Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Ad blockers are great, but are they also an ethical problem?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 7, 2025| 1 Comment »

You may think you’re looking at Youtube, but Youtube is also looking at you. This should not come as a surprise. They say that if you can’t see what is being sold on a website, the thing being sold is you.

Youtube is selling your eyeballs, so of course they’re interested in what you get up to. They know when and where you looked, for how long, whether you finished an item, whether you watched an ad and if as a result you clicked on it. Behind all this surveillance is the chink of money being counted.

On the whole most of us are quite happy to let this go on in the background. We watch what we want to watch and try not to be manipulated into watching what we don’t want to watch … “You’ll never guess what happened next” and other clickbait avoided.

An important aide to an enjoyable Youtube session is an ad blocker. A good ad blocker will seamlessly remove those ads which interrupt longer pieces and insist on you watching for at least five seconds.

I understand this is a matter of much irritation to Youtube. A constant arms race continues between Youtube boffins trying to produce a blocker-proof ad, and the ad blocker people trying to keep ahead of them.

However using an ad blocker in this way does bring us to an ethical dilemma. People producing Youtube vids often depend on them for an income, in some cases most or all of their income. Part of that income comes from measured traffic on the ads inserted in their material by Youtube.

The possibility that I am blocking some small part of this by avoiding ads is not a problem if the content provider is someone like DAZN, a sportscasting company which throws billions of dollars around in public acquisitions. They do not need my pittance. But thank you for the football coverage.

Still, a lot of Youtube content still emerges from a cottage industry. Minority pursuit videos are often done by two people taking turns filming each other. Obscure hobbies attract dedicated individuals. Sometimes the possibility of being paid by Youtube for what they were doing for nothing comes as a pleasant surprise.

When you are looking at a site like this it is easy to feel guilty. Yes, I am enjoying the video without irritating interruptions, but the person producing it, who has become a famliar and admired figure, is missing out on the money to be earned by seducing my eyeballs.

Discussing this with computer-using friends I find I am not the only one bothered by this. A popular solution is to leave a “like”, whether you liked that particular offering or not. Subscribing is also a boost for a site.

Youtube also measures “engagement”, by which it means the response in messages to the site. So a costless word or two like “Bravo” or “Nice video” will help. This is not just a matter of pleasing Youtube. As a site operator in a small way I can assure you that all responses (other then the rabidly hostile ones) produce a grateful glow.

If you really want to be generous you can sign up for Patreon, which will funnel a donation on your behalf, or “Buy me a coffee” which does the same thing on a more small and casual scale. This may get you a mention and a thanks on your favourite site.

One of my more thoughtful friends has noticed that content providers these days often urge, or even beg, visitors to stay for the end of the video. Apparently Youtube pays more for this. So whenever he opens a video on a site he approves of he keeps it running to the end. If he doesn’t actually want to watch it to the end he opens a new window and leaves the old one running underneath it.

No doubt Youtube would regard this as a dishonest trick. But then Youtube is a bit of a dishonest trick itself. We all know the endless scroll is addictive.

Read Full Post »

Fruit and vegetables now defy the seasons … with one exception

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 31, 2025| Leave a Comment »

When I was a kid my mother was still in the habit of shopping daily. We had a fridge but it hadn’t really changed our eating habits yet. Most shops featured a counter, behind which the “assistant” would stand and fetch what you wanted.

Fruit and vegetables were different. These came from a specialised shop called the greengrocer’s, which was set up rather more like a Hong Kong wet market. The fruit and veg were out on shelves or in baskets so you could inspect and fondle the goods.

There was a big open space in the middle of the shop where the greengrocer performed, juggling fruit, chaffering with the customers (most of whom he knew by name) and weighing purchases on a large weighing machine.

There was, I noticed, a lot of variation in what was available. We were at the mercy of the climate. You ate salad in the summer because that was when lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes were “in season”. You had Brussels sprouts with your Christmas turkey because sprouts were the only green vegetable immune to frost. Strawberries were a treat at Wimbledon because they had been unobtainable for nine months before

Apart from bananas, which came from – I suppose – banana republics by refrigerated boat, and citrus fruits, imported from Spain, to every thing there was a season, as the song had it.

Well we have changed all that. Wandering my local supermarket I find that most of the fruits and vegetables are reassuringly consistent. They may come from different places at different times of the year but they are always there.

This is partly because food now frequently flies. So what is out of season in the northern hemisphere will be just coming into fruition in the southern one. Also a lot of food production is now conducted in entirely artificial environments. Confused plants can be persuaded that it is fruit time regardless of the calendar.

