[Info-vax] [OT] Japan, was: Re: HP short of ideas - hiring dancers for inspiration

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-earth.ufp> wrote:
> On 2013-04-23, Bill Gunshannon <bill at server1.cs.uofs.edu> wrote:

>> And then they wonder why American business is in the crapper.

>> It's a lot like "Agile" and all this other business crap from Japan
>> that has been foisted on American companies.  They are still fighting
>> the war, just changed tactics. "What", you say.  Look at what Japanese
>> methods got them.  Fukushima.  And now we think we should use the same
>> business methods?
 
> Actually Fukushima showed us something else. It showed the average Japanese
> person in the street acting with dignity and honour in the face of disaster.
 
> The Japanese victims brought great honour upon themselves and their country
> as a result of the way they conducted themselves during that disaster.
> It's a example some other cultures on this planet could learn from.

I do agree that the Japanese did an amazing job of conducting themselves
during a disaster. 

It might be getting a little off topic, but Fukushima itself was at
least as much a political/cultural failure as a technical failure.

After a NOVA special about it, I e-mailed to the nuclear power expert
(I believe from MIT) who was on the show. After the diesel generators
failed, they had two or three days of battery backup to restore power,
and before the radioactive water leaks. Someone could have flown in 
diesel generators from, if nowhere else, the US in that time.
(Most likely there were closer ones.) For political and/or cultural
reasons, that wasn't done.  He agreed with my thoughts on it.
 
> There were some incidents to report, but given how rare those incidents
> were actually made the individual incidents newsworthy.

After the disaster, there were power shortages throughout the area, 
and people did a great job of coping with it. I doubt most US cities
would do as well.
 
> BTW, it's perfectly ok to criticise current cultures if you base those
> criticisms on facts still valid today. It's wrong however to take values
> common during a war in the middle of the last century and just state
> without evidence that those values still exist today.

-- glen