Hacking the Good days…

Okay, so girls. I have to say there are real shrinks in which they are really good in telling you what you should avoid, unfortunately we seem to learn from our own mistakes than actually from the article.

(back and forth finally deciding on not quoting the para – sometimes there are people who put everything up their blog. I just can’t. There is a thin line between being liberal versus emotionally flashy, and probably I’m too chicken to be bold online. Anyway. That could be a good thing though. Talking to Cecilia today about the HK girl who puts her drug-taking description on xanga, as much as she wants to delete it, it’s still there on Google cache.)
Okay, enough rants. I mean, I shouldn’t be mad neither. I guess I am just a dumb person in general and there’s no one to blame. There are always the good moments. But I not used to this tornado like tendrums of ups-and-downs. It doesn’t spell ‘respect’ to me. Yes I am bitchy. Watch out.

Two things to be grateful of. First is Zombie. If without him, I wouldn’t know how to probably spell respect :)

And also as bitchy as I am, thanks JoeSun for the wonderful Sunday morning, I love your cats too :)

A recent big buzz in Hong Kong is the government proposal of the General Sales Tax (GST) and when the democratic party went demostrated today, a legislator got assaulted. What city is Hong Kong becoming??

The mass protest against the proposed goods and services tax Sunday has prompted officials to release new figures highlighting the territory’s income volatility, but political analysts insist the government is “barking up the wrong tree.”

I was so mad but it was good to read on Gregg’s writing about his stance, as he works for a major news outlet in Hong Kong,

反 對 加 稅 。 經 濟 才 剛 復 蘇 ， 五 十 二 億 元 （ 未 計 地 價 ） 的 添 馬 艦 已 急 急 上 馬 ， 現 在 又 說 加 稅 ， 市 民 的 印 象 分 已 先 減 了 一 大 截 。 在 沒 有 緊 控 開 支 和 慎 用 公 帑 的 表 現 及 承 諾 下 ， 與 「 藏 富 於 民 」 相 違 背 的 建 議 ， 實 在 難 以 教 人 支 持 。

Oppose. The economy is just recovering, and the goverment is already implementing the 52 billion dollars Timar proposal. Now they suggest the introduction of GST, and it definitely discounts the public’s impression of the govenrment. Without a tight budget or prudent financial outlook, the government has gone against its ‘returning the money to the public’ proposal, making it difficult to solicit support.

My opinion (cross-posed on Gregg’s blog): Agree. The whole purpose of taxing, political conspiracies aside, should focus on narrowing down the income inequality gap.

GST – even an average Form Five student in Hong Kong can tell you that GST is regressive tax, which means that poors pay porportionally way more than the rich.

If widening the tax base is the main rationale to this proposal, this doesn’t make sense either. Youth unemployment rate is 9.7% in 2005, compared to almost half of the adults population. What the governemnt needs to do is to invest in enducation for teenages and young adults, and leave the poor alone. This way it strengthens the long-term economic environment while leaving our tourism industries untouched which remain the aorta of our economies.

The education policy has already segregated further the rich kids (who all went abroad) form the disadvantaged ones. Now they want to harrass the older folks too?

damn.

So having sat in front of my desk revising my thesis, I am distracted again.

All I wanted to do right now is to relive my teenage – go somewhere and rent to the sequence of 《去吧！稻中乒團》, laugh at the vulgarness and chill. But I am so close to finishing up my thesis, I want to get it done today and watch apprentice afterwards!
I think I am REALLY lucky because the wound doesn’t hurt as much, there is still slight bleeding but I am eating IndoMIE again.

Damn it was good. (PS; for those who has not tried it you gotta) I am kind of worried that I won’t loose weight as much as other people said I would. But it’s okay. Alright, I will be frank. I actually went hiking on my own 7 hours after the surgery, you have to understand how good the dentist was! Let me know if you’re from HKU, I’ll pass you the name of the dentist. He’s the man!

Tomorrow I’m gonna remove my two wisdom teeth from below.

I’m really freaking out here… Please please please… may the force be with me.

