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So the fleet making its way across hasn't made any waves yet and might not even when it hits the headlines? [edit] As far as power goes how much could they do with Geothermal? has anyone made an assessment of how much could be generated. Due to the mountainous terrain you might be able to do some stuff with hydro but that might not be the best idea in an earthquake prone area. Has there been any thought or outline as to how they'll deal with their energy needs in the future? Munin fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Sep 17, 2012 |
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Sep 17, 2012 14:56
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The majority of news coverage and concern has been to do with the safety of Japanese in China. In fact in a lot of the 反日デモ stories I have seen there has been only a passing mention of the terrirorial dispute itself. As mentioned above though it's really just one of many ongoing news items - certainly one focus, but there's not exactly a frenzy of concern. Noda's been very low key, calling for cool heads and asking for China to show self restraint. Anecdotally, none of my friends (late 20s) seem too interested by the whole thing.
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Sep 17, 2012 15:56
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I don't know anything about geothermal but the Japanese are in serious negotiations with the Russians about building a direct LNG pipeline from Russia into Hokkaido. That would significantly reduce energy costs and go a long way towards making the nuclear free 2030 plan possible.
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Sep 17, 2012 16:13
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As far as going completely without nuclear power, they, as far as I know, went through all of 2011 with all the nuclear plants shutdown and only brought 2 or so only this summer to alleviate the worst energy shortages. So it is possible. Furthermore, while replacing the present nuclear power plants with non-nuclear options might be expensive, the existing plants won't last forever and will need replacing at a certain point anyway. A direct LNG pipeline from Russia might lower costs, but I'm not sure if they'd be willing to risk the political consequences. If anything, the Russians have shown that they're not above shutting down the gas to get some leverage. Just as Ukraine.
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Sep 17, 2012 22:43
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The plan also left plenty of loopholes in place, so 2030 isn't actually when the plants would all be shut down. That's just the number that the DPJ is going to use in its uphill campaign this coming year. In all likelihood if this plan went into effect as is, not all of the plants would actually be shut down until 2070 or something.
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Sep 18, 2012 01:09
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Just Winging It posted:As far as going completely without nuclear power, they, as far as I know, went through all of 2011 with all the nuclear plants shutdown and only brought 2 or so only this summer to alleviate the worst energy shortages. So it is possible. That is true, but at the same time, the trade surplus was pretty much wiped out because of all the oil and that they had to import to make up for the lack of nuclear. And they had to deal with Iran for some of that oil, which I don't have any problem with myself, but which risks pissing off the Yanks, whom Japan depends on for part of its security.
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Sep 18, 2012 01:23
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Inu posted:The plan also left plenty of loopholes in place, so 2030 isn't actually when the plants would all be shut down. That's just the number that the DPJ is going to use in its uphill campaign this coming year. In all likelihood if this plan went into effect as is, not all of the plants would actually be shut down until 2070 or something. 2030 is so far off in politics it may as well be an eternity. Crap, a significant chunk of the people that are protesting it now will be DEAD or so senile they can't even remember the problem. Really all they've done is boot the can down the road to the next generation of politicians that will be coming in to deal with. Current old farts will be done retired or in amakudari positions. Hell, they just okay'ed the building of 3 new reactors.
