What the Heck?! Thread (Closed)

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antiterror13

Brigadier
In my company people who work long hours are sometime considered inefficient

super expert @SamuraiBlue may able to advise us, how efficient Japanese workers are .. why they need 100+ hours overtime a month or over 5 hours a day ... thats crazy!!!!!!!!

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Death by overwork: Japan puts 100-hour cap on overtime, critics call it ‘outrageous’
WORLD Updated: Apr 19, 2017 11:40 IST
AFP, Tokyo
Japan overtime
Workaholic Japan has unveiled in March 2017 its first-ever plan to limit overtime.(AFP File Photo)
Workaholic Japan has unveiled its first-ever plan to limit overtime, but critics want to give it the boot, saying an “outrageous” 100-hour-a-month cap will do nothing to tackle karoshi, or death from overwork.
Tokyo’s bid to ease a national health crisis comes after the top executive at advertising giant Dentsu quit late last year in response to the suicide of a young employee who regularly logged more than 100 hours of overtime a month.
The death of Matsuri Takahashi generated nationwide headlines, prompting the government to come up with a solution to punishing work hours blamed for hundreds of deaths due to strokes, heart attacks and suicides every year.
A panel headed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has since come up with a plan calling for a maximum of 100 overtime hours a month.
The conservative leader called it a “historic step for changing the way people work in Japan” but critics think the plan should be given its marching orders.
The Labour Lawyers’ Association of Japan has slammed the proposed cap as “extremely inappropriate” and “impossible to support”.
“It’s tantamount to endorsing a limit that could cause overwork deaths,” said Association head Ichiro Natsume.
Others who have lost loved ones to karoshi agree.
“We cannot accept this -- it’s outrageous,” said Emiko Teranishi, who heads a group for relatives of karoshi victims.

“I thought the government was finally going to tackle the issue.... But this has turned out to be (a) step backward rather than a step forward.”
Teranishi’s husband was the manager of a struggling soba noodle restaurant in Kyoto when he committed suicide in the mid-nineties after suffering from depression blamed on long working hours.
“My husband worked for a total of 4,000 hours a year without weekends off. At most, he had two days off a month,” she said, adding that he was pressured to work more by his recession-hit employer.
“He was depressed. He told me he couldn’t sleep or eat. I asked him to take a day off every morning, but he still went to work.”
‘How many more must die?’
The popular post-war image of a Japanese “salaryman” toiling long hours, drinking with the boss and then taking the last train home has evolved over the decades, but many still spend far more time at the workplace than their counterparts in other modern economies.
Currently, Japanese firms can make full-time employees work far beyond the usual 40 hours a week during busy periods.
Overtime is viewed as a sign of dedication at many firms, even if Japanese workers’ productivity lags behind that of their US and European counterparts.
And more than one in five Japanese companies have employees whose tendency to overwork puts them at serious risk of dying, according to a government survey published in October.
That survey was part of the nation’s first white paper on karoshi.
The new rules would limit monthly overtime and levy penalties on firms that don’t comply -- both firsts in a country notorious for its gruelling work schedule.
The scheme, hammered out by Japan’s biggest business lobby Keidanren and the Japanese Trade Union Confederation, known as Rengo, officially says overtime should not exceed 45 hours a month.
But the proposed changes to the labour laws, expected to be submitted this year, would let employers make workers put in as many as 100 hours of overtime if the office is busy -- a determination made by managers.
Rengo’s president Rikio Kozu praised the scheme as “the first step taken toward eliminating karoshi”.
But it does not do enough to tackle the problem, said Hifumi Okunuki, a unionist and teacher at Sagami Women’s University, warning that the death toll was sure to mount unless more stringent action was taken.
“It seems we have drifted further away from that day in the future when the word ‘karoshi’ becomes an historical footnote,” she wrote in a Japan Times opinion column.
“How many more workers must die before our country wakes up?”
 

broadsword

Brigadier


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Mein Kampf Enters Japanese Classrooms to Help Kids 'Reflect on History'

© AFP 2017/ Christof STACHE
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19.04.2017

Schoolchildren in Japan are to read excerpts from Mein Kampf during history classes, the Japanese government has announced.
Japanese schoolchildren are to read Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, after the government took the controversial decision to allow schoolbooks to contain excerpts of the fascist text.

According to Koichi Hagiuda, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary, the book will be used to improve students' knowledge about the early twentieth century.

"There are examples of teaching materials with partial citations from 'Mein Kampf' being used in order to reflect on the historical background of the era in which it written. It is being used in a negative, not a positive way," Hagiuda explained at a press conference on Wednesday,
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.


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The Japanese Cabinet had confirmed the change on Friday after a question from the opposition Democratic Progressive Party. It said the book will be used in a way which does not contravene Japan's Fundamental Law of Education.
Mein Kampf is a semi-autobiographical account of Hitler's life which also outlined the manifesto of his party. The book represents the basis of Nazi ideology, including anti-Semitism, ideas of German racial superiority and the concept of Lebensraum (living space), the idea that Germans needed more space and should take that space from eastern Europe, and particularly Russia.

The Cabinet's move to allow the
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follows its decision last month to allow schools to study another historical text which is said to have influenced the rise of Japanese nationalism and the outbreak of World War Two.

Previously forbidden from use in classrooms, the Japanese government has said that the
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, which was issued by Emperor Meiji in 1890, can now be used in education classes.


