Recent stuff

A fair bit of Nova news to catch up on.

News of the company hit the Aussie papers again. They've stopped recruiting in Australia. The sub-contractor recruiting company I went through has also cancelled their contract with Nova.

The government has ordered Nova to comply with an order to refund students who've cancelled their contracts. Word is that some students haven't been refunded up to six months after cancelling - including some of my ex-students.

In today's paper there was a story of a potential investor in the company, purchasing options of 200 million shares, raising about 70 million yen. For the record there are currently about 60 million shares issued in total by Nova, and Nova needs about 10 BILLION yen to settle its debts to students as well as pay outstanding debts and wages. If the companies who purchased the option decide to buy, then that'll raise only about 7 billion yen. It'd be a welcome shot in the arm, but it wouldn't do much in the long term. Sales are still bad.

Related: here's a calculator to work out how much unemployment benefits you can get in Japan through Hello Work. It's a lot less than people on the internet were saying. Babelfish is useful for translating the Japanese to English.


Going home isn't much of an option since I'd likely have to undergo training of some kind, and stories like this don't exactly provide inspiration. Fancy trying to study as well as work up to four part-time jobs just to make ends meet! Thanks Mr. Howard!

If you still want to try to help the environment, then here's a list of easy things to do.

You may have no choice regarding your flat-screen TV since most of them churn through more electricity than your fridge!

At least in New York you can still get a good night's sleep - thanks to your very own Sleep Concierge!

Another thing to do might be to plant some trees - or buy a block of land next to yours and make it into a park since that'll lower the temperature somewhat...

You can also keep telling yourself that things really are getting better. Sure, we don't have wonderful things like rampaging disease and dying before you're 40 of old age, but there's such a thing as willingly putting your head in the sand too!


And finally, just in case you don't know - there's been a genocidal war going on in Afghanistan for six years now...