News Stories

[sa547]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

Is the Japanese gaming industry in crisis?

"The Japanese don't like shooting and war games very much. They prefer playing in fantasy worlds and battling with swords. I think there is very little interest in fighting with guns and this sort of combat game."

I'm amused with the Enterbrain man's statement, as I know that Kana Ueda sometimes goes off to battle in Halo.

[ganbaru]

Leukemia breakthrough suggested in lab finding
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/...rticle1788954/

[Azumanga Davo]

Amazing the science breakthroughs that are possible today. Long live scientists!*

* - I imagine they are already working on that...

[AnimeFan188]

Originally Posted by Hey Missus

Amazing the science breakthroughs that are possible today. Long live scientists!*

* - I imagine they are already working on that...

Actually, yes:

Army Looks to Keep Troops Forever Young:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009...forever-young/


The End of Aging? Inside the New Hunt for a Cure to Growing Old:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...ension/4248482


Though it all brings this Dilbert comic strip to mind:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-01-30/

[Roger Rambo]

Originally Posted by AnimeFan188

Actually, yes:

Army Looks to Keep Troops Forever Young:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009...forever-young/

Great. Then they can start drafting people in their seventies

[Nosauz]

Originally Posted by Roger Rambo

Great. Then they can start drafting people in their seventies

That would solve the social security quandary, instead of black people for Operation Human Shield we can have old people, 2 birds meet one stone.

[Ithekro]

Sad news from Japan, Yoshinobu Nishizaki (creator of Space Battleship Yamato) passed away yesterday on November 7th due to a fall. Here are the news links:

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/natio...na002000c.html

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news...ki-passes-away

[Terrestrial Dream]

G-20 Needs More Than Luck to Avoid Lost Decade

Spoiler:

There’s a bit of karma involved in the Group of 20 holding its summit in Seoul.

Thirteen years ago, South Korea was at the center of chaos that was going global in a hurry. Investors who ignored troubles in Thailand and Indonesia had no choice but to confront reality once the then-11th biggest economy crashed.

South Korea had U.S. stocks reeling and the Federal Reserve worried. Korea in the late 1990s was like Spain today, and Thailand was like present-day Greece -- a canary in the financial coal mine. We feared its woes would be shared by more vital places. Today, we worry Spain, the No. 9 economy, will be the Korea-like domino that causes a chain reaction.

The G-20, along with discussing China’s currency, will focus on Japan. Namely, keeping the U.S. and euro zone economies from experiencing their own lost decades.

That’s where Korean karma comes into play. Korea offers a good road map to fighting the Japanifaction of the global economy. Past actions put its economy on a virtuous path, allowing it to steer around deflation and falling living standards.

Just two years ago, South Korea was on tap to become the next Iceland. The fear was that its companies didn’t learn the lessons of the Asian crisis and issued too much short-term debt in foreign currencies. To many, that meant Korea looked like a giant hedge fund. Korea confounded the skeptics and today is growing at 4.5 percent.

Crisis Management

Korea’s real contribution to today’s discourse is its crisis-management steps in the late 1990s. It did everything Japan didn’t and the U.S. is failing to do now. Weak companies and banks were allowed to fail, often regardless of size. Interest-rate policies never lost a long-term perspective. The nation’s people were asked to sacrifice. Avoiding denial was a key element of the response.

Things didn’t always go smoothly. One snafu was shifting bubbles from the corporate sector to households, which took on too much debt. That was later corrected. The jump in short-term debt in the late 2000s didn’t help. The role of family conglomerates remains too large for comfort.

In a world devoid of economic role models, though, Korea’s handiwork is worth a look. Japan’s main failing after its 1980s boom and bust was timidity. It restructured little and tossed money at the economy expecting an eventual rebound. Twenty years on, Japan has the largest public debt in the industrialized world, a central bank no one respects and persistent deflation.

Japanese-Like Quagmire

Count Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley’s nonexecutive Asia chairman, among those worried the “world economy is at risk of falling into a Japanese-like quagmire.” We need to stop debating whether the U.S. will suffer that fate. It already has -- politicians in Washington just don’t know it yet.

The Fed said as much last week when it announced a second round of quantitative easing. The risk is that lawmakers don’t get the memo. Last week’s U.S. election divided Congress in a way that should worry Asia.

It’s great that China’s economy is growing at 9.6 percent. Yet it’s no substitute for the $14 trillion U.S. economy, and an undervalued yuan may harm neighbors more than China’s growth aids them. We could be looking at two years of complete gridlock, making the U.S. policy apparatus look all too Japan-like.

On some level, the U.S. would be lucky to become Japan. While this heretical view has made the rounds in recent years, it’s worth exploring anew. Even today, Japanese households are sitting on more savings than the annual output of the U.S. economy. That’s why Japan has been able to muddle along for 20 years without unraveling.

