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RE: Keeping abreast of things?
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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 RE: Keeping abreast of things? (in reply to MikeC)
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First of all, big thank you to Richard for what I call a perfect reply.
Secondly, Stephen, I am amazed of how you hit a nail on the one hand, -though not on the other.
For the latter, I am following the environmental findings since the early Eighties or so, and am alarmed since maybe 25 years or so now. To date only one aspect of worries has turned out relatively needless, which was the predicted forest dying. (Although all these bold connifers in Germany do look unhealthy to me.) All of the other threats have turned out encreasingly worse than predicted. With nearly each year outdating estimations from the year before.
From there, I was just as intense on this theme when still in my homeland. And there as well desperating on the people´s state-of-mind defending ignorance. (Though not yet comparable with the local awareness here, where environment doesn´t exist as a topic for the very most of people. - Comaparable to the west until late 19 Seventies or so, and much worse due to the traditonal habit of throwing waste around.)
However, even though erring with the idea that I could otherwise be watching the environmental scene more relaxed, it is incredible how precisely you nailed my situation.
I am currently trying to raise a summ one would rather spend for a new car, to get "remission" from the scum who instigated my fleecing. I need their remission urgently before the next court instance, eventhough it would not guarantee yet that the jail sentence be cancelled. Nothing is predictable.
In the same time, in view of the "judge" having qualified me as danger for the public (totally rediculous considering how actual gangsters will not be qualified this way after volumes of files and things like knifings etc.), if I get entangled physically anywhere or possibly even just recorded as wrangling anywhere, what´s left of my life will turn into an ultimate mess then.
I am living on an archaic contact mine.
In the same time a criminal neighbour had invented an alleged wittness against me whom he claims to have held back from worsening my legal case. A friend of mine then promised to the neighbour that if the wittness came to court and told how the scum offered him money to make a false statement, he (my friend) would make me shelling out an amount of cash (worth a concert level guitar). If the false witness hower just stayed away and if the case turned out to my right (which it should had, as I had three witness to my advantage while the scum had none, but as I said: Nothing is predictable) some still considerable amount could be paid to the false witness for refraining from acting against me.
Now, since a month or so my friend, the dottore, tells me that the neighbour is pestering him with sms (typed by his sons), wanting money, even though the court sentenced me fiercely.
And finally yesterday, these two men stood vis-a-vis, with me watching from the other side of the street. I had been told to stay in the yard, but you can´t let someone really alone whose been all dearly helping.
The criminal neighbour had ordered his police friend beforehand to be there as well as his baggage train, aiming to provoke the doctor and then have him him sued and heavily fined, basically like it´s been done with me.
He was waving with his fist before the doctors face, pushing him and shoving away another friend of mine who tried to calm him down.
When the doctor pointed to the scheme the neighbour agreed into moving away and the two jumped in the doc´s car and drove away. I thought they were going to see the false wittness, but was told then they were going to face each other discretely.
This neighbour guy has already killed someone, and I started seriously worrying about the doc.
They returned unharmed though.
However, when away, the doc turned on the light in the car then realizing how the neighbour was holding a chunk of opium in hands. Admitting that he had planned to leave it in the car and then send his police friends after him. (Which would had totally ruined the doc´s life. With jail and withdraw of aprobation.)
So, today I will have to consult this neighbour and tell him to take off hands from my friends.
And since last night I am pondering on how to say this, so that it be understandable in this squiggly tongue and manner yet without ending into an escalation. (Still no idea how to do.)
No one who has grown up in a culture of common sense, not to mention upright types, can get away over an extended period of time in an unbound sneaky mentality, unless buffered and protected like for instance diplomatic personel. (When friends tell me to watch out for myself ... It´s that you just won´t be let alone. You may be living for yourself / not bothering anyone, but the trash will just come over you. Be it by force or by artful scheme.)
You just can´t predict what illiterate (= not self-observing) minds do to compensate their ill-feelings and pry off your belongings. Nor do you have a clue of how twisted evil intelligence can be, neither of up-side down bizzare custom and judiciary that may be tooled to skin you.
The guy mentioned above for instance can´t write or read, but produce hundred different drafts spontaneously of how to sneak into your life and slice off in no time. (For instance in regard of a foregone scammer saying to me: "Just make him come here and park in this street and I´ll arange taking his car away".)
I am tired of dealing with the incredible, but paradox and underhandedness won´t let me alone. Not for a single day.
You´ll be busy with some editing, phone or door bell may ring with message of another pest coming at you.
