I'll second the other reply to your comment. If you are actually interested in committing to growing rice, most rural areas would welcome you. It's a lot of work, and it's a serious commitment, so it's not for everyone, but if you have independent income (or are self employed and can work remotely), then it's an interesting lifestyle to try.

The locals, particularly the older farmers, have mostly come to terms with the fact that their way of life is dying, so even complete outsiders willing to carry on the tradition are welcomed. They base their trust on apparent commitment more than anything. If you work with them, cut the grass with them, plant the rice with them, they'll welcome you whole heartedly.

From a food security standpoint, gutting domestic production and buying exclusively from foreign countries is about the stupidest thing you could do, but It's easy to suggest by those who live in the US or Europe, areas that produce more food than they need.

You are missing the point, though granted that is because the summary does not explain the full situation.

This tech is not so the farmers will say healthy longer or live longer. Farmers in Japan are old. The reason they're still farming at age 70 for instance is because their sons, who traditionally would have taken over the farm years ago, have moved into the city to take an office job and are never coming back. Certainly some are glad to have something to do and will smile and tell you they plan on doing it until they're 100 years old.

As the average age of farmers goes up, the amount of fallow land has also gone way up. They stop tending land in less ideal locations. Land that is harder to reach, where it is hard or impossible to get the tractor to, where the plot is on a slope - terraced and too small, land where it is more likely that wild animals can damage the crops because you're unable to monitor that field every day.

The TechRice program will be expanded to measure other factors. The specific aim of the program is to make the tending of more remote/less ideal fields more viable, both in terms of labor and in terms of economics. It's an experiment to be sure, and the passing of TPP today raises the bar on what it would need to achieve. Personally my hope is that the program goes on to cover small scale affordable robotics (weeding, protection against wild life, etc.) but that is still just a pipe dream.

Source: I'm one of the people who suggested the program.

Modern Japanese consumers refuse to eat rice from Thailand. They *may* eat rice imported from the US if it is the variety grown in Japan and tastes the same. There was a big shortage in the 90s and they tried importing Thai rice. Very few ate it. The variety is completely different and tastes completely different, and therefore is not seen as being "rice" by the typical housewife.

Certainly, there is need for reform, but this situation is a bit more complicated than you think. TPP passed anyway, though, so we'll see what comes of it.

Radon is not cesium. Different things happen when you ingest them. While the level of background radiation is an easy metric to report, the real dangers are from ingesting or breathing material directly or ingesting that which has entered the food chain, which has happened to a significant extent around Fukushima.

Comparing a nuclear accident with a place with high background radiation is ignorant at best, willfully disingenuous at worst.

According to NHK news the other day, the key to the ruling was that this particular service was being recast to an "indeterminate number of viewers", and that that constituted copyright violation.

The "indeterminate number" concept shows up often in Japanese law and thought, enough so that they have a single compound word for it ("futokteitasu"). It often makes a big deal of a difference for a given question whether some factor is of an "indeterminate number" or not.

I am not familiar with the details of the service in question for this case, but according to the ruling alone, one can only assume that it was not the standard space-shifting service, where the subscriber in effect pays to have a single recorder installed in Japan for them to access from overseas, as that would arguably not involve an "indeterminate number" of viewers for the content, but specific individuals, one per recorder.

However the news was very clear in pointing out, repeatedly, that this particular service had been judged to be taking broadcast content and redistributing it to an indeterminate number of viewers. That would mean this is not as sweeping a ruling as it would appear.

You are comparing two different metrics. Government size on the one hand versus social stability on the other. That's an apples and oranges comparison.

While there may be an apparent correlation between the two in many cases, I do not think it is a true correlation.

A given society has to experience a significantly long period of stability, usually across multiple generations or perhaps even centuries, before such stability becomes part of their culture. Once it becomes part of the culture, perhaps government organization or size can change without destabilizing the society as a whole, but doing so before stability is part of the culture will almost as a rule destabilize the society. That is what you see happening in most unstable countries today: frequent changes in government, whether in the system, the group in power, etc. When the imposed power is removed, the society returns to the default level of stability (or instability as the case may be) to which it has evolved. Historically speaking, it is usually the case that powerful government (whether large or small in organizational structure) is the way that stability can at first be imposed over a larger geographical region, and the only practical method when there are instable neighbor states. Incidentally, this is why you cannot, for example, impose a given system of government arbitrarily on a given society without being prepared to enforce that system for generations if you want the society to remain stable.

In the world today we primarily see that the more stable countries have powerful governments. These augment their power through deep mutual economic integration with other countries, such integration usually having stability as a prerequisite.

However I think it would be naive to assume that there will be no further significant evolution in the organization of society and government systems or that any further evolution will be linear. Thus I doubt that there is any universally applicable answer to the debate between large and small scale governmental organization.

Not sure if this is still the case now, but a few years ago it was well known that a given viewer is counted multiple times if they stayed on the same channel over a long period of time in Nielsen's ratings system, and that Fox's apparent lead at the time (2005) was due to this, basically meaning that fewer people were watching longer compared to other channels/networks.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2005

If the system hasn't changed significantly, then the current FOX surge in ratings could be misleading. That doesn't mean that FOX viewers aren't a significant force in politics, just that they probably do not represent any kind of majority in actual numbers of individuals.

Direct democracy is only a threat when it is enacted on a scale which exceeds the human cognitive ability to deal with each other directly and personally. People supposedly evolved to handle knowing 400 people or so directly. Up to that scale, it is possible to know most of their names, what they are capable of doing or likely to do, etc. In such an environment, direct democracy works pretty well (in the form of general group consensus - direct, democratic). Humans spent almost all of their prehistory living in communities of under 400 people, so they evolved to prefer this system, or more accurately we evolved the system and it us. Close to 200,000 years of continued human existence speaks volumes on the success of this.

When you start organizing people into centrally controlled groups (cities, states, etc.) of greater than 400, then a few people will be clever enough to control it and the rest will be clueless sheep, or somewhere in between that. The majority of "voters" in such an environment will always be extremely good at making very dumb choices, because their brains (our brains) did not evolve to handle the rational and thoughtful analysis of a system on this huge scale which is in fact a prerequisite for making an informed choice about it.

If you do for whatever reason have the ability to grasp the big picture and, very rare, have the ability to make the correct judgement, then remember you are the exception and you should never expect "society" to behave as you believe they should.

When everyone (normal and abnormal both) finally gets that point, then we won't be having discussions of whether or not to give someone the authority to shut down global infrastructure.