[Note: Haven't post any entries for a month, and suddenly I have two. Interesting.]
I am not a smoker, so I was happy with the enforcement of smoking ban in Hong Kong. Nevertheless I was disappointed and suprised by a lot of exemptions in bars. Owing to the opposition the government allowed some bar places to be exempted for a period. I thought it had to be a strong enforcement, but apparently it rules leniently. Like usual, the government makes concession when many business parties does not give any support.
Reading BBC's news I know that North Ireland also put smoke ban in force. Australia had this regulation in force last year. It is a trend that smoke-free legislation will be found in many countries. I know that a lot of them rule it out strictly, so I do not understand why my government always does such silly thing - they execute a new legislation, but always with exemption and concession. The government always claims it takes time to be like this or that, but for something it wants to do it always takes action quickly without mercy. I know the government is hopeless, yet I am still always disappointed. The clubs or bars I often go are all exempted. What's the point of having such legislation? Money speaks everything in this tiny city almost doubtlessly.
I cannot tell how sad the city is without mercy, without memory, without culture but only about business, profit and money. To be concrete, this city has culture, but the culture of profit. We are at the extreme of capitalism and consumerism.
Nevertheless a point I wrote before has to be highlighted once again - we talk about free city and freedom of people. Smoking ban seems to be good for people, yet at the same time it restricts our freedom. I am not a smoker, but a lot of people are. I cannot judge whether the law is really for the sake of our health and non-smokers or it actually exploits our rights to smoke. It is two faces on the same coin. One may say our health is on top of these things, but who knows some people may not even want to be healthy as they choose to smoke - in this way their rights to be unhealthy seems to be exploited, despite the strange logic. Hopefully as a reader you would understand what I am trying to explain here. (Have never had a feedback!)
Monday, April 30, 2007
Cocoa
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/11659/1102/
Chocolate's cocoa can be replaced by trans fat and partially hydrogenated oils, particularly when the price of cocoa increases because of the bad harvest in Ivory Coast and Ghana, the two largest producers of cocoa beans in the world.
The suggestion is certainly criticized as trans fat, an unsaturated fat unnecessary for our health, is gradually abandoned by many countries. Yet the cost of adopting the new composition is one third of the original cocoa, despite cocoa is healthier, especially in terms of our cardiovascular system.
The bad harvest was due to a dry weather. I guess global warming is inevitably one of the reasons for the weather. That means it is possible to see the extinction of cocoa because of the continuing bad weather.
I am no longer a big fan of chocolate; still I find it quite unacceptable in my sense that cocoa will disappear from our life one day. We have so much chocolate in our daily life - chocolate bars, chocolate cakes, chocolate ice-cream and so on. Even though someone now says there is a substitution of the same taste, it can never be the same without cocoa. Chocolate, the name itself is already come from cocoa. Can you link chocolate and cocoa together? Probably not; I cannot imagine.
Nevertheless I remember I read one Chinese fiction before about a woman from the future suddenly went back to the past and met a chocolate factory owner. It is an amour but in the story chocolate was extinct in the future world. No one in the future knew the taste. It was one of the most touching stories I have ever read, possibly because I was very young when I read it. Will it become real, let say 50 years later? I feel sad for this.
This morning I read some environmental news provided by the Reuters RSS feed. Everyday there are many pieces of bad news, telling everybody how dangerous the current situation is and how urgent we have to take action for life sustainability. Someday glaciers will be gone, like the news about the melting of glacier in Germany since the beginning of industrialization. Rivers will be dried out or polluted irreversibly, like Yangtze River. Aquatic life is ruined owing to over fishing - can you imagine tuna fish will disappear from our diet completely because of extinction?
The bad news overwhelms the good.
When an increasing number of people gather to fight for our living environment to be livable, wars and human conflicts continuedly devastate our established civilization. It is always easier to destroy than to construct. It takes 30 seconds to knock down a building with a bomb after it took maybe a year to have it built up. People in the war surely understands but they seemingly won't think about it. These people are the most powerful to save the world from deteriorating, yet they apparently choose to create damage rather than aids. It is hardly convincing to be optimistic.
Still, we have to work on it. Otherwise we wouldn't have any single opportunity to survive.
Chocolate's cocoa can be replaced by trans fat and partially hydrogenated oils, particularly when the price of cocoa increases because of the bad harvest in Ivory Coast and Ghana, the two largest producers of cocoa beans in the world.
The suggestion is certainly criticized as trans fat, an unsaturated fat unnecessary for our health, is gradually abandoned by many countries. Yet the cost of adopting the new composition is one third of the original cocoa, despite cocoa is healthier, especially in terms of our cardiovascular system.