Exit Strategies

Mass homelessness never occurred, crime rates didn’t soar and the bond market avoided crashing amid an explosion of government debt. It’s doubtful the U.S. would fare even slightly as well if its savings-deprived economy walked in place for 10 years, never mind 20.

Japan has yet to find an exit strategy from zero rates and a debt that’s double the size of its economy. The U.S.’s problem may be that it didn’t spend enough to jumpstart things or address the crushing household debt imperiling its outlook. This is the root cause of America’s Japanification.

The odds are stacked against the Nov. 11-12 G-20 confab finding a solution. All ultralow rates in the U.S. and elsewhere accomplished is sending waves of hot money Asia’s way. It’s inflating bubbles in stocks and real estate and complicating the jobs of officials from Beijing to Jakarta.

That brings us back to the lessons from Korea. In its darkest days it resisted the urge to slash rates to zero to avoid the so-called bubble fix. Free money has a way of boosting markets and offering a false sense that recovery is afoot. In reality, it just creates new bubbles to paper over old ones. Such actions come back to haunt you later.

What the world needs is a little good karma for a change. If officials look close enough, they may find some in Seoul.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-1...iam-pesek.html

[ganbaru]

10,000 refugees flee from Myanmar after election violence
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1789774/
Beside China, is there anyone than back-up the junta ?

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by ganbaru

10,000 refugees flee from Myanmar after election violence
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1789774/
Beside China, is there anyone than back-up the junta ?

India - the world largest democracy has quite a few trade deals with myanmar.

[flying ^]

USA vs Europe

who will be the first to find god particle?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10733944

[Azumanga Davo]

The Netherlands comes up with a novel idea to combat illegal cannabis plantations: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11714714

[ganbaru]

China and Germany slam U.S. policy before G20 summit
http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNew...6A80MB20101109
Remind me of what is the use of those reunion.

[Azumanga Davo]

Originally Posted by ganbaru

China and Germany slam U.S. policy before G20 summit
http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNew...6A80MB20101109
Remind me of what is the use of those reunion.

I believe it accomplishes the following:

* It guarantees at least one argument between nations per year.
* Protesters get good practice at being angsty.
* Police get to have fun with riot shields for probably the only time in their career.

But apart from that, nothing useful.

[Tom Bombadil]

Originally Posted by Hey Missus

I believe it accomplishes the following:

* It guarantees at least one argument between nations per year.
* Protesters get good practice at being angsty.
* Police get to have fun with riot shields for probably the only time in their career.

But apart from that, nothing useful.

Having verbal arguments in batches instead a major one that branches into other means? Make sense.

[ganbaru]

U.S. cargo shippers lobbied against security screening in years before mail-bomb plot
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1791240/
Of course they probably thought than strict inspection would cost on the long run more than loosing a few airplanes, given the (apparent) low risk ...

[AnimeFan188]

"Last night the normally hazy sunset off the southern California coast was i
nterrupted by a missile streaking upward and across the sky, captured by a local
CBS News affiliate's helicopter camera. But no one from the Navy to the Air Force
to the brass at the Pentagon is saying definitively what the object was or where
it came from, outside of the fact that it originated from somewhere at sea about
35 miles west of Los Angeles and north of Catalina Island."

See:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/art...medium=twitter

[Xellos-_^]

it is ET and he is going home.

[Mentar]

Actually, it's not quite THAT funny.

Experts were saying that the kind of the vapor trail indicates a missile of considerable size, possibly a sub-launched ICBM. The Department of Defense has no clue who or what it was, but at the same time they claim that there's no cause for alarm, and that no foreign military would be behind this. (Which - in this combination - makes no sense whatsoever, but what could make the American press mention this little detail).

So. How could that happen?

Possibility 1: Launched by the US military, and someone has forgotten to announce the launch. Exceptionally unlikely, because the US military should know who fired the missile when, at least.

Possibility 2: Launched by the US military, but they're pretending not to know. Now why would they possibly do that? What's the point? Does anyone doubt that the US has submarine-based missile platforms? The only reason I can come up which would be remotely likely would be that this was some kind of accident. But if that's the case, that's no reason to worry?!?!

Possibility 3: NOT launched by the US military. Unsettling, but perfectly possible. THIS would make sense, as a message: "Look, we can fire strategic missiles at you from point-blank range." - as a threat. And if something like this happened, I'd expect the American DoD to react EXACTLY this way: Pretending not to know, insisting that this was no cause for alarm, and categorically denying that it could have been someone else.

So let's see with which cover story they'll be coming up. If there's no detailed final conclusion, and we see the story dying out in the media quickly, I'm convinced it will have been 3) - and then I'm wondering what the *censored* is going on to cause a major power to pull off a threat like that. And for WHAT?

[Anh_Minh]

Yeah, it is kinda worrying when the least alarming possibility is that some kind of typo on some console in a submarine resulting in the launch of an ICBM. "Sorry, guys! I was cleaning the rocket, and it went off on its own..."