dave: August 2007 Archives

Hot Fuzz may just well be the greatest Cop movie ever made. Great Fun,and well worth a look.

Hong Kong needs to take control of its taxi drivers.

It seems passengers don't decide where they will go, taxi drivers do - they won't take passengers across the harbour or some other destinations.

I have been visiting Hong Kong regularly, from Sydney, for more than 20 years, attending many trade fairs and business meetings. I have often had to wait like the proverbial dance hall wallflower for a taxi driver who deigns to be my partner. Declaring I want to go to the other side of the harbour, they don't want to go to.

The law which requires them to not unreasonably refuse to take a hirer to where they want to go is simply flouted.

It is a disgraceful way to treat locals and an even worse way to treat frequent visitors like me who actually spend money in your beautiful city.

My complaint to the Transport Complaints Unit got me exactly nowhere. I'm dreading my next visit in October.

Bruce Propert, Sydney, Australia

So you've been coming to HK for 20 years and you still don't know how to tell which taxi rank is cross harbour? Despite the fact that Cross Harbour taxi ranks have a sign stating that very fact? Or that taxis with an out-of-service sign up are actually looking to cross the harbour to go home at end of shift?

As for a disgraceful way to treat locals - just about every local knows how to tell which taxi is cross harbour.

Green pressure could harm city, says Li Ka-shing

Li Ka-shing warned yesterday that conservation campaigns and calls for limits on high-rise buildings could damage the interests of everyone in Hong Kong.

The remarks by the chairman of Cheung Kong (Holdings) (SEHK: 0001) were the first time a leading developer has hit out at the recent tactics employed by groups that are seeking to improve the city's environment through legal means.

...

"It affects the [government] revenue, which is everybody's revenue in Hong Kong," Mr Li said.

...

If by "everybody's revenue", you mean the revenue of large property developers, who make huge profits at the expense of the actual population, then I suppose that's true. If you look at it otherwise, then it's blatantly untrue.

As Chris says here, and Alice Poon points out here, the relentless skimping on contruction costs (thin, single layer walls, no double-glazing, no centralized air-conditioning) which increases the profits of the developers leaves the eventual owners with increased running costs (air conditioning, heating, etc).

Slightly increased construction costs would result in developments with lower over environmental impact and could also result in substantial reductions in running costs, as Chris points out in his linked article.

James Tien Pei-chun, another developer who is also chairman of the Liberal Party, month urged the government earlier this month to hold public consultations on urban development immediately before a decision on a project was made, to avoid last-minute objections.

Mr Tien, as well as not apparently understanding the whole "public consultation" thing in the first place, is also in charge of the Hong Kong Tourism Board.

You know, the very same Tourism board which raised no objections to the recent destruction of the Star Ferry, one of Hong Kong's signature attractions. Which is raising no objections to the imminent destruction of the markets in Wanchai and Central. The Wanchai one is particularly egregious, as they're clearing it to allow vehicular access for a development.

Some somewhat related articles from AsiaSentinel.com:

• How to Be an Asian Godfather
• Asian Godfathers Part 2

Contrary to popular outside belief, the big HK property tycoons are not superb businessmen. They've come up in a system with a captive core-revenue generating mechanism which requires very little business acumen.

If they were good businessmen, they'd recognise that there's a clear and growing market demand for more environmentally aware developments. Better insulation, recycling facilities, centralized air-conditioning, use of sea-water for cooling, more effective use of internal space, and use of solar power for minor power use. These are all things which are just starting to be incorporated in commercial developments, and which should really be in residential developments.

There's a small market for developments which are more concerned about their impact on the environment. It will grow over time, if there are properties to cater for it. Unfortunately, the system is closed and there is no competition.

As Alice Poon says in her post, we need proper standards to force the developers to pay more attention to the damage they're causing. I don't think there's going to be much chance of this government bringing in such legislation though. Not when it would upset the only public they pay attention to: the tycoons.

Airport needs new procedures

K. W. Chow, for the director of immigration ("Staff at airport hitting targets", August 13), replied to my letter on the time it took to go through immigration at Chek Lap Kok ("Long wait in line out of order", July 31).

As I am a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I assure him I am able to read my watch correctly. The use of averages is known to miss fluctuations, and a 92 per cent standard does not yield good-quality service. Indeed, why should visitors wait in line on average 15 minutes to leave? I have not experienced this type of wait when leaving other places.

Further, while eight counters were open, Mr Chow admits that only 15 per cent of visitors used the three counters that had almost no traffic, as I observed in my letter.

Thus, the procedures should be improved so that visitors leaving Hong Kong are not subject to long waits.

Jerry Hausman, professor of economics, MIT, Boston, US

(Unlike most of the times I quote a letter to the SCMP, this time I don't think the writer is unhinged.)

One of the issues which Prof. Hausman mentions above (and which was referred to in the Director of Immigration reply earlier) was the average time taken to go through outbound immigration. The Immigration Department has spent a great deal of time and effort to speed up the processing of residents as they go through the various border controls we have in Hong Kong. Much of this effort has been the replacement of paper based systems with electronic systems, and the whole SmartID system.

If Prof. Hausman had glanced to his right while queuing, he may have noticed some people approaching turnstiles, using a card of some kind and apparently being processed electronically. Total time through inbound or outbound immigration for those lucky people? Under a minute, depending on the volume of people. When I return to HK usually, I don't stop walking from leaving the plane to collecting my bags.

So how to get one of those electronic cards? Well, you have to be a permanent resident[1] with a SmartID card. Unfortunatey for Prof. Hausman, that means that you must be resident in HK for a period of 7 years.

[1] I've heard rumours that the electronic system will be extended to non-permanent residents, but I've not heard anything concrete about that. UPDATE: Spike confirms in the comments that the E-Channel at the airport is usable by ordinary residents.

This short processing time naturally makes the average processing time look very good. And, as the vast majority of border crossers are permanent residents, the costs benefit analysis is clearly on the side of improving the experience for permanent residents.

One of the primary drivers behind the whole speeding up of the immigration process has been the land-based borders (we're supposed to call them 'boundaries' now) with China. The Lo Wu border, for example, can handle several hundred thousand travellers per day, largely thanks to immigration on the HK and China sides being largely electronic. There are queues at the non-electronic immigration gates there too, but they're nothing like the airport queues.

Note that this doesn't change Prof. Hausman's point at all: there are still far too few Immigration officials manning the Visitor gates at the airport and this can create a poor first (or last) impression as to the efficiency of the airport and Hong Kong.

The Immigration department separates the categories according to equipment required to process the travel documents. Permanent residents just have their ID cards scanned, Ordinary residents will require a passport stamp, while visitors will require a visa sticker or stamp. Officers at non-visitor gates will almost certainly not have the equipement required to process visitors and this is a big part of the problem. It's 2007, we should be entirely electronic with visitor records now. The Australians have electronic Visas, so why doesn't HK record a visitor visa on the passport number electronically?

There is a way to bypass the long visitor queues, if you're a regular visitor: Frequent Visitor Card. Unfortunately, it requires that you have come to Hong Kong three or more times in the last 12 months, but it may be of value anyway.

#!/bin/bash

# a script to illustrate the steps required to upgrade using yum.

# Note that this is FC6 to F7.

# this should require a locally mounted repository for extra speed.

yum clean all

yum update

/usr/bin/pg_dumpall -U postgres >/storage/postgresql/all_data.backup

rm -rf /var/lib/pgsql/*

chown -R postgres.postres /var/lib/pgsql

#(/storage/linux... is my local repository)

rpm -Uvh /storage/linux/fedora/core/7/i386/mount/Fedora/fedora-release-*

#

# There's a missing dependency: libgcj.so.8rh

#

yum remove libglade-java libvte-java libgnome-java glib-java kdemultimedia

yum upgrade

#yum install libglade-java libvte-java libgnome-java glib-java kdemultimedia

service postgresql initdb

/etc/init.d/postgresql start

su - postgres

psql -f /storage/postgresql/all_data.backup

# you may need to check the ident config in pg_hba.conf, and that it's

# set to trust, not ident. Also there may be more than one file!

And I certainly didn't expect this:

I notice that Hemlock appears to have updated his index of Hong Kong blogs recently and I've been removed after being on the occasionals list for a while. He wouldn't be the first who got the impression that I was more of an Australian blog...

If you're reading this site by an RSS feed, there was an older RDF feed which remained stuck in 2005. The real feed is http://www.diaspoir.net/index.xml, although the rdf feed is now a clone of that. There's also a feed of all the comments, if you're really bored.

The new version of Movable Type is looking good - I'll probably upgrade to that as soon as it's out of Beta and an Upgrade to Fedora 7 is on the cards.

Back to your scheduled ranting...