PS:  like my thesis a lot.  Need some final touch.

PPS:  Thanks God I got the extra stipend recovered!  So it’s a bit more than 300q per month!!!!

But since you guys are funny and good at maths, we still like you ;)
PS:Yes I think I’ve seen this somewhere but seeing this on a friend’s blog I can’t help posting it up.

Reading in more details the wealth of networks.  It’s indeed a very good book which empassess all the key economic and cultural issues when it comes to current internet-driven information and cultural production.  As Benkler coins it, Commons-based Peer Production (CBPP).
Basically it’s more likely for CBPP to emerge when (1) there are excess capacities of computer storage that widely distributed among different households (2) communicative technologies, i.e. the Internet that link these capacity together; (3) compounded by the vast amount of exccess human capitals.

Using this framework to condense to cultural-virtual-social environment of how Wikipedia emerges  remains my FIRST choice.  But having read Benkler’s work (2002, 2004, 2006) I came to see that it’s quite hard to condense his arguments.  As much as I love to do, right now my work is really granular and modular (the way he describes how projects can be broken down to tiny bits) and I am still trying to figure how to tightly knit everything together.  Contrasting his work, and presentations with Lessig (which is not exactly fair but I am hungry and bored right now…) Lessig has a faster momentum to his writing and definitely speeches, which keep people like me (ADD) in tract.

Well I was reading the economics of social production – why am I blogging?
Let me know if you want to read the chaotic, mushy, first draft of my thesis.  Man, as I said, I really REALLY want to put it on Wikipedia *NOW* :)

PS:  there is something I don’t understand about men/women…  having dinner with a girlfriend tonight made me realize something – remember the father-test?  So we have the waitress test (to see how a guy treats the waitress, that’s his real self), mother test (how he treats his mom forecasts how he treats you when the novelty periods wear off) and finally the FATHER TEST.  Well. This is the reverse of mother test for guys – but never as direct.  A girl’s sense of self-worth and identity stem from a collective perception of how the parent treated her.  So if the mother provides a strong emotional ground but the father doesn’t do so, it may cost the girl to over compensate that in a relationship.  A few possibilities can emerge.  (yes it sounds even more complicated than CBPP).  If she lacks the affection, she may become more aloof or dependent on the relationship.  NOTE:  it’s the relationship, not the boyfriend.  Once the relationship becomes the comfort zone, it doesn’t matter who is in.  Sad, huh?  It’s nothing empirical, but years of observation and being bought up in a girls’ school….

Benkler, Y. (2002). Coase’s penguin, or, linux and the nature of the firm. Yale Law Journal, 112(3), 369-+.
Benkler, Y. (2004). Sharing nicely. The Yale Law Journal, 114(273), 273-385.
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks:  How social productino transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

It’s 3 am.

And all of a sudden I had that random rushes of missing Chicago the city…

The loop

So I didnt’ bring my camera photo-credits to Margaret. Man I hate Yahoo photo album though they don’t let you download the realsize pictures!

Apologize for the poor resolution, let’s blame yahoo :)

It’s a dinner get-together with all the Chevening scholars, Most of them are already working. Well where am I? guess. Yes. All the way back :)

No this is not an online game.

I’m severely jet-lagged and I have never had that before.  Slept at 2am last night I woke up 5pm this evening, only to discover that my phone went out of battery so the alarm didn’t go off!  And when I got home after a fun dinner when Oscar and the folks – I went straight to bed hoping that I would wake up in the morning and things would be restored to normal.

No.  I just woke up and I had a cup noodle (even worse that jetlag!).
And my thesis is still not done.  Mark reminded me a better example of ingroup bias would be the Catholic Alliance of Wikipedia.  They are a group of people who tried to pull in a bunch who share pro-life ideals and intend to affect voting results by collectively affect the deliberation process.

Hm.. this is getting interesting.  But at the same time I just want my thesis done!

I know – there are people who never clean up their Gmail. I’m getting _way_ better. But still…

Should I be concerned??