卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

A haven for the South Asian migrant workers, and an interesting insight into the services needed by an insecure, low-paid service force.

The LIFT Asia conference starts today, and I can’t be there. Bummer. I had really hoped to attend; the LIFT conferences is one of the more interesting gatherings around, from my particular set of interests. Alas, the new semester starts next Monday, and today and tomorrow I have meetings that Shall Not Be Missed… Ah, so near and yet so far - just a couple of hours’ flight across the Yellow Sea to Korea. Ah well, I’ll just have to read about it on their website like everyone else…

I’ve just moved in to my new apartment, on the inner side of Beijing’s north-western Second Ring Road. This road was built where the city’s ancient defensive walls used to stand, so “inside the second ring road” means “inside the historic part of the city”. One of Beijing’s little mysteries, by the way, is that there is no First Ring Road…

My apartment block’s not historic, except perhaps for the people: when the old alleyways and courtyard dwellings were to build shopping malls etc, the local residents were relocated in these housing areas. They’re rather cheaply built - bare concrete stairways, and no elevators (and didn’t I feel that this morning, when I was carrying my boxes and bags up to my 7th-floor place - I climbed those stairs twelve times, each time with a heavy load!).

Today’s been a lovely late summer day: blues skies, the air getting dry now, compared to the humidity of July and early August. I was coming back from my evening meal at the Guloudajie dumpling joint, looking up at the stars as they came out… and then realised, hey, I can see the stars! At least in these areas, and especially in these apartment complexes, Beijing has definitely joined the Dark Sky movement, with plenty of screened halogen lights, sending all of their light downwards - not up into the sky…

It’s also interesting that the apartment complex has lots of “flower beds” around - which is to say, I don’t think anything much was ever done with them, except perhaps some sickly grass. However, almost every available spot has been colonised somehow, bu residents planting all kinds of flowers and other plants. Sometimes occupants of ground-floor flats have planted vines outside, training them up to almost entirely cover the windows. I can see the advantages - extra privacy and insulation, flowers, and so on, but it must still be a little strange to live there! Anyway, another Western trend that’s got some coverage lately, Guerrilla Gardening, also has its Beijing equivalent!

So, the Olympics have come and gone,the Paralympics will start soon, but the city and it’s local culture - which didn’t get so much attention - continue to grow and thrive in ways that the rest of the world could learn from.

Coming to the end of a couple of weeks’ holiday in Singapore, it strikes me that when I fly back into Beijing on Wednesday morning it will be different…. For the first time since my first stay there in 2004, Beijing won’t be looking forward to the Olympics… I wonder whether it will make a difference?

All things change, and the globalized economy is no exception. The globalization of the early noughties was based on cheap oil - but oil isn’t cheap any more. At the same time, globalization took the internet… almost everywhere.  Two stories that I found via Slashdot show future directions…

1. Rising fuel costs make outsourced manufacturing less desireable. The cost of shipping manufactured goods from low-cost countries such as China is now such that it’s beginning to outweigh the price benefits of low wages. As a result, manufacturers in Western countries are becoming competitive again.
2. If the rising cost of oil is reversing the outsourcing of things, there is no such barrier to the outsourcing of knowledge work. Students in the UK have been found outsourcing their assignments to graduates in lower-cost countries. Universities are stumped for a solution. “The problem is definitely getting worse, it is hard to detect, the number of these sites is spreading all the time and it is impossible for us to monitor all of them.”, says one administrator.

Will these two trends develop and become persistent? The consequence will surely be a globalisation very different from what we first anticipated - manufacturing becoming strong and locally-based again, while intellectual work becomes the most competitive (and dishonest?) sector…

Living in China is fascinating in very many ways; one of them is watching the transformation of values as prosperity spreads through Chinese society. The Chinese are, of course, just like everybody else: they want security, consumer goods, education… and that shouldn’t be any surprise; it’s odd sometimes to hear Western commentators (especially in the US) attributing more sinister reasons to China’s increasing demand for the resources needed for a better life.

The worrying thing is whether it can last - not just here, but everywhere. Looking at my RSS feeds, I see many worrying trends:

• the price of oil is rocketing - $200/barrel soon? - and that’s affecting our entire society. In the US, the consequences will be felt most of all; Paul Krugman talks about this in today’s IHT, for example.
• One consequence is the rising price of food, for example, partly because so much agriculture is based on oil-derived fertilisers, partly because of the substitution of crops for ethanol production instead of food crops. (This situation may soon get much, much worse as the Ug-99 fungus looks set to devastate wheat production throughout Asia and the Middle East).
• The rise in food prices has already sparked food riots in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. What happens when people realise that their government is not capable of ensuring affordable food? Of course, they lose faith in the government and, eventually, seek more effective affiliations - perhaps criminal, or insurgent… and these groups are getting more and more powerful, with sometimes international or global influence. This is the kind of trend that John Robb is documenting in Global Guerillas, and it can make worrying reading. Just as a thought, who do you think will be strengthened by food riots in Afghanistan?