You may be playing your guitar at night, all the time due to interrupt and check what might be done to your dogs.
You may be in traffic and be seriously endangered (I´m no pussy mind, you. Always been good for some speed and adrenaline on asphalt, but not in terms of endangering anyone else) by ruthless drivers who only display the common attitude of culture and after all produce the highest number of death toll world-wide, and again, just not be let alone.
You see folks sitting slanted in their cars, so that they can put their heads out of the window anytime and harras pedestrians or even stray animals.
Just sick from ground up.
So, right, just the more do I need talking to level-headed people. A handful here, the rest abroad.
But my environmental concerns are not influenced by that. It is not meaningful to reduce my environmental concerns on unrelated personal conditions. They are pure rational.
We are seeing it already, and regretably, we will be seeing dramatically worse.
As Ricardo suggests, wait and see. Although certainly rather intelligent not to.
-
Thank you again, Richard!
Ruphus
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Date Oct. 1 2015 11:44:26
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Keeping abreast of things? (in reply to Ruphus)
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Totally, Simon.
Days ago in the capitol someone said to me that she loved the country.
I said: "Only possible, when you havn´t seen better yet".
She then again emphasizing how she loved it -obviously just self-ensuring-.
Me pissed: "What do you love?! The ugly country; the lying, stealing and betrayal!?"
Though not knowing a single individual who would had not been diversely hit by local specifics yet, I need to mention however, that the whole of ordure will come to the surface only with a case like mine.
For simple minds (on top with about zero experience with strangers and languages) equalling humble skills in local language with general dumbness, further seeing that you are alone (extremely important here! Total focus on who be behind your back or not / family / tribe / connections ), and finally assuming you to be rich (foreigners picking up greenbacks from trees anyway, you know) find such a target specially attracting. Especially when seen or heard from your tending to lend a hand to cases of hardship.
And in fact, in respect of a certain quality of elaborate brain work (that takes no school nor consideration), you are actually dumb in such an ambience. Silly, entrusting, clueless, empathetical quarry.
A leaf of ideal in winds of consistent recklessness (under such an oversized formal cloak of phoney well-meaningness).
-
Breasts to me seem the most beautiful line nature has generated. Definitly when full and well proportioned.
It´s why they turn up sometimes when I create a picture.
(Been about to upload something, but it didn´t work.)
Only after them come other great nature designs like horses, big cats, landscapes etc.
Ruphus
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Date Oct. 1 2015 15:52:01
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Keeping abreast of things? (in reply to Ruphus)
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Ruphus,
If you ever get out of that place and return to civilization, We will have to get a few of us from the Foro together with you for an evening of a good dinner, a couple bottles of wine, some good conversation (in person, not via internet), and celebrate.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Oct. 1 2015 21:34:29
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Keeping abreast of things? (in reply to Ruphus)
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Thank you, my friends! :O)
I totally appreciate your thoughts, and boy would I enjoy a meeting in a good restaurant!
(Just last night on the phone with a friend in Germany at the end of talks mentioning those pizzas from stone ovens! - And learned why the dough must not be rolled. It must keep the air bubbles in there. Just to mention the entry level of Italian cuisine. >drool<)
Am quite down today. Received an e-mail from dottore who is badly disappointed from me, for "allowing" the neighbour to behave hat way with him.
Rather overly straight all my life, now I find myself humiliated, first by being due to not process openly in court, now, much worse even, appearing like a selfish spineless worm before someone who has been really engaged in helping me.
Aside from having failed to put straight that heighbour beforhand, I now don´t call him either. After a night of pondering on how to convey without escalation (to no avail) I asked local minds for a hint. Advice: Under no means confront that guy before legal case being closed. For, he could easily consult the court and put me to misery with any welcomned hoax.
Anyway, the doc knows me for not yet 2 years and I feel like sh!t.
First it is worldly matters that are distorted, next you even find yourself disfigured.
And the truth is that I am intimidated. That day in police jail, though then not displayed to guards and inmates, had it´s effect in anticipation of the coming instance.
Now even worried when simply leaving home. Even just the bovine traffic is always good for getting into conflict, and there is my temper when facing pigheaded arbitrainess. Perfect conditions in an upside-down tradition to sculpe a "threat for public" from.