The bad harvest was due to a dry weather. I guess global warming is inevitably one of the reasons for the weather. That means it is possible to see the extinction of cocoa because of the continuing bad weather.
I am no longer a big fan of chocolate; still I find it quite unacceptable in my sense that cocoa will disappear from our life one day. We have so much chocolate in our daily life - chocolate bars, chocolate cakes, chocolate ice-cream and so on. Even though someone now says there is a substitution of the same taste, it can never be the same without cocoa. Chocolate, the name itself is already come from cocoa. Can you link chocolate and cocoa together? Probably not; I cannot imagine.
Nevertheless I remember I read one Chinese fiction before about a woman from the future suddenly went back to the past and met a chocolate factory owner. It is an amour but in the story chocolate was extinct in the future world. No one in the future knew the taste. It was one of the most touching stories I have ever read, possibly because I was very young when I read it. Will it become real, let say 50 years later? I feel sad for this.
This morning I read some environmental news provided by the Reuters RSS feed. Everyday there are many pieces of bad news, telling everybody how dangerous the current situation is and how urgent we have to take action for life sustainability. Someday glaciers will be gone, like the news about the melting of glacier in Germany since the beginning of industrialization. Rivers will be dried out or polluted irreversibly, like Yangtze River. Aquatic life is ruined owing to over fishing - can you imagine tuna fish will disappear from our diet completely because of extinction?
The bad news overwhelms the good.
When an increasing number of people gather to fight for our living environment to be livable, wars and human conflicts continuedly devastate our established civilization. It is always easier to destroy than to construct. It takes 30 seconds to knock down a building with a bomb after it took maybe a year to have it built up. People in the war surely understands but they seemingly won't think about it. These people are the most powerful to save the world from deteriorating, yet they apparently choose to create damage rather than aids. It is hardly convincing to be optimistic.
Still, we have to work on it. Otherwise we wouldn't have any single opportunity to survive.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Heritage Conservation
Recently I am doing my final year project about heritage conservation in Hong Kong. It is a hot topic since last year when the government determined to remove the Star Ferry pier in Central. Protests broke out to preserve the old pier when I was in Australia, but bulldozers finally started working and the pier with lots of memory was removed.
People talk about collective memory since then.
How much memory do we have in Hong Kong? What is collective memory? The government immediately reacted by putting the term into the heritage grading system, which is used to define whether an architecture should be a heritage. People complained the slow response of the government and its temporization of just putting the term into the system. This is quite confusing since the government tried to do something at once, and then the people criticized the government for doing things so rushed and seemingly without a thorough consideration. The government can hardly play a good game in this issue.
There are many problems in heritage conservation. More than half of the graded heritage are owned by private parties, which makes the situation complicated. The structure of some heritage is in danger that can hardly be approved to be preserved. It involved a huge amount of money to conserve the heritage, which the government does not show an interest to spend the money for that. The government noted that all decisions were up to the public, but sometimes it was said to be misleading as the government does not show the whole picture for people's understanding. The process of assessing the historical buildings is not transparent and accountable.
On the other hand, the public does not look very responsible to me. The government did a number of things to raise the public concern. In 2004, a consultation about heritage conservation was done to collect people's opinions. The feedback was not very enthusiastic, despite some useful and contribute ideas. It is a question that how much attention the public pays to the government and its policty. Surely it is somehow too idealistic to say the government and the public should work together, in the case of Hong Kong; but still I think the people should do some more instead of just waiting for the government making mistakes and thereafter blaming it. As a citizen we have our rights and responsibilities.
It is also interesting to see the government attempted to construct pseudo heritage through imitation in the original or a new site. For instance, long ago the Murray Building was removed from Central to Stanley. The one in Stanley is actually a new building and is not quite related to heritage. I don't quite understand the point of doing it, as it is not attractive enough to be a tourist point. At least it is nothing much so special.
The government also promised to keep the original social network, while it tried to rehabilitate people into different places and put the original site into a different use. In Lee Tung Street in Wan Chai, Urban Renewal Authority purchased nearly all properties and decided to develop it into "residential care home for the elderly, day care centre, refuse collection point and public toilet" (Lee Tung Street/McGregor Street Project). It was originally famous of printing services of invitation cards. In the future it will be a residental care home. Asking someone from the Planning Department yesterday, the government will try to build up something similar to the previous livelihood. Then I don't understand how residential care home can relate to the original printing services' street. The original residents there were accomodated to somewhere and the original social community was already destroyed. I don't see how the government realized their promise. When the government said the buildings' structure is too dangerous to be preserved, as I was told yesterday, it is actually fine to build something new for development. Yet I don't quite understand why the government had to promise something they were not planning to do or they could not do. If the government really tries to preserve the original culture there, I don't know if it means the printing services will be established on the ground floor and the care home will be upstairs. This does not sound quite right to my logical sense.