This is all well and good, and no doubt makes it easier to follow a healthy diet. But there is one exception. We have just passed, you may not have noticed, the end of the lychee season.

I was a fan of the lychee long before coming to Hong Kong. This is because Chinese restaurants in the UK, at least outside the big cities, sold a rather specialised foreigner-friendly version of Chinese food, and this did not include desserts.

If you really wanted a dessert there were only two possibilities: ice cream or tinned lychees. This was thoroughly misleading. When I came to Hong Kong I found whole restaurants devoted to Chinese sweet dishes, offering an intriguing range of soups, dumplings, fruits and variations on rice. There were no tinned lychees or, for that matter, ice cream.

In due course I was introduced to the real fresh lychee. In those days the Xinhua news agency office in Hong Kong was routinely described as China’s de facto embassy in the colony, but they did perform some press relations stuff. And so I was invited on a day trip to see the lychee harvest in Shenzhen, which in those days still had trees and farms.

I am not sure how the industrial scale picking is done but we were all issued with bags and urged to help ourselves. The lychee tree is a conveniently low tree.

But it seems somehow to have eluded the trend towards fruit and vegetable globalisation. You can get lychees when they are in season in Guangdong. Outside that time you can’t. This is surprising.

When kiwis were a New Zealand speciality they were seasonal. But the fruit – also known as the Chinese gooseberry – was long ago transplanted and copied. So now they come from a variety of places and you can get them all year round. Why has this not happened to the lychee?

Let me offer a free suggestion to any New Zealand farmer who thinks the kiwi business is getting a bit crowded these days. Buy, borrow or steal a lychee tree. In the summer – that is your summer, not ours – you will have the world to yourself.

Read Full Post »

Is writing on toilet walls still a thing?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 24, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Without commenting in any way on the merits of the case, the news that a young man had been arrested and charged with writing a seditious message on a toilet wall was … pleasantly nostalgic.

Writing on the walls of public toilet cubicles used to be a widespread hobby and some walls in popular … establishments were virtually covered in writings and drawings. Well prepared graffiti artists had pencils or pens; the rest of us just scratched.

Of course many of the results lacked artistic quality and most of them were obscene. Among the more printable was the almost universal assurance that “Kilroy was here.” A variety of theories are offered about who Kilroy was and why he was commemorated in this way.

I also recall coming across “Clap your hands and jump with joy; I found this wall before Kilroy” to which someone had added “Kilroy built it.”

Public toilets in the more academic parts of Oxford sported graffiti of a more learned kind. Many of them were in Latin; a few in ancient Greek. Some users spent their toilet time composing alphabets: A is for Anabasis, B is for Binomianism, C is for Critical Theory and so on.

Inevitably, academics have swooped. Selection of findings here. Sample discovery: “Females discussed body image more than males did. There was also a difference in focus: females listed their height and weight, whereas males listed their penis size.”

A more civilised habit, in private homes, was to decorate your toilet walls with examples of entertaining newspaper errors of the “Headless body found in topless bar” kind. Many of these came from The Guardian, which was so notorious for the laxity of its proofreading that Private Eye called it The Grauniad

It must be said, however, that in the vast majority of English toilets the graffiti, if there were graffiti, were fairly crude and disgusting. However this was a result of the fact that the toilet cubicle was private. You could do what you liked in there and nobody would know. At my boarding school there were actually crowds in some cubicles at break times, of smokers.

So I am a little concerned at the news that someone has been arrested and charged for defacing a toilet wall. The question is how did they catch him?

I assume … I hope … there is no question of CCTV in the cubicles at Hong Kong China City, where the deplorable deed is alleged to have taken place. I realise we are on camera a lot these days. City Super actually has cheerful notices saying “Smile! You’re on CCTV”. Shoplifting is a serious matter and I yield without complaint the right to televise the avocados.

The toilet is another matter. No doubt writing on the walls is only one of the many ways in which the privacy of the cubicle can be abused, but privacy there should nevertheless be.

Other theories are also a bit worrying. Does Hong Kong China City expect its toilet attendants to inspect a cubicle after each visit to make sure the walls have not been defaced? Or do the national security cops keep an eye on suspected subversives by poking a periscope over the partition from the next cubicle?

No doubt the ensuing trial will be a big attraction to the media and all will be revealed in due course. Meanwhile the story also has a serious side. The suspected scribbler could face seven years in jail if his work is considered seditious.

