Just sharing news out of Japan that seems like it could have been a real shadow run. The camera company Olympus is in real trouble. In the last few days it's stock value has dropped by 66% and it is about to be delisted on the tokyo Stock exchange.

A couple of weeks back a high ranking gaijan in the company discovered what he thought were irregularities in the book keeping. Serious issues about reporting losses. He reported what he found and his superior, a senior VP at once fired him. Apparently this guy kept good notes, and I thought I was the only person who kept a dead man switch on my files, and it all went public. The VP had been ochestrating for years that they were hiding loses and failing to accurately report their findings. Evidence is that the president didn't know but there are criminal charges pending on the VP and his agents and the company is on the edge of collapse as investors and regulators express no faith in the company books. which is amazingly bad considering none of this affects the quality of the cameras the company produces. Being any part of htis could be a great run-finding/hiding the evidence. getting rdi of/protecting the whistle blower and finally finmding/hiding evidence or protecting/implicating various company officers. i mean maybe the president did know but he just hid his trail better.

Lastly I got this from European news agency's. the Japan Times on line, that plugs itself as the west's window on Japan made NO mention of this at all.

OwO;
Wow.

I was in a camera store yesterday and the clerk had heard none of htis but I noticed the Olympus werep retty expensive and all i could think is 'spare parts are gonna get rare."

Some Japanese papers report it, in at least a general way.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/s...AJ2011111217300

But Reuters is a lot better.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/12/...E7MB2UM20111112

Hehe, considered runs from that reads like some kind of Horizon chess game.

With MCT and Renraku getting involved because they want the technology/equipment/talent/everything else the company has. And it's local to them.

EDIT: Also proof you can't trust those shifty gaijan! No work ethic or concept of "Face".

Gai-jin-owned! Take that, cultural tendency not to voice uncomfortable facts!

John Wayne throwing a punch: http://www.demotivationalposters.org/59482

"Fill your hands, you son-of-a-bitch!"

Heh. Late in our marriage, that's what my ex-wife used to tell me whenever I got frisky.

kzt that was posted on Saturday, this has been brewing for a while. It's amzing/sickening how slow the japanese press is to report problems with japanese corps.I noticed it when the whole Toyoda issue came up, but politicians, they're ready to string 'em up at short notice.

Different culture, Snow Fox. Maybe they wanted to get facts straight and report accurately instead of being "First to announce the information!" on half-given or misunderstood data.

The Japanese Press has Face they have to be careful with as well.

Or I might just be an idiot.

Their willingness to slaughter politicians at the drop of a hat, leaping to stories of spoorts fixing etc but easing off of corp stories seems to SR that it's almost funny, or not.

This is different from elsewhere, how? Seems like other media around the world is also reluctant towards reporting of corporate problems within their own nation. No wonder, as the corporations are prime advertisement space customers...

How long did it take for us to get reports on Occupy Wall Street that wasn't from the Internet?

And of course, the Yakuza may be involved. The NYT coverage is pretty exhaustive, for those looking for run inspirations.

The occupy guys got pretty quick notice. the news corps are so competative in the US they want to be the furst to report any rumor and apologize later if they get it werong. The only time they stay silent is when they have union problems themselves. BUT thenthe other networks delight in reporting on it. So if CBS is having a picket line,they won't report it but ABC, and NBC will give lead coverage.

Besides putting speed over accuracy the one thing with US news services that gets me down is the hopeless cross-promotions for entertainment shows on the same network- ABC is particularly bad at that.

Or, apparently, entertainment shows that try to pass themselves off as news.

Unrelated to Olympus (by the way, making cameras is just a sideline for them, they do a lot more), but I didn't want to start a thread jus for that - hers another story to inspire runs. Two Russian oligarch going at each other. Plenty of shadow opportunities (from B&E jobs to steal crucial evidence documents to assassination jobs).

http://www.economist.com/node/21531489

Seems to confirm that the worst scum come dressed in suits...

LOL, almost everyone has worn a suit.

And that's changed... When?

Or uniforms. Essentially, the clothing of power, because while power doesn't necessarily make you scum - although some would argue that it does - it certainly exposes scumminess for all the world to see. But that's not the fault of the uniform, or the suit, of even of power: it's the fault of the scum itself.

