Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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  • Six and Out

    Each country has its own rules governing how long foreign nationals can stay and whether they can work. However, as far as I am aware, normally the difficult part is getting a visa in the first place, and once it has been granted you can stay at least as long as your contract of employment lasts (and often longer, sometimes permanently). Not so in Bermuda, it seems.

    According to The Economist, it is almost impossible to stay beyond six years.

    So Bermuda is becoming a difficult place to live, not only for locals but also for foreigners. Already most of those see Bermuda as a short-term proposition—a good thing, because immigration authorities have taken to booting out work-permit holders after six years (marrying a local won’t help unless you stay together for at least ten years).

    How is that going to work if you get thrown out after 6 years?

    I see from the photograph that bankers in Bermuda seem to wear shorts with long socks and formal shoes. Don’t they know what they look like?

  • Mug Punters

    This week the Jockey Club announced that although their turnover on football betting was lower than expected, the profit margins were much better than they had expected.

    They say that this is because of some unexpected results in major competitions, but my information is that it is actually a matter of mug punters and good odds setting. Unlike racing, where there is effectively a pool of money to be shared out amongst those with successful bets, football bets are fixed odds and there is no guaranteed profit margin. On the other hand, if they get it right, the profits can be very high.

    I understand that the exotic bets are the most profitable for the Jockey Club, presumably because they offer the prospect of a high payout if you get it right. One involves forecasting the ‘result’ at half-time and full-time in a number of games, which sounds pretty much like a lottery to me. The suspicion is that the punters are just picking numbers at random. If they are, they’d be better off putting money into Mark Six or the Triple Trio.

    Two observations on this:

    Firstly, it seems clear that the illegal bookmakers are still making a good living, so perhaps the shrewd punters are staying with them and the Jockey Club is attracting people who don’t know much about football.

    Secondly, this is another example of how lotteries and betting generally act as a form of regressive taxation. It’s generally the less well-off who are making these bets, giving their money to the Jockey Club and thence to the government or to ‘good causes’. The same thing happens in the UK with the National Lottery.

  • Nice cheese, shame about the fly

    FlyThis is from a brochure that a British supermarket gave out to the press. Seems no-one noticed the fly feasting on the Stilton…

    Full story here

    Our promise – more stories about cheese than any other Hong Kong blog!

  • Hong Kong fashions we don’t like (2)

    Grandpas in pyjamas. In public.

    Nothing more needs to be said, I think.

  • Getting closer

    I don’t drive in Hong Kong, but I do take buses, so traffic jams do affect me. One of the more baffling things about traffic jams is that there is sometimes no apparent cause – no accident, no roadworks, no car broken down in the middle of the road. The M25 (London’s orbital motorway), especially around Heathrow Airport, used to be one of the worst places for this problem. The explanation, as set out here is that:

    Such jams start when a car slows suddenly to allow, for example, another vehicle to enter the traffic stream. Slow reaction times mean that instead of responding smoothly, the drivers behind such a vehicle often end up slamming on the brakes. That slamming propagates backwards, and before long the traffic is at a standstill.

    One solution that worked well on the M25 was lower speed limits at the busiest times. This worked very well, and so a lower speed limit led to an increased average speed, amazing as that may sound.

    The next step is apparently Adaptive cruise control (ACC), which adjusts the car’s speed to match the vehicle in front. The benefits are that gaps between vehicles can be reduced without compromising safety, and vehicles with ACC can reduce their speed more rapidly without slamming on the brakes (which is one cause of these mysterious traffic jams).

    The intriguing thing is that according to research, even if only 20% of cars on a road had ACC installed and working, it could still improve traffic flow.

    The problem I can forsee is that the car in front may not appreciate someone following them so closely. How can you tell whether it is tailgating moron or someone with ACC fitted? Of course, drivers can still set the system to leave a bigger gap, but then you aren’t getting the full benefit of the technology.

    I’m still waiting for the day when you can drive you car on to the highway and not have to do a thing. Your car would simply travel along at a fixed speed until you reached your exit. Probably too boring for most people, but who it’s not much fun driving on a busy highway, especially if there are traffic jams.

  • Heads roll

    So the health secretary Yeoh Eng-kiong has finally resigned. Simon seems to be happy about it, whereas Fumier is less impressed, writing (to paraphrase slightly) that “The mob marches; a head rolls, the baying crowd has been appeased” and that perhaps Dr Yeoh was correct that SARS was less of a crisis than many seemed to believe.

    Since I wrote only a couple of days about the perils of finding scapegoats, I have to agree with Fumier on this one, though politically I think there was no alternative. My feeling is that Yeoh Eng-kiong’s downfall is partially the result of his rather aloof and imperious style. Yesterday’s TV news showed his confident (some might say arrogant) assertion that Hong Kong was free of SARS at a time when there were already cases here.

    He wasn’t helped by the fact that the three main political parties (the Democratic Party, the Liberal Party and the DAB) had all called for his resignation. It’s hard to survive that type of pressure, especially when there is no governing party to support him. As you can see, Hong Kong’s political system is quite strange – as well as only having opposition parties, most of our ‘politicians’ are former civil servants (Anthony Leung was something of an exception here). This creates more problems – there are no obvious replacements, since we don’t have junior ministers who could be promoted, and why would a senior official want to take on a role that could suddenly make him more accountable and hence reduce his job security.