The government published the list of the graded buildings, which was previously inside the "drawer" staying confidential. Yet the grading is just a guideline for various departments without any power to conserve the heritage. It remains unknown what the government is going to do next, or perhaps it has to await public opinion. I wonder some heritage owned by private parties will be redeveloped or demolished before any decision is made.
It is reasonable to see the people related to the heritage want to preserve them, and they are not satisfied when the government does not disclose the reasons of redevelopment. It is interesting when I was told by the government that they are always open to public while some peoplel blame they are not. Then I'd conclude myself that it is the lack of communication in between. Communication takes so much time and will leave Hong Kong lag behind an assumed progress of conservation. As the dominant role in the society, I think it is the government's responsibility to speed up the discussion process and reach a decision as soon as possible.
People talk about collective memory since then.
How much memory do we have in Hong Kong? What is collective memory? The government immediately reacted by putting the term into the heritage grading system, which is used to define whether an architecture should be a heritage. People complained the slow response of the government and its temporization of just putting the term into the system. This is quite confusing since the government tried to do something at once, and then the people criticized the government for doing things so rushed and seemingly without a thorough consideration. The government can hardly play a good game in this issue.
There are many problems in heritage conservation. More than half of the graded heritage are owned by private parties, which makes the situation complicated. The structure of some heritage is in danger that can hardly be approved to be preserved. It involved a huge amount of money to conserve the heritage, which the government does not show an interest to spend the money for that. The government noted that all decisions were up to the public, but sometimes it was said to be misleading as the government does not show the whole picture for people's understanding. The process of assessing the historical buildings is not transparent and accountable.
On the other hand, the public does not look very responsible to me. The government did a number of things to raise the public concern. In 2004, a consultation about heritage conservation was done to collect people's opinions. The feedback was not very enthusiastic, despite some useful and contribute ideas. It is a question that how much attention the public pays to the government and its policty. Surely it is somehow too idealistic to say the government and the public should work together, in the case of Hong Kong; but still I think the people should do some more instead of just waiting for the government making mistakes and thereafter blaming it. As a citizen we have our rights and responsibilities.
It is also interesting to see the government attempted to construct pseudo heritage through imitation in the original or a new site. For instance, long ago the Murray Building was removed from Central to Stanley. The one in Stanley is actually a new building and is not quite related to heritage. I don't quite understand the point of doing it, as it is not attractive enough to be a tourist point. At least it is nothing much so special.
The government also promised to keep the original social network, while it tried to rehabilitate people into different places and put the original site into a different use. In Lee Tung Street in Wan Chai, Urban Renewal Authority purchased nearly all properties and decided to develop it into "residential care home for the elderly, day care centre, refuse collection point and public toilet" (Lee Tung Street/McGregor Street Project). It was originally famous of printing services of invitation cards. In the future it will be a residental care home. Asking someone from the Planning Department yesterday, the government will try to build up something similar to the previous livelihood. Then I don't understand how residential care home can relate to the original printing services' street. The original residents there were accomodated to somewhere and the original social community was already destroyed. I don't see how the government realized their promise. When the government said the buildings' structure is too dangerous to be preserved, as I was told yesterday, it is actually fine to build something new for development. Yet I don't quite understand why the government had to promise something they were not planning to do or they could not do. If the government really tries to preserve the original culture there, I don't know if it means the printing services will be established on the ground floor and the care home will be upstairs. This does not sound quite right to my logical sense.
The government published the list of the graded buildings, which was previously inside the "drawer" staying confidential. Yet the grading is just a guideline for various departments without any power to conserve the heritage. It remains unknown what the government is going to do next, or perhaps it has to await public opinion. I wonder some heritage owned by private parties will be redeveloped or demolished before any decision is made.
It is reasonable to see the people related to the heritage want to preserve them, and they are not satisfied when the government does not disclose the reasons of redevelopment. It is interesting when I was told by the government that they are always open to public while some peoplel blame they are not. Then I'd conclude myself that it is the lack of communication in between. Communication takes so much time and will leave Hong Kong lag behind an assumed progress of conservation. As the dominant role in the society, I think it is the government's responsibility to speed up the discussion process and reach a decision as soon as possible.
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