Letters to the Editor
ikuiku
Published Letters: 190 Editor's Choice: 22
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McCain is pathetic, but then we already knew that.
[Read the article: Much to be desired from McCainonomics]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If anything, we should double the gas tax to help fund mass transit and alternative fuel R&D.
Gas isn't expensive because of federal or local taxes, which haven't increased all that much over the last 10 years or so. Gas is expensive because demand keeps rising. If McCain really wanted to be a "maverick" he'd explain this to the American public and make conservation and alternative energy development a major plank of his campaign.
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While I agree that we are the biggest problem , . . .
[Read the article: Let's dump "Earth Day"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]. . . Europe was still relatively sparsely populated when many of our ancestors began to "colonize" the Americas, and it would still be nearly 200 years before Western Europe would develop the technologies responsible for the first air and water pollution.
They (Native Americans) only used what they needed, didn't hoard, didn't "own" even the lands they lived on and hunted. Game was plentiful, and water was clean and pure. The Europeans however, had early on trashed their part of the Globe, and sought to find new lands to destroy. -- veteran71
Much of Asia, however, was already grossly over-populated if behind the West technologically, and now the same is true of the ME and Africa.
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Not likely a long term problem.
[Read the article: Japan's unwanted low-fat diet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As Japan's population continues to decline it will need to import less food. This should also lead to the long-overdue shift in commodity food production domestically.
Japan's agricultural is categorized as "intensive gardening." Anyone who has lived there can describe the pointlessly labor intensive and needlessly small scale of Japan's agriculture. Like India, Japan needed to rationalize agricultural production a couple of decades ago. Farmer population continues to decline, but Japan still has one of the highest percentages of population devoted to at least part-time agriculture. As with India, too many farmers equals too many small farms, and productivity is lower than it should be.
Japan's greatest challenge, like most of the world's, is energy.
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I'm not sure how you define "staples," . . .
[Read the article: Japan's unwanted low-fat diet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]. . . but I'm pretty sure that the Japanese consume more dairy per capita than anyone else in East Asia, and are probably second to S. Korea in beef consumption.
Beef and butter are not exactly staples in Japan, and many Japanese go their entire lives without eating either. Beef is atrociously expensive in Tokyo and is a status symbol of the rich. Butter is something used in Western-style restaurants and not part of traditional cooking.
Actually, very few Japanese go their entire lives without eating either beef or butter (though some Buddhist monks may abstain). Western-style baked goods, particularly French, are very popular, buttered toast is common at breakfast, McDonalds is ubiquitous in the metropolitan and suburban areas where the overwhelming majority of the population is centered, and three Japanese dishes, sukiyaki, shabu-shabu and tenpan-yaki, are made with (among other ingredients) beef.
Japan's topography has never lent itself to cattle herding (or herding at all).
Hokkaido, which very much resembles the PNW west of the mountains, has substantial dairy farms and wagyu, Japanese style beef, which is raised throughout the country, is more like veal thus requiring relatively little space (Japan imports most of its lower grade beef). The same is pretty much true of raising dairy cattle: it doesn't require the acreage you commonly see used in the semi-arid regions of the U.S. (and S. America) for raising beef cattle.
The Japanese diet, I believe, focuses on rice, vegetables, tofu and seafood . . .
The traditional Japanese diet, and rice consumption has declined yearly for a couple of decades now. However, the Japanese, particularly in the major metropolitan areas, are almost on par with N. American in terms of the variety of diet. Some of the best French and Italian (and Chinese, Thai and Indian) food I've ever had has been in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka and Nagoya.
Regarding food, the Japanese are concerned about a much more serious threat to their food supply--the depletion of worldwide fishing stocks. That would be a far graver threat to Japan.-- cdunlea
This is true. However, they are also one of the primary culprits in this. The waters off Japan have been over-fished for decades. This is why the Japanese commercial fishing fleet travels all over the world.
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1989!
[Read the article: Japan's unwanted low-fat diet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Where were you, confined to some remote fishing village on the Sea of Japan side of Tohoku?
But seriously, when did the Japanese diet become so much like ours? That has to be recently. I'll admit the last time I was in Japan was 1989, but my travels through the country left me a distinct impression that beef and butter were uncommon.-- cdunlea
I first ate at McDonlds in when I live in Naogay in 1979 (used to be my favorite place to quench a hangover - nothing quite like a couple of cheeseburgers, fries and a chocolate shake at ten in the morning). I know it had been in the country for several years before that.
When I last lived in Nagoya, the same year you last visited Japan, we had three pizza delivery options, one of them being Dominoes.
The contemporary Japanese diet is nearly as bad as the American diet, and maybe worse for all the salt. I predict that Japanese life expectancy will plateau here in the next couple of decades as the post-war generations excessive drinking, smoking and fattier diet catch up with them. The positive aspects of more dairy and meat (not just beef) in the Japanese diet are better teeth, stronger bones and, for what it's worth, greater height and girth.
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Okinawa is an exception.
[Read the article: Japan's unwanted low-fat diet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Furthermore, you seem to be mistaken that Okinawa is actually part of Japan (BTW, that's an in crowd joke). Furthermore, the U.S. military would still probably bring in dairy goods and beef from elsewhere for a base even if it were next door to a dairy farm and a cattle ranch with it's own abattoir. Remember, this is the same organization that trucks gas and diesel in from Kuwait for use in Iraq.
I don't know about the rest of Japan, but I was in Okinawa in the middle 80s and there was no beef or dairy industry there at all. The US military was flying milk in from the Phillipines
-- IaintBacchu
Think of Okinawa as Guam or a poor version of Hawaii, and then you better understand it's relative physical isolation, and it's political, social and economic relationship to the rest of the country.
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That's a bit of an understatement.
[Read the article: Is humanity running out of technological tricks?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]On Wednesday, Paul Krugman kicked things off by pondering the sad state of alternative energy technology development and concluding that, "For the last 35 years, progress on energy technologies has consistently fallen below expectations."
While we have actually made some significant strides in conservation based on energy consumption patterns that have existed since the middle of the previous century, we've made no meaningful progress with regards to developing any kind of practical and/or affordable alternative energy to replace fossil fuels.
I believe that if we'd stop wasting federal dollars on shit like manned space exploration and had recast our foreign policy/military posture after the collapse of Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union, we'd have already seen significant progress toward a viable non-carbon fuel future.