Reuters reports that President Obama “signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi” within the last “two or three weeks.”
Free of any bias. Except for that liberal elitist one.
Category Archives: World Events
Goldman Sachs Employees Ordered to Stay in Radioactive Hell
Understandably, people living in Japan are kind of worried about all that cancer/death/glowing dust floating around everywhere. So, when employees of the Tokyo branch of Goldman Sachs asked their company to work from a country that wouldn’t kill them, the response was SHUT THE FUCK UP AND KEEP MAKING US TONS OF MONEY YOU FUCKING PUSSIES. THANK YOU.
Employees at the investment bank’s Japan offices are worried about radiation levels affecting their families, the person said. Many were asking if they could temporarily relocate out of the country or perhaps move to a location in southern Japan, farther away from troubled nuclear power plants. The were told that they should not leave Tokyo, according to the person…. “The message was clear: no one is to leave. If you do leave, you can’t come back and expect to still work for Goldman,” the person said.
If you really valued your health and life, you wouldn’t be working at an investment bank in the first place, unless you really think that 80 hours/week is somehow compatible with good health, as opposed to a very comfortable life for all the years that you manage to get. It is not a place where work/life balance is aspired to, or at least not something you would talk about without invoking suspicion about how much you’re not working.
Honestly, I always thought that was the trade Bernie Madoff made – not the work/life balance, but the idea that he could knowingly give up a number of years at the end of his life in exchange for living like a king during the years he got to keep, as he clearly knew that the scheme would get exposed eventually; the math on that is obvious. And I suspect that a lot of people on Wall Street would make the same trade, because you can’t take it with you.
Japan: The Worst Is Yet To Come
Looking at the pictures from yesterday’s earthquake off the coast of Japan, and the resulting tsunami, it’s hard to imagine it being any worse. Entire coastal towns swept out to sea, thousands without power, and an impending nuclear disaster paints a heart-wrenching picture of the tragedy.
It’s no secret that Japan is probably the most earthquake prepared country in the world (it has some of the strictest building codes out there) but officials in the country have been preparing it’s citizens for something potentially more catastrophic. It’s called the “Great Tokai Earthquake” – a predicted disaster southwest of Tokyo that Japan has spent trillions of yen preparing for, based on the inexact science of predicting earthquakes.
I know what you’re thinking, “Friday’s quake was a 8.9-magnitude, isn’t that the one they’ve been preparing for?”. The answer is simple.
Yes and no.
While all quake preparedness is good preparedness, Friday’s quake hit in a completely different subduction zone-where two oceanic plates collide. Since 1976, the quake-prone country has warned its citizens about the possibility of an 8.0 quake off the coast of Shizuoka prefecture, located about 100 miles (160 km) southeast of Tokyo. Friday’s quake was centered offshore some 230 miles (373 km) northeast of Toyko.
Japan’s government has even provided a 14-page guidebook on the Tokai earthquake theory – which warns, “It would not be surprising if a huge earthquake happened tomorrow” – and how to prepare for it.
It’s all based on the fact that there hasn’t been a major quake along an area between the two plates that collide off Shizuoka’s coastline in over 150 years. That means a lot of energy has built up and will eventually release in an earthquake.
“The tectonics of Japan are very complicated because they have three plates coming together beneath that country: the North American plate to the west, the Eurasian plate to the east, and the Philippine plate somewhat to the southeast,” said research geophysicist Morgan Moschetti with the National Earthquake Information Center.
Basically, the event on Friday took place where the North American Plate and Eurasian Plate meet and in return had no effect on alleviating the pressure building up between Eurasian and Philippine plates, where the Great Tokai quake is predicted to happen.
Essentially, after Japan picks up the pieces and begins to recover and rebuild from this most recent disaster, they’ll have to prepare for what could be the next “big one”.