Tomorrow I Leave for Japan. Here are some issues to think about. at Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts

Tomorrow I Leave for Japan. Here are some issues to think about.

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Popularity: 5% [?] Published by tj_han July 22nd, 2009 in Research

I hope to update the site as often as possible, possibly like a travel log. I’m not sure how fun it’ll be, since it’s a school trip, but it’s surely going to be educational.

A brief summary of what my trip involves:

Eight Asian and American universities—Columbia, Harvard, Korea, National University of Singapore, Peking, University of Washington, Waseda, and Yale—are considering the formation of a Global Honors College that will regularly assemble groups of faculty and students to study, on site and on line, issues of enduring and emerging global concern. To test the feasibility of this enterprise, a “pilot program” will be mounted this summer at Waseda University in Tokyo. The program will bring together one faculty member and three undergraduate students from each participating university for three weeks of intensive study in Japan, followed by a final week of work on line. The program will take the form of an undergraduate research seminar and be offered formally as a summer course of Waseda University, which will award course credit for its successful completion.

It’s basically a bunch of people doing presentations, listening to talks and discussing stuff, and finally, handing in reports. FUN? I suppose the nice Japanese Waseda students’ll take up the task of being tour guides, and they don’t look much like otaku so I foresee Akiba won’t be on the travel menu. Unless of course, some of the guys from the other unis are interested then, we can go together. There’ll be 3 other Singaporeans with me, all of them females majoring in biology. The others in the programme are a wide-ranging mix of ethnicities, and have majors like medical robotics, international studies and environmental studies.

On the 3rd week we’ll all be heading up to the mountains, to this secluded Shounan village resort, where we’ll probably be locked up to do work. So it’s essentially 2 weeks of Tokyo and 1 week of the resort.

Despite the content of this blog, I’m actually a decently active environmentalist who is capable of thinking in terms of the big picture. That is, I don’t go around throwing red paint onto fur coats just because it seems cruel to skin animals (is it?), or ramming fishing ships who depend on the sea for their livelihood. I’ll share a few thought-provoking opinions with you.

1. Is ivory bad? Pure evil? Should we ban it? Trade is currently banned officially under CITES. But, not all countries in Africa have the same elephant problem. In the northern countries, the population is dwindling and these countries are in support of banning trade in ivory. In the southern countries of Africa, the population of elephants are actually rising, because of good management and other factors, but these cost money. And if sustainable amounts of ivory production can provide income for the poor locals, then why not?

2. Most "environmentalists" hate hunters, poachers and other local people who destroy the environment they hold dear. Like the Amazon, and other nice places. However, most "environmentals" are also from developed countries, who have completely destroyed their own natural environments for the sake of industrialisation. Most natives of developing countries hate environmentalists, because they spew hot hair from their comfortable homes with large ecological foot prints, while lobbying for laws to make life harder for the locals, without providing solutions. Conservation is deeply linked to economics in this sense. The locals need the land to farm, graze, build houses, industries etc to escape poverty, but the "environmentalists", the brainless ones, seek only to keep these countries as some natural history museum. The USA was once covered in awesome old forests, now it’s almost all gone.

3. Focusing on single species is the bane of environmentalism. I blame stupid people for this. People always cry, "Save the dolphins, they are the kitties of the sea!" yeah but dolphin-cruelty-free tuna actually creates a huge amount more bycatch than regular methods of catching tuna, which destroys like thousands of other species just to save a couple of dolphins, who aren’t even endangered anyway. Same goes for whaling, basically hunting is OK in sustainable amounts and it probably is even beneficial, because it provides food, jobs and keeps the natives from overexploiting their environment.

4. Nuclear power is good, or even essential. Hydropower is bad bad bad, even if it’s renewable. Remember your education in geography, when teachers used to talk about how using renewable power is the way to go? It’s not as simple as that. Right now, renewable power like sunlight etc accounts for like 0.004% of the world’s energy needs. The technology isn’t there. Hydropower is terrible, it causes huge water problems, as well as destroys giant areas of natural habitats and human settlements. It diverts water away from lakes and rivers, causing agriculture problems, and water shortages. Nuclear power on the other hand, has such a bad reputation, which is pretty undeserved, just because of Chernobyl, which actually killed less people than a single aircrash (ignoring the cancer for now). The Chernobyl disaster served to strengthen safety measures to an extreme level, so it’s quite safe these days. Coal and oil are pretty much like taking loans from a bank, or drawing on your inheritance, it’s not really sustainable at all.

5. The financial sector is pure evil. All they are are parasites of society, and bankers make tonnes of money, only to buy useless luxuries. Their money comes from exploiting the masses. There was once a revered logging company in the US, the Pacific Logging Company, which was deeply respected by environmentalists, because they did sustainable harvesting of lumber and in effect, protected the great trees of America. But some greedy corporate vultures did a hostile takeover of the company, with a giant loan leveraged against the company’s own assets, and promptly chopped everything down, leaving the company a shell of nothingness, and its proud reputation in tatters.