So the future looks tough. I don’t think it will necessarily be the Grim Meathook Future that did the rounds a year or two back; there will be technical fixes, and new discoveries, and political initiatives. At least, I really hope there will. Still, it’s worth reading and comparing two IHT articles on transition from abundance to scarcity and self-reliance. Which one would you choose for yourself?

1. Voluntary simplicity re-emerges. A renewed trend in the US of affluent, educated professionals shedding their possessions, and opting for a simpler lifestyle as on-line homesteaders, or techno-nomads.
2. Living off the land in a post-Soviet world. When their economic and political world collapsed, well-off skilled workers in Kyrgzstan were forced to become subsistence farmers. They were the lucky ones, perhaps, with land and clean water.

Like I say - which transition would you prefer? What’s the best way to prepare?

That’s what I’ve heard many people say since I joined Twitter a month or so ago,and it’s true; all of the thoughts that might otherwise have been stored up as potential blog posts are instead released immediately into the Twitterstream… Sometimes they spark up a conversation, more often they don’t, but never mind. At its worst, Twitter is like being on the fringes of a series of interesting conversations, where I learn a lot just from listening. Twitter isn’t the only culprit, of course - work, and a slow network connection, have rather more to do with low blogging frequency recently. Still, I need to make a bit more effort to actually blog longer posts!

OK, I grant you that I could have done all this before, but really: which genius decided that the best time to take Singapore’s online tax-filing system down for two days of maintenance was the last weekend before the filing deadline? For goodness’ sake…

No-one likes paying tax, but it can at least be made easier. Online payment is convenient - when it’s done right.

I spent a long time last night  trying to submit my Singaporean tax return. My last employer had entered all the necessary details, so that was already on the system. Very convenient. However, the job before that had overlapped into 2007 slightly, and that employer hadn’t been connected with the tax system, so I had to amend the form to add on that income, subtract CPF, etc.

Except - it wouldn’t work. Every time I tried to submit, I was stopped by a pop-up that informed me “Only positive numbers are accepted”. Try what I might, this stumped me. There was nothing in the FAQ.  Why on earth was the system thinking that I was inputting negative numbers?

Eventually, after much frustration and wasted time, I had an inspiration. What if I took off the 67 cents from the end of the amount..? Bingo! It worked!

Note to the retard who wasted my time - find a dictionary, please! “Positive number” and “round number” are very different things!

Sometimes I really have to wonder why Singapore persists in calling itself an English-speaking country…

Are we heading for a global recession? All of the signs are that the US economy is now in recession. The next thing we find out is how much knock-on damage this will cause in developing markets. Are the Asian markets sufficiently decoupled from the US economy for India-China trade to keep everyone here afloat? We’ll find out in the next few months.

This recession, which was sparked off by the US housing bubble and compounded by bankers’ recklessness, has been a long time coming. Steven Roach at Morgan Stanley was warning about it even before I took my MBA, so it’s not as if we haven’t seen it coming.

What has come up swiftly and without much warning, and may yet bite us hard, is the shortage of food staples - rice, especially. With a number of media sources warning of food riots and social instability as a consequence, this is likely to be tough all around.

The people who are going to suffer the most are the ones Niti is investigating at the bottom of the pyramid - and this is going to be very different from anything we’ve seen before.

I remember, as a child, seeing the pictures of the famine in Cambodia, and the appeals for public donations. I helped to organize a Blue Peter Bring & Buy sale at my primary school to contribute. Soon afterwards, the focus shifted to Ethiopia. Here I oversimplify horribly, of course, but in essence the famine victims here had to be essentially passive, waiting for external food aid to arrive.

In a lesser case of food shortage, citizens in the old Soviet Union had to opportunistically join queues as soon as they saw one forming, hoping it meant that a delivery of food or other scarce goods had just arrived - even when (famously) they often didn’t know what they were waiting for until they reached the head of the queue. This would just be luck of the draw.

What difference will it make when the poor, who are most desperately affected by food shortages, all have mobile phones? Will governments and aid agencies use it to inform people of deliveries, and in this way alleviate anxiety? Will be see spontaneous, SMS-directed “hunger mobs” flash-forming on the rumour of food availability (either delivery, storage or hoarding)? And what will it mean for us when instead of seeing appeals for donations on TV, the hungry millions are calling us for help personally?