As a police spokesman memorably put it: “doing with a seditious intention an act or acts that had a seditious intention is a serious offence”. Also it’s a national security offence, so even if your only audience was a toilet wall you don’t get bail.

Kilroy was here, and has moved to Canada.

Read Full Post »

An economist on education: if it don’t make you rich it’s a waste of time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 17, 2025| 1 Comment »

The newspapers are full, as is customary at this time of the year, of stories about local kids who have done well in the school-leaving exams. It seems that most of the stars of this show want to become doctors, which shows a touching faith in the inability of AI to take over the routine parts of medicine.

For a discordant note readers could turn to The Economist, which printed a long piece lamenting the fact that, as a subsidiary headline put it, “the bottom has fallen out of the graduate job market”.

The primary evidence for this comes from America, where graduates in their 20s have been found in one study to have higher unemployment rates than the general population. Things are apparently moving in a similar direction, but much more slowly, outside America.

Graduates – again from the evidence we are back in the USA – find jobs harder to come by and also less satisfying than they used to. Very good international example from the BBC on Thursday: mainlander with degree from Oxford and PhD from Singapore university is working … as a food delivery driver.

The Economist’s writer dismisses as an unsatisfactory explanation claims that many graduates of American universities are ill-educated and in some cases actually illiterate. These stories may be true, but the brightest and best are also finding employment elusive.

Some formerly entry-level jobs are certainly falling to AI. A more original suggestion is that people used to go to university to achieve digital literacy; now everyone gets it from their smart phone so for many button-pushing jobs a degree looks unnecessary.

The writer concludes that many American students are now deciding that university is not worth it: the time… the debt … the disappointment. This is not happening in Europe where, as our scribe puts it, “”Governments are subsidising useless degrees, encouraging kids to waste time studying.”

What do we mean by “useless degrees”? “Outside America, the share in arts, humanities and social sciences mostly grows. So, inexplicably, does enrolment in journalism courses. If these trends reveal young people’s ideas about the future of work, they truly are in trouble.”

Really? Underlying this lament appears to be the unspoken assumption that the main or only reason for any form of study is to increase your future income. Education of any other kind amounts to “encouraging kids to waste time.”

I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s lament that people “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” This might usefully be adapted. Economists – and The Economist – know the price of everything and erroneously suppose that the value is the same thing.

“Until recently,” says our author, “the obvious path for a British student hoping to make money was a graduate scheme at a bank.” But making money is only one of the things people hope to find in a job. Some British students would rather shovel sewage for a living than work in a bank and I was once one of them.

Only a Philistine society will limit its educational offerings to subjects with an immediate practical application, or indeed an ironclad promise of future wealth attached to them.

Indeed there are some areas of human activity where the attainment of the highest standards requires that many are tested, most of whom will fail. Training for air traffic controllers is a notorious example. Thousands apply, hundreds are accepted, tens actually complete the course and get into a control tower, some of whom drop out later when they find the work too stressful.

Many of the more demanding military specialities have similar attrition rates. In university programmes this is obscured by the fact that every student who makes a reasonable amount of effort will get the degree. But in general music grads do not become musicians, Eng Lit grads do not become novelists, philosophy grads do not become professional philosophers and the only graduate archaeologist I ever met was teaching in a primary school.

This brings us to the “inexplicable” attraction of journalism courses, which I flogged happily and successfully for nearly three decades. It was a platitude among teachers of journalism that most of our students were not going to be journalists, or if they became journalists would not stay that way.

At one time there was a spirited debate in the journalism education business about whether we should continue to design courses on the basis that the graduate would be able to meet the requirements of the trade (art, craft, science, con trick or disease, whichever you prefer) or we should accept that we were teaching non-journalists and adapt courses accordingly.

Generally we concluded that the practical aspects of a journalism programme were one of the things which students liked, even if they were not going to be practitioners themselves. Most of my students never became journalists. A surprising number (at least to me) became police people. Journalism may be (as Max Hastings puts it) a pursuit for “cads and bounders”, but it still has a whiff of adventure around it that you are not going to get in the Business School. But if you really want to be rich … your choice.

Read Full Post »

So soft resistance is not a legal concept? Why this is a worrying thought

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 4, 2025| 1 Comment »

One does not wish to seem ungrateful, but the enduring mystery of the hour – exactly what do officials mean by “soft resistance” – has not been much clarified by the Secretary for Justice, who offered a definition last week.

Soft resistance, said Paul Lam, has three main elements: making false or misleading statements, expressing them irrationally with emotional bias, and having the intention to create misunderstandings about the Chinese or Hong Kong governments and their policies.

