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"The government that raises beer prices will surely fall" - old Czech proverb

Ah. Recall the wonderful scene in the 1958 film Ice Cold in Alex when John Mills pauses so agonisingly long before downing his beer. Not completely unlike Japan and its exit from the deflation trap, I'm sure you're all thinking.

So Japan's nationwide consumer price index has crept minutely back into positive territory, which means that, even as we speak, the Bank of Japan is probably dusting-off the language it uses to justify an impending interest rate hike. Sighs of relief all round. Normality once again.

But you can see the cause of the BoJ's worry - things do suddenly look dangerously inflationary: Asahi Breweries has, this very morning, announced the first increase in beer prices for 18 years. Alright, the 5% boost in prices isn't exactly Zimbabwean, but for some of us, it does represent a kind of doom-of-the-gods Ragnarok event. After all, beer (give or take taxes) has effectively remained at exactly the same price since my first visit to Japan in the very early 1990s. The government shouldn't be worried about inflation, it should be worried about rioting.

It put me in mind of a visit to Plzen, the charming Czech town where lager was invented. I was taken on a tour of the wonderful old Pilsner Urquell brewery (actually, the beer drunk by Mills in Ice Cold). At the end of the tour, we were simply left in a large room, empty except for a long bar that served only the delicious Urquell on tap. I cannot remember very much about the rest of the day, but I do clearly recall a boozy conversation with one of the old brewery workers. Speaking through an equally smashed interpreter, the chap repeated an old Czech proverb: "the government that raises beer prices will surely fall".

The reasons for the price hike, by the way, are a little bit to do with China using more aluminium and cardboard, but  largely the fault of President George W. Bush. It's billboards like the one on the right, and the short-sightedly pro-biofuel policies of the current White House, that have raised the price of beer. And not really helped lower greenhouse gas emissions. The crop-planting patterns of farmers chasing the biofuel buck have caused prices of other materials - especially hops and wheat - to soar globally. The price of a stein at this year's Munich Oktoberfest was the highest ever.

Grim stuff. After all, as Benjamin Franklin once remarked: "Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy."

Sweet, sweet mockery...

Oh joyous day!

Just when I was about to give up hope, the heavenly gift of satire has swept in and saved the day. And how fitting, in a way, that it should have happened in the electronics/manga/anime capital of the world - Akihabara.

Bear in mind that Akihabara, home of the geek and the maid cafe, was supposedly the electoral home territory of Taro Aso - the manga-munching hopeful who appealed brazenly to the nerd vote and narrowly missed out on becoming prime minister this summer.

The image you see below is an elaborate piss-take of Japan's latest blink-and-you'll-miss-him prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda. It is the packaging for a box of sweets, called "Yakkun Manju" - or, roughly translated "Little Yasu's sweetie buns". For some reason, they were on sale in the shop next door to the one where I bought my R4 chip the other day.

You can click on the image to see it at full size, and read the translation in the continuation of this post below...

Tokyo Dizzyland - the theme park from Hell!

Roll-up, roll-up for the ultimate adventure of a lifetime!  Tickets* on sale now for the brand-new fun-packed attractions of Tokyo Dizzyland - the all-thrills, all-spills theme-park where lunacy is reality and dreams become fairy** dust!!

Tokyo Dizzyland has everything for the whole family!

- GRRRRrrrrrr!!! Ride the gut-churning "Bear-o-Coaster" - the world's most bearish roller-coaster! Only  Sri Lanka has a comparable thrill-ride and they're in civil war!! Gasp in awe as a 320 metre drop instantly becomes a 500 metre surge in the space of a few seconds. Lose your lunch (and bonus) as it plunges another 150 metres again FOR NO APPARENT REASON! Thrill to the amazing magical feats of OUR DAILY HYPNOTIST - each day we bring riders of the Bear-o-Coaster a different conjurer who actually dictates the direction and pace of the ride. Who's it going to be today? China, Wall Street, or Abu Dhabi? Roll Up! As any roller-coaster fan will tell you, it's the not-knowing that makes it all so much fun!!

