Electricity Rationing Starting Monday In Tokyo 286
siddesu writes "Japanese officials are announcing a schedule for electricity blackouts to last from tomorrow until the end of April. Practically all suburbs of Tokyo will be affected by the blackouts. The 23 districts of central Tokyo seem to be exempt for the moment, but if supply is not sufficient, blackouts are possible. Electricity will be interrupted for about 3 hours a day in each area."
Re:50hz vs 60hz (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the issue is more that most of the nukes are off-line and a good percentage of the transmission lines and facilities are just not there any more.
Check out these before/after shots [nytimes.com] (with a nifty little slider) to really understand that a lot of towns just are not there now.
Even with the best civil defence of any nation, this is going to be a long haul for Japan.
This is also a reminder of why, at least those in the US, should take http://www.citizencorps.gov/cert/ [slashdot.org]"?>CERT training, or what ever your local equivalent is. Oh, and get a ham radio and a license too and train with your local EmCommies.
Re:This is a good reminder (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have some bizarre notion that other nations offered to beam their electrons at Japan but got turned down?
This doesn't have anything to do with refusing help or not, it has everything to do with large amounts of critical infrastructure being damaged or destroyed.
Re:Sounds like there will be a baby boom in 9 mont (Score:5, Insightful)
If Japan had deficit spent more on earthquake research, they might have been able to avoid this disaster.
They did. Their buildings are much more earthquake-resistant than any other country. This was an extremely powerful quake, one of the most powerful recorded, there's inevitably going to be damage. Anytime you have an extremely powerful natural disaster, you're going to encounter problems. Aside from fusing the earth's plates with nukes or moving the entire island away from the fault lines, I don't know what you're suggesting they could have been more proactive about.
Re:This is a good reminder (Score:3, Insightful)
Honor only goes so far, is it honorable to let your countrymen and woman die because you are too stubborn to accept help from other nations when your infrastructure is failing and the simple lack of fresh water and food will kill people?
And you're right, it's not unkind or stubborn, it's downright stupid. Save your people, work on saving face afterwards
Just because you and I don't agree with a cultural practice, doesn't make it wrong.
Re:This is a good reminder (Score:1, Insightful)
Some people (not parent poster) use this argument to excuse female genital mutilation, the burka, virtual house arrest for women, honor killings, and "The Jersey Shore". I'm not advocating invasion over these horrible "cultural traditions", but can't we at least start with, "that's wrong - you shouldn't be doing that"?
On the bright side, at least in this disaster Japan is accepting help from the world.
Re:This is a good reminder (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an honor thing. It's not that Japan is being stubborn or just refusing to accept help for no good reason. For them, accepting help would be a display of weakness, which is heavily frowned upon. The Japanese highly value honor and humbleness. They don't like to ask others for things like that because it feels like taking charity. They see more honor in pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and overcoming through their own hard work and solidarity.
What a load of bullshit honestly. There is already US search teams on the ground in Japan and US search aircraft carriers of the coast of Japan providing landing platforms and US airbases provided backup airfields for commercial flights that couldn't land. Hardly seems like not accepting aid to me.
Remember that these are a people who, for many centuries, had a proud tradition of disemboweling themselves when they screwed up in order to restore their family's honor. That's pretty hardcore dedication to honor. So I don't figure their refusal for help as unkindness or stubbornness. It's just their tradition and ways, and I respect that, so I really don't feel offended at all at their saying "No thanks."
