Pass the air-motion discomfort receptacle! Putrid Crawly Creepo-Grovel Shoe-shine of the Day Award goes to this. Eeeeewwwww…
Hong Kong Chief Executive-in-waiting Carrie Lam’s platform is essentially ‘Same as before, but with more committees’. More ‘shortage of land’, pricier homes, higher rents, cram-more-tourists-in, and all the other policies that are slowly killing the city.
One exquisite recent example of official idiocy-malevolence in practice is the inane Pilot Tourism Initiative Themed Food Truck Project Concept Scheme. Essentially, the bureaucrats decreed that food trucks could (after a two-part selection mechanism) operate on the strict conditions that: only big corporate investors could take part; trucks must stay in fixed locations; the fixed locations must be remote from existing food outlets and customers; and truck-design, fees and other overheads must make profit impossible in any case. The idea was so dumb it made the NY Times.
Restaurant superstar Michelle Garnaut describes the bureaucratic nightmare involved in setting up a place at the Central Police Station heritage site, due to open in the third quarter of 2046. She gave up, lamenting that the system is ‘geared towards the super rich and too bad for anybody else’ (and she does not exactly run HK$20-a-bowl noodle joints).
A couple of land-related links for anyone who missed them.
EJ Insight ponders scrapping Disneyland for affordable homes. It is an old (and obvious) idea among us free-thinkers, but still too radical and counter-intuitive for much of mainstream polite society, or even the slightly quirky EJ – so this is a Good Thing.
And Asia Sentinel looks at the Hong Kong government’s measures to curb rising home prices. The measures have largely dried up the market for existing apartments, and pushed buyers to the developers selling yet-to-be-completed brand new units, prices of which are up 50% since this administration took over in 2012. Question: is this grotesque outcome an unintended consequence of the policy put together by highly qualified, exceptionally paid genius bureaucrats, or was it deliberate? The ever-charitable Asia Sentinel leans to the ‘overpaid retard bureaucrat’ explanation. You may or may not agree.
Th food truck law is even funnier given that the Governemnt can’t even control the masses of Alphards that idle in Central. Perhaps this is an answer, in HK there are laws that are seldom enforced as it offends th ‘wrong’ people, while your average, law abiding citizen has to jump through a variety of manufactured hoops, all to who who is boss.
@Maugrim
… or simply open the side doors of the Alphards while they are idling in Central and allow the driver to sell burgers and/or dim sum and/or ethinc fusion crap from the back seat while he’s waiting. Hey presto, food trucks in Central!
Off topic: Looking at yesterday’s rant against Prof. Richard WONG, according to SCMP he is the “Philip Wong Kennedy Wong Professor in Political Economy at the University of Hong Kong”. So, he must be incorrect in what he says because two WONGs don’t make a WIGHT. Boom boom!
(Shaking head in utter disbelief and grief for the common plebs and unconnected, non trust funded entrepreneurs of HK) …after reading the NY Times article…
Politics..food…bureaucracy…accommodation…
Jerry Lee Lewis sang There Must Be More To Love Than This…
Perhaps there is more to Hong Kong than what you imagine.
Remember: like Kafka’s mouse, all you need do is change direction.
You don’t have to knock anything down at Disneyland. There is an area of equal size right next to it, flat, vacant and completely unused, within walking distance of an MTR, and a huge pier, spade-ready. Its there as a potential phase II, but has never been touched.
Why doesn’t anyone propose building there?
Have a look on Google Map to get a sense of scale – its about the size of Tsim Sha Tsui.
@Citizen
That spare land is probably ear-marked for more exciting rides and wondrous evocations of magical vistas. This will enhance HK’s regional and global competitiveness.
Ahh the food trucks…
Only our intrepid HK government and the highly paid civil servants could really hatch such a scheme. Spending four decades destroying our genuine indigenous street food culture then deciding that street food is a good idea, and setting up a knock-off foreign import that no one really wants, whilst managing to nobble the only advantages of selling food in a truck, by making them static and forcing them to pay rent.
Quite why anyone signed up for it after receiving the initial list of unfathomably stupid demands, restrictions and regulations is beyond me… renting a small hole in the wall somewhere people actually want snacks is a far cheaper, less risky and much more flexible scheme to make money selling snacks.
Perhaps this is the HK government’s weird way of encouraging innovation — they go around bankrupting anyone stupid enough to fall for one of their non-innovative schemes, thus leaving the field more open for people with some sort of business acumen and an actual idea? A bit harsh, this “tough love” approach, and somewhat slow on the fruition end, I reckon.
@Big Al
I told you he was a Wong ‘un right from the start…