I'm not sure if it is just Boston, but the Church is totally out of control if all of these allegations of pedophilia are true. We're talking about 5-10% of the priesthood has been alleged to have committed these crimes against children for DECADES!
See MetaFilter discussion as well.
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Reiko-chan's "Japanese for Anime Lovers" is a fun, educational website. Learn some Japanese and let's watch some anime.
I'm a big Ogata fan but I don't think she should take Koizumi's offer to take over the Foreign Ministry. She's done her duty, and getting involved in the current politics will only tarnish her platinum reputation....
Koizumi Sacks Tanaka, Nogami; Asks Ogata To Take Over Foreign Ministry
Putting a dramatic end to the quarrel between Foreign Minister Tanaka
and vice foreign minister Yoshiji Nogami, Prime Minister Koizumi called them
in separately Tuesday night and fired them. LDP Dietman Muneo Suzuki, whose
role in barring two NGOs from attending an Afghan relief conference last
week was at the center of the dispute, is also likely to be forced out of
his post as lower house Steering Committee chairman, reports said. Reports
said Koizumi asked former UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata,
currently his special representative on Afghanistan, to take Tanaka's job.
As of mid-afternoon, Ogata hadn't answered. Mainichi and Nihon Keizai said
Environment Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi is also under consideration for the
post, though Kawaguchi denied she has been approached. Deputy Foreign
Minister Toshiyuki Takano, is considered likely to replace Nogami, reports
said.
Early End: Koizumi executed the midnight sackings soon after the ruling
coalition pushed a Yen 2.6 trillion second supplementary budget through the
lower house in the face of an opposition boycott over the affair (Digest,
1/29). Because the dispute threatened to disrupt the legislative schedule in
the upper house, "I wanted to put an early end to the situation," Koizumi
told the upper house Budget Committee when it met this morning. When a
committee members asked who he thought was telling the truth about Suzuki's
influence at the Foreign Ministry, Koizumi said he didn't want to get
involved in "an unending argument....In the end, the Foreign Ministry
decided to cooperate (with the barred NGOs), and so that's fine." Opposition
politicians, deprived of a juicy target, are still demanding a probe that
would require Tanaka, Nogami and NGO leader Kensuke Onishi to testify before
the upper house committee.
(From Japan Digest)
Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University explored a situation in an oft-cited experiment involving a theater ticket back in 1984. They told one group of subjects to imagine that they have arrived at the theater only to discover that they have lost their ticket. Would you pay another $10 to buy another ticket? they asked. A second group were asked to imagine that they are going to the play but haven't bought a ticket in advance. Then, when they arrive at the theater, they realize they have lost a $10 bill. Would they still buy a ticket?
In both cases, the subjects were presented with essentially the same simple question: Would you want to spend $10 to see the play? That's largely the way the cash-losing group thought of it, with 88 percent opting to buy the ticket. But the ticket losers, focusing on sunk costs, tended to frame the question in a different way: Am I willing to spend $20 to see a $10 play? Only 46 percent said yes.
HIGHLY interesting article. I am one who buys expensive car insurance...maybe I should reconsider? :)
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NYT: In Another Big Bankruptcy, a Fiber Optic Venture Fails
Global Crossing has never reported an annual profit since it was created in an ambitious plan to extend its sole resource Û a fiber optic cable traversing the Atlantic Ocean Û into a 100,000-mile network connecting 27 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The company has $22.4 billion in assets and $12.4 billion in debt, making its filing the largest bankruptcy by a telecommunications company. It is almost half the size of Enron, the largest bankruptcy filing of any kind in United States.
oopsie...
Reuters/Variety: Sony defies gloom with record Q3 sales, profit rise
Sony owed much of its good fortune to the weaker yen.
Sony's previous earnings forecasts issued in October assumed exchange rates of 115 yen per dollar and 105 yen per euro for the second half of its business year.
The yen has since taken a drubbing, falling to three-year lows of nearly 135 yen per dollar in the gloom shrouding Japan's debt-burdened financial sector and moribund economy.
Analysts noted, however, that currency hedging and pressure for discounts in overseas markets had kept Sony from reaping the full benefits of recent yen weakness.
Jitters in Japan for Savers and Banks
On Monday, Moody's Investors Service lowered the deposit ratings for five regional banks and downgraded the outlook for Japan's biggest banks to negative from stable. Moody's (news/quote) said it "considers the Japanese banking system to be in a grossly inadequate financial shape to meet the new challenges from a changing systemic support mechanism."
Starting in April, fixed-term deposits at any single bank will be insured only up to 10 million yen ($75,466) for each saver, a system similar to that of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the United States. Ordinary savings accounts will be treated the same way beginning in April 2003
O'Neill Ends Trip With Call for Japan to Reform
"The straight fact is this: exchange rates cannot improve productivity or fix non-performing loans," he said. "The weight of historical evidence shows that those who have tried to fix underlying economic problems with protectionist measures - and I count artificially depreciating the currency as one of those - actually weaken their own economy."
The US is urging the Koizumi government to move quickly in three areas. First, Mr O'Neill called for an ambitious effort to resolve the problem of bad debt held by Japanese banks by government efforts to sell the loans at whatever they can fetch in the market and absorb the losses. Secondly, he backed further efforts to combat deflation through monetary policy, which he said would be necessary to allow other reforms to take place. Finally he said that a series of adjustments should be made to trade, regulatory and financial policies to introduce price competition into Japan's domestic economy. He pointed out that Japanese companies that compete in international markets are highly competitive and said the same competitive pressures should be introduced into the domestic economy.
More bad news for Japan. It seems neverending...
And to think I wanted to work for these jokers at one time ;)
It has been clear for more than a year that the dot-com boom is over, and yet privately held Idealab continued to pour millions of dollars into new start-ups that have little hope of success, Miller said. If Gross and his cohorts really had the best interests of the investors at heart, they would wind down the incubator and return the remaining cash, he said.