Russia's an amazing mess, add in graph and politico's and corps and gov't trying to get dirt on each other and it's a SR wonderland

Expect Iraq to go the same way, being the latest nations to be slapped silly by "shock doctrine"...

Ugh, now that i think about it i wonder if some European nations will perhaps be "incentivized" into employing said doctrine...

Watch Europe start the Eurowars soon as economies fall apart and debts come due.

War, good for capitalism as long as the factories are not in the zone. This because it results in a massive destruction of material that is saturating the commercial pipelines. This has been a problem ever since the aftermath of WW1, where the tycoons found themselves with production capacity way beyond what the need focused population could "consume". So from then on, they have wages a continual campaign to make people think in a want rather then need way. And when they found that this resulted in ongoing wage claims, eating up their profit margins, they swapped to easy credit. And now that has saturated in the population in debt and printed a whole mess of on-books currency (every loan is a deposit, and every deposit is basically money).

It starts with Germany and France invading Greece this time?

Nah, why would they when they have gotten right-wing (even fascist) politicians into power unelected? Politicians that will protect the corporate profits and the debt repayments above all else?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

http://thoughtmaybe.com/video/the-shock-doctrine/

France: "Wait, this war isn't going to be fought here for once? 'BOUT DAMNED TIME! Now, where's my wine?"

Sorry, no native speaker: what does it mean? What it says or is it just a wording, standing for something else?

I believe it's a old Wild West saying meaning "Draw your pistols and prepare for a fight." (It might just be from John Wayne, however. Either way, it's a damn good line.).

Back when revolvers couldn't be reloaded in the middle of a fight, most people carried two of them, shooting their six shots (or five if they didn't trust having a loaded chamber, as there were no safeties in those days) with their primary hand, then dropping it and switching their off hand pistol to their primary hand. This gave them twelve shots (or ten if they were careful, for the reason given above) before they had to switch to their knife if the fight was still going on.

And that brings us to why Jim Bowie invented the knife that carries his name.

And far, far away from Japan. Despite their love for Westerns.

"Fill your hands" means, "Draw your weapon and fight." It is a stereotypical phrase from old-style Western movies.

Edit: D'oh. Ninja'ed.

Fear my 1337 ninja powers!

EDIT: It helped that I GMed Deadlands: Weird West.

Don't forget the limitations compared today of trying to reload a lever action rifle, as well.

It was easier to load a Lever-Action than a Muzzle-Loader. Or a Colt Peacemaker. At least the Lever-Action ejected the brass when it fired. The Peacemaker had to eject each spent brass casing before you could load in another one. This was in the days before swing-out cylinders, folks! Smith & Wesson had a Break-Open revolver that was faster loading, but you had to be more careful with buying ammo. Not all .45s were the same back then. (Standardization of Ammunition didn't really happen until NATO/Warsaw Pact. And I highly doubt it survived the Megas starting to put out their own firearms.).

Compare it to changing a belt of ammo by yourself while under fire today. And that's with a pistol that only got 6-shots or a rifle that got 15. Not a fun thing to do while outgunned.

And that's with cartridges. Muzzle/Cylinder-loading Cap & Ball Rifles and Pistols were even slower.

So, if your 'Runners ever needs to infiltrate a Western Reenactment, you now know a bit more, and, of course, who to ask for info.

Unlikely because was are expensive. As long as youre not donig the fighting you make money but it causes alsorts of dislocation of ther economy. In WW2 until the US came in, it was makingm oiney hand over fist but Britain was being bankrupted.

After WW1 Germany was in such a bad shape because Britain and France had run up big debts in the war and wanted someone else to pay them, this was especailly true of France leading to the vindictive terms at Versaille that led directly to the rise of nazi'ism.

I think anyone who wants to do wild west role playing should go participate in a Cowboy Action blackpowder shooting event.

Because knowing is half the battle.

The other half, BTW, is violence.

Not often i comment on someones writing but i found myself wondering if you where drinking...

Not nearly enough, why do you ask?

Perhaps, but so "where" you?

DumpShock the Drinking Game?

Oh thank you very much.