- UH-Oh!!! Hey kids - how about a game of "Ministry Monopoly"? The property trading game with life-size houses! Have you got what it takes to become a major real-estate tycoon or do you just want to build a nice summer villa in the countryside? Either way, you'll love this game of strategy and skill as you navigate a relentless barrage of baffling new construction laws, and work out how many builders, architects, and construction supply merchants you have to lay-off just to finish the game solvent. (Warning: queueing-time used to be just 20 minutes, but due to heavy demand may now take 73 days to reach the front)

Yowzers!! Yes, for all you speed freaks out there, we've got the thing for you! "The Wacky Races Great Narita Run". Scream with joy (and weep bitter tears of frustration) as you attempt to race from landing at Gate 34 at Narita International to the centre of Tokyo in LESS TIME THAN THE FLIGHT ITSELF!! Can it be done? Has it ever been done?? Only you have the answer. Drive some of the greatest cars ever constructed along 60-misery filled kilometres of pure Chiba fun. Avoid the other Wacky Racers - Dick Dastardly (short-sighted retiree, never breaks 40kmh), Penelope Pit-stop (J-princess never leaves the middle-lane) and the Ant-hill Mob (Japanese police, armed with foreigner-detectors).

Wooooooohooooo!! Hahahhaa! Dare you face the unspeakable horrors that lurk in the "Domain of Demographic Doom" ?? Have you the raw courage to confront your darkest fears and take that fateful step into a world without children? Are you too chicken to tread the streets of "Ghost Tokyo" - the city where not a single living soul is younger than 70 and not a single thought is given to the future? Roam freely through our ultra-realistic vision of things to come, where empty schools rattle to the sounds of Educa-bots - humanoid robots training for a life of service in Kasumigaseki. Visit the "spooky ole immigration office", whose doors have been welded-shut for years...

*the value of your entry ticket may go down as well as up

**fairy dust may contain asbestos

Wake up and put your trousers on, Japan: the neighbours think you're cheap...

So it has come to this...

After weeks of shilly-shallying around haplessly following whatever Wall Street does the night before, Tokyo -  the deepest, most liquid and mightiest stock-market in Asia - has shown the rest of the world who's boss. And it's China.

The morning started innocently enough. Last week's calculations by the FSA showing that the Japanese banks only had a few billion dollars' worth of sub-prime exposure had been hanging pleasantly in the air over the long holiday weekend. It cheered-up Urban Dirt's Saturday no end. The numbers were far more benign than previously feared: the megabanks were not looking too bruised by the ridiculous affair, and (if any of these figures can really be believed) the regional banks appeared to have escaped more or less scot-free.

Buoyed by this rare bubble of good news, stocks were tootling along merrily 150 points higher until the lunch break this morning. Then suddenly, the Nikkei republished (republished!) an article saying that the $200 billion Chinese forex fund (basically a sovereign wealth fund with bells on) was going to divert some of its loot towards Japanese stocks. The article, which was denied fairly soon after it appeared, typically didn't say a) how much dosh would be landing in Japan b) who actually said it would be doing so c) when it would be doing so d) what sort of shares it will go for.

And, as I say, it was denied by the Chinese. But who the hell cares?

Tokyo stocks are embarrassingly cheap at the moment, but the market has been in weeping, agonising need of a catalyst before anyone would put their money where the charts say they should. Bang! We're suddenly up 365 points with the closing bell an hour away. And look at the effect on the yen, by Zeus. It's no longer a question of "how soiled is the dollar?" but "when will China start buying yen to finance all these future stock purchases?". Bosh! The yen leaps half a pip in the space of a few minutes. And the Nikkei's article is only FOUR paragraphs long. And was denied.

Now, there are a number of things that can be said about all of this. Here they are in a nutshell.

A) Tokyo may have itself a new all-jumping, all-pumping "stock-shover" story. You know the sort that brokers (and hacks) wheel out whenever they are truly out of ideas. The Chinese Investment Company now proudly joins private equity, hedge funds, Livedoor, the Mack fund and a load of others on a list of potential "wall of money" buyers of Japanese stocks and currency. It ticks all the right boxes: the CIC is mostly opaque, secretive and neither confirms nor denies anything written about it. It is so big that literally any story is plausible.  "CIC to buy Microsoft", "CIC to buy a laptop PC for every single Chinese", "CIC to bid for the moon" - these all seem theoretically possible because of the jaw-dropping sums involved. And because the activities of the CIC are not genuinely known to the outside world until they have happened, you can attach the name to any ongoing story to bid-up the apparent stakes involved.

