Goldman Sachs to Tokyo Employees: "Leave Tokyo and You're Fired!"

This is a story that broke over a week ago, but I think it holds a great lesson for everyone even in hindsight...

JOHNNY PAYCHECK - TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT

Everything in this world today revolves around technology or the economy. It doesn't revolve around sensationalism or hyperbole. As I quoted Tech Crunch in News for Intelligent People Criticize Japan Nuclear Sensationalist Reporting:


The news from Japan is both awful and appalling. Awful: 23,000 confirmed dead or missing, and counting. Appalling: pretty much anything to do with the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. Nuclear meltdown like Chernobyl! Deadly contaminated milk and radioactive tap water! Tokyo a postapocalyptic ghost town! A plume of radiation that threatens America’s West Coast!

Where do they get these morons? Again, twenty thousand people are dead, and the drooling dimwits of the media can’t stop babbling about Fukushima, where exactly one person died – a crane operator who had the misfortune to be up in the cab of his vehicle when the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history hit – and fewer than 30 were injured, only a handful of whom required treatment for radiation exposure.

If you want to know the reality on the ground, you need to look at tech issues and economics. Take Goldman Sachs for example... (Please!) Even though I think Goldman Sachs are scum, I think it must be admitted that big, world-wide blood-sucking corporations don't screw around. Need a measurement of how dangerous Tokyo was during the height of the so-called "nuclear crisis" was?


Goldman Sachs told their Tokyo employees that if they left, they'd be out of a job. Flyjin.com reports:


When four executives from Goldman Sachs visited their Tokyo subsidiary last week, they told foreign employees in no uncertain terms that if they left Tokyo they would not have a job when they returned, according to a report by John Carney of CNBC.com.


Nah.... Do you think that one of the biggest companies in the world that is involved with finance and risk mitigation would be taking unnecessary risks? I don't. Do you? Why should they?


Nope. They just don't do that. They don't screw around with nonsense. From what I hear, their employees get paid over $200,000 US dollars a year.


They'd better not be running away with poop in their pants at that price.


The lesson here is that some of the world's top professionals at risk management and assessment judged the facts and concluded that there never was a huge enough risk to evacuate. This is important because, as a company operating out of the USA, if Goldman Sachs were wrong, they would be liable in US courts for hundreds of millions of dollars - if not more - in damages and liability claims from injured or sick employees.


I don't think it is difficult to deduce what this boils down to: Media hype and sensationalism is just that. The facts on the ground told a far different story.

FlyJin.com: Masterful New Blog!

There are some really smart young people out there and one has started a brilliant - and very fair - blog entitled "FlyJin.com." It is wonderfully written and gets my award for the best new blog of 2011.

In their latest post entitled: Why the Flyjin Flew: The 8 Factors That Led Them Astray Flyjin.com deftly spells out why people panicked in a much nicer way than I would have put it. Here's some choice parts from the article and some explanations of the reasons why people left:


Poor Decision Making

Flyjin made poor decisions, and in the process shirked responsibilities, upended their lives, cooled relationships, wasted money (however insignificant it may have been to them given their circumstances), contributed to an unnecessary panic, and set themselves up for a well-deserved ribbing.

Here are the factors that I think played into these bad decisions:

An Irrational Distrust of Authority

Governments, institutions and corporations are not always right and sometimes have interests that are different from ours. But in a situation like this the good people working in them usually give pretty good advice, often overly cautious advice, despite the flaws in the system. This is simple delegation: You listen to expert consensus, you don’t try yourself to become an instant expert.

Focusing on Worst Case Scenarios Rather Than the Most Probable

Worst case scenarios rarely happen. Fixating on dire predictions is akin to hypochondria. What about the French government?: Yes, they are an authority that should be considered, but they were an outlier here.

Faulty Interpretation of Contemporary Media Sources

Knowing how to ingest modern media is a necessary skill these days, but few seem to have mastered it. The “link bait” headline syndrome has spread to all media. Television news shows are not put together by experts searching for the truth, but rather by 26-year-old “segment producers” eager for controversy. Level-headed experts consulted by the media often lose it and give an ill-considered soundbite because they want the “As Seen on CNN” screen grab for the sidebar of their blogs.

The preceding "Faulty Interpretation of Contemporary Media Sources" is a succinct and concise statement that explains my thinking in one complete paragraph. I've said it over and over: After 30+ years in the mass media, I know BS when I hear it. It is understand able that most people do not have that understanding about how the media works. I do. I am an expert in it. I said the same thing (about mass media sensationalism) concerning swine flu, bird flu, SARS, Man-Made Global Warming, and Saddam Hussein's Nooklar weapons before the Iraq War.  How many people listen? Sadly, not too many. 

