Japanese accept everything and there are problems with that.neorichieb1971 wrote:So what if any justification does Japan give for its lack of progress on sexism? Do the women just accept it?
RegalSin wrote:New PowerPuff Girls. They all have evil pornstart eyelashes.
RegalSin wrote:You can't even drive across the country Naked anymore
Looks like something skykid would come up with. An expert on every American and Japanese and person of the world in only 6 months.GaijinPunch wrote:and there are problems with that.
This guy doesn't think our uneducated poor folk are real Americans.The difference is that Americans don’t live their lives by this continual acceptance of defeat and helplessness.
How many roads must Skykid walk downRob wrote:Looks like something skykid would come up with. An expert on every American and Japanese and person of the world in only 6 months.
RegalSin wrote:You can't even drive across the country Naked anymore
If it hasn't happened yet, it's not going to happen.Mortificator wrote:How many roads must Skykid walk downRob wrote:Looks like something skykid would come up with. An expert on every American and Japanese and person of the world in only 6 months.
Before you will call him Skyman?
Or Skyboy.Mortificator wrote: How many roads must Skykid walk down
Before you will call him Skyman?
ChurchOfSolipsism wrote: ALso, this is how SKykid usually posts
Strikers1945guy wrote:"Do we....eat chicken balls?!"
.. And the great thing is that you could replace "Japan" with almost any country and justify most anything!neorichieb1971 wrote: Japan is a peaceful country.. Its clean, it has pride and values. Surely those qualities are above all else the most important? Its ranking status in the world of sexism is more important to us than them. Which goes to show you a lot about how our cultures are different. Let people be different if they want to be.. Don't persecute them.
Child-sex tourism:neorichieb1971 wrote: U.A.E. is a peaceful country.. Its clean, it has pride and values. Surely those qualities are above all else the most important? Its ranking status in the world of immigrants kept in inhuman working conditions with no chance of escape is more important to us than them. Which goes to show you a lot about how our cultures are different. Let people be different if they want to be.. Don't persecute them.
Wheeeee!!!neorichieb1971 wrote: Cambodia is a peaceful country.. Its clean, it has pride and values. Surely those qualities are above all else the most important? Its ranking status in the world of children used for sex and pornography is more important to us than them. Which goes to show you a lot about how our cultures are different. Let people be different if they want to be.. Don't persecute them.
You're entering dangerous territory, man. Cleanliness is more important than basic human rights? Japanese women like being continuously disrespected and having no voice? Being conditioned to accept one's lot in life and learning how to repress your true feelings doesn't mean you "like" it.neorichieb1971 wrote:Japan is a peaceful country.. Its clean, it has pride and values. Surely those qualities are above all else the most important? Its ranking status in the world of sexism is more important to us than them. Which goes to show you a lot about how our cultures are different. Let people be different if they want to be..
ChurchOfSolipsism wrote: ALso, this is how SKykid usually posts
The other 60% of Japanese men surveyed disagreed that there is sexism towards women. Rather, they believe that the sexism is instead towards Japanese men.*In the workplace: women have higher expectations placed on them, longer working hours, face unacceptable sexual harassment and lack of respect from male coworkers, are often never promoted, receive far lesser pay, are expected to serve the men, etc.
*Even if women want to work, they are still expected to single-handedly take care of the children and the house as well, making their lives extremely busy and difficult
*Japanese women are always expected to look cute, making them, by society’s standards, “undesirable” after they’ve reached a certain age
It then goes on to state that because women in Japan earn less, they pay less too.*Women often receive discounts for certain social places, such as “ladies night” at the movie theater, or paying less than a man to enter a bar
*Men are not allowed to do certain jobs, because those are only given to women
See, before I thought you were being serious. You are joking around though, right?neorichieb1971 wrote:Are there any Japanese women on here that can chime in?
I have never once witnessed a protest from Japan about sexism. Therefore I don't think its a concern. If Japanese women were doing a "Tiananmen square" type ordeal then obviously the world would take better notice.
As for rancors comments. Japanese women come across as very respectable human beings. I've never met one, but i've watched movies, ghibli stuff and I can't remember any kind of sexism portrayed at all. Comparing respectable women to victims of child abuse and slavery is a bit of a stretch. I really think this is cultural acceptance thing.
any links to complaints internally to Japan about sexism?
