Car keys?

People who live in big cities where apartments of 344 square feet are normal don't waste massive amounts of space on parking for cars -- there will be stores within walking distance, and they probably take the subway to work.

If the guy lives by himself, 344 ft^2 really isn't small at all. My wife and I share just under 38 m^2 (408 ft^2) and, while not spacious, our apartment certainly isn't tiny. We have a kitchen, living room, and bedroom, plus a bathroom, and a balcony on which to hang the laundry. This is in Tokyo, where density is about the same as Hong Kong.

When we have a kid, then we'll start to feel cramped. But there are other people in our building raising kids in rooms the size of ours!

The only 'tax' non-fossil fuel vehicles should pay is a nominal road maintenance fee - where I come from it's already included in our property taxes.

If that's the case, then any property owner who doesn't own a car, or has some physical disability that prevents them from driving one, is getting shafted.

If the wear on the roads is porportional to the fourth power of the weight of the person/vehicle, that means that a 70-kg person puts (forgive the scientific notation) 2.4e6 kg^3 of burden on a road compared to 1.6e13 kg^3 for a two-ton SUV.

No one without a car should have to pay road maintenance fees in any form -- the burden they put on the roads is literally less than a millionth that of a motor vehicle!

It's not clear form your post if you have a non-fossil-fuel vehicle or if you have no motor vehicle, but if you don't have a motor vehicle, you should protest your city for making you subsidize vehicles through your property tax. The amount may be small, but that doesn't make it just.

Some, but not all, German speakers have changed the [r] sound into an uvular one, as has most of France.

I learned my German as textbook Hochdeutsch, with trilled [r], and without "ch" merging with "sch", and the first time I met a speaker who changed those two things, saying recht as if it were something like ghescht, I could barely understand him! But that doesn't mean that it's not a legitimate variety of German. That's how language variation gets started.

Why Germans get so much guff for the supposedly-throat-clearingly-unpleasant sound of their "ch" whereas French people's "r" goes unnoticed is a great injustice. The French must have better PR.

Map with local magnitudes (on the Japanese "shindo" scale):

http://tenki.jp/earthquake/detail-4575.html

Tenki.jp was my go-to site during the last quake. It shows quakes and tsunami warnings, updated almost instantly.

I want public transit to die. I don't use it, and all they do is say that they need more money, every year, right after they've been given 1.1 billion dollars. So I'd scrap it. Let people learn to work closer to where they live, and learn to live closer to where they work.

Living near where you work is admirable, but plenty of those newfangled office "parks" built near highways literally have no residences within walking distance of them.

You might want public transit to die because you choose not to use it. But we visually impaired people are not allowed to drive automobiles. Any employer with no public transportation or residential districts within walking distance is a place where we can never work.

And the billions spent on public transportation (which, again, you choose not to use) are dwarfed by the billions spent on maintaining highways and other automobile-related infrastructure (which your non-driving counterparts are forbidden from using). We could stop funding both -- but something tells me you wouldn't enjoy all those potholes.

I'm supposed to pay $0.05 per plastic bag at the grocery store -- the dumbest law in the world. So instead, I tell them I've brought my own -- and I steal them from the next cash register that's closed.

Forgive the bluntness (and the fact that we're straying far afield from copyright laws), but based on the above two attitudes, I'm glad I don't do business with you.

Or plutonium. You probably think that here in high-tech Japan, we can just walk into the corner drugstore and buy plutonium. Unfortunately, even here it's a little hard to come by.

^_^;

They do, but they don't have the capacity to convert the amounts of power that the Kanto side suddenly needs. It's unfortunate that they didn't invest in more conversion capacity before this disaster, but then again, it probably would have been viewed as a waste of money, as few people could have imagined a power shortage of this scale before.

A few years ago the government began urging offices to keep their indoor temperatures at 28 degrees C (82 F) to save energy; there are doubts as to its efficacy as the increased sweat and lethargy bring greater water usage (more laundry) and lowered productivity.

I despised this program but could certainly endure it this year when there are so many people suffering from a lot more than an overheated working environment, but the silver lining is that when power capacity does finally get back up -- the Fukushima reactors were nearing end-of-life and new ones were already scheduled for 2013 -- regular folks might be able to work in air-conditioned offices again. After what we've been through, it sure will feel like a luxury.

<p><i>Japan is as rich as the USA, <b>has vastly greater savings</b>, astronomical foreign trade surpluses, etc. I'm saying this not to castigate but to support my argument.</i>

<p>I recognize the fact that Japan is one of the rich nations of the world. But using "greater savings" as support from your argument doesn't make sense to me. Japanese people are somehow less deserving of aid because they diligently save money? If they were irresponsible spendthrifts who emptied their bank accounts as soon as the money came in every month, and buried themselves in debt, they'd be somehow more deserving of help?

<p>Yes, the leadership is imperfect. But the people shouldn't be denied assistance because they were competent at managing their lives before the disaster.

Oh, I completely missed that, AC! You're a sharp one!

I'm American, for the record, and *this* American is trying to be as compassionate as he can.