B) Could this genuinely be the moment where the Tokyo story belatedly de-couples from the tired old US economy story?  I'm not sure, but it would be both long overdue and tear-jerkingly welcome if it were. It is quite preposterous that the export-led Japanese economy has 50% of exports (by value and volume)directly exposed to Asia, but the stock market is still not rated as an Asia-focused play.

C) It is high time that Tokyo stopped whinging about the takeover threat posed to its companies by  tiddlers like Steel Partners and other US buyout funds. China is sitting around the corner with a load more money and (for the time being) a lot less managerial competence than the "vultures" that Japan Inc. has been warding-off so far.

D) Look Japan! Just look what an irresistible global financial force you swing around when you make your forex reserves work for you. China has dared to use them to make some money - why not have a crack at it yourself. Come on. I dare you. Dip into the trillion-dollar forex reserves you've got sitting around doing nothing.  Just take 10% of them, create a $100 billion Japan Investment Company and watch the world quake in its boots.

Because at the moment, it's on the floor laughing.

Is the synthetic stem cell Japan's greatest ever invention?

Well I think so...

Placed against the staggeringly impressive historical output of one of the world's most inventive   countries, the synthetic "ethical" human stem cell announced this morning does Japan proud. I mean, it really is right up there with the Walkman, the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Toto Washlet.

The Japanese stock market, say Goldman Sachs and others, is now historically cheap - perhaps cheaper than it has been for 33 years. It is developments like the synthetic stem cell that should scream that "buy" signal across the skies in vast, flaming letters. Sure - fill your boots with China if you like cheap factories and stories of a billion future consumers. But buy Japan because, for all of its undeniable dysfunction, it consistently changes the shape of the world with products that are smaller than your finger-nail. In this case, they might actually BE your fingernail.

This morning's headlines seemed to say it all: the wonderful Prof Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University has indeed found a way of generating human embryonic stem cells without resorting to the messy, controversial and red-tape-encased business of using human embryos. There is, in fact, much more going on behind the scenes. I interviewed him in July, and he promised at the time that it would only be a few months before the technique was perfected. He has been as good as his word and the world has today entered a new era. Where previously anyone wanting to use a stem cell for research would have had to take it from a human embryo. A simple skin cell and Prof Yamanaka's technique will now do the trick - and it would take a really single-minded brand of lunacy to object to that combination.

The pace of research on stem-cell based regenerative techniques and medicine should now quicken substantially - not just in Japan, but in a whole slew of countries where objections to the use of human stem cells have held things back.

It is a spectacularly pivotal breakthrough, and the world should be very, very happy. But what is so interesting is the motivation that has carried Prof Yamanaka through all this. Unsurprisingly, a lot of it has to do with fury at the Japanese government - the government that has destroyed the construction, consumer-lending and pachinko industries and is looking to obliterate investment trust sales, taxis and all visits by foreigners.

Bibendum does Tokyo - part II

Right. This is exciting. I think this is the moment it all changed for Tokyo. To be the most Michelin- starred city in the world is, of course, lovely. I'm sure it will be good for tourism: no doubt the fact will feature heavily in Tokyo's probably doomed bid to host the 2016 Olympics. 

But there is so very much more to it than that. Finally, perhaps, Japan will admit to itself that not everything wonderful about this country is made in a factory by beautifully engineered robots. This is a victory, if you will, for pure intellectual property and attention to detail. It is a glorious extension of the culture that built the Walkman and the Wii, created the Power Rangers and Pikachu and produced My Neighbour Totoro and The Ring. This is recognition that Japan is among the very best in the world at making people happy.

Naturally, that recognition had to come from a foreigner. Japan, for all its quality, is terrified of admitting that it is rather good at non-manufacturing. Tokyo and the government, if they are sensible, should treat the Michelin guide as a very timely prod in the ribs: it's time to move on - the city is now more than a collection of head offices and government buildings. You're an international city now. Through its world-class restaurants, the private sector has made you globally recognised as somewhere desirable - now give something back to the private sector through better policy-making and joined-up government thinking.

Now I'm expecting la belle France to get a little bit miffed by Michelin's little paean to Tokyo dining today. It is, after all, a very strange revenge for the fact that, having given the world Judo, the Japanese always get beaten in the finals by a Frenchman.