This looks like an extension of the law on subversion, already unmoored from its Common Law attachment to the provocation of violence. If this were the case it would still leave a variety of tricky questions: for example, would sincere belief in the truth of the statement complained of be a defence?

But Mr Lam scotched this notion by adding that “methods of soft resistance may not always be illegal, but that did not mean they did not harm society.” He also said that although the term was hard to define the government would not use it arbitrarily. ”You can say it is a political term,” he mused.

“Not all issues in society should be addressed by legal means. [Legal means] are also not always the most effective way of handling [matters],” Lam said. This brings us to a rather alarming question: what non-legal means is the government proposing to use?

A few reminders: we have repeatedly been assured that freedom of expression continues to be protected in Hong Kong. Both the Basic Law and the National Security Law reiterate the point, often also made by officials.

Anyone who complains about apparent infringements will be referred to the relevant part of the Civil Rights Ordinance, which permits exceptions to protect — put briefly — reputations, public order (including national security) and public decency.

But there is one condition attached to these exceptions: they must be “provided by law”. That means that if a person engages in soft resistance, deplorable though that may be, using methods which are not illegal, then he or she is exercising the right to self-expression and is entitled to Mr Lam’s protection while doing so.

The answer to soft resistance which does not break the law is of course soft repression. This could take the form of counter-arguments, pointing out untruths, denouncing irrational language and correcting misinterpretations of government policies.

This should not be too difficult. The government has a whole department devoted to putting its version of events before the public. RTHK is at its service and most of our surviving media take a pride in doing more than justice to the government line.

The answer to erroneous speech is, or should be, correct speech.

Yet somehow I do not think this was on the mind of the numerous senior officials who thought a 28th anniversary speech was a good opportunity to denounce the evils of soft resistance and promise to extirpate it.

The Secretary for Culture, Art and Tourism, for example, promised to step up scrutiny before allowing funding or the use of venues for shows. Other issuers of permits of various kinds are apparently putting their shoulders to the wheel. Of late we learn that restaurants can lose their licences, social workers and teachers can be drummed out of their professions. Some people cannot run a bookshop without entertaining a stream of visitors from government departments, citing anonymous complaints about hygiene, fire safety, business regulations or whatever.

We may have a government which, as Mr Lam said, welcomes criticism, but it is not very good at looking like that.

The problem with this sort of thing is that after a while it makes people suspicious. Maybe the venue you wanted to hire really does have an air conditioning problem. Who knows? The Lord moves in mysterious ways and routinely refused to discuss individual cases.

Recently the Inland Revenue Department resumed sending me annual tax returns. In normal times I would put this down to a lucrative one-off freelance gig in 2023 after which the employer very properly filed the usual form reporting how much it paid me. As it happened, though, this sudden renewal of interest in my finances coincided with several stories about news media and individual reporters being asked for large tax payments they did not owe. So an innocent bit of bureaucratic routine looks … fishy.

Read Full Post »

District councillor enters beauty pageant; this is a problem?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 29, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Today, gentle reader, the defendant before you in the court of public opinion faces a charge of conduct likely to bring the Saikung District Council into disrepute. This woman, careless of her obligations to the council and the public, sought to enter the Miss Hong Kong Pageant.

No, indeed, the Miss Hong Kong Pageant is not in itself illegal. Indeed many of us have happy memories of watching it in the days when there was only broadcast television to watch and not much choice of that. Every year they picked a different hairdresser to attack the tresses of all the contestants. This often produced startling results, sometimes apparently inspired by the works of Hieronymus Bosch.

The competition retains its appeal for presentable young women, and this led into temptation Ms Angel Chong, who sits on the Saikung District Board as an appointee of the government.

After attending the first round of interviews, and before any result had emerged, she rashly told Instagram consumers what she had been up to. Some people then complained. Some of them were maybe simply taking advantage of a chance for a bit of soft resistance to the “reformed” electoral system.

Among those complaining, though, was Alice Mak, the Secretary for Home and Youth Affairs.

We may charitably suppose that Ms Mak was asked a question on this topic, and felt some sort of reply was called for. On the other hand it is perhaps a pity that she did not take the better course of replying that what Ms Chong did with her free time was nobody else’s business.

Ms Mak said that councillors, regardless of their profession, should follow the Performance Monitoring Guidelines for Members of the District Councils (hereafter the PMG) and fulfil their duties. Ms Chong understandably interpreted this as a rebuke, and promptly dropped out of the pageant.