Anyway, I doubt I’ll be meeting the likes of Danny Choo in Japan, simply because he’s too busy. In the past, before he started his company, he’ll still have the time to meet up with online friends, but as his empire grew, it became just physically impossible to do so, and he came up with the trick of not replying to anyone who said or messaged him that they were going to Japan, until the person returned to his home country. Totally understandable though, you can imagine that he has at least 20 people asking him to meet up per day!

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11 Responses to “Tomorrow I Leave for Japan. Here are some issues to think about.”

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1 Soshi 32 comments Jul 22nd, 2009 at 7:01 pm

Okay, the points were TL;DR but i shall read it later. Really.

“all of them females majoring in biology” — maaaaan, I want to go with a group of female biologists! Anyway, Akiba is overrated! Don’t go! ENJOY WASEDA! ROLL ON THE GREEN FIELDS!
2 Baka-Raptor 13 comments Jul 22nd, 2009 at 8:12 pm

The financial sector keeps money from lying around unused and allocates it to people who need it to be productive. We’d be nowhere without finance.
3 tj_han 1440 comments Jul 22nd, 2009 at 10:33 pm

Bakaraptor, funny you just described Islamic banking, which by law forbids interest-gathering. The evil one is western banking.
4 TP 15 comments Jul 23rd, 2009 at 12:18 am

Interesting points you garner there, tj_han. Let me offer you my 2 cents’ worth of reply/opinion/rebuttal:

1. Unfortunately, it’s a tricky question. The balance of supply and demand is suspiciously very skewed, in my opinion. The ivory trade has always been sold in the black market, unregulated. Sure, it means that the southern African countries that has more “supply” of ivory can cash in very quickly. It doesn’t mean that greedy humans will demand for an exotic, rare “North African elephant ivories,” despite the good manufacture of Southern African ivory.

2. I’ll be terribly surprised if the term “eco-terrorism” still exist. Greenpeace may have proven its mettle (or PETA, rather), but they do have a point.

Case in point: native Amazonians in Brazil. For quite a long time, they have been owners of the land, living off their forests comfortably without outside intervention. With the demand of biodiesel (I’ll describe this later) at the moment, there seems to be a conflation of Western agricultural conglomerates buying up native land in South America. Using legal threats against the natives (because they “technically owned the land”), the locals have no choice but to move into urban areas, where their skills and expertise in jungle survival are irrelevant.

You have a social decay here, where unable to find jobs to make ends meet, they resort to violence and crime. I’d like to know if there is an authentic, rags-to-riches native Amazonians that have risen up from such a situation, and live comfortably like the rest of the city-folk. (Please disregard that actress in 2 Girls 1 Cup: obviously she and her co-actress were high on crack, and probably didn’t get compensated.)

3. Lol eating dolphins and whales. Actually I’d prefer the whales for their blubber – it’s highly valuable! Dolphins, in my opinion, is like eating horse meat. That said, somebody needs to do massive fish farms on the ocean, man. The money’s on the tuna!

4. It’s not just hydroelectric power that’s making bad headlines: biodiesel are also eating up on production resources. To tell me that I can’t eat that perfectly edible soya because it’s being raised to make some rich guy’s fuel… Madness, I say, madness!

I will agree that nuclear fuel is the best source of energy yet. Question now is: who’s to regulate? (I don’t even trust the IAEA to do its job.) Every single nation on this planet – Malaysia and Indonesia are looking into nuclear power source, if Singaporeans are going to be scared paranoid about this – will demand nuclear fuel some time in the future. How to resolve this matter? Shall we employ a “select group of companies to manage nuclear power distribution?” Do we have to restrict nuclear power to only “the select few nations that are under the US’ circle of influence?”

Politics – somehow democracy is rearing its ugly head from time to time.

5. Let me tell you of the story of the Stanford International Bank.

The founding guy, Sir Allen Stanford, built his bank upon reputation and shrewd business acumen. (In short, I don’t know what the heck he’s selling.) He based his empire on the islands of Antigua and Barbuda, whose lax policies favour him. (On hindsight, the nation did not foresee the brewing storm that was to come.) He basically raised the standards of living of each and every citizen of Antigua and Barbuda, because he is the main employer of the country. Now with that kind of influence, I’m sure you guys know what happens in between the flurry of goodwills.

Now, after the Madoff scandals, attention is now focused on Sir Allen Stanford. In case you didn’t know, Sir… no, Mr. Allen Stanford, got his knighthood from the country of Antigua and Barbuda, NOT from the Queen of England (trust me, England should restrict the knighthood intellectual property rights: we’re confused whether he was royally accorded or was given such a title from a democratic country). We don’t know how the heck he made figures that are astoundingly stable even under economic crises. We don’t know whether he was pulling a Ponzi scheme. Heck he was quoted that “he left the operations of his bank to his employees to run the show.” (Big transparency no-no.)

So the FBI raided and freezed his assets and businesses. What happens now?

People are clamouring for their money that has been parked in the SIB. The SIB constantly reassured them of their monetary safety, but not all are convinced. In the meantime, the people of Antigua and Barbuda are at a crossroads: if indeed SIB is running a Ponzi scheme, that will meant an economic destruction for the country, for Stanford International Bank are the greatest employer for the nation. Even if it wasn’t, they’re being sued by the same bank for fraud.