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Sep 18, 2012 02:24
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China: "All those riots here? They're all the fault of Japan. Had they not tried to buy the island, people wouldn't have destroyed buildsing, crippled people, and killed others." Most hilarious thing about this "purchase" business is if the Chinese really saw it as theirs then they would have just shrugged and been like: "  Look at you guys wasting tens of millions of dollars!" Instead they are taking it like Japan stole it from them which seems to lend credence that it really is Japan's.EDIT: Also wanted to add that apparently the Hague Convention on Child abduction basically fell off the table. I expected this to happen. They only put it on the table because of the stupid woman that got arrested in the US. Also an interesting bit in that link about parliament rules and conduct. Kenishi fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Sep 18, 2012 |
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Sep 18, 2012 07:47
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These riots serve China's political purposes, at least for the moment. I don't think they were planning on people smashing Korean shops too though. I bet they'll reel it in eventually, like they did back in 2005 or whatever when this happened before. Man, nationalist politicians in Japan, China and Korea should all get together and have a big thank-you party for each other, they all get everything they could possibly want out of this arrangement. edit: similarly Hezbollah should send the guys that made that rear end in a top hat movie a big bouquet of flowers and some chocolate. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Sep 18, 2012 |
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Sep 18, 2012 07:51
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Samurai Sanders posted:These riots serve China's political purposes, at least for the moment. I don't think they were planning on people smashing Korean shops too though. I bet they'll reel it in eventually, like they did back in 2005 or whatever when this happened before. I think they've already started to reel it in. There are some news blurbs floating around stating that China has already stated through state media circuits that it will be cracking down more on the protests. They don't want them to run to long because it'll put an even bigger hamper on their economy if too many businesses are destroyed or feel the need to leave.
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Sep 18, 2012 07:54
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Munin posted:So the fleet making its way across hasn't made any waves yet and might not even when it hits the headlines? It never existed. http://jen.jiji.com/jc/eng?g=eco&k=2012091801058
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Sep 19, 2012 23:52
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Hahaha, look how the new iOS map program solved the China/Japan island dispute: I just checked it myself and sure enough, two identical island groups.
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Sep 20, 2012 02:53
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They got the name wrong though. It's 钓鱼岛 or 釣魚臺。 What the gently caress, lets burn Foxconn!
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Sep 20, 2012 03:35
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The Bank of Japan attempted some degree of currency intervention yesterday. It didn't work.
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Sep 20, 2012 08:42
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No surprise there. They only bought 10 trillion yen worth of assets back (127Bil USD). That's negligible compared to prior attempts at intervention.
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Sep 20, 2012 09:31
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ClubmanGT posted:The Bank of Japan attempted some degree of currency intervention yesterday. Can we get a link on this? Some commentary? Kenishi posted:No surprise there. They only bought 10 trillion yen worth of assets back (127Bil USD). That's negligible compared to prior attempts at intervention. What were these prior attempts? Could you elaborate?
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Sep 20, 2012 15:41
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The Japanese Finance Ministry has been burning money at a record rate trying to stop the strong yen, with as much effect as anything else they do. I don't think there is a single useful politician here, and that isn't a loving exaggeration. Japan is a case study in how to fail and it is all because of the elected leadership and the bureaucracy and vested interests around them. Countries should study Japan so they can best learn how to avoid all the mistakes. I don't find any of that cynical.
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Sep 20, 2012 15:47
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hadji murad posted:The Japanese Finance Ministry has been burning money at a record rate trying to stop the strong yen, with as much effect as anything else they do. Ok, can you give me more info on what/how they've failed in doing? Is the strong Yen hurting exports or is there more to it? I learned a bit about how the tri-part power structure in Japan, that it is between the politicos, Beaurocrats and the mega-corps, with the two latter being the important ones but not in any great depth and from fairly biased sources, so it would be cool to know more about that.