The list of two-starred restaurants is an interesting one. Lots of fugu, plenty of French contemporary and only a single Chinese. Cogito, Kyubey and Beige - all French restaurants - are awarded only a single star, somewhat to my surprise.

Oh, and by the way. Not a single whale meat restaurant to be found...

Tokyo - the world's brightest constellation of stars

Well I suppose those of us who live here knew it instinctively. But somehow, when it comes from two beaming Frenchmen in faintly shiny suits, it feels much more official: Tokyo is the most gourmet city on earth. More Michelin stars than any other city on the planet. Beats Paris. Beats New York. Beats London. Ha.

The new Michelin Guide to Tokyo awards no fewer than 150 eateries at least one star. 25 of them - including two Fugu restaurants and a Spanish joint - receive two stars and an extraordinary eight are honoured with the prized three-stars.

Here are the Great Eight:

Hamadaya - Japanese, Joel Robuchon - French, Kanda - Japanese, Koju - Japanese, L'Osier - French, Qunitessence - French, Sukiyabashi Jiro - sushi, Sushi Mizutani - sushi.

Michelin, bless its long tradition of well-informed gluttony, has taken its own sweet time realising that Tokyo is, in reality, the greatest city on this planet for food. Has Tokyo got a future as a world financial centre? Who the hell knows...but it's going to be fattening, lip-smacking, utterly delicious fun finding out.

Back in a mo.

Humpback a l'orange? A Michelin star for "Ganso Kujiraya"?

Well, thinking about it, probably not...

So today is the day. I shall be blogging LIVE from the front row on this day of high excitement and drama.  For Bibendum - that dilated Gallic champion of three-star obesity - has arrived for the greatest eating contest ever held.

Well, sort of. At 3 pm we will discover what those industrious gluttons, bon viveurs and..er...tyre salesmen have been keeping such a dark and mysterious secret. Finally, after decades of almost perversely avoiding the most eatery-intensive city on earth, the first ever Michelin Guide to Tokyo restaurants will be unleashed for the perusal of entertainment brokers, dating couples, and visiting heads of state.

It's incredibly tense stuff. The utterly irrelevant "controversy" has, of course, already begun. It's all tiresomely predictable cobblers - nonsense along the lines of  "who are these French to come here and tell us what is and isn't delicious?" versus "some of the best food in Tokyo is actually cooked by Frenchmen!" Yawn. Yes of course we care about what does and doesn't get stars - for big hitters like my pal Smitty at Blackrock it will be something of a religious experience. But in the end, the stars are probably going to be awarded to places we've all been anyway.

No. What is much more fascinating is whether Bibendum is going to be a little bit daring - especially just one day after the Japanese whaling fleet set sail with dreams of landing its biggest catch ever. After years of heartily recommending places in France that serve up the distended organs of force-fed geese and frogs whose legs are torn off while still alive, the big question-mark hangs over Michelin's view on whale-meat. Is the Michelin Man, in short, a true gourmet or has he drawn an ethical line in the sand?

Steamrollers, nuts and odd-shaped balls

For some weeks I've been scouring the news for an analogy- some incident or statement that perfectly encapsulates the self-destructive absurdity of Japan in 2007. I wanted something that neatly demonstrates the new national logic: "Nuts need cracking! Summon the ministerial steamroller!"

I was hoping for something spectacular: maybe a bureaucrat deciding to abolish Wednesdays or perhaps  the Bank of Japan replacing the monetary policy committee with a team of Daleks reprogrammed to scream "Up-the-rate! Up-the-rate!".

But in the event, the analogy has come from the hallowed halls of academe. Of course, when I say "hallowed", I mean "shallow". When I say "halls", I mean "balls". And when I say "academe", I mean Kanto University.

So here, in a nutshell, is the story. Kanto University has an elite rugby team which, more or less, wins everything. It's the Manchester United of university rugby: annoying, rich, and run by a ruddy-cheeked tyrant. Two of its naughty players were arrested for growing a few sprigs of marijuana. The authorities considered their options and...the entire 200-man squad has been told it cannot play for the rest of the season. 

Apparently, says the rugger correspondent for the Daily Yomiuri, Kanto was offered a choice by the Japan East Rugby Union - sack the coach, or keep him on and sit the remaining five months of the season out. So of course - this being Japan in self-destruction mode - the whole team takes an early bath.

