(0)Almost there… I’m leaving on Saturday for Beijing where UNSW is holding a summer session elective called “Chinese Legal System” there. Yes, it’s conducted in English. Yes, China has a legal system. Here’s the timetable:
| Morning | Afternoon | |
| Mon 10 | Chinese Legal System overview | Australian Embassy visit |
| Tue 11 | Constitutional Law | The Forbidden City |
| Wed 12 | Tiananmen Square The Great Hall of the People |
Yonghe Lamasery Temple of Heaven |
| Thu 13 | Intellectual Property Law | Field trip to State IP Bureau Acrobat show |
| Fri 14 | Contract Law | Great Wall, Ice Lamp Park |
| Sat 15 | Harbin | |
| Sun 16 | Harbin | |
| Mon 17 | Foreign Investment Law | Law firm visit |
| Tue 18 | Corporate and Securities Law | Court visit |
| Wed 19 | China’s Foreign Trade Law | Ming Tombs & CUPL’s new campus |
| Thu 20 | Mediation, arbitration and civil enforcement procedures | Summer Palace Farewell Banquet |
| Fri 21 | Free | Free |
| Sat 22 | Free | Depart Bejing |
Should be fun, although the main thing to be worried about is the temperature. This was showing on the firm’s intranet today:
That’s like, a 38 degree difference. I’m so going to get sick. On the weekend I’m meeting up with Kev and Cath who are bungling me on a 13-hour overnight train trip with them up to Harbin. Harbin is way up north. In fact, it’s further north than Vladivostok, which is a notoriously cold Russian city. I’ve been warned of sub-negative-20 degree temperatures there. I’m so going to die. Nonetheless, the Ice Festival in Harbin looks amazing (although when they light it up at night it looks pretty cheesy).
Interestingly, by the end of the trip I’ll know more about Chinese IP, Foreign Investment, Corporate and Trade law than Australia’s. Not hard, since I know nothing about those Australian laws.
There’s also a 3.5 hour transit in Singapore on the way there. My sprightly Aunt Carol has been kind enough to take us for a quick late night snack while we’re there, a welcome respite from airline food. Apparently the cuisine in Beijing leaves a lot to be desired.
To family and family friends: pics from Hong Wai Ching’s 80th birthday are online here. I don’t know who most of the people are, so any help you can give with names will be appreciated.
I wasn’t in Singapore for the event, having other commitments, but sounds like it was an interesting night. I swear I’ve never seen my grandmother anywhere near as animated as she is here. Must be the grog.
Unfortunately, Anthony has decided to close Aussie Blogs. It was a fantastic resource and a nice piece of programming work – well done mate. He’s offering to hand over the reins to anyone over 21 who has maintained a blog for at least three years. I imagine it would require a fair time investment to keep it oiled.
(0)Parents got back today. Armed with a nice new lens (EF 17-40mm f/4L USM) and a digital album, Dad went crazy with the photos overseas, snapping over 3000 shots in about three weeks. I look forward to test driving the lens in Beijing.
After complaining about how my current memory stick (or thumb-drive or pen-drive or whatever you call them) is too fat and sometimes takes up two USB slots, Dad picked me up a new one in Singapore. I didn’t know they made them so small these days… it’s miniscule!
(0)A research associate at the Ayn Rand Institute makes an argument in his article “US should not help tsunami victims” that, regardless of the moral altruism and propriety (albeit, supposedly superficial propriety) of giving foreign aid, the US has no right to give such money. His argument is simple. The government gets its money from taxation which is “extorted from American taxpayers”. He raises the hue and cry of “By what right do they take our hard-earned money and give it away?” It is not the State’s money to give. That is not what the American public pays taxes for. He goes on to write, “This is why Americans–the wealthiest people on earth–are expected to sacrifice (voluntarily or by force) the wealth they have earned to provide for the needs of those who did not earn it. It is Americans’ acceptance of altruism that renders them morally impotent to protest against the confiscation and distribution of their wealth.”
I suppose you could attempt to give the author the benefit of the doubt and try to interpret his argument as asserting that foreign aid should come entirely from the private sector, but this is still missing the point. I’m sure it is immediately apparently to most of you the flaws in the article’s argument.
The government has the authority to spend taxpayers’ money in the way they see fit. The reason for this is that the democratic process has given them a mandate to do such things. When a politician strays too far from the mandate given to them by the public, the democratic safeguard of an election kicks in. That’s the way the system works. Allocation of funds (ie, handling the budget) is the government’s prerogative. Just as creating taxation legislation, handling international trade relations and UN involvement all are the responsibility of the government. I mean, the US Constitution gives Congress the right to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”. Presumably, that includes the unilateral transfer of monetary or other aid.
The article assumes that people are discontent that the government is spending the money on foreign aid. Or, at least, assumes that people are blind – that the “morality of altruism” makes people pliable enough to allow their hard earned money to be spent in this way without much contestation. That’s a pretty cynical view.
Law aside, it’s also a very selfish argument. The US is a member of the United Nations. The preamble of the UN Charter, signed in San Francisco, pledges that member States are determined to “employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples”. In other words, there is a strong underlying theme of developed States helping developing States because it’s recognised it is the human thing to do. Foreign aid is just one aspect of this “international machinery”.
After branding altruism as “vicious morality” and saying it “demands that we sacrifice our values instead of holding on to them”, it really begs the questions: what exactly then are these values that America supposedly holds dear?