The writer's understanding of economics unfortunately does not go beyond buzzwords. For starters, the quantitative easing which the writer praises as ending deflation(seems a bit early to be proclaiming that so definitively) and setting the stage for a new era is nothing new in Japan. Nor is what Japan practicing monetarism.Ed Oscuro wrote:Topically, I thought this recent op-ed in Bloomberg was interesting, perhaps even hopeful.
Oh to be fair I think the author was hinting at austerity type measures when he referred to Europe as going the opposite direction, and I don't disagree with the premise there. Many people have written similar things. I don't disagree with that idea in the article.Ed Oscuro wrote:+/- Monetarist push - the note about Milton Friedman is strange here, but if the author is just using this as a synonym for quantitative easing, then this doesn't seem like it goes in the - side of the ledger. But that apparently isn't right. I also originally read this as including a clear reference to the rather disastrous austerity policies popular in Europe at the moment - but now that I read it again, I realize I don't know my righty lingo well enough to figure out what Europe is doing that's supposedly contrary to monetarism. So probably I read this as juxtaposing totally different economic theories than the ones the author intended. Talking about monetarism seems to be strange when the issue hasn't been "do governments influence national output negatively by issuing currency" but rather "do governments influence national output positively?" I thought this was the stark contrast between the US (which still has plenty of "deficit hawks" and other white knight types seeking to enact austerity policy) and the European situation.
One of the difficult things to get across is that actually taxes do not pay for government. Money is created by government(the central bank) and then injected into the economy. Taxes come afterwards. It's like a football stadium, they get the tickets out there and then collect them. It's impossible to do it the other way around. If anyone can explain to me what the Central Bank is for and where the money comes from if it is not created by government, I would be amused to read. But the actual fact is that, unless it's counterfeit, money comes from government, another words government finances itself.Ed Oscuro wrote:+/- Cutting the corporate tax rate: Overall bad. The realist in me has to admit that everybody wants to defect in this prisoner's game, putting neighboring states / nations at a disadvantage for corporate profits. On the other hand, it still seems the big picture is that this doesn't serve much of a purpose other than shifting the burden for paying for government away from the wealthy, so it should still be opposed.
Anytime a news story from the United States comes up describing Japan's efforts to "privatize" a particular industry in Japan(and East Asia in general), one should immediately apply air quotes and be skeptical of the information being communicated. Free marketers have spilled much ink about the 80s privatization of the Japan railways for example. Except when one digs a little deeper(here's a summary: http://www.jrtr.net/jrtr27/s48_ter.html), one finds a better word might be the "splitting" of the Japanese railways rather than some more fundamental changes. One major government owned railway gets split into multiple railways that are distributed and contracted to various "private" companies. A few railways closed, but for the most part the structure of the Japanese railway is unchanged, you just had some private companies adding some features and whatnot. But these are highly regulated entities is the point, they are not private companies with the power to do what they like. They're government partnerships.Ed Oscuro wrote:Looking at the rest of the paragraph that begins with corporate taxes: Deregulation, privatizing the national pension fund, TPP - kind of funny to see the author talking about "red meat" issues earlier and then trotting out all these horrible and mostly uniquely right-wing causes. So yeah, agreed on those.
This is remarkably true, actually. If you don't have to pay the tax that is rent and car insurance, it is REALLY cheap to live. I'm talking one or two hours a day on Amazon's online sweatshop cheap to live. 50 bucks for food, 50 bucks for electricity, 50 bucks for water, you've got money left over to even buy a little something at the end of the month.Without taxes, no one needs to have a "job" that pays them money.
It's... depressing that these folks can't see what a world with deflation would be like.a complete horror of inflation
The estate tax is probably the only reason fiat currency still works. Compound interest is a hell of a thing; Marx's example of a penny invested on the day Jesus was born accumulating 5% interest a year being worth a gigantic sphere of gold reaching from the center of the Sun out to Jupiter always comes to mind. That's a real concern if you abolish the estate tax. Or cure aging I guess.is to restrict control of the economy by wealth accumulators.
Just wanted to say that I really liked this post.Wenchang wrote:Oh to be fair I think the author was hinting at austerity type measures when he referred to Europe as going the opposite direction, and I don't disagree with the premise there. Many people have written similar things. I don't disagree with that idea in the article.Ed Oscuro wrote:+/- Monetarist push - the note about Milton Friedman is strange here, but if the author is just using this as a synonym for quantitative easing, then this doesn't seem like it goes in the - side of the ledger. But that apparently isn't right. I also originally read this as including a clear reference to the rather disastrous austerity policies popular in Europe at the moment - but now that I read it again, I realize I don't know my righty lingo well enough to figure out what Europe is doing that's supposedly contrary to monetarism. So probably I read this as juxtaposing totally different economic theories than the ones the author intended. Talking about monetarism seems to be strange when the issue hasn't been "do governments influence national output negatively by issuing currency" but rather "do governments influence national output positively?" I thought this was the stark contrast between the US (which still has plenty of "deficit hawks" and other white knight types seeking to enact austerity policy) and the European situation.