-
On behalf of the thread:
quote:
Abstract
The oft-repeated claim that Earth’s biota is entering a sixth “mass extinction” depends on clearly demonstrating that current extinction rates are far above the “background” rates prevailing between the five previous mass extinctions. Earlier estimates of extinction rates have been criticized for using assumptions that might overestimate the severity of the extinction crisis. We assess, using extremely conservative assumptions, whether human activities are causing a mass extinction. First, we use a recent estimate of a background rate of 2 mammal extinctions per 10,000 species per 100 years (that is, 2 E/MSY), which is twice as high as widely used previous estimates. We then compare this rate with the current rate of mammal and vertebrate extinctions. The latter is conservatively low because listing a species as extinct requires meeting stringent criteria. Even under our assumptions, which would tend to minimize evidence of an incipient mass extinction, the average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is up to 100 times higher than the background rate. Under the 2 E/MSY background rate, the number of species that have gone extinct in the last century would have taken, depending on the vertebrate taxon, between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear. These estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way. Averting a dramatic decay of biodiversity and the subsequent loss of ecosystem services is still possible through intensified conservation efforts, but that window of opportunity is rapidly closing.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253
Ruphus
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Date Oct. 2 2015 13:20:04
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Keeping abreast of things? (in reply to Ruphus)
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Flying would be the shizznizz!
In my old future book in the 19 seventies such flying stuff was predicted for the times around the year 2000. (With drawings of small jets over the city.)
Also these nozzle harnesses that militaries have been trying out made me dream of Carlson on the Roof, but they seem to not have overcome bad maneuvering and huge fuel consumption.
The most promissing ideas for small aircarfts that I am aware of are product from home mechanics and little companies. (One I think to remember being American, another one Russian or Polish ...)
Devices smaller than that which could allow for kind of flying around like superman or at least hoovering, and that at best without combustion ought to remain dream of a future that is too far away.
All of thelike would require reliable anti-collision features, otherwise permission over urban area should be no go (other than for officials).
Great to hear about the decision towards EV in China.
... But this as well aims at effects past the urgent time frame.
The question is:
What if individual´s look on a green landscape is deceiving, with an ecological break-down lingering behind the surface?
What if there be only a handful of years left over for prevention through immediate and serious global measures?
-Which is what facts indicate, even if Big Brother´s media prefer to ignore.
Imagine the current ambitious announcements to be as meaningful like fancied decoration on a shroud.
If that be the case, current agreements would be equaling the self-defence methods against nuclear explosion that we used to be taught in school.
Anyone remember those instructions on how to hold your satchel over one´s head and jump behind the next wall?
Ruphus
PS:
BTW, saw a report on Fukushima happenings. Quite the same trivial background as with Tshernobyl. Clearly indicating how failing human in action is, but also even how lacking the preparation of worst-scenario instructions for such plants.
Missing out yet on the most obvious of predictable processes and drafts.
Partially even on potential occurances that laymen like you and me could had pointed to.
To begin with, just consider how much sophistication it needs to be aware of that if you build a nuclear reactor on sea shore (which let´s say be necessary in a country of scarce ground like Japan), it should at least be built on a base distinctively over sea level?
Let aside bagatelles like providing of CCTV in the control room, ensuring staff´s familiarity with the cooling condensor system, etc.pp.
There is that truly impressive thinking power at work with scientifical and ingenous inventions and production. And in the same time it turns out over and over again, how ineffective and failing grand-scale foresight and drafts can be.
Something you wouldn´t expect with orgs and projects of many thousands of heads behind them; but that is how it can be and shows to be every other time.
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Date Oct. 3 2015 11:57:57
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Keeping abreast of things? (in reply to Ruphus)
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Fukushima was a major Fuk-up. But it led to all the nuclear power pants in Japan being shut down. The only one to reopen so far is the one in Satsuma Sendai, which is about 45km away from me!
It looks like the rest of the nuclear plants will remain shut, but politics and stupidity led to the opening of the facility in Sendai. It was more about jobs than energy. The Kyushu area power companies are run by idiots who piss and moan about allowing solar to feed back into the grid.
Tt was widely thought that the nulcear plants being shut down would be an economic depressant, and it was, but the economy is rallying a bit despite the nuclear plats being closed. Especially here in southern Kyushu the only ones who missed nuclear plant where the workers and the income going to the power company. Lucky the west side of Kyushu is not a high alert area for tsunami, the east coast gets hit, but the waves don't wrap around the island in a big way to hit Sendai. Although anything is possible.