    On the subject of the SARS crisis being overblown, I think this article by Nury Vittachi is worth reading. It’s a year old, and the hysteria he is writing about is thankfully long gone, but I think he makes his point very well. At least in part, the media hysteria about SARS is one of the reasons why Dr Yeoh has been forced to resign. It is sad that 299 people died as a result of SARS, but how many people die each year from ordinary pneumonia, or smoking-related diseases, or on the roads of Hong Kong? No-one is forced to resign because of those deaths.

  • Blogjet – still not quite there yet!

    Typepad is reasonably user-friendly, but I still have to key everything in using a web brower, which is not ideal (and makes it all too easy to lose your work). So I’ve been testing Blogjet, which is a small application that allows you to create posts offline and publish them. There are others, such as w.Bloggar, which I have only evaluated very briefly, and Zempt which admits to several bugs with Typepad.

    Other good thing about these applications are that they make it easier to do clever formatting, they have spellcheckers and they enable you to save posts to disk.

    There are two main problems. The first is that these application is not just designed for use with Typepad, and they are trying to accomodate the features and quirks of many different blog services, meaning that not all Typepad features are yet implemented. So, for example, you can’t do future-dated posts, or extended posts.

    The second is that they seem to have difficulty with the way that some of the blog services implement certain features. Presumably this is because there is no formal documentation, and standards (such as they are) are not always followed. This means there are annoying bugs. Blogjet allows you to save ‘draft’ posts but then publishes them anyway. w.Bloggar and Zempt seems quite unable to retrieve postings from Typepad (Zempt has it on their list of known bugs). To be fair, Blogjet have fixed a number of the bugs, but it doesn’t inspire confidence when they blame Typepad for the problems without giving a clear explanation of what is wrong, and then fix them without Typepad doing anything!

    My dilemma is this – do I pay for software that is obviously not working properly and needs to be enhanced, or do I wait for it to get better?

  • Verging on the ridiculous

    This week I received a letter from one airline telling me that they will be renewing my membership of their frequent flyer program and simultaneously discovered that my membership of another program has been downgraded from silver to ordinary. 

    The first airline is one I have used twice, first for a return (short-haul) flight in business class more than 2 years ago, and the second for a return flight on an excursion ticket (no mileage) about 18 months ago.  I have never met their official criteria for the frequent flyer program, but they enrolled me and keep renewing the membership.

    The second airline is one I have been using regularly for several years, and for a brief period I actually achieved ‘gold’ status in their program, before returning to silver.  Originally their system was that once you qualified for the silver level you kept it permanently as long as you carried on flying with them, but a while back they changed the rules so that you had to qualify each year otherwise you would be downgraded.  I wrote a complaint letter, and got a fairly sympathetic response saying that they would consider the individual circumstances before making the decision to downgrade the membership level.

    It seems that in the last twelve months I fell just short of the qualifying level.  So, naturally, they downgraded my membership level.  How pathetic is that?  Not that it really matters – the benefits are not significant, and I can’t remember ever getting anything out of it – but in terms of PR and marketing it seems ridiculous.  The cost to the airline is minimal, and surely you want loyal customers who will choose your airline rather than a competitor?

    The really odd thing is that generally they seem to be quite good at customer relations.  Some time ago, two former colleagues of mine were travelling on different airlines out of Hong Kong at the same time, both in business class, and wanted to sit together in the lounge before departure.  One airline was not willing to allow a customer using another airline into their lounge, but the other readily agreed.  Which one is more likely to get their business next time?     

  • First the congestion charge, now this!

    I couldn’t quite believe this, but today is not April Fools Day, and this news is from the BBC, so I guess it must be true.  It seems that there is a serious plan to run a Formula One Grand Prix on the streets of London!!

    Apparently they set up a demonstration circuit as a publicity stunt, but now the mayor of London (even more publicity hungry than that nice Mr Ecclestone) thinks it’s such a good idea that he is talking about having a Grand Prix in the centre of London in 2006. 

    The demonstration circuit was like this.

      • Start at Waterloo Place, bottom of Lower Regent Street
      • Up Picadilly Circus and into Regent St
      • Up to DH Evans department store.
      • Turn right through pedestrian precinct outside the London Palladium
      • On to Marlborough Street opposite Liberty’s
      • Back onto Regent St for run back down to Waterloo Place

    I love the idea of Formula One racing cars driving along a pedestrian precinct.  Surely there must be a law against that?

  • New HK blog: Wanbro

    Hey, this is a bit spooky.

    For the second time in a few days we discover a new Hong Kong blog that has kind things to say about Ordinary Gweilo. This time it is Wanbro:

    seemingly self-deprecating but actually fairly
    insightful

    Ordinary Gweilo    .

    I suppose if I tried really hard I could track these people down, but it’s enough of a challenge doing my day job, trying to do my bit as a husband and father, and writing a few posts here and there. I don’t know how Simon manages it! I think it was him who spotted this one first.

    Incidentally I share the loathing for the word ‘blog’, but I don’t know what to use as an alternative!