "favorite": When that leading environmental scientist Prince (now King) Charles said that we only have 96 months to save the world.

He said that in 2009, and 96 months is 8 years.

So that means according to His Majesty the Environmental Wizard ... we've all been dead now for 6 years.

No it doesn't.

It means that, if he's right, we passed the point of no return in 2017. Temperature rises are in positive feed back now, so even if we miraculously hit net zero emissions tomorrow, temperatures will continue to rise.

That's entirely possible.

Some animal activists came up with the false narrative that serial killers start with cats

False narrative?

Ian Brady, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Kobe Child Murderer... and they're just the first three that spring to my mind. I'd call that a pretty damning and terrifying precedent.

On a per capita basis, Japan had just 2.24 deaths per 100,000 residents, less than a fifth the US rate of 12.7 per 100,000.

Deaths per capita, per vehicle and per 100,000km driven encourage widely varying conclusions as to which countries' roads are safe or dangerous. The USA comes out worse than Japan on all three metrics though.

CCS compatible.

Meanwhile Japan soldiers on with Betamax. Sorry, "Chademo".

Tip of the iceberg.

Car Convini Club, Autobacs, Yellow Hat, JMs and branded dealers get up to the same shenanigans. But Big Motor were so confident in their fraudulent antics that they even typed a staff manual of how to inflate an invoice!

BTW always, ALWAYS, make the mechanic show you the parts removed from your car any time something is "replaced". Better still, watch them do it.

Many happy memories from that show. It did foster some false expectations though: when I went to the mountains of Korea, they looked almost nothing like the hills of Southern California;-)

Expert (noun) - a person who is very knowledgeable about a particular area.

Gut feeling (noun) - a feeling or reaction based on an instinctive emotional response rather than considered thought.

Nissan, justifiably, gets a lot of stick on this site but their GHQ in Yokohama is a paragon of business acumen and common sense when compared with Jim Farley's loony bin in Dearborn. The 4,500 staff already let go are the lucky ones. There are better places to work.

Harmless eh?

So why are my mechanics banned from pouring engine coolant down the drain?

23 yr old drank till passed out at 4

Groping

Junior High School Teacher

BINGO!

Do I win a prize?

This always seems remarkably easy to do. Do they use face-recognition technology? Is there a law which permits that? A database?

This has become a euphemism for, "Police contacted Docomo, Au and Softbank and got a list of every mobile phone in that cell at that time. They then looked for a cell phone owner the same sex, age and height as the suspect the witness saw flee the scene. Finally they did a bit of old fashioned plod work and narrowed the field down to Hattori." Unfortunately for them, he hasn't done the honourable thing and admitted all charges as soon as he got arrested.

The agency said, following interviews with 89 tourism facilities, that they were able to charge an average of 54.2 percent more for renovated rooms.

So the 89 hotel owners immediately increased their staff's wages by 54.2% right? Right?

Or, let me guess, the (LDP funding) construction company got a barrel full of cash from us tax payers for the renovations, and the corporations owning the hotel chains increased profits, but not wages.

Good grief.

There are essentially only two oil companies in Japan now: Apollo and Enejet.

And they absolutely do rig forecourt prices already.

analysis of street surveillance camera footage

coupled with the location of their SIMs.

Wanderlust is spot on. Add Suica/Pasmo to the list and don't forget you'll have to divulge Your Number when registering a SIM card. The good news is that crime will continue to go down as criminals will continue to carry their phones while breaking the law. Unfortunately this also explains the push for ETC 2.0 (which transmits location several times a second) and why the Highway Patrol have started removing speed cameras recently; they're soon to be surplus to requirements.

Meanwhile Ford is withdrawing from "overserved markets" and will soon only sell cars in the USA.

The tide has turned.

I'm no fan of Mr West, but I'm even less of a fan of paps.

"I know, but Kanye you are a celebrity," Lechmanik replies, continuing to film.

That does not justify hounding these people in their every day lives. Find a better way to make a living Ms. Lechmanik.

The way that one slowly built in intensity brought back unpleasant memories.

Check your grab bags folks.

Criticising Russia for daring to base some of their nuclear weapons in a third country (Belarus) is a bit rich when the US overtly has nukes in Turkey, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, and covertly has them right here in Japan.

Reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis when Washington claimed having Soviet nukes on the island would give the USSR an unfair first strike advantage, all the while bold face denying that they already had missiles in Turkey (which they absolutely did).

In other words, "We can only make money in the USA, where our F-trucks have an unfair advantage thanks to the 25% chicken tax, and where future EVs will be protected by a similar lopsided tax on imports."

I've always had a soft spot for the Blue Oval, from Cortinas and Escorts to Fiestas and Rangers, but the management in Dearborn have been less than useless this millennium. Seems Farley at least acknowledges that.

I'm guessing Proxy hasn't spent a lot of time in Libiya.

Good on Kaouther Ben Hania for making this film. I've always found the disparity between the British press's treatment of 15yr old Shamima Begum and 17yr old Virginia Giuffre to be sickening. Hopefully this can convince some that these girls were victims, not traitors.