Seppuku was a warrior tradition started around the 12th century which lasted for about 700 years. It probably started with a belief that the soul is contained in the stomach and was thus linked to religious practice and later evolved into an honorable way to serve out a death sentence. It's worth remembering though that at the height of their power and refinement in the Edo era, the warrior class never made up more than 10% of the population and even then were mostly bureaucrats and it's doubtful that every warrior believed in the practice of seppuku. It was only in the Meiji-era that it was elevated and romanticized as a form of traditional martial morality and national morality. In other words, 90% of the population never practiced it in the first place. Of the remaining 10% who made up the warrior class for many it was probably a gruesome and fearful but honorable way to serve out a death sentence and not something they would consider otherwise. Or in other words nobody anywhere near serious about sociology or at all knowledgeable about Japan uses a hugely romanticized and elevated in pop. culture custom to judge the actions of modern Japanese (except maybe to matters of support for the death sentence as a form of criminal punishment although even that is questionable. After all lots of other countries also support it). It's like using the extremes of Victorian upper class moral codes as a lens through which to judge the modern British.
Here let me give you some more realistic reasons, which have actually been discussed in the Japanese media, as to why foreign aid workers aren't so helpful:
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like there will be a baby boom in 9 mont (Score:5, Insightful)
Too true. I live in Ireland, and a discussion came up about what would happen if an earthquake+Tsunami of that magnitude hit this country close to say, Dublin.
My conclusion was that you would basically have to write off the whole state. Half the buildings would collapse, Dublin would be submerged, and there would be no infrastructure or competence to mount a rescue or recovery operation. Those not killed in the mass collapse of buildings, would die soon after from starvation and disease. The response of most of the population would be, naturally, to emigrate.
But... this conclusion would probably hold for most other western states as well. We all remember Hurricane Katrina. The mantras of free market solutions and small government have left most western nations with barebones disaster response capabilities. A major Earthquake, Tsunami, Hurricane or firestorm in the wrong place could probably turn most western countries into Haiti within hours.
By contrast, the Japanese need only put up with power cuts. Nuclear plants aside--they have a well developed emergency response infrastructure. No skyscrapers collapsed and people actually got a warning that a Tsunami was coming, despite the nearness of the epicentre. The army was out collecting people the very next day. Again, compare this response to what happened in New Orleans.
Japan was far more prepared than any other Western nation, and their preparations have paid off. Pray your country is never visited with a disaster of this magnitude.
Re:This is a good reminder (Score:4, Insightful)
Losing mod points, but yes, this. There is a HUGE logistical challenge in managing searches like this, and adding in people that don't know the language or the area at all just needlessly complicates managing the search. The Japanese are accepting help where help makes sense, but the mythical man month applies just as much to search and rescue as it does to software engineering.
Re:Sounds like there will be a baby boom in 9 mont (Score:3, Insightful)
You have just described all insurance, public or private.
Social Security is a multi-generational insurance policy. It is currently solvent enough to pay the current level of benefits until 2037 and 80% of benefits for 40 years after that. It could be made to pay full benefits beyond 2037 with some pretty minimal adjustments. That takes into account the baby boomers. When you hear about taxpayer money going into Social Security benefits, those are just proper repayments for the money that was borrowed against the trust fund.
There's not really an indication that the size of the US workforce is going to decline, although it's quite possible that jobs will decline as they do whenever the top tax rate goes below 50%. Yes, every single time since the beginning of income tax, when the top tax rate went below 50% we had shrinking GDP, rising unemployment and bubble economies. Every single time the top tax rate went above 50%, we had growing GDP, lowering unemployment and never a bubble economy. If that's a coincidence, it's a very strange coincidence, don't you think?
So, to summarize: Social Security is solvent. Raising taxes on the rich has always meant better times for the country. The current debate over taxes and government spending is completely phony and not based on anything but ideology.
Re:Sounds like there will be a baby boom in 9 mont (Score:5, Insightful)
We all remember Hurricane Katrina. The mantras of free market solutions and small government have left most western nations with barebones disaster response capabilities.
I see what you did there. Katrina had zero to do with "free markets" and everything to do with corrupt local officials and just plain shitty citizens. I suppose "Schoolbus" Nagin didn't get a lot of press overseas. Look him up. A similar storm, Rita hit Texas a year or two later and the government responded adequately, and Texas is a poster boy of small government. I suppose that didn't make the news in Europe - inconvenient truths and all