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Sep 20, 2012 18:15
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Ok, can you give me more info on what/how they've failed in doing? Is the strong Yen hurting exports or is there more to it? There are a lot of books, mostly written in the 1980's, which claim to explain this and are all still relevant, though kind of out of date. The best one is Gavin McCormack, 'The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence.' Basically, a lot of electoral consent in Japan after World War II was secured through big infrastructural development projects, particularly out in the sticks. So your local LDP politician would secure a gov't level contract for a hydroelectric dam or a highway or a bizarre theme park working with the key ministries, mostly construction and finance which would plan the thing and then a big construction company connected to a keiretsu (say, Seibu or Mitsubishi) would build the thing, producing employment and possibly even a quality of life improvement. In return, you voted for the LDP politician, who did what the keiretsu said otherwise and let the ministries decide policy while worrying about getting reelected. So, for example, this is how the Fukushima plants got built. There is a lot more to the story, like bid-rigging, local opposition getting plowed under, keidanren (the Industrial Manufacturers Association) writing gov't policy, gerrymandering, and so on. The big story now basically has to do with how this all got financed (read: bonds, public debt) plus the fact that the policy was all based on long-term projections about economic growth which turned out to be wrong after the bubble ended. So there are now a lot of little municipalities in dire debt with declining populations and no economy because their long-term development plan was based on endless demand for, say, sheep insemination theme parks (I'm making that up, but barely.) McCormack's book has one account of a municipality who decided to make their theme park about gold, so they bought lots of gold objects...they were either completely caught in the fever of the 80's or very, very, smart. SO basically that system doesn't work any more, except that the gov't is so divided that by most accounts the power of the ministries has actually increased. The best explanation I've heard of the political gridlock is that the Diet is actually sandwiched between popular opinion and Keidanren and can't do anything: see the consumption tax, which is a pure austerity measure, basically dipping into peoples' personal income for debt service. PS: a lot of this also has to do with the fact that the judicial branch of government in Japan does close to literally nothing whatsoever. Roadside_Picnic fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Sep 21, 2012 |
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Sep 21, 2012 05:56
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hadji murad posted:The Japanese Finance Ministry has been burning money at a record rate trying to stop the strong yen, with as much effect as anything else they do. There are lots of things in Japan that do work well but get no attention. The health care system is excellent, particularly when you consider that Japan is actually not particularly rich by OECD standards. For all the greenwashing, Japan does very well on some environmental issues, particularly transportation, and it's easy to forget how environmentally soviet-style, wrecked and lax Japan was into the 1970's (Tokyo had brown air, people were getting chloroacne from household products, etc). Also, it's a cliche but keep in mind Japan used to be -really- poor per capita. As a country Japan has been rich and powerful for a lot longer then people tend to assume, but that's because Japan is a big country. Most average people saw none of that wealth until the 1950's and 1960's.
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Sep 21, 2012 06:35
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Roadside_Picnic posted:There are lots of things in Japan that do work well but get no attention. The health care system is excellent, particularly when you consider that Japan is actually not particularly rich by OECD standards. For all the greenwashing, Japan does very well on some environmental issues, particularly transportation, and it's easy to forget how environmentally soviet-style, wrecked and lax Japan was into the 1970's (Tokyo had brown air, people were getting chloroacne from household products, etc). Japan also holds a majority of the world's green energy patents.
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Sep 21, 2012 07:14
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I agree with Roadside_Picnic on this. Japan does have a lot of unfortunate problems that shouldn't happen, but most of the hand-wringing I see over it comes from business people or economists that, in my opinion, have a very warped view that economic growth should be infinite. You see it phrased as "Japan's economy is stagnating." It seems like every criticism like that has packed with it a tacit assumption that if Japan is not performing as it did during then bubble, then it's failing greatly. It reads to me like a bunch of rich assholes whining that they've lost one of their favorite places to dump lots of money for a quick payout. I'm not really sure what people are envisioning for Japan. It's the 3rd or 4th largest economy in the world, has very little in the way of natural resources to exploit, doesn't really have that much land, and had a GDP very close to China's despite having 1/10th population. I don't see how anyone can argue in a reasonable way that the aggregate economic numbers out of Japan should be "better" than they are right now. The idea that Japan's economy is somehow weak or doing poorly right now is also ridiculous. There's a reason the yen is so high. With the dollar doing poorly and American institutions having lots of exposure to the meltdown in Europe the yen has become a very safe place to park money. The yen is strong right now for reasons that are completely outside the control of Japan. It's not a wonder more quantitative easing hasn't worked. Unless Japan has enough money to bail out Euro-zone then the yen will stay strong. A person can belly-ache all day about the macroeconomics of Japan, but Japan's mostly doing fine. Quality, price, and access to healthcare are very good. Japan is self-sufficient in terms of producing most of the staple foods that feed most of its citizens. Transportation and infrastructure are extremely good. Japanese citizens as a group are very conscious of recycling, energy conservation, and sustainability. Japan also does well in terms of income inequality, though I suspect probably less well in terms of social mobility due to discrimination. This isn't to say Japan is some magical place where everything is aces. There's problems and dumb poo poo does happen too often, but it's not the dumb poo poo that I hear about in the foreign press a lot.
