One of the reasons why it's harder to buy some used homes in Japan is because it's harder government backed housing loans for housing that do not meet earthquake standards. For older buildings it's also harder or not possible to get tax breaks.
Building standards were first implemented in Japan in 1952 and were revised in 1981 and 2000. Apologies for not having an English source, but of the people who were killed because of the house or building that they lived in, 98% were living in a building/house that did not meet the standards of the 1981 revision to the building codes.
Is it important to learn the kana and kanji at the same time as learning how to converse in Japanese? I'm a native speaker, but it was a lot easier to learn kana and kanji because I already was able to speak some Japanese.
Also, I hope you try some immersion Japanese again. :D
Yes, learning Kana and Kanji is very important. You'll learn Kana in less than a week but it takes time to learn Kanji. there are 2136 characters which are high school level.
1. one chapter of Genki Elementary I
2. 60 Kanji via memrise and "remember the kanji"
3. Given up on Duolingo till I read Genki
4. Use an app called LingoDeer, it is awesome.
5. Started watching Japanese anime. Haven't understood anything but "thank you" and "good morning" yet.
`'One-punch'' assaults have cost 90 Australian lives since 2000, most in booze-fuelled bashings, a study has found.`
...
`NSW had the highest number of king-hits (28), followed by Victoria and Queensland (24 cases each).`
So not night after night at all, but more than a couple (this article is from 2013.
That's one-punch deaths, but not one-punch assaults. There's even more of those. Tucked away further in the article is a quote that says it is an occurrence every club night:
"St Vincent Hospital's emergency department director, Gordian Fulde, treats four or five ''absolutely obvious'' king-hits while working at the hospital every Friday or Saturday night."
Instead of destroying small business and bringing in laws which detrimentally affect everyone, the state government should create examples of the offenders (the idiots that thing its cool to knock someone out), throw the book at them. strengthen the laws in a way that limits the potential for misuse, but sends a strong message to the drunken yobs, "if you do this, you're toast".
These lockout laws don't fix anything, they just move the problem elsewhere, Newtown and Enmore residents are seeing more and more violence at nights now. It's an example of shifty moral knee-jerk-reaction law making, 'lets pass these heavy handed laws that give us more power, but lets frame it in a way that if you oppose it, you can be painted as supporting murders on the streets'.
I completely agree with the author that NSW becoming more and more of a nanny state, i.e: not allowed to have a BBQ (which god forbid, might make a bit of smoke) if you are in a strata property, or that un-named council that has banned kites (probably because a kite could take down a plane), I know restaurant owners who follow the rules and are still terrorized by the prospect of the office of gaming and liquor deciding to shut them down.
Hopefully with Malcolm leading the federal libs now, he will exert some pressure on the NSW libs to wake up and stop sabotaging the NSW economy. Australian politics (and politics in general) are just pathetically depressing.
The media did. There's not much point in making an example out of drunk people, because violent drunk people aren't thinking of the consequences.
The only way of making this work would be a register of offenders who can't go to pubs because of their drunkenness. Given that we tried to have mandatory pre-commitment for gamblers (which allowed them to gamble, but put limits on it) and this utterly failed, I'm not surprised that the government realised that lockout laws were the only way forward.
Incidentally, do you have any facts to back up that lockout laws are "sabotaging" the NSW economy?
As for not BBQ'ing in a Strata property - that's ill-informed. There are currently a set of amendments that hopefully will be enacted by July 2016 that prevent people's smoke from drifting into adjoining properties. The amendments allow a ban order to be made if the tenant makes a nuisance or hazard through their actions. If the tenant doesn't comply, then they get taken to the tribunal, who can then fine them a lot of money.
Don't see what the issue is here. If your cigarette or BBQ smoke is interfering with another tenant, then you should be prevented from doing this.
P.S. Malcolm Turnbull knows better than to interfere with State matters, given he's a Federal politician.