An entire country is being held hostage for something they did not, for all intents and purposes, envision.

6. Islamic banking: now that’s something many economic advisers are looking at. I may not be an expert of Islamic banking (despite being from the same religion), but I opined that for Islamic banking to work, the other aspect of trade – barter trading – must also be incorporated into the financial system for it to work. I may just be touching the surface, yet looking at the economic system right now, it’s running based on credit – a fancy name for I.O.U. People need to relook into barter trading, because obviously you don’t need to have a lot of capital to do barter trading: the “intangible costs” are probably manpower and time. There’s minimal risk of capital bleeding. This, of course, needs to be worked out on how to compensate people for the services rendered.

It’s an interesting topic you raised, tj_han. Are you turning into Darkmirage?

—–For those who see my comments as tl;dr, I recommend you follow the 10-minute task (Google for “10 minute task” and click on the first link that you see) and digest the information slowly.
5 tj_han 1440 comments Jul 23rd, 2009 at 1:34 am

Wow TP, thanks for taking the time to write that. I love reading comments like yours!

If you follow this blog, and ignore the filler posts that I churn up, once in a while, I’ll post non-anime stuff as well, most of which are under the category “research” though not real research lol. DM appears to be going more into the “current-affairs-talking-points from otaku POV” route of blogging, which is a breath of fresh air from the usual episodic stuff.

When I wrote this post, I didn’t actually put much thought into it, just rambled off a few issues I thought most people weren’t too aware of. I’ll like to talk about each point and more, in more detail next time, when I’m not packing and getting ready to go to Otakuland.

1. The main problem is of course, you can’t distinguish between good and bad ivory. As in, the pro-sustainability southern ones and the evil northern ones, will inevitably get mixed together either accidentally or more likely, intentionally. This is the main reason why the UN did the straight ban. Also, elephants of the African variety are hugely destructive of cropland and even livestock and homes, which affects the locals and causes resent, resulting in retaliatory killings. The elephants need a lot more space than the parkland they are allocated, so this is a problem. Compensation needs to be given to the locals who have to co-exist with these huge animals.

2. I fucking hate ecoterrorists. Sea Shepard, Green Peace and Peta. They do stupid counterproductive things that give a bad name to environmentalists. Most of the members are brainless sheep lured by celebrities into the movement.

4. Yeah, same for corn isn’t it? It’s a complex issue. If the issue of powering vehicles were that easy to solve, we would’ve done it long ago. We can learn from the most ecofriendly city in the world though, http://ecocity.wordpress.com/2008/02/09/a-convenient-truth-urban-solutions-from-curitiba-brazil/
Basically awesome city planning means a lot less wastage and pollution and energy usage.
6 Steven Den Beste 66 comments Jul 23rd, 2009 at 1:41 am

TJ, are you the faculty member from Singapore?
7 tj_han 1440 comments Jul 23rd, 2009 at 2:01 am

LOL NO. I’m the most junior noobass member.
8 XT 17 comments Jul 23rd, 2009 at 10:54 am

Yeah there is still that stigma surrounding nuclear power (at least in North America) despite it’s been proven pretty safe (and Chernobyl was entirely caused by the operators being stupid). It are plenty of cons (waste storage, need for water, can’t be varied easily), but for base load power there’s nothing better than nuclear.

The financial sector is evil, but it’s a necessary evil just like politicians and lawyers.

and have fun your trip.
9 Quazacolt 12 comments Jul 23rd, 2009 at 11:34 pm

Anyway, I doubt I’ll be meeting the likes of Danny Choo in Japan, simply because he’s too busy. In the past, before he started his company, he’ll still have the time to meet up with online friends, but as his empire grew, it became just physically impossible to do so, and he came up with the trick of not replying to anyone who said or messaged him that they were going to Japan, until the person returned to his home country. Totally understandable though, you can imagine that he has at least 20 people asking him to meet up per day!

^

this. lol.
10 feng 38 comments Jul 25th, 2009 at 10:14 pm

Trip sounds like serious fun.

Anyway.

3. Focusing on single species is the bane of environmentalism. I blame stupid people for this.

Good point. Unfortunately, stupid is the flavour of the month, or year, decade, century… whenever the next big evolutionary change happens. They just can’t focus on too many things at once.

4. Nuclear power is good, or even essential. Hydropower is bad bad bad, even if it’s renewable.

Everything has a cost. I imagine when solar, wind and wave power become *big* enough, we’ll see major weather changes. You don’t just draw huge amounts of energy from the global weather system and expect the effects to be buffered forever.
Nuclear: it’s like coal/oil, but the bank doesn’t call loan until the next generation or two. When they do, you’ll find one hell of an interest waiting.
Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, hasn’t bared it ugly side yet, if any.

1 Temporal Paralysis » My Intellect Comes in Random Numbers Pingback on Jul 23rd, 2009 at 12:50 am

Do not use any < and > for your own sake. It will end the comment there and then. Also, there is an automatic IQ filter which weeds out comments made by those who accidentally got transported from the stone age.

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