Oddly enough nobody made the traditional complaint about beauty contests, which is that they are demeaning to the contestants and corrupting for the spectators, because they imply that the most important thing about a young woman is her appearance.

This may be a bit unfair. In my early reporting days I was often sent to cover early heats of the Miss Great Britain contest (amazingly still with us). These were held at a swimming pool and most of the contestants were swimmers of pleasant appearance who had been talked into it to make up the numbers.

The prize money, which was modest at this stage, went to the professionals. You could spot them easily: carefully applied tan, enormous eyelashes, one-piece swimsuits and hair which had certainly not been in the pool. They also had the pose: one leg forward, body slightly turned to emphasise the – cough – chest, and a big smile.

These women were on a circuit which was just a rather basic part of the entertainment business. Many knew each other and in the summer they turned up for pageants all over the place. It was, in the season, virtually a full-time job. They were all beautiful, though having been unhappily married for a while to a former Miss Southport I was not tempted.

The Miss Hong Kong Pageant is a bit different, because there isn’t a circuit in Hong Kong, so the organisers have no supply of shovel-ready contestants to call on. Those selected are all more or less amateurs and get a good deal of training in what could be described as how to make the most of themselves. And some of them do go on to … greater things.

If this means a career in showbiz the matter of the Harvey Weinstein Syndrome comes over the horizon, though I have never heard anything of the sort about the Miss Hong Kong show itself. I do, though, recall a court case in which it emerged peripherally that the man who agreed to sponsor a TV programme was also accorded, as part of the deal, the right to cast all the female parts. I fear we all know what that was about.

Anyway, if we leave the feminist perspective aside and assume that Ms Chong’s virtue was not in danger, what is the problem? Apparently many of the complaints thought that competing in the pageant was incompatible with discharging the time-consuming obligations of a councillor, and this may be what was bothering Ms Mak.

This brings us to the PMG, one of those government documents perhaps more often cited than read, because it runs to 16 pages, with a further 19-page annex which appears to consist mostly of forms. There is nothing in the PMG for or against beauty contests.

District Councillors are required to attend meetings, join committees, hold meet-the-public sessions, have (or share) an office open 40 hours a week and turn up at a minimum number of “district events”. Clearly you could make a full-time job of this if you wanted to, but you could also, without violating the PMG, fit in the odd bit of beauty pageant.

Whether you should want to, I don’t know. Despite attempts, possibly sincere attempts, by their organisers to introduce such matters as talking, talent and ambitions, the path to victory is to look pleasing to men. And their requirements tend to be distressingly simple.

I once watched, on television, the Miss USA contest. My brother, also watching, announced at the stage when there were still 50 contestants that Miss Arkansas would win because she had “the biggest boobs”. And in due course, win she did.

Is a District Council member participating in this sort of thing a threat to the good repute of the council concerned? Only, perhaps, if the council’s reputation is rather fragile…

Read Full Post »

Where are we going to put these overseas students? Not in Shenzhen, please

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 28, 2025| 3 Comments »

Some time ago I noted that banks continued to prune branches while the local education industry continued to spawn new universities, and if these trends continued it would eventually be easier to find a university here than an outlet of the bank whose branches used to be proverbially “as common as rice shops”.

We’re not there yet, but we’re close. HSBC is now down to 20 branches while the number of universities has officially risen to 12. This does not include the mysterious University of the Built Environment, which announced its promotion in the Standard recently, but apparently is domiciled in the UK. There are eight recognised post-secondary colleges waiting in the wings. So lots of choices.

Unfortunately this expansion of opportunity has coincided with a drastic drop in the proportion of the population in the late teens and early 20s, whether in the workforce or the general population. Why this has happened – the trend seems to have picked up after 2019 – I leave to your imagination.

Meanwhile, in a possibly unrelated development, the government has increased the proportion of students which the universities it funds can take from outside the territory. The upper limit has now reached 40 per cent. Many of these people are paying through the nose. This is what economists count as an invisible export of services.

So it is a Good Thing. But like all Good Things it comes with costs and one of these has now surfaced. Hong Kong students traditionally solved their accommodation problems by living at home. This is the system still followed in Scotland, though not in England, where leaving home to go to Uni is an important life landmark, albeit an increasingly expensive one.

The usual Hong Kong arrangement when I started teaching was that the parents provided room and board, while the student worked part time to raise fees and spending money. The more well-off universities had “halls of residence” which made no attempt to fit in the entire population, but aimed to provide a taste of communal life for those who wanted it.