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Sep 21, 2012 07:36
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ErIog posted:I agree with Roadside_Picnic on this. Japan does have a lot of unfortunate problems that shouldn't happen, but most of the hand-wringing I see over it comes from business people or economists that, in my opinion, have a very warped view that economic growth should be infinite. You see it phrased as "Japan's economy is stagnating." Edit: and also, they refused to write off the bad private debts. LngBolt fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Sep 21, 2012 |
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Sep 21, 2012 07:57
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I think they should bring it down because I'm looking to buy a car and it would help me out a lot. But yea, I think people wildly underestimate the safe-haven effect. New Zealand has the same problem, although given our size we'd probably have to print money for the next thirty years straight to even dent the NZD, let alone seriously bring it down. Japan may not have inspiring productivity, but it's a relatively safe and stable market.
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Sep 21, 2012 08:12
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LngBolt posted:Japan is doing less well than it could if it had full employment. Which it could have, but doesn't, because interests within the leadership refuse to utilize their sovereign currency to the maximum extent. Oh and the austerity, consumption tax stuff isn't helping either. Full employment in Japan historically has been defined at 0% unemployment. In the US, it's 5%. The bigger problem is actually underemployment, hidden unemployment and exploitative poo poo jobs. There are a lot more people than you'd think working 37.49 hours a week at 100-yen shops with 16-hour shifts.
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Sep 21, 2012 21:03
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Ok, can you give me more info on what/how they've failed in doing? Is the strong Yen hurting exports or is there more to it? Yes, the primary concern is the strong Yen hurting exports. As for Japan's previous Yen interventions, I casually dug around the internet and found 4 explicit instances of the Bank of Japan intervening to weaken the yen prior to the most recent one. I might be missing something because central banks intentionally use the same or similar terminology for different policy actions and news organizations follow them, adding to the confusion. Seriously, gently caress central-bank-anese.
Here’s a chart of USD to JPY exchange rate for the time period. For laughs, 82 yens-per-dollar was suppose to be the do-not-cross exchange rate.  Generally speaking, the interventions haven’t stopped the Yen appreciation (getting stronger) against the US dollar. The Yen does weaken temporarily immediately after the intervention, but then it bounces back after a few days. This current intervention is not negligible compared to previous interventions but is actually par for the course (it's ~Y10 trillion). However, that doesn't bode well for its success given how the similarly sized intervention in October 2011 didn't do much to stop the Yen's appreciation. As to why the interventions fail, the most plausible explanation I've heard (please note that I don't know poo poo) is that there's a strong demand for Yen assets. Even with its massive debt, political inability, deflation, etc., Japan is still better off than many other developed economies, so it has a perception of being a "safe haven." The world keeps getting more and more uncertain (economically speaking) so people keep piling onto safe things, namely US Treasuries and, I guess, Japanese bonds. If someone has a better explanation, please bring it up because, seriously, I don't know poo poo. CIGNX fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Sep 23, 2012 |
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Sep 22, 2012 23:55
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CIGNX posted:Yes, the primary concern is the strong Yen hurting exports. Look into: The Yen Carry Trade, which kept the Yen cheap (and relies on it being cheap), which then fell apart in 2007 and was followed by the reverse yen carry trade (which banks on the exact opposite happening).
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Sep 23, 2012 02:51
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Also look into historical interest rate spreads. The yen was cheap for way too many years.
