Reminiscences

  About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions A couple of days ago, I introduced to my readers this formula by American legal scholar and economist Richard Posner. Economists do not care as much about the nature of rights, including the right to free speech, as about economic efficiency. A good law restricting certain expressions is good as long as the perceived harms of the expressions are greater than the costs of suppressing them. This seemingly complex formula isn't all that complex if you understand the reasoning: I want to embark on a more challenging and contentious endeavor this time, which is to study the economic efficiency of laws regulating the use of (gender) pronouns. As you may already know, some US states such as New York and most of Canada have added pronoun laws in their human rights codes or anti-discrimination laws. Whereas "misgendering" people--aka not addressing people by their preferred pronouns--b...

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About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions   This is not for people who dream big and aims to be a world-famous writer. I am not qualified to give advice on that. People like J.K. Rowling and Stephen King do. For over decade, I have been earning side incomes as a writer and thoroughly enjoying the process. This has made my life more satisfying and its dark moments more bearable. If you want to do what I am doing, consider these tips: 1. Develop your own niche and pitch your ideas to mainstream newspapers. I have published numerous opinion pieces in major Canadian and Hong Kong newspapers (both English and Chinese) through this strategy alone. The great thing about these channels is that they no doubt have wide readerships. Your pieces may get criticized. Yet it is known to be competitive to publish in these places: you feel prestigious just to be able to associate with high-profile and accomplished people. The downside is that y...

About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions   For a long time I have missed the smell of books, new and old, as well as that of newspapers. As I am completing a big project I treated myself to some book-scented fragrance that I recently found while Internet-shopping. While this might seem like a new thing, there are already several brands to choose from. I settled on one that is made in Germany, that looks elegant and that I thought would compliment my night table.  Here you go ~  Durfkerze: Aromantische Bibliothek : This lit candle added a warm glow to my room as I was writing away on a cozy evening.  As the scent of burnt wood weaved in and out of my nostrils, I felt like I was in my school days, huddled in a corner of an old library on a wintry day. *** In recent years, many Hong Kong youngsters have been keen on portraying themselves as literati (the "learned class" or intellectual circle consisting of well-educat...

About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions I finally found time to write about Keung To, a singer and main vocalist of the Hong Kong boy band club known as "Mirror."  I normally do not spare time for singers and actors in Hong Kong, except those who impress me somehow.  The fact that many of those artistes-would-be are of the lowest quality, in terms of talent and looks, has almost never bothered me. Yet this Keung To is a complete farce, whereas his fans and admirers, many of whom