Hey Nick, careful with this, it's loaded:
> ... Hardly a
> justification for the small-town-America prurient moral superiority and
> condescension implicit in his title.
If there's a part of journalism that's whoring yourself out, you're doing
pretty well if you confine it to the headline. Yeah, there was a slant
inside as well-- in particular, LINC feels stiffed from the official menu
despite what may well be a creditable chakumero-composition offering (they
did a desktop java version a a few years back; Steve Meyers', I think.) I
don't know the merits of the case, so I won't comment. Suffice it to say
that as slants go in our paid-placement media world, this one was about 1
degree off the vertical.
And there's not enough corporate altitude at Japan Inc for it to tower
over much of anybody, so I have a hard time seeing this supposed
condescension. Chutzpah maybe, but that's all to the good.
As for reading prurience in there -- well, Nick, you've been quite
reliable at that, I've noticed. Keep up the good work.
That leaves moral superiority, and with the still-not-fully-deflated
bubble wafting its flatulence our way, anybody who so much as says "well,
couldn't you see it coming?" will be seen as smug and arrogant -- instead of
just being better informed, more experienced, and brutally frank. *I'll*
cop to being smug and arrogant, but I haven't seen it in Daniel.
> PS - perhaps a course in elementary Aristotelian Logic is in order for Mr
> Skusa.
That's "Scuka" (dammit!), and here on my planet, Earth, people have to run
their lives and businesses not logic but on probability. Which, certain
pedants notwithstanding, measures only "strength of belief."
If Daniel had only facial expressions, silence and evasion to go on, in
numerous face-to-face encounters, he's forced to employ a time-honored skill
of the interviewer's trade: reading body language.
If this means so little, why do people still, after a century of
telephony, still bother to have face-to-face meetings? Those little green
levitating monsters might not be very numerate, but they can be very
informative. They're out there. I've seen them. In some companies, they
outnumber the employees.
As far "hard numbers" - feh! A very capable gaijin economist of my
acquaintance does very little study of the Japanese economy precisely
because there are no hard numbers here. Give it up already.
But let's not limit it to Japan-bashing -- how about the late, great 1990s
New Economy productivity growth in the U.S.? The one on which a staggering
budget surplus (now vanished) was based? Talk about counting your chickens.
Lies, damned lies, statistics -- and it's never been truer than now. If
economists can't stay sober about numbers, businessmen sure won't. That
leaves intuition refined through experience, and on that I'm inclined (too
probabilistically for your tastes, I'm sure) to give a canny journalist the
benefit of the doubt.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
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Received on Fri Sep 7 16:34:58 2001