Welcome to 2005! The New Year’s fireworks display on Sydney Harbour was excellent.
We were walking down Elizabeth Street later in the night when this car slowly drives past filled with four burly guys of middle-eastern appearance. They have the windows wound down and have some cheesy 80s hit blasting on the radio, which they are singing along with at the top of their lungs. The crowds on the streets are in a pretty good mood, so there are a few that join in the singing. Suddenly, this guy walks by and dumps a glass of wine into the car through an open backseat window, laughs and jogs off.
There’s a scream of rage from the backseat of the car. The brake lights slam on and it screeches to a dead stop in the middle of the road. The radio turns off and the guy who has just had wine dumped on him clambers out of the car. He’s a little inebriated and has a bit of trouble freeing himself from his seat belt. In the meantime, the prankster has realised that the guy is actually coming after him and has bolted off into Hyde Park. If that’s not enough, the car quickly pulls over to the kerb, and the three other people in the car get out and are soon hauling ass across the park after this poor sod whose New Year is about to get unhappy very quickly. The car, lights still on, doors unlocked and keys still in the ignition, is just sitting there, empty on the curb. Ten minutes pass by and they’re still not back. I don’t know what happened to the guy they were chasing, but I suspect it wasn’t pretty.
I’ll try to keep this short. It’s been a good year personally and a very interesting and tumultuous one in terms of world events. After kicking off 2004 with an enjoyable summer holiday in South-East Asia and Melbourne, it was time to knuckle down to a pretty full on year. I suppose my number one goal was to get a decent clerkship in a step towards securing employment for when I graduate next year, and also to try out “the corporate law thing”. I am really happy about the outcome of the process, which took a good 2-3 months and resulted in a clerkship that I’m finding positive. The downside of this is that the social side of life has been fairly quiet for me this year, replaced by interview stress and trying to bolster my average at the last minute. Winter holidays were cut short by having to do two subjects. This summer is no better, and there’s the clerkship on top of that. But this pain is all for a delayed payoff, and although 2005 will still be busy, the difference is that it should be relatively stress free and fun. And of course, because I should finish uni in July, I look forward to doing some travelling!
I got broadband in April, and still haven’t gotten over it.
Hear Ye! turns seven next month. I’ve been intending to do a redesign, separating out the design from the content with CSS, adding an XML-RPC posting interface and tweaking a few more things, but really haven’t been able to find the time. Maybe next year.
I’ve watched about 34 movies at the cinemas this year. It’s been a decent year for movies. The era of good, Braveheart-scale historical epics seems to be over though, with Troy and King Arthur disappointing. It was a good year for comedy and sequels. Added to the mix were a couple documentaries (Super-size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11).
World affairs have been off the scale this year, with the US and Australian federal elections, a boatload full of Iraq related news, a few corporate scandals, Google floating, and most recently, the tsunami tragedy in Asia. Wikipedia does a far better job of remembering the news events of 2004.
I don’t play computer games as much anymore, due to a geriatric video card, but it was a big year for game releases. There was, of course, the triumvirate of Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft.
My money this year went almost all to food and other going-out expenses. I spent very little on anything tangible and for once bought virtually nothing computer-related (apart from a DVD burner I got last month). Broadband has alleviated some of the money I would otherwise have spent on DVDs, movies and CDs. It’s all been saved up for travel, although funnily enough, this was never a conscious decision, it just sort of worked out that way.
I’m heading out to the harbour tonight to catch the fireworks and welcome in the New Year. Here’s to 2005!
For as long as I’ve lived here, and I suspect for many more years than that, there’s a small group of Mediterranean people living on the corner of my street, probably retirees, who run a garage sale every single Sunday. I’ve walked past it many times on the way to the busstop and they have an amazing agglomeration of paraphernalia on sale: VCRs, TVs, picture frames, bicycles, tapes, books, chairs, other furniture and at least 3 microwaves. I don’t think they actually ever sold anything, because the pile of junk never seemed to grow smaller. They’d just sit out on the footpath watching people pass by and chat among themselves to pass the day.
One evening, a few weeks ago, I saw flashing red and blue lights from my bedroom balcony. Fire engines arrived down the end of the street, but, not being able to see any actual fire, I forgot about it. The next morning, as I stepped out of the building, I was assaulted by the smell of burnt… something. Turns out the garage had caught on fire (a defective microwave, maybe?). The blaze had blackened everything within a five metre radius of the garage, including the footpath and the grass on the nature strip. The contents of the garage was obliterated, now sitting on the footpath in one large, charred, still-smoking heap. You could smell it from hundreds of metres away.
They no longer run Sunday garage sales there anymore, and I suspect never will again. They still keep the garage door perpetually open, airing out a completely blackened, empty garage which still smells of charcoal.
There’s a taxi sitting in our apartment’s garage. It’s been there for over a year. It doesn’t have any rego plates, and the “Combined Taxi Services” decal has been peeled off from the side. It gathered a layer of dust and dirt so thick you could no longer see through the windows into its interior. One day I decided to scrawl the hackneyed “Wash Me” on the windscreen in big, thick letters. A few days later, the words “Don’t write on me” and “Bite Me” were written underneath it. And that’s when our entire apartment block decided to turn it into a bulletin board. Every day, there’d be a new retort and soon the taxi was overrun with messages in the dust. It was fun until we ran out of space to write and someone wiped off all the dirt. Just have to wait a few months for it to build up again. Well, you know what they say about small things amusing small minds…
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12:24am (GMT +11.00) tomorrow 