We now have the prospect of a severe shortage of accommodation for students from outside Hong Kong. This has not gone unnoticed and last week the permanent secretary (the senior real civil servant, not the DAB apparatchik) in the Development Bureau announced a pilot scheme. The government will relax some planning requirements and procedures for property owners who wish to convert into student housing their hotel or office block.

The secretary, Doris Ho Pui-ling, noted – perhaps tactlessly – disappointing demand from tourists, and high vacancy rates in some commercial offices. Ms Ho said that action on this matter was necessary to support the “Study in Hong Kong” brand and the government had set a quota, as governments do.

Whether it will be met remains to be seen. Real estate people were doubtful, citing conversion costs of $1,500 to $2,000 a square foot, as making it difficult to devise profitable schemes.

The Standard (which has dropped the Mary Ma masquerade and now calls its editorial an editorial, as a respectable newspaper should) opined that student needs should not be met at the expense of tourism; the territory’s hotels were 80-90 per cent full, and the number of overseas tourists was rising.

Well I agree with Ms Ho. If the government wants to have lots of students from other places it needs to provide somewhere for them to live. From my time as a bit of student representative grit in the smooth machinery of university management a few observations.

Conversions of factories and offices are really difficult. They usually feature large floor spaces. The bosses take the spaces round the outside with windows and the peasants work in a big open space in the middle which has no natural light or ventilation. Short of digging a big hole in the middle of the building to provide a light well, or a change in student expectations – do you really need a window? – the floor plan is a problem.

Hotels do not have this issue. Actually many UK universities are happy to let out empty student rooms to budget tourists in the summer. It’s a good deal. The room is simple but you also get the use of a kitchen and a laundry, a boon for travellers on the cheap. I would have thought a basic hotel could be switched to student use with little change.

The price of conversion should not be regarded as fixed. In my experience architects can be quite creative if told firmly enough that their first draft is unaffordable.

There will usually be opposition. I find this a bit surprising but some people think student residences will bring noise and disorder, or depress nearby property prices. No doubt the Standard will not be the only defender of the tourism industry’s interests.

I hope, though, to hear no more of the Standard’s suggestion that students who are studying at Hong Kong universities should live in Shenzhen. It is a curious fact of life that students, who cheerfully waste their time in interesting ways, will not tolerate a long commute.

When the University of Lancaster was planned it was assumed that students would live in nearby Morecambe, a moribund seaside resort with lots of cheap holiday accommodation. This did not happen. Students hated the idea. Readers who have had the misfortune of visiting Morecambe in the winter may find this unsurprising, but it held in other places also.

The “Study in Hong Kong” brand will not long survive the discovery that your student is regarded as a sort of reverse vampire, welcome in Hong Kong only in the hours of daylight.

Read Full Post »

A new way to lose your shirt: betting on basketball

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on June 23, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Like most people who have worked in the casino business – I had a short but lucrative career in the bingo business before my first journalism job – I have mixed feelings about gambling.

For most people it may be a bit of harmless fun. The proportion of partakers who get hooked is quite small. But for them the addiction is a life-wrecker.

Serious gambling also seems a terrible waste of money. The house wins in the long run. That means in the long run you don’t. I am suspicious of stories of “professional gamblers” who show a profit. But if they exist this trick clearly depends on a lot of hard work and research. You might as well get a real job and do something useful with your life.

These thoughts surfaced when I read that the government plans to launch a whole new betting option. People will be allowed to gamble on basketball. A licence will be issued by the Secretary for Home and Youth Affairs.

Will the lucky recipient of this licence to print money be carefully selected? Of course not. It is going to the Jockey Club.

Our government’s affection for market forces and competition does not, it appears, extend to the gambling industry. The Jockey Club has a great deal of expertise in the highly technical and complex business of running horse casinos. It also has a lot of influence where it counts. So whenever another gambling option comes along the Jockey Club gets another opportunity to fleece the unwary punter.

We have been through this before. When the idea of legal football betting came up the government said, as it says now, that of course it does not approve of betting at all. But a legal outlet for the public’s weakness must be supplied, since otherwise unapproved and illegal betting will flourish.

The same arguments are offered for basketball betting, and this leads to the suspicion that something may be going here which we are not being told about. Why do people use illegal bookmakers when the legality and convenience of a Jockey Club account is on offer? Could it be because they suspect that the illegal bookies will be … more generous?