One of the difficult things to get across is that actually taxes do not pay for government. Money is created by government(the central bank) and then injected into the economy. Taxes come afterwards. It's like a football stadium, they get the tickets out there and then collect them. It's impossible to do it the other way around. If anyone can explain to me what the Central Bank is for and where the money comes from if it is not created by government, I would be amused to read. But the actual fact is that, unless it's counterfeit, money comes from government, another words government finances itself.Ed Oscuro wrote:+/- Cutting the corporate tax rate: Overall bad. The realist in me has to admit that everybody wants to defect in this prisoner's game, putting neighboring states / nations at a disadvantage for corporate profits. On the other hand, it still seems the big picture is that this doesn't serve much of a purpose other than shifting the burden for paying for government away from the wealthy, so it should still be opposed.
The purpose of taxes is to regulate demand/control for inflation and to regulate in other ways(such as to de-incentivize particular types of behavior). And also, in the initial stages, taxes are what force people to work in the first place(otherwise those paper bills are useless, they only acquire value when a coercive entity, a government another words, creates incentive for people to want to hold on to them), or more succinctly: to create unemployment. As Warren Mosler would say: "The purpose of taxes is to create unemployment." Without taxes, no one needs to have a "job" that pays them money. They're still busy doing things of course, as survival would dictate, but they're not working for money.
From the inflation standpoint, if you think the behavior of corporations is more conducive to inflationary tendencies than the general populace it might make sense to tax them more. If you want to eliminate money from corporations in favor of other elements in the economy corporate taxes *might* accomplish that. But mostly I think corporate taxes are a matter of regulation. If you want to limit the power of corporations(something I do not necessarily disagree with doing), taxes are a way to do that. From my perspective the issue tends to be overblown on both sides. Abe cuts the tax rate for corporations, but he also eliminated some exceptions and deductibles that certain businesses were able to employ. How significant the difference is, is not clear to me. What's most important to me is regulating how corporations behave. Tax systems that encourage investment but discourage large accumulation of wealth by individuals of a corporation, which the United States used to have, and most OECD nations have in some form or another, I think is generally a good idea.
Anytime a news story from the United States comes up describing Japan's efforts to "privatize" a particular industry in Japan(and East Asia in general), one should immediately apply air quotes and be skeptical of the information being communicated. Free marketers have spilled much ink about the 80s privatization of the Japan railways for example. Except when one digs a little deeper(here's a summary: http://www.jrtr.net/jrtr27/s48_ter.html), one finds a better word might be the "splitting" of the Japanese railways rather than some more fundamental changes. One major government owned railway gets split into multiple railways that are distributed and contracted to various "private" companies. A few railways closed, but for the most part the structure of the Japanese railway is unchanged, you just had some private companies adding some features and whatnot. But these are highly regulated entities is the point, they are not private companies with the power to do what they like. They're government partnerships.Ed Oscuro wrote:Looking at the rest of the paragraph that begins with corporate taxes: Deregulation, privatizing the national pension fund, TPP - kind of funny to see the author talking about "red meat" issues earlier and then trotting out all these horrible and mostly uniquely right-wing causes. So yeah, agreed on those.
This is basically the reality of much of the Japanese economy, and places like South Korea for example as well. When U.S. writers want to write about how awesome they are, they resort to the "free market" myth. When they're feeling down about them, they forget about free markets and talk about something else like demographics or how the "markets don't work there" or lack of "innovation" or whatever the story of the day is. But the reality is that these are all highly regulated countries. South Korea is an example almost to the point of comedy. Their great national companies like Samsung used to be government owned until relatively modern years. This is a country who creates government programs to help export animated films and K-Pop to other parts of the world. But this sort of thing gets little attention in U.S. and British media, which credits development in East Asian countries to buzzwords like "free trade" without caring to investigate further. Of course I don't know, but I suspect the pension fund issue in Japan is mostly more of the same.
The Trans Pacific Partnership example might be that writer's biggest failing though. Namely because its adoption seems to have been a failure so far, and also because it's not even clear to me that the Japanese government are "supporting" it for any reason other than to placate the United States.