There are solar power installations everywhere down here a few acres to fairly large plots can bee seen out in the country, in the city outskirts behind Dept Stores. it ls very solar positive, but the jack asses that run the power company don't want it feeding back into the grind an using their infrastructure. Many people are pissed at them for that. ( there is also some military radar housed in giant golf ball looking towers about 10 minutes from down town Akune. The purpose is to monitor North Korea missile launches. Not a joke. )
You would think Japan would be progressive in that sense, but there are all kinds of quirky things politically that suspend some type of progress. Petty regional beefs between governmental bodes. As an American some things are exasperating and when I ask another American, which I occasionally see every six months of so, I say what 's up with such and such a problem how come they can't fix that? The answer is shrug shoulders, Hey man you know as well as I, that's Japan.
One thing they can't get together is the road from Akune to the prefecture capital Kagoshima. They cannot build a freaking road that stems from inland to the coast 15 freaking miles to connect Akune to the Kyushu Expressway! Politics. Americans would have murdered the transit officials by now. So in order to go to Kagoshima we have to go on a 90 minute trip down the coast and then jog inland and take a combination of farm to market roads and main highways. And some old man in this 'K'Truck" loaded with potatoes will always be cutting you off and hogging the road for 5 miles until he turns off on his farm road. What could be a straight 40 minute drive becomes a desperate stop and go nerve trial. Screw it anyway I don't drive here. I almost punched the the driving instructor he was such a stupid cow. So I had to chill out and I never took the driving test.......
Which is another thing altogether. The police give the driving tests and they give favor to those who go to the expensive driving schools. Typically a student taking the driving test will fail the road course test three to five times before the testing officer will give you a pass. And a gaijin gets special scrutiny if he is from the US. Canadians get a free pass by showing the Canadian drivers license, but since the US issues DL state by state Japan does not honor the US State issued driver license because there is no national driving standard in the US. ( there is really, it's called bad driving)
The road course takes about 15 minutes to drive, but you have to memorize two or more routes. The tester can call the routes on you and you never know which until you get in the car. The he says route 1 or 2. The way you actually drive a car and the way you are required to drive a car on the road test are two totally different things. The road test is highly stylized and you are required to display skills that you will not use in actual driving, it's kind of an abstraction of real driving. They want you to move though turns without hitting the accelerator and also stay 18 cm from the center line and look in 5 directions before you turn. If you did all this in real traffic you get broadsided. For them is not really about drigin but showing you have command og the vehicle by way of these abstractions. Despite this stringent testing Japanese guys still drive like fukicking askshoooles. Older people are auto polite, but whippersnappers are the same everywhere.
And the testing place is a tidy two hour drive away, you can't just go to your own city department of vehicles...OH HELL NO, you must go to the main police office of driving out in Bumfest East Nowheresville.
They make the French bureaucracy look like crack addicted amateurs.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Oct. 3 2015 15:45:36
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Keeping abreast of things? (in reply to Ruphus)
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In Germany too the owners of the grid try to push through against whatever competition. It only shows among diverse contra productive symptoms that supply of basic demand must never be privatized.
That seems quite a weird condition with bureaucracy in Japan.
I used to be of the impression that states with little of organized history were contemporarily outperforming those with traditional bureaucracy, in order to pretend "advance". But learning from your post about official custom in Japan, which after all ought to have a very old tradition of decrees and bureaucracy, makes for an example contradicting my home-grown impression.
The international acceptance, respectively neglect of national driving licenses seems to be totally disconnected from actual contents / skills in the matter.
It is outright sarcastic how licenses from here, where aquiring a DL means nothing at all / driving standards being sub-terristical, are being accepted yet in pedantic countries like Germany or Switzerland and certainly in Japan too, but in the same time not yours, which will without question have required way higher preparation and skills than a license over here, no matter from which state in US.
I always say how I can´t imagine what a typical local driver causes in traffic right after arrival and renting a car at Frankfurt´s airport. Wondering how not hearing of stories of thelike drivers being pulled out of vehicles and beaten up. Really beyond me how such visits in traffic work out at all.
Only one thing is for certain: The times of predictable and cooperative manners in Germany´s traffic are definitly over long since.
Have had my share of careless drivers who´d for instance swing into the fast line right before me passing, making me passing them with the bike threaded into the gutter at over 200 Kmh, and lots of similar considerate manouvers.
Before the worst encounters used to be boneheaded old men (usually with hats on, often times those with feathers or gambsbart at the ribbon) who´d block the highway with their 200 Mercedes gasoline vehicles (typically in dark green color, hehe), refusing to give way to speedsters.
Those were the harmless times.