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Critics say the 315-word text, which was memorized by schoolchildren and hung in Japanese classrooms alongside the Emperor's portrait, contributed to Japan's entry into the Second World War as it served as the basis of moral and civic instruction which drilled ideas of "loyalty and filial piety" towards the emperor from his subjects.
It was officially abolished by
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's National Diet in 1948, however Tokyo has now said that the text can be used in schools as long as the teaching does not contravene Japan's Constitution and Fundamental Law of Education.
 

dingyibvs

Junior Member
100 hour overtime a month may sound crazy, but that might be difficult to achieve in some professions. Here in the states, resident physicians used to easily work 100+ hrs a week, they'd go over the limit in less than 2 weeks. Now we have an 80 hr work week rule, which people still go over from time to time (usually the inefficient ones), but that's still going over the 100 hr overtime rule pretty comfortably.
 

Blackstone

Brigadier
Gordon Chang's white half-sister no doubt.

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Don’t believe what you hear about China’s economic might and the durability of its increasingly belligerent Communist regime. That was the message
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, a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, delivered Tuesday in a talk titled Is Asia Lost to China? at
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“I believe the end of this horrible regime will come; and when it comes it will come quickly and when you least expect it, just like the Soviet Union,” she said.

Kissel, who hosts WSJ Video’s Opinion Journal and co-hosts the foreign policy podcast Foreign Edition, knows a great deal about Asia. She joined the Journal in Hong Kong in 2004 and served as Asia opinion writer from 2005 to 2010.

China’s economic resurgence was fueled by its opening to the West in the late 1970s, she said. But “underneath China’s economic miracle is a debt-filled paper tiger,” she said.

China’s economy is teetering because it more than doubled the money it poured into economic stimulus after the 2008 recession and rolled back economic reforms, she said. Chinese leaders “may find the debt-fueled tiger will throw them off its back,” she predicted.

What’s more, China’s pro-democracy movement cannot be quashed by the regime’s brutal tactics, she said.

China’s yearning for democracy dates back more than 100 years to the end of the Qing dynasty, she said. The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests “were not just in Beijing, it was in hundreds of cities throughout China,” she said. “That’s why it scared the Chinese leadership so much.”

Chinese leaders believed the memory of democracy would fade in Hong Kong, even as they reneged on promises made during the hand-over from Britain, she said. Instead “a new democracy movement led by people who weren’t even born during British rule has risen up,” she said.

More than half of China’s population has access to the Internet. And despite China’s firewall, “the leadership is starting to realize that the problem is not with foreigners bringing in ideas about democracy. The voices are inside the firewall.”

China is pursuing aggressive military tactics, such as installing weapons on artificial islands it has constructed in the South China Sea, because the United States has retreated from the region, she said. Barack Obama’s administration cut $500 billion from the defense budget and reduced the size of the Navy to its lowest level since the 1950s, she said.

The United States has done nothing in response to China’s military aggression, she said. Her advice to President Donald Trump when Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives for a planned visit next month at Mar-a-Lago is to “push back and push back hard.”

She regards the $54 billion Trump proposes adding to the defense budget as a good first step. The United States also should support Japan in beefing up its military defenses, she said.

In her view, such moves will speed the inevitable fall of China’s anachronistic Communist regime.

Resident Rachel Lorentzen, who proposed Kissel as a speaker to the Four Arts, said the talk left her feeling “very optimistic. I didn’t realize democracy is alive in China and the economy isn’t as strong as we were led to believe.”
 

ahho

Junior Member
100 hour overtime a month may sound crazy, but that might be difficult to achieve in some professions. Here in the states, resident physicians used to easily work 100+ hrs a week, they'd go over the limit in less than 2 weeks. Now we have an 80 hr work week rule, which people still go over from time to time (usually the inefficient ones), but that's still going over the 100 hr overtime rule pretty comfortably.

The difference is that US and Canada, we get paid overtime and in Canada, it has to be 1.5 times your hourly wage. If you are working for a large company that does not pay overtime, that is just corporate greed.

Hong Kong is another example that they really should go back in time and regulate maximum hours a worker can do. My parents told me that, in the past, some factories in Hong Kong required permit to have workers to work overtime or the department of labour will come and investigate
 

bd popeye

The Last Jedi
VIP Professional
I have now seen EVERYTHING...well almost everything.

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The sisterhood stresses that its seven members, despite the moniker, do not belong to any order of the Catholic Church.

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Reuters / Thursday, April 20, 2017
California "weed nun" Christine Meeusen, who goes by the name Sister Kate, smells hemp in the kitchen at Sisters of the Valley near Merced, California. Meeusen adopted the nun persona after she took part in an Occupy Wall Street protest in 2011 dressed as a Catholic nun, a look that led her to be known by protesters as "Sister Occupy. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

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Reuters / Thursday, April 20, 2017
California "weed nun" Christine Meeusen, (R), and India Delgado, who goes by the name Sister Eevee, smoke a joint at Sisters of the Valley near Merced, California. Based near the town of Merced in the Central Valley, which produces over half of the fruit, vegetables and nuts grown in the United States, the Sisters of the Valley grow and harvest their own cannabis plants. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

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Reuters / Thursday, April 20, 2017
California "weed nun" India Delgado, who goes by the name Sister Eevee, trims hemp in the kitchen at Sisters of the Valley near Merced, California. The group says its Holy Trinity is the marijuana plant, specifically hemp, a strain of marijuana that has very low levels of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound in the plant. Members turn the hemp into cannabis-based balms and ointments, which they say have the power to improve health and well-being. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

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California "weed nun" India Delgado, who goes by the name Sister Eevee, carries hemp at Sisters of the Valley near Merced, California. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
 
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Equation

Lieutenant General
G05xFQS.jpg


Nun or not, I would love to get "high" with her!:eek::D
 

Blackstone

Brigadier
I have now seen EVERYTHING...well almost everything.
Oh yeah? Have you seen this and do you have cider in your ear?

One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear.
 
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