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Here's more unintelligible US foreign policy at work: at the end of a good Slate article on the '93 Mogadishu debacle, and to me it's nothing but a horror of mistake after mistake, there's this...
American soldiers may soon be back in Somalia, if they're not there already, in pursuit of al Qaida. Couldn't this have legitimately been used to promote the film? Sure. The only trouble is that our most likely ally in the anti-terror fight will be Hussein Aideed, leader of the Habr Gidr clan and son of the "Hitler-like" villain in Black Hawk Down. No wonder the film's promoters chose not to play up the post-9/11 "return to Somalia" angle.
NYTimes: Japan Slows Down, but Not Its Road Builders
Highway construction here once enjoyed wide popular support as a way to spread Tokyo's wealth and to reduce rural isolation and poverty in this California-sized nation. But in recent years, road construction projects have taken on the air of government make-work programs, intended to disguise Japan's growing unemployment.
In fact, Japan has spent trillions of dollars in the 1990's in an effort to build its way back to economic growth. But instead it finds itself today deep in recession and saddled with daunting construction bills Û the world's largest government debt and an annual deficit that increased fivefold in the last decade.
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Still, critics say, Japan is littered with public works projects built with little concern about profitability. From heroes of development, construction company presidents have became villains of economic stagnation, and are accused today of building bridges and bullet trains to nowhere.
"We are starting to look like medieval Spain, wasting our money on useless things," grumbled Hideaki Mizuno, an investment banker in Tokyo. "We need to use market mechanisms to allocate money."
Stuff like this story of a 17 YO internet fraudster who bilked $1M out of thousands of investers continue to amaze me. Who is naiive enough to send money to random companies/people on the web? How many suckers are born every minute?
Newsbytes: Stephen Cutler, director of the SEC's Enforcement Division, said the case "demonstrates that just about anyone - even a 17-year-old high school student - can mastermind a securities fraud over the Internet."
NYTimes: Cole Bartiromo, a California teenager who raised more than $1 million from investors late last fall by guaranteeing returns of up to 2,500 percent? In less than two months, Mr. Bartiromo, 17, persuaded more than 1,000 people to send him money by promising to make risk-free bets on sporting events, according to a complaint yesterday from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Then he transferred much of the money to an account he held at a casino in Costa Rica.
I went to my second i-Club event on Saturday, the Queens Meet #8. It was cold out but I bundled up with long underwear and kept pretty warm.
More Queens Meet 8 pics here and here.
My car is the silver wagon on the right in the first photo (that's my leg sticking out of the driver's side door.) Another guy with a silver wagon bought a very nice set of used OZ 17" wheels from Garrick (blue wagon in the "blubarus" photo) and I was jealous :) You can see the wheels in question in the fourth photo from the top.
One cool thing was that another guy, Ray, and I traded armrests. He's shorter than me but had the extended armrest (which got in the way of his shifting) and I had wanted the extended one but didn't want to pay the outrageous $150 or whatever Subaru wanted for a bunch of plastic. So we swapped out our armrests.
It was very cool to see so many Imprezas in one place, especially so many WRXs. This is the kind of thing where I really see the value of a digital camera.
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I've been a loyal Windows man since the first version, which required you to write on the screen with crayons. Every year or so, Microsoft comes out with a new version, which Microsoft always swears is better and more reliable, and I always buy it. I bought Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1415926, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows RSVP, The Best of Windows, Windows Strikes Back, Windows Does Dallas, and Windows Let's All Buy Bill Gates a House the Size of Vermont.
My computers keep having seizures, but I keep buying Windows versions, hoping I'll get lucky. I'm like the loser in the nightclub who keeps hitting on the hot babe. His shoes are squishing from the piña colada she poured on him, but he's thinking: ``She's warming up to me!''
I bring this all up because now Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the ``most reliable Windows ever.'' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is ``the most articulate vegetable ever.''
Happy New Year! I had a quiet Xmas in Connecticut with family and friends and a phenomenal New Year's down in Miami.
oh no...4000 DPI scanner from Nikon
uh oh...5 megapixel Nikon digital camera...
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NYTimes: Yes, There Are Still Optimists in Japan
"Don't hold your breath for quick reform in Japan Û particularly of bank bad debts Û or you will both underperform and die before it," David Roche of Independent Strategy, an investment firm based in London, said in a recent report.
But there is a silver lining: because of their woes, banks, contractors and real estate companies make up only 11 percent of the Topix, about half of their weighting in 1998. So even if the government mismanages the bank cleanup, the effect on the broader market is more limited than it was during the previous recession.
More important, plenty of big Japanese companies are still partly insulated from the domestic economy, and many of their stocks are more affordable than at any time in the last 15 years. Matsushita Electric Industrial, Toshiba (news/quote) and Fujitsu are trading at well below their peaks, yet have little debt, strong brands and well-trained work forces. All of them have announced job cuts, factory closures and plans to spin off or trim unprofitable divisions.
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Salon: Martha Stewart Invades Japan
...in Japan, democracy is largely nominal, a diplomatic cover for some rigidly hierarchical systems and assumptions. Little surprise that to some local fashion arbiters, European models seem better attuned to contemporary Japanese tastes. One editor at a mass-market Japanese women's magazine sours on Martha Stewart Omnimedia's chances for success in her native land. Citing the recent failure of a Japanese version of Good Housekeeping, she finds Stewart's über-Americana ill-timed. "Today's Japanese are more interested in Italian styles in furniture and design," she says. "There's an Italian boom, partly because the aesthetic sense and the use of space are similar. American homes are unrecognizable in Japan; Japanese women simply don't have the room to entertain guests."