Though I'm not sure why you actually need to serve alcohol to enjoy live music. As for killing the nightlife sector, if the nightlife sector relies on people drinking copious quantities of alcohol, then it might not be a bad thing. Maybe they should evolve to be less dependent on alcohol.
My issue is that we even need laws to deal with this, people can have horrible neighbours (you must remember the fence wars saga), what's to stop your horrible neighbour from making your life painful because you grill up some food once in a while.
Please, cry me a river. Of course you need laws to deal with obnoxious people who live in close proximity to you. There are wars over fences, but the law handles that pretty well now.
The thing stopping your horrible neighbour from making your life painful is that they must have evidence of your wrongdoing. If you "grill up some food once in a while" and smoke from your grill goes into their property, then what's to stop them from deliberately doing the same to you?
So you're looking at about 4 deaths a year. To put that in context, in 2012[1] 26 Australians died from falling off a chair and 58 died falling while getting out of bed. The gold standard for these kind of comparisons, lightning strikes, gets 5-10 Australians a year[2].
There is a problem with drinking and violence in Australia, but at the same time, 90 people over 13 years isn't all that many; by itself, it shouldn't be used to argue for new laws.
There were zero deaths in Kings Cross from falling off a chair, and zero deaths whilst getting out of bed. Similarly, nobody was struck by lightning in Kings Cross either.
In 2012, there were about 20 deaths per 100,000 people attributable to alcohol in NSW. Source is here:
What the fuck are you talking about? The 90 deaths mentioned by the parent are Australia-wide, not merely bound to King's Cross. It's entirely appropriate to compare them to other Australia-wide measures. Unless Victoria and Queensland, mentioned in the parent's article, are now located in King's Cross, I guess. Or hey, I can reframe it your way if you like: There were zero deaths from alcohol-fueled king hits whilst getting out of bed.
Also, talking about misusing data, you're claiming that 20 deaths per 100k "attributable to alcohol" is due to violent assault. What a load of shit - the Australian homicide rate (from all sources) is only 1.1/100k. "Attributable to alcohol" basically means diseases - there aren't 4400 (22M/your rate) deaths across the country every year from violent assault, alcohol-related or otherwise. There's not even a tenth that number. Alcohol-deaths-by-violence are a rounding error compared to alcohol-deaths-by-disease.
Look at your own linked graphs sorted by age - do you honestly believe that 65-year-olds are dying from king hits at a rate five times greater than 20-year-olds? That 85-year-olds dying from such violence at nearly twice the rate as those 65-year-olds? Those are some pretty feisty nursing homes.
No fool, I'm not. I wasn't aware that the god of lightning was throwing down bolts from the sky to murder innocent civilians. And those dastardly killers committing murder by making people fall out of bed, someone should set up a taskforce, stat! It's diabolical.
Here's a small hint: those laws weren't just introduced due to homicides, but also for assaults.
I was putting the number of deaths into context, not the cause of it. Laws are sledgehammers, not scalpels, and keeping things in context is important. Cyclists die every year from being car-doored, yet we don't seem to be so passionate about fixing that, nor inconveniencing the whole demographic of car drivers because of a few idiots.
As for your last sentence, if you re-read what I said, you'll see "by itself". It was put there there along with "Australia has a problem with drinking and violence" to suggest that you need to argue with more than just what is actually a very few deaths. It's like you wilfully misread me.
As for "no you're not", do you mean you're not claiming that 20/100k are deaths from alcoholic assault? I can't see something else I said you were doing. Then why the hell did you bring it up? Who was talking about long-term effects of alcohol on health?
Putting aside the content of the article, the photo of the "Cherry tree with temple in background. Chubu Region, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. " is actually a photo of Matsumoto Castle (in Nagano Prefecture).
As noted, they likely had nothing to do with it... but I take all of Iyer's writing about Japan with a grain of salt, because despite those 28 years, he can't read a word of Japanese and is apparently proud of it.
Thanks for pointing that out, considering he can't really participate in the culture or even read Japanese literature he has a pretty limited perspective I wager.