Thank you so much Tomy - Japan desperately needed more piggy banks...

What a gloriously awful end to the week.

So we have the political scene in the world's second largest economy descending ever less entertainingly into Ealing farce; we have mighty Honda recalling 22,000 faulty lawnmowers in the latest evidence of slipping standards; we have the Bank of Japan, faced with clear warning signals of a collapse in oh-so-fledgling real-estate story, still talking nervously about the "risk of investment bubbles"; and now, the crowning rabbit-punch of them all - Tomy has released an exploding piggy bank.

Why? I mean...why?

Was there some perceived problem with the Japanese propensity to save? Did the nation with the world's largest pool of savings really need the extra encouragement? When the domestic economy still desperately needs people to spend (and is once again staring down the barrel of the deflation blunderbuss), did Japan really require Tomy the toymaker to foster yet another generation of Scrooge-like Japanese savers?

"This is a piggy bank where you have no way but to save," enthused a Tomy stooge, "we wanted to add some thrill to an act that's usually painstaking."

It may be "painstaking" for many of us, but I see scant evidence that the act of saving is even slightly annoying for most Japanese. At any level of society.

I think, absolutely, that there is a healthy balance to be struck between debt and savings. I am even prepared to acknowledge that the UK and US may have strayed, in their own ways, a little too far into the cult of credit. But Japan is a  place that lives, not, as some observers would have it, by the "herd-instinct", but by the hoard-instinct. Everyone is at it: from the massive blue-chip chief executives who refuse to spoon any of what they see as THEIR lovely cash out to investors, right up to the government's boss-eyed assault on the consumer lenders. Retiring baby-boomers have hardly stunned the retail and services industries by spending like drunks, and now Tomy wants to make the whole miserly mindset into a game for the kids.

So Tomy's exploding piggy bank works as follows: if you don't stoke it with gelt EVERY day, the infernal machine displays its petulance with what I can only imagine is a sanity-shattering cacophony of bleeps and whistles (thank you Tomy for addressing Japan's pernicious "calm and silence" bubble before it grew dangerously inflated). If this irascible little electronic tantrum goes un-appeased for too long, the whole thing blasts open and any loot inside is strewn all over the floor.

As Reuters points out in its coverage of this astonishing technological development, the Tomy piggy bank will be on the shelves in time for the January piggy-bank buying season, where everyone buys more piggy banks. Perhaps people could start hoarding piggy banks in one huge piggy bank. It could become a national thing. We could call it the Japan Piggy-bank Overflow Storage Terminal - or just Japan POST for short...

Is the US dollar a load of old rap?

So the world has finally twisted off its delicate axis.

Japanese politics are imploding, US banks seem to be creating board-level vacancies every hour and it now looks as though the future of currency markets pivot on the answer to this one, diabolical question: when it comes to the bull/bear case for the US dollar, whom do you trust - the "American Gangster" rapper Jay-Z, or a supermodel's panicky PR girl?

This story comes to me courtesy of Teal'c (see The Times Snitch List) and from his new desk assistant, an American pants-man who wishes to be known on this blog by the codename "Sugizo" [more on this enigmatic fellow later].

Anyway, with the yen carry story off the screens for the time being, currency brokers will clutch at anything for a lead these days. Of course there's all the usual gubbins going on - comments by the Fed chief, the ex-Fed chief and every other pundit on the block. But for that real "on the streets" sense of market direction, the traders have taken a surprising interest in Gisele Bundchen - a Brazilian scorcher generally considered the world's richest supermodel.

Puff the magic vending machine

We have an old saying in The Times Tokyo bureau.

Fool me once: shame on you. Fool me twice: shame on me. Fool a vending machine: fun for the  whole family!!

So Fujitaka and a few other tech companies are getting behind a project aimed at stopping young Japanese smoking. Laudable, I grudgingly suppose...

Attitudes to smoking in Japan do hurl out some truly extraordinary phenomena. I'm particularly fond of the rules that ban outdoor smoking in certain districts of Tokyo - centred mainly on Minato, Chiyoda and Chuo-ku. The genius is that, despite draconian restrictions on smoking in the streets in those areas, it is perfectly acceptable to smoke indoors.