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me"... Regular Joe-Blow on the street? "Keep fooling me over and over and over... I never learn." The article continues with another great point:

Getting Lost in Details Rather Than Grasping the Overall Gestalt

If you find yourself obsessively researching on the internet or glued to the television, you are starting to slip into the space inhabited by 9-11 Truthers. Reality is not contained in thousands of facts. Think less data, more common sense, a holistic integration of information that takes account of various weight factors. Some people are better at this than others, but the ability to make decisions in this way can be lost if you think too much. In A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson writes of how he obsessively researched bears prior to his Appalachian Trail hike and ended up being frightened to death throughout the trip.

You can read more of the Why the Flyjin Flew: The 8 Factors That Led Them Astray here: http://flyjin.com/why-the-flyjin-flew-factors/

Like I said, this is top quality writing and one of the best blogs I've seen in a long time. I liked it so much that I've added it to my blogroll. FlyJin.com! 5 stars! And my nomination for "Best New Blog of 2011"!

Japan Nuclear Holocaust?: The Scorecard so Far (Part Two)

This is part two of a series concerning the nuclear disaster in Japan - Well, not really in Japan, it's more in the tabloid and newsrooms around the world that desperately need to do something to keep their geriatric audience glued to the screens. You can read part one here.

THE RETURN OF THE CREATURE:

The UK tech publication The Register fills us in on the crisis on the ground with a new article entitled: Fukushima Fearmongers are Stealing our Jetsons Future - Hysteria Now Completely Disconnected from Reality:


As the situation at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant slowly winds down, the salient facts remain the same as they have been throughout: nobody has suffered or will suffer any radiological health consequences.


The situation being as it may, the article goes on to talk about the continuing shock, panic and hysteria that still exists in Japan's nuclear no-man's news-land. The article continues:


Three workers who suffered noticeable but not dangerous radiation doses from standing ankle-deep in radioactive water – and possible minor burns equivalent to a mild case of sunburn – have been confirmed to have suffered no ill effects. Their "hospitalisation with radiation burns" was widely reported: the fact that they are – as was to be expected – perfectly fine was not.


Plant owner TEPCO has now decided to cut its losses, however, stating that it now considers that reactors 1 to 4 at the site will have to be written off: being near the end of their planned lives anyway, it makes no sense to spend much money on fixing them. The other two Daiichi reactors, Nos 5 and 6, were brought safely into a cold shutdown condition early on and TEPCO still expects to continue operations with these (as would be quite normal: both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island continued in operation as nuclear power stations following the incidents there).


It's true. These reactors were slated for decommissioning at the end of March 2011 anyway... But the closing was delayed by the "Good ol' boys" at TEPCO and the Japanese government.

So goodbye yellow brick road....

But wait a minute, Mike! (I can hear you say!) What about that deadly Plutonium? Oh, yeah, about that. The Register talks about that too (complete with funny headline):


PLUTONIUM FOUND AT FUKUSHIMA!! Probably from old weapons tests thousands of miles away, but hey, let's wet ourselves anyway

There has also been heavy reporting in the press regarding the discovery of very small amounts of plutonium isotopes at the site – producing less than one Becquerel of radioactivity per kilo of soil. (For context the human body naturally emits radiation around 50 Bq/kg). This is utterly insignificant in a health context but is possibly indicative of fuel damage in the cores – if the isotopes did in fact come from the cores. The levels in three of the five samples are so low, and of such isotopes, that it is quite possible they result from long-ago nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific. Two other samples contain some plutonium-238, a clue that they may be from the no 3 reactor which had plutonium in its fuel.

"[Those two samples] could possibly come from the accident," TEPCO spokespersons told World Nuclear News.

Often these facts have been reported in such a way as to suggest that the Fukushima events have led to contamination levels similar to those following nuclear weapons tests, which is utterly untrue.


So, folks. There you have it. Your update. It's not as exciting as nuclear death or as exciting as three headed beings, but so far the scorecard is:


Deaths from nuclear accident................................ 0
Missing from nuclear accident............................... 0
Deaths from earthquake and tsunami.....(over) 10,000
Missing from earthquake and tsunami....(over) 17,480


There was one death from the nuclear site but that was caused when a crane operator died when his crane tipped over... It had nothing to do with radiation...Yes. There's been a real disaster. But you'll find little of it being reported in the MSM... Starving children and people living in shelters and squalor don't make for interesting news to people living the way the media says they should in a consumer society.

X-RAY SPECS - ART-I-FICIAL

Please help those poor mothers, fathers, children and 
elderly in northern Japan who are suffering without 
shelter and supplies due to the recent disaster!

They thank you and I thank you sincerely. 
God bless!

http://bit.ly/gZXJBw

Thanks to Victor Vorski