Now it´s partially heads who could care less if you take a flight into the field or a tree. And if their wife refused last night, they might as well provoke your accident. Void of sawy and self-reflection.
Not sure if I´d ride a bike again, should I return to Germany, even if it be just about a chopper this time. Probably better to restrict oneself to four wheels in the late mentality.
BTW, there are being built E-bikes that are quite some stuff. There have already been won motocross ralleys with them.
Never rode a bike that hadn´t engine growl to it, but am sure that a silent e-bike could enthral with its torque. And one wiil likely embrace the noiseless gear at low speed (at higher ones it´s always been the helmet that made the most of noise for me).
Ruphus
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Date Oct. 3 2015 20:55:41
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Keeping abreast of things? (in reply to Ruphus)
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quote:
That seems quite a weird condition with bureaucracy in Japan.
I used to be of the impression that states with little of organized history were contemporarily outperforming those with traditional bureaucracy, in order to pretend "advance". But learning from your post about official custom in Japan, which after all ought to have a very old tradition of decrees and bureaucracy, makes for an example contradicting my home-grown impression.
There's bureaucracy everywhere, but way it operates here is often surprising. Now I paint a picture of it for fun, it's comedic at times. Odd things, there are areas where one would expect over regulation and intrusive inspection policies and you don't find them. Such as building permits and inspections in small towns a rural areas. Fairly lax on that stuff compared to California.
Also the worst carpenters I have ever seen in a developed country. Perhaps that is because you have the expectation of Japanese carpenters to be spot on perfectionists. There are the carpenters who are like artists, but those are not the guys hired to build Uncle Joe's barn down the road. If a guy want to be a great carpenter sure, but there are a lot of hacks running around that do the minimum quality job in order to get paid. And some companies that prey on older people who are in retirement. They poke around and talk older people into replacing things that don't need to be replaced and charge too much money for the work.
It happen everywhere, but because you have expectations that Japanese carpentry will look like a post and beam 11th century temple you get mildly disappointed to find slipshod work. I can say the majority of carpenters are pretty high level, but the ones who are bad are disasterously bad.
A few weeks ago I helped a friend clean up his dads farm after a typhoon. We took a tractor and chainsaws a cleared a irrigation canal of fallen trees. Set up a couple blown down trellis'. I got a nice dose of poison ivy too.
On the way back from the farm we stopped at small but famous shinto temple to look at it. It is famous for being on the national registry of important buildings. It's quite old, built around 1250 AD. The reason it is famous is because it is the first place that a literary reference to the distilled potato drink Shochu was made.
Around 1525 a carpenter worked on the building with his crew and apparently the monk who ran the temple was not very forth coming serving the shochu for the workers. A kind of traditional courtesy at that time. The monk should have given the works some large ceramic vessels of shochu in addition to payment.
The carpenter thought this treatment was rude so he made a sign that read: The monk of this temple is Greedy with his Shochu and wil not give my workers and myself the customary gift of shochu.
This sign was attached to the facade of the temple and it remained there for a long time. The monk said he did not care what the carpenter thought and allowed the sign to remain. So the temple because famous of the recalcitrant monk, and in modern times famous for being a first site of literary reference to shochu.
Shochu is a big deal in the South.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Oct. 3 2015 23:52:35
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Keeping abreast of things? (in reply to Ruphus)
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Indeed, I would had fancied them crafting as meticulous like with sushi.
Really interesting to imagine the situation with the frustrated workers and the self-confident monk. Personalities just like from a scene today, hundreds of years ago.
However, they might be slightly erring with the date. Patatos, including sweet ones, stem from South America from where the Spanish brought them to Europe. Probably first time around 1560. (Just checked that out, for not knowing when after discovery.)
Yet, from there across the pond to Japan should have taken some additional time.
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Over here hardly anything seems left over from formerly advanced craftmanship.
I tend to hear the dilettantism from far by the hammering. Instead of taking the handle at its far end and sinking in a nail with 2 or three decent smacks, what you hear are a dozen of chicken hits from a hammer grabbed near its head.
When you order the guys for repair, you can count on them damaging something else. Constant job-hopping is more common than not, with the least knowing what they´re doing, and hardly anyone having gone through a regular education in craftmanship.
It susprises when I tell them of 2,5 to 3,5 years of apprenticeship abroad including one day of the week at special schools.
Ruphus
PS:
Just read that the sweet potato was already spread in the Pacific in pre Columbian times.
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Date Oct. 4 2015 0:49:28
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