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Sep 23, 2012 06:47
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The yen appreciating against the USD is also the fault of the dollar weakening over time. It's hard to untangle exchange rates sometimes, but I suspect significant parts of have more to do with the dollar losing strength as opposed to the yen gaining that much strength.
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Sep 23, 2012 17:10
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This is purely anecdotal, but I occasionally work with people in the financial services sector in Japan, and by all accounts they're experiencing a huge boom right now. Hiring and salaries are up, and every major brokerage house in Tokyo has seen a massive jump in foreign investment. The conventional wisdom on this is that staying clear of mortgage backed securities left them with much healthier balance sheets than competitors on Wall Street or in the Eurozone, making it the default place to stash capital for safekeeping.
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Sep 23, 2012 17:23
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ErIog posted:The yen appreciating against the USD is also the fault of the dollar weakening over time. It's hard to untangle exchange rates sometimes, but I suspect significant parts of have more to do with the dollar losing strength as opposed to the yen gaining that much strength. It's not just against the USD though. It's way up against the KRW, for one, and the won is up against the dollar too. As I'm reminded every time I transfer money back for student loans. 
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Sep 24, 2012 00:01
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Grand Fromage posted:It's not just against the USD though. It's way up against the KRW, for one, and the won is up against the dollar too. As I'm reminded every time I transfer money back for student loans. If the Won is up against the dollar shouldn't you be happy when you transfer it back because you will be getting more USD for the same Won?
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Sep 24, 2012 00:03
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EasternBronze posted:If the Won is up against the dollar shouldn't you be happy when you transfer it back because you will be getting more USD for the same Won? No, I get a lot less than when I first moved here. Am I using the words wrong?
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Sep 24, 2012 00:08
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Grand Fromage posted:No, I get a lot less than when I first moved here. Am I using the words wrong?
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Sep 24, 2012 01:07
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Yeah I think you had those reversed. If the Won is up against the dollar, that means its value has increased relative to the dollar, right?
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Sep 24, 2012 02:13
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Yeah I shouldn't post so early in the morning. It's vaguely confusing since the bigger the won number in the won -> dollar relationship, the further down it has gone. Here it has little to do with the dollar, the government is constantly loving with the value to drive exports. They had a big intervention months back that wiped out 10% of my income in a weekend. That was fun.
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Sep 24, 2012 02:16
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I realize this isn't related to Japan (directly), but is Korea's domestic market fairly strong? I've heard it stated that that is why Japan has been struggling in recent years. Japan use to have a huge domestic market and then the real estate bubble popped and people started saving, and then Japan's only option was to switch to being an exporter.
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Sep 24, 2012 02:23
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I'm not sure. Most Koreans will only buy Korean goods because they are Korean, and Koreans hate buying used things or having old things so there's constant turnover. Consumer goods here are also hella expensive though, there are some kind of taxes to encourage selling overseas instead of domestically plus the aforementioned Korean only products thing kind of gives the chaebols license to charge whatever the hell they want. Korea has some of the highest prices in the world for consumer goods. Exports have always been primary, Korea's really only had the money for home consumption in the last decade, two if you're being generous. My experience isn't useful for judging since I have found Korean products to be garbage and avoid them whenever possible.
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Sep 24, 2012 02:35
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Grand Fromage posted:I'm not sure. Most Koreans will only buy Korean goods because they are Korean, and Koreans hate buying used things or having old things so there's constant turnover. Consumer goods here are also hella expensive though, there are some kind of taxes to encourage selling overseas instead of domestically plus the aforementioned Korean only products thing kind of gives the chaebols license to charge whatever the hell they want. Korea has some of the highest prices in the world for consumer goods.
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Sep 24, 2012 04:35
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Kenishi posted:This isn't really that much different from Japan really. There is still a lot of "Buy Japan" going around in Japan, maybe more so since the earthquake. They also tend to have the same idea about used stuff.
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Sep 24, 2012 04:37
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