While at Starbucks I over heard an elderly couple speaking to another elderly gentleman about staying in touch while living in Shenzhen using email, Flickr and blog.
A New Year a New Start
This is the first post of 2007. I will promise to be more regular with my entries to my blogs. Both here and my Vox.com site.
If you are someone who love to share their thoughts, photos, videos and books they’ve read then Vox.com, in my opinion, is the best site to do just that.
Today is also the start of the Hong Kong partial band on smoking on public places. Being a non-smoker, I had been waiting for this day for quite some time. Hard to believe that before this day, there are still offices in Hong Kong where smokers would freely light up without any considerations for their non-smoking colleagues.
Unfortunately, this “partial” band of the HK government leaves many loopholes for arguments. Like anything else they do since the Turnover, for some unknown reason the people in the government that make decisions frequently come up with ideas and implementations that even the average person would not find to be common sense.
As you may have notice, I say that is is a “partial” band imposed by the Hong Kong Tobacco Control Office, Department of Health. This latest law allows nightclubs, bars, mahjong parlors, bathhouses and massage establishments until July 1, 2009 to comply with the law. Plus, this law also have provisions for establishments and groups to apply for exemption areas.
Although this law comes with a maximum penalty of HKD5,000.00 (USD643.27) fine we all know that the ones who will be confronted with these violators are the average law biding citizens and the ones who will openly violate the law are not people that you and I should confront.
This is very similar to the existing “No Smoking” laws in elevators (lifts). Over past 7 years I had been stuck in elevators with chimney puffing smokers, and is always the Mong Kok Tirade types, with tattoos and dyed hair, which I would not confront.
So will this citywide “partial” band on smoking help the general health of the average HK residences? Only time will tell.