Hence the recently observed oddity at the splendid A971 bar (click here for a truly lamentable official homepage) in Tokyo Midtown - a spot where the gin flows like water and a couple of rogues from Lehman Brothers tend to drunkenly pick up the tab.  They have a lovely little terrace onto which hedge fund managers, money brokers and the type of ladies who find such things appealing spill out when the weather is clement. But try to light an al fresco cigarette, or enjoy a nice Partagas under the stars and the outdoorsy idyll is shattered. Insanely, the staff actually ask you to come inside to smoke, so that Minato-ku by-laws are not broken...

But, as ever, the Japanese instinct to over-engineer everything has marched triumphantly onto the scene. After years of quite astonishingly liberal views on these things, cigarette vending machines are to have achingly high-tech age-recognition software installed in order to prevent the under-20s getting their hands on Japan Tobacco's evil products.  It is actually rather impressive. I went to Kyoto to see Omron's version of this software and it was able, within less than a second and using a standard digital video camera, to guess my age correctly.

But come on. Surely this is where the fun begins.

I think - even for those of us over the age of 20 - it should become a matter of honour to fool the  machines as often and as hilariously as possible. With masks. Crazy masks.

My anarchic pal Teal'c has suggested carrying around a life-size photograph of the face of Roger Moore, and holding that up to the vending machine to establish one's age.

I like the idea of doing the same with the face of Mother Teresa or perhaps Bob Monkhouse just to see how sophisticated the software really is. Perhaps it sells you particular brands based on what you look like. Mahatma Gandhi disguises might get you a packet of Peace. Come as Clive Dunn and it sells you 20 Woodbines. Come as Stan O'Neal and it sells you a box of Hope. Come as Chuck Prince and it sells you a carton of Craven.

One wonders whether it would vend fags to someone covering his face with a life-sized photograph of Yoda, the 900-year old Jedi Master who, I believe, smoked 40 Johnny Player Specials a day...

Of course, if the software gets really sophisticated, vending machines could become fantastic traps for lying celebrities. Just engineer a situation where some starlet claiming to be, say 28, was strolling past a machine, cram their faces up to the screen and their deception will be exposed in cold, digital readout. Bleep-bleep AGE: 36... SALE PERMITTED. Ha ha! Take that, wrinkled idoru...

Imagine what one of these babies would make of that notorious snap of Liza Minelli's wedding. Bleep-bleep DOES NOT COMPUTE...FREAKSHOW DETECTED...CUT POWER PLEASE...MERCY

Appetite for destruction

Roll up! Roll up! Who's up for a punt on which sector of the Japanese economy will be the next to get  wiped out by a single stroke of a bureaucrat's pen? Several candidates are in the news: food, defence contractors, restaurants...it seems implausible but could the government somehow obliterate the entire "eating" industry?

Easily, I fear. Japanese policy thinking is now about as joined-up as a four-year old's handwriting, but with less sophisticated content.

It all fell into sharp relief yesterday when things went so terribly wrong with the housing starts numbers. It had previously always struck me as odd that, when asked to explain their vast cash-reserves or slavish devotion to paying-down debt, Japanese chief executives simply offer a sad smile and describe the inefficiently deployed billions as "rainy day money".

I've often wondered what exactly this "rainy day" they fear so much might be. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan? A power blackout across Japan? A major quake in Tokyo? A 100% hike in eel prices?

But, of course, it's none of these. What these fellows fear most of all is not the unexpected meteor from space but the totally predictable, cyclical hammering they will get from the government.

Yesterday we saw the horrific effects on the construction industry of a daft new law covering the earthquake proofing of new buildings. The consumer finance industry is already on its knees because of unwarranted political interference in the small loan market. For all of its founder's undeniable cack-handedness, you could even argue that Nova's collapse was government-triggered. Half of the country's English teaching industry obliterated by a crass piece of punishment by myopic officialdom.

There's a wonderful quote in the Yomiuri today from a "senior ministry official at METI", who says: "I'd heard Nova's financial situation wasn't good, but I never expected it would fail just 4 1/2 months after the administrative punishment."

And that's just it isn't it? "I never expected". is not a phrase senior ministry officials should be using when they know full well that their actions have such colossal ramifications. Surely, if these bloated bureaucracies serve any purpose at all then it is to consider all the possibilities before taking a given action. If your research tells you that an action is going to wreak unprecedented havoc and misery, then consider not doing it.