A meme which is going around - remixed subway (Tube, MTR, Metro, etc.) maps. Two of the funniest things I've seen online for a while were remixed London Underground maps, one simply translating, literally, the station and line names into German, the other suggesting possible names for stations which had taken commercial sponsorship - essentially, mixing well-known British company or brand names into the familiar map and station names. My place in London is in the Tescolindale, Kingsmill Hill East, MSNdon area.

The particular sub-meme (the result of a mutation?) currently gaining strength is maps with the station names replaced by anagrams. In the two remixed MTR maps I've seen, Tsuen Wan (where I am right now) is rendered as Nun Sweat and Tuna News... Honestly, I don't think the MTR offers as much scope for anagrams as some other cities' maps, simply because the transliterated names are often quite short and don't have the right sort of mix of letters to make interesting English words or phrases - no slight to the authors' skills!

As with most memes, this will almost certainly blow over - in fact, I'm surprised it's lasted this long - but for now, it's fun...

I'm writing this on my Treo while sitting on a little boat, puttering across Hong Kong Harbour. Boats like this one (which is called "Night Star") have been running this route for well over 100 years, and although the road tunnels (with busses, minibusses, taxis and private cars) and MTR tunnels have made them anachronistic, they keep running and are frequently full. They are very cheap - HK$2.2 (about US$0.27) for a one-way ride on the upper, posh deck - and pretty fast - about 7 minutes for a crossing, and frankly they're just fun. They are the single best way to see the Hong Kong skyline, in my opinion, they are pretty calm and serene, they clearly show the fact that Hong Kong is a busy working harbour, and they are a tradition. I can't imagine that the company makes huge profits, if any, but they are both one of the major tourist activities (both for the view and the sheer experience) and at the same time a regular part of life for many residents - and it would be a pity if anything happened to them.

And now, if you'll excuse me, we're just coming into Tsim Sha Tsui and I've got a traditional afternoon's shopping ahead of me...

I was working for Sun Microsystems, and was in Boston at LinuxWorld, for slightly murky reasons. The conference ran Monday to Thursday, the exhibition hall (where I was working) was closed on Monday for setting-up, then open to the public from Tuesday morning - I was flying in Sunday night and out again Thursday night. On Monday afternoon, Boston time (Monday morning UK time) I got an email telling me there was an all-hands meeting the next morning in the office in Watford, mandatory attendance. I obviously wasn't going to make it, so I emailed my manager for advice, telling him I was willing to set an early alarm and call in for the meeting if need be - I got no response to my mail. I left the conference centre, telling my colleagues, jokingly, that I'd see them for the pre-exhibition meeting in the morning, assuming I was still employed by then. I set my alarm anyway, for 4:45am, and called my manager to ask if there was a conference call number I could use - he said he'd see what he could do. Nothing happened.

At about 5:20am, one of my colleagues pinged me on ICQ to tell me the news - they had announced the immediate closure of the Watford office, and the intent to lay off all the staff based there.

So, I felt dazed for a bit, went down and had some breakfast (still on expenses, see), and wandered over to the exhibition to let them know not to expect me around any more. The people there were sympathetic, someone gave me a show shirt, and I went off and had a couple of quite enjoyable days in freezing-cold Boston, paid for by Sun. I did have a quick try at getting some employment leads at the show, but most of the companies didn't have anyone on the floor who could or would talk about recruitment, and even when they did, they weren't particularly interested in talking to someone who didn't have a visa to work in the US.

This wasn't a complete shock. There were already well-advanced plans to close the Watford office later in the year, and we had been offered the option of moving to a new office and commuting (and getting a mileage bonus), moving to the new office and moving house nearer it (and getting a relocation allowance), working from home (and getting the necessary equipment), or voluntary redundancy. I had already chosen redundancy, so I was already planning to move on, and I got exactly the same package as I would have done, just a little earlier in the year.

I did get a phone call a few minutes later from my soon-to-be-ex-manager's manager to formally tell me and talk to me about it. Apart from the minor issue of being by myself in a hotel room in Boston when I heard, over ICQ, and the major issue that I think they should have kept us open until the original closing date, I have no particular complaints about the way Sun treated us. We all got a fair payment, I understand their position - I still wish they hadn't fired me and moved all our jobs to Bejing.

