Ordinary Gweilo

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

recent posts

Archives

Categories

  • Hong Kong public housing

    From today’s SCMP, about 50 years of public housing in Hong Kong:

    Subsidised housing has become so popular that last year half the population lived in permanent public housing. There are 90,000 people waiting an average of three years for a public housing flat, down from 150,000 in 1997.

    When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Britain in 1979, one of her more radical policies was to get rid of public housing. She made significant progress, and in England alone 1.6m homes were sold off. Yet, more than twenty years later, half of Hong Kong’s population lives in public housing, and still most people’s image of Hong Kong is that it is a bastion of free enterprise! Mind you, the socialist republic of Singapore has 86% of its population living in public housing!

    The original policy was admirable, and achieved its goal of providing homes for people who could not afford to buy. The problem now is that people who can afford to buy property are able to obtain heavily subsidised public housing. In fact, they often live in public housing and own property that they rent out.

    Public Housing rentals are not determined by the market, or even by the cost of providing them, but instead are limited to 10 per cent of tenants’ income. The Housing Authority recently lost a court case on this subject, and will have to reduce rentals to bring them back in line with lower salaries. Of course, anyone living in private housing is likely to pay significantly more than that – perhaps 40 to 60 per cent of their income. The result is that for some people it can be better to have a lower-paid job so that they qualify for public housing, and can mean that life is much harder for middle-income families who have to pay significantly higher rentals (or purchase a property and pay a mortgage).

    Some prominent academics have argued that the public housing system should be privatised because it distorts the property market and disenfranchises a sector of residents. The problems were highlighted at yesterday’s ceremony, which was marred by demonstrations. Some protesters wanted lower rents while others were frustrated by the long waiting lists.

    Lower rents? I don’t think so. The obvious solution is to increase the rents but provide means-tested benefits that could used to pay for either public or private housing. Long waiting lists? That’s because public housing is so attractive, and people move out of property they own in order to take advantage of the cheap rental fee. The solution is fairly obvious, but is the government brave enough to do anything about it?

  • Front page news – dog dead

    Today’s Sun has this front-page story: it’s about one of the Queen’s dogs. What could be more important than one dog killing another?

    0200359076500.jpg

  • International Rip-Off

    One of the biggest sources of revenue for mobile phone operators is international roaming. Amazingly, the Hong Kong government now seems to be doing its best to help the phone companies at the expense of consumers.

    Phone companies try to make it as easy as possible for the customer to use their phone overseas (which is fine) but the end-result is that some people find they have huge bills when they come home. Part of the problem is that in Hong Kong, mobile phone calls are extremely cheap – if you need hundreds of minutes each month you can subscribe to a plan that will offer that for not much more than HK$100. Then if you use your phone abroad, you could spend the same sum for a 10 minute call, and in a week you can easily have a bill of hundreds of dollars.

    In the UK and many other countries, the catch is that you don’t pay for incoming calls – except when you are overseas. So it is easy to believe that the person making the call is paying (which they are, but not for the international portion). So you are unwittingly paying for the call, and at a much higher rate than you would pay for making a call at home. Some people have received mobile phone bills that were higher than the cost of their holiday!

    When I was working for a multinational company with staff travelling around the region, I was horrified by the bills that some people accumulated. Some vistors to Hong Kong even took part in lengthy calls on their mobiles whilst they were sitting in the office (sometimes from people in Hong Kong), which struck me as ridiculous. Sure, it’s convenient, but you’re paying a lot of money for that convenience.

    Of course, the high cost of these calls fits in neatly with the way that hotels charge a lot for making IDD calls, making the charges appear reasonable – and it can actually be cheaper to use your mobile – but that doesn’t make it any better. Fortunately there are alternatives.

    One possible solution to this problem is to subscribe to a call forwarding service and purchase a local pre-paid SIM card in the country you visit. You can divert all your calls to the overseas number, and although you pay for this service, it is significantly cheaper than roaming (roughly one-quarter of the price, I think). You can also make outgoing calls (including IDD) more cheaply than roaming. The only limitation is that SMS messages are not diverted.

    Now, however, the Hong Kong government has introduced a surcharge of 15.86 cents per minute on these services to compensate the mobile phone operators for this loss of business! This only adds about 5-10% to the cost, but why on earth is the government doing this? It’s good news that the mobile phone companies have noticed the loss of business, but surely they should be reducing their charges, not asking the government to help.