From article:
------------
I can't read — I can't — to this day, I can't read or write Japanese. And I'm at the mercy of things around me. I can't have the illusion that I'm on top of things. Japan was a place that I had a huge amount to learn from, and I'm still learning it.
This has to be hyperbole - how can you live in a country for 28 years without learning what a single word looks like?
reminds me of teens today who feign ignorance of popular music and only listen to classic rock or some other specific genre and love to criticise others' taste in music.
That's a pretty high bar. Newspapers, news magazines and technical materials (economics, poli-sci, math, circuits, algorithms, mechanical designs, chemical processes)are straight forward enough. And enough to consider one functionally literate, I would contend. Enough to participate in day-to-day culture, I would contend.
Japanese literature can be completely different level of challenging.
That astounds me. I met some expatriates that were illiterate (well, they couldn't speak much either) when I lived there -- but they usually came and went over the course of three year stints. They lived with their families, in expat neighborhoods, and their kids went to Western (American) schools.
And they left. Every ~3 years or so.
Even that would kill me. For me, literacy is job one. I never understood how an adult would be - could be - willing to be functionally illiterate as an adult.
One underlying reason for the split between the Imperial Japanese Army, and Navy was that the Army was generally made up of members of the Choshu clan who were rivals of the Satsuma clan that was mostly responsible for the Navy.
The two clans put their rivalries aside temporarily to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate, but from the Meiji Era the rivalry was responsible for the lack of coordination between the Army, and Navy through the Second World War. [1]
Google does not have majority share in Yahoo! JAPAN. There reason Yahoo! JAPAN uses Google instead of Bing (unlike the rest of Yahoo!) is because Yahoo! JAPAN felt that Google offered a better search product in Japan than Bing.
I certainly would vote for politicians that would support universal basic income in Japan. A calculation done in the past few years found that ¥50,000 a month (about $500 US) could be paid out to each citizen without raising any extra revenue. Something closer to ¥170,000 a month would probably be more reasonable, if we could figure it out.
Who did the calculation? I'd be keen to see the breakdown.
My rough estimates put the cost of JPY50k/month to the adult population at somewhere around USD 700 billion/year and JPY170k/month at USD2,400 billion, or around 47% of Japan's GDP. Total social security spending is currently in the order of USD300 billion.
Given that the Japan Government currently spends (excluding interest costs) around USD230 billion more than it earns in revenue each year, such a proposal would be extremely difficult to implement.
The 50k JPY figure comes from the budget for social welfare in Japan. Here is an article where it is broken down for 2009: http://diamond.jp/articles/-/16672
But, let me try it with figures from 2011.[1]
107,495 billion JPY for total social welfare
32,463 billion JPY for national health insurance
The author deducted the amount spent for national health insurance from total social welfare.
That leaves:
75, 032 billion JPY
It should only be for the adult population, but I can't find numbers for just adults, so I divided by 120million.
625,266 JPY annually
or
52105.5 JPY a month.
IIRC social insurance is not included in the general budget.
As far as the 170k JPY calculation, that was just my imagining what would be a reasonable basic income. I have never crunched the numbers on it.
But, it comes out to 2.04 million yen a year. Since the GDP per capita in Japan is 3.76 million JPY, this would be quite the redistribution of wealth.
Indeed, the social insurance premiums/expenditures are not included in govt. revenue/expenditure figures, thus the disconnect.
It's worth noting that ~25% (JPY29,040 billion - JPY20k per month per capita) of the funding for those programs comes from employer contributions for their employees.
Question: If this were to actually pass in the State of California, would the only thing necessary after that be for the US Congress to accept six new states into the Union?
> If this were to actually pass in the State of California, would the only thing necessary after that be for the US Congress to accept six new states into the Union?
Probably not; even if the ballot measure passed it would still probably have to pass the state legislature: the US Constitution requires consent of the State Legislature (not just "the State") to form new states from the territory of existing states, and in other circumstances (the similar restriction regarding rules for choosing Presidential electors), ISTR that the federal courts have looked specifically to the Legislature.