On the other hand, I am now working for an underwear company in Hong Kong, so it's not all bad...

Technorati tags: sun linuxworld employment

Is Hong Kong a free place?

Depends on how you define it, really. Freedom is a very nebulous term, even if you ignore the no-cost ('free beer') meaning and focus on the liberty ('free speech') meaning. It certainly isn't a binary thing - 100% free or 100% non-free - but it's also not a simple scale - UK is 97% free, France is 95% free and so on. It is, instead, a combination of many factors, so any attempt to rank countries in order of freeness is doomed from the start.

This is prompted by a couple of articles on the Free-Market News Network site, which popped up on my regular Google News search for Hong Kong. I would never normally read this publication (although I do read another publication dedicated to the free market) so I have neither an axe to grind with them nor a larger feeling towards them.

The two articles clearly consider Hong Kong (and Macau, which I can't really comment on) to be one of the free-est places on earth - if not the most free. For the record, I consider myself a European liberal, and some of the things in the articles really smack of right-wing American Christian politics, an ideology I find repulsive, but in some ways they are correct - in others they are laughably wrong.

Hong Kong has a very free economy, except in a couple of specific senses. As the articles correctly point out, land distribution and control is very unfree, with most of the land owned by the government, which then leases it to development companies - of which there are a dangerously small number for true competition - who then build and lease properties. The majority of the land in Hong Kong is protected park/reserve land, which is a good thing, but it does mean that residential and commercial areas tend to be very dense, and property prices (to rent or buy) tend to be very high. The articles are also correct about taxes and fees for cars - although most of the costs only apply to new cars - but I don't think that's so much of a problem, since Hong Kong has very good and affordable public transport (busses, ferries, trams, taxis and trains) and simply does not have the space for any significant expansion of road traffic - so yes, it's a restriction on freedom, but not a particularly significant one. It's quite possible that this is an American bias - while the UK isn't exactly a car-free paradise, it doesn't suffer from the American love affair with petrol (gas), and I have quite enjoyed being car-free while living in Hong Kong.

The strangest thing in the articles, while also the thing most connected with the real world, is their mentions of guns. After stating, correctly, that private gun ownership in Hong Kong is prohibited, they point out that, therefore, "the people have no "ultimate check" against their government" - again, correctly, but missing the point by such a huge mark that it's almost comical. Hong Kong is indeed a very free place: free travel, freedom of the press (at least as much as most 'Western' presses), freedom of association, religion, occupation, a very free market - but it is missing one very very essential freedom: freedom to choose and remove the government. Hong Kong is not a democracy - it has almost all the freedoms which tend to be taken for granted in the West, except for universal suffrage.

There is a separate government and parliament - the Executive Council (ExCo), headed by the Chief Executive, the de facto Head of Government of Hong Kon, and Legislative Council (LegCo), respectively. In the last election, in 2004, 50% of the 60-seat LegCo was elected by universal suffrage by geographical constituencies, and 50% was elected by functional constituencies - essentially, special-interest groups, mainly industrial/commercial. ExCo is appointed by the Chief Exec, who in turn is elected by an Election Committee (EC) - most recently, in 2005, by an 800-member committee, again mainly consisting of representatives of industrial/commercial groups. In fact, the 2005 election was uncontested - 100 members of the EC most nominate any candidate, so once 701 members had registered their support for Sir Donald Tsang, the rest of the process became a formality.

There is a famous American quotation, for which I unfortunately cannot find a reliable source, which states that, paraphrasing, people may use four boxes, in ascending order of seriousness, to defend their liberty: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the ammo (or cartridge) box. In Hong Kong, the people are seemingly welcome to use the soap box - with, on occasion, devastating results - largely welcome to use the jury box - with possibly weaker results - may use the ballot box - with little effect - and are forbidden from using the ammo box. In terms of political liberty, no, Hong Kong is therefore not particularly free. How much that matters is a question for another time...