There will be “net stake receipts” from legal basketball betting, according to the official notice. I take this to mean that the cash paid out to lucky winners will be somewhat less than the receipts from luckless losers. The “net stake receipts” will be shared on a 50:50 basis with the government. They will, clearly, be considerable.

Football betting was licensed in 2004, but this did not in fact result in the disappearance of the illegal version. And meanwhile the illegal bookies went on to basketball. I wonder if in 20 years time we shall be reading that there has been an upsurge in illegal betting on something else – Indian cricket, Rumanian pickleball, the number of times a senior official can get “national security” into one speech – and the only solution to this problem is for a legal version to be offered by … the Jockey Club, naturally.

The club is rightly famous for its charitable activities but there is surely something a bit odd about a private members’ club for rich people being given a succession of lucrative monopolies. Also a bit odd is the club’s progression from running betting on its own races to running betting on other sports taking place in other countries.

Will there come a time when the Jockey Club is offering a book on everything from athletics to yodelling competitions (I do not think there is a sport beginning with z) in every country you can think of. And at that point will someone say that running horse races consumes a lot of attention, space and water, most of which is wasted, and is a distraction from the club’s real business, which is running a lucrative gambling operation.

I am reminded of the story of the Eastern potentate who buit a magnificent mausoleum round his wife’s tomb, but eventually decided the building would look better if the tomb was removed…

Read Full Post »

Phew! National security is now to be protected from subversives in saunas

Posted in Uncategorized on June 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Here’s one from our “you could not make it up” department. In Hong Kong you will soon need, in effect, a security clearance to operate a washing-up machine.

This is the latest message from the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, which is supposed to regulate the restaurant business, among other things, but is now, like most parts of the government, trying very hard to look as if it is making a contribution to national security.

You would think this was quite difficult. What could be subversive about commercial food?

Where there’s a will there’s a way. The FEHD has been sending a letter to restaurants, warning that a new condition will be added to the licences for restaurants and other food outlets. This will state the proprietor’s intentions as follows: “I shall ensure that no act or activity engaged or involved in by me or any of my related persons… may constitute or cause the occurrence of an offence endangering national security under the National Security Law or other laws of the HKSAR, or conduct [that] is otherwise contrary to the interests of national security or the interest of the public (including public morals, public order and/or public safety) of Hong Kong.”

“Related persons”, the letter adds, include directors, management, employees, agents, and subcontractors. Similar conditions, according to local media, are also to be imposed on cinemas, gaming centres, funeral parlours, and saunas. Failure to keep to the new conditions will lead to loss of licence.

Chief Executive John Lee defended the new arrangements with a straight face at a press conference as “appropriate and the right thing to do.” He added that “Offending conduct means any offence that endangers national security, or acts and events that are contrary to national security and public interest in Hong Kong. It is very clear,”

But it is not very clear at all. “An offence” and “national security” are legal terms subject to carefully framed definitions to which citizens may refer, although at some risk of disappointment. But what are we to make of “acts and events” which are contrary to “public interest”?

The new arrangement looks disturbingly like an attempt to make a large group of people – of whom, by coincidence, the government disapproves – unemployable in a wide range of venues and industries, because the proprietor will fear that the inclusion of one of them in his “related persons” will lead to loss of his licence.

It is of course true that many jobs or professions are barred to some people because of features in their background: medics, teachers, district councillors, bus captains, the Pope… But such restrictions are justified by the need for a qualification or the potential for harm.

Does the Hong Kong government seriously expect us to believe that national security will be endangered if the flunky who hands you your towel in the sauna has dubious views about the merits of the Chinese Communist party? Are there really dangerous opportunities for an active subversive employed in a funeral parlour?

Then there is the question who is actually affected and how we are to know who they are. I do not see how this new arrangement can be compatible with our frequently voiced devotion to the Common Law. After all we are all supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.

The government, or the restaurant proprietor, may suspect that a would-be waiter has an eccentric view of the “public interest”. But an opinion is not a crime. If a person has infringed the law he will and should be prosecuted. During his custodial sentence he will not be in the market for jobs in restaurants, or anywhere else.

Upon his release, having as the old phrase has it “paid his debt to society” he is again entitled to all the legal rights of a citizen, including the right to be presumed innocent until a court decides otherwise.

Clearly though the FEHD intends its restriction to cover a wide area. Unless the department proposes to publish a black list of people unsuitable for employment in cinemas or funeral parlours there is going to be a tricky edge zone. Here neither the employer nor his potential underling know what the position is and there will be a temptation for the employer to err on the side of safety.