    The other interesting aspect is the competition between Hong Kong operators to persuade visitors to use their network. I’m not sure whether it is still available, but CSL were at one time offering a special rate of HK$1 per minute for anyone using their network, and handing out promotional material on the Airport Express. Apparently this form of competition is OK, but other companies getting in on the act sends them crying to the government – and unfortunately they listened and did something, rather than politely telling them to go away!

  • Sign of things to come?

    Interesting story from The Guardian about Kazaa. Apparently they have done a deal with an Indian film company to make films legally available for US$2.99. The idea is that the file cannot be copied and will self-destruct after being watched. Following on from the news last week of DVDs being available a few days after cinema release for US$1.00, this is a welcome sign that some companies are being imaginative and forward-looking.

    I have never used Napster or Kazaa, and all the legal music download services are currently only available to US residents. However, I believe that within a year or two it will be very simple to access music, films, TV shows and other content from anywhere in the world. The benefit to the copyright owner is that they will get most of the revenue, and I think that outweighs the risk of the material being copied illegally (especially given that already happens). My view is that if something is available legally and easily at a fair price, enough people will pay to make it a worthwhile proposition.

    As an example of how not to do it, we have the appalling service provided by a company called Premium TV on behalf of most of the clubs in the English Football League. I’d have thought that this had a lot of potential, but currently all that is available are a couple of minutes of low-quality video showing the goals (and possibly one or two other incidents) from selected matches, a couple of days after the game was played. The quality is not good enough to properly see what happened, and it is much too short to get any idea of the game as a whole. I am convinced that football fans would pay more for a better service, and surely there are enough broadband users to make this a worthwhile proposition.

  • One country, how many languages?

    Phil is complaining that eBay’s new Hong Kong site is all in Chinese, following the example set by Yahoo Hong Kong, which dropped its English version a couple of years ago.

    It is a significant overhead to maintain systems in multiple languages, and one major difference between Hong Kong and Singapore is that here there is a much greater determination to use Chinese wherever possible. Two Chinese Singaporeans talking to each other in the workplace will very likely use English, whereas Hong Kong Chinese would almost certainly use Cantonese. Unsurprisingly, Hong Kong is more Chinese than Singapore.

    If I am looking for some information on the Internet, I have got used to a Hong Kong site of a multinational company either having no English at all or only a subset of what is in Chinese. Multi-language sites are sometimes very frustrating to use – for example, after I sign on to Netvigator it displays information in Chinese and I have to re-select English (it doesn’t remember either that I selected English on the first page or that this user prefers English).

    Many standard letters and bills from the government, utilities, banks, credit card companies and similar are bi-lingual, which works well in my household (although my wife is fluent in English she still prefers to use Chinese). Now the Inland Revenue have changed their approach, and send you correspondence in one language. My wife was complaining that they had chosen English for her, which is fine for me because I can understand the letters, but not ideal for her. One subtle variation on this is if we are planning to go to the cinema we display the English and Chinese websites alongside each other and discuss which films to go and see.

    Most phone response systems work fairly well, and there is even a standard that you press ‘1’ for Cantonese, ‘2’ for English, and ‘3’ for Putonghua, though in my experience if you eventually get through to a real person they greet you in Cantonese regardless of the language you selected! However, that is only a very minor complaint, because the conversation then switches to English without any problem. One minor frustration I have experienced a few times is with trying to set up my mobile phone for voicemail etc. Each time I switched to a new provider, I found myself trying to navigate through the system in Cantonese in order to find the option to change the language to English. The catch being that if you can’t understand Cantonese (or find someone who does) you can’t change the language to English!

  • You can’t libel the dead

    Leading libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck died on Friday. Readers of Private Eye will know the name because he was frequently writing to the magazine demanding damages for something they had written, and when they felt confident or brave they would publish the letters. One of his former partners has written a piece in today’s Guardian criticizing him for being unscrupulous in persuading people to sue for libel when they were unlikely to win significant damages but could end up paying a large legal bill.

    There is, of course, a delicious irony in the fact that a former partner should write an article like this just after Carter-Ruck’s death. It would not have been published whilst he was still alive, because he would have been sure to sue for libel. Even if he had little or no chance of winning the case, it would still have been very troublesome for the newspaper or magazine involved, which is why cases are often settled with an apology and payment of nominal damages. In the longer term, the threat of legal action can act as a strong deterrent against writing about people who are likely to sue, which is not good for freedom of the press.

    (more…)

  • The newspaper we deserve? More Nury, more ESF problems

    Sunday’s SCMP had a very muddled piece by Katherine Forestier, their education correspondent, about the problems at Kennedy School (run by the English Schools Foundation) and the demand by the staff that the chairman of the school council should resign. I read the story a few times, and I’m still not sure that I fully understand it. The problem is, I think, is that this is effectively a follow-up to a piece that appeared in the paper a couple of weeks ago. Is it too much to ask that the paper should summarize the story so far, for those of us that don’t remember all the details?

    It’s also a bit of a non-story, given that the piece in the SCMP two weeks earlier said the teachers had sent a letter to the council expressing no confidence in it. Now they’re calling for the chairman of the council to resign. Big deal.

    (more…)

  • Brrr, it’s cold…

    I have to admit that it has been cold these last few days, and I have been wearing a jacket or a coat when I go out. No scarves or hats or any other nonsense, just a jacket.

    I know that Hong Kong people aren’t really used to cold weather, but I couldn’t quite believe how this has been affecting people who were brought up in colder countries. Phil tells us that:

    It takes me up to ten minutes to get out of bed because I need that long to build up the courage to expose myself.

    Someone has added a comment to Phil’s piece, noting something that Big White Guy (who comes from Canada, where it really does get cold) wrote some time back, complaining about how unpleasant it is having a shower or going to the toilet when it’s cold in Hong Kong. Poor thing.

    It’s a fair point that Hong Kong apartments are designed to keep us cool during the hot summers, not to keep us warm for the few days of winter each year, but I don’t find it that much of a problem. In the UK you normally have the reverse problem, in that when it is very hot (as it was this summer), it is very difficult to keep most homes bearably cool, but during the winter you have central heating so you are comfortable at home. In an ideal world, I suppose homes would be designed for both extremes of temperature, but I don’t think there’s much demand for central heating in Hong Kong!

    Anyway, today it was warmer, and the maximum temperature for Tuesday is 20 Celsius. That is not cold!

  • Gadgets

    I found this article about the ‘gadgets of the year” in The Guardian. I’m not really a gadget freak, but I am interested in what is coming along and I normally wait until prices drop before I actually buy. Today I bought a webcam (mainly so that my son can use it to talk to his cousins) and I was amazed how cheap it was and how easy it was to set up.

    My only weakness has been PDAs. I have bought a couple of Psion Organizers, a couple of Handspring Visors, and a couple of Handspring Treos, each time upgrading to a newer, faster, cleverer machine. The Treo is very useful in that combines PDA and phone functions (though it’s only an average phone). Probably my favourite application is Mobipocket, which enables you to view websites off-line – it’s better than Avantgo in that it has less restrictions and seems more reliable, but someone has to write a small script for each website. With cheap GPRS plans available in Hong Kong, the built-in browser (Blazer) is also useful.

    My theory on PDAs (and many other gadgets) is that the vast majority of them are not used to anything like their full potential. It must have seemed like a great idea at the time they bought the item, but in practice people either don’t need most of the features or don’t know how to use them.

    One gadget concept that I am watching with some interest is “pen computing”. My ideal scenario is to be able to write on ordinary paper and have the words turned into editable text with any diagrams etc. also incorporated into the document. So far most of the available systems fall some way short of that ideal, usually falling at the first hurdle by being unable to turn handwriting into text. What is frustrating is that some products appear to do more than is actually the case, so you have to be careful to check what they can really do. This company has some interesting software that could help a lot in this area (and they already have a simple handwriting recognition program for the Palm OS).

    Keyboards are fine for many things, but there many situations where it would be much more convenient to be able to write discretely on an ordinary pad of paper: it seems impolite to be tapping away on a keyboard in a meeting and it is not always possible when travelling. Eventually they will be cheap enough and reliable enough to be a practical solution.

  • Noisy Hotel?

    England seem to be heading for defeat in the Third Test in Colombo, and athough there is still the possibility of another rearguard action to save the game, the Daily Telegraph’s cricket correspondent came up with a novel excuse for their poor performance:

    Another excuse occurred on Friday night. A party on the front lawn of the team hotel on the sea-front – take note of the name Taj Samudra if you do not want a good night’s sleep in Colombo – kept window-rattling music going until after three o’clock on Saturday morning.

    I have stayed in the Taj Samudra, and when I was there it was very quiet and peaceful. It’s a pleasant enough hotel with large rooms and a slightly ‘colonial’ atmosphere, though when I was there (6 years ago) it looked a little past its best. Certainly preferable to the much more anonymous Hilton nearby.