Goldman Sachs to Tokyo Employees: "Leave Tokyo and You're Fired!"

This is a story that broke over a week ago, but I think it holds a great lesson for everyone even in hindsight...

JOHNNY PAYCHECK - TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT

Everything in this world today revolves around technology or the economy. It doesn't revolve around sensationalism or hyperbole. As I quoted Tech Crunch in News for Intelligent People Criticize Japan Nuclear Sensationalist Reporting:


The news from Japan is both awful and appalling. Awful: 23,000 confirmed dead or missing, and counting. Appalling: pretty much anything to do with the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. Nuclear meltdown like Chernobyl! Deadly contaminated milk and radioactive tap water! Tokyo a postapocalyptic ghost town! A plume of radiation that threatens America’s West Coast!

Where do they get these morons? Again, twenty thousand people are dead, and the drooling dimwits of the media can’t stop babbling about Fukushima, where exactly one person died – a crane operator who had the misfortune to be up in the cab of his vehicle when the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history hit – and fewer than 30 were injured, only a handful of whom required treatment for radiation exposure.

If you want to know the reality on the ground, you need to look at tech issues and economics. Take Goldman Sachs for example... (Please!) Even though I think Goldman Sachs are scum, I think it must be admitted that big, world-wide blood-sucking corporations don't screw around. Need a measurement of how dangerous Tokyo was during the height of the so-called "nuclear crisis" was?


Goldman Sachs told their Tokyo employees that if they left, they'd be out of a job. Flyjin.com reports:


When four executives from Goldman Sachs visited their Tokyo subsidiary last week, they told foreign employees in no uncertain terms that if they left Tokyo they would not have a job when they returned, according to a report by John Carney of CNBC.com.


Nah.... Do you think that one of the biggest companies in the world that is involved with finance and risk mitigation would be taking unnecessary risks? I don't. Do you? Why should they?


Nope. They just don't do that. They don't screw around with nonsense. From what I hear, their employees get paid over $200,000 US dollars a year.


They'd better not be running away with poop in their pants at that price.


The lesson here is that some of the world's top professionals at risk management and assessment judged the facts and concluded that there never was a huge enough risk to evacuate. This is important because, as a company operating out of the USA, if Goldman Sachs were wrong, they would be liable in US courts for hundreds of millions of dollars - if not more - in damages and liability claims from injured or sick employees.


I don't think it is difficult to deduce what this boils down to: Media hype and sensationalism is just that. The facts on the ground told a far different story.