I really do not think it would be a good idea if there was a large group of Hongkongers subject to restrictions on their employment (as well as engagement in politics) like those imposed on English Quakers in the 18th century or Jews in the Austrian Empire in the 19th. Will this make them love big brother?

I also note the danger that the FEHD’s initiative will be copied by other departments. Will similar conditions attach to my next dog licence?

Read Full Post »

An offenders registry? National security does not need this sort of help

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 28, 2025| Leave a Comment »

National security took care of herself for many decades in Hong Kong. Now it appears the poor lady is in constant peril. Or so you might think from the number of white knights galloping to her rescue.

Latest is Mr Greville Cross, who amused readers of the China Daily with a piece entitled “Keeping tabs on released offenders reduces risks”.

Mr Cross notes with concern that four of the famous 45 primary election offenders recently emerged from prison, and several more will soon follow. He believes that prison is supposed to have a salutary effect on inmates, but worries that “if … individuals have committed crimes against society that are politically motivated, they may also be resistant to reform.”

This apparently was “partially addressed” by the provision in the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (the latest legislative masterpiece on this topic) which states that nat sec offenders are not eligible for the usual early release schemes unless the Commissioner for Correctional Services thinks they will not be a threat.

New to me was the additional snippet that the Commissioner is “advised” in this matter by the Committee for Safeguarding National Security, a high-level group of law and order officials who will not, perhaps, be inhibited in their deliberations by thoughts of rehabilitation or reform.

But what to do when the offender comes to the end of his or her sentence? Mr Cross goes on to note that Singapore has solved this problem with legislation empowering the Home Affairs minister to keep people in jail indefinitely if they are “a threat to the public”.

Oddly we are not told, although it appears relevant, that our motherland has also solved this problem. People deemed “a threat to the public” disappear into the detention system for years, sometimes for ever. However the UK and Hong Kong have (unlike Singapore) signed up for the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, so something like this is “unlikely”.

Thus at the moment there is no arrangement for monitoring nat sec offenders post-release. However the UK has “shown a possible way forward”. And where is this seductive highway to security? The Sex Offenders Register.

Under this, convicted sex offenders are required to register with the police, provide addresses and other information, admit inspecting police to their homes at any time, and so on. The register can be consulted by potential employers.

We could have a “National Security Offenders Register”, Mr Cross suggests, which “would go a long way toward neutralizing any continuing threats to national security posed by offenders who have completed their sentences. It would enable the police to keep tabs on them, and the individuals concerned would know they needed to be careful.”

Wow! Lots of places have registration schemes of one kind or another for sex offenders, They are particularly popular in the US. A variety of bells and whistles are commonly added to the basic requirement of an occasional visit to a police station.

Actually they are not particularly effective. Repeat offending among sexual offenders is rather rarer than for more conventional criminals. Victims of such repeat offences generally knew their partner (the vast majority of sexual offences are committed in the home) was on the register. Some critics have dismissed registers and the associated restrictions as having very little effect beyond depriving the released offender of two keys to a successful return to society: somewhere to live and a chance of employment.

The whole idea is based on the questionable notion that crime can be prevented by identifying potential offenders and looking ostentatiously over their shoulders. So far as it inconveniences the released offender it also violates the basic principle that people should be punished for what they have done, not for what they might do in future.

Of course how this will work in Hong Kong depends a lot on the details. Will the released offender be required to wear an an ankle tracker, report regularly to a probation officer, undergo weekly drugs tests? Will he be forbidden to go – or live – within 1,000 yards of any police station, government office or other national security establishment?

Will the offender have to register email addresses, Watsapp numbers, any name used on the internet, his car registration, his Octopus number? Will the register be public? Indeed will the police, as they are in some American jurisdictions, be expected to notify the neighbours if a released offender moves in nearby?

Somewhere at the bottom of this slippery slope we may be heading for a national security equivalent of the Sexually Violent Predator Order, under which the offender who has served his sentence is shunted into a “hospital” in which treatment is a choice but leaving is not.

Anyway, this is a really bad idea. It will generate international criticism; most common law countries will take the view that a sex offenders registry is one thing and a political offenders registry is another. Domestically Mr Cross notes that some 20 per cent of prisoners reoffend within two years of discharge. But that means 80 per cent do not. They are entitled to their freedom.

And it is not as if, without some formal scheme, released national security offenders are going to disappear from view completely. Presumably those three hotels full of nat sec specialists, not to mention our friendly local police force and patriotic nosy neighbours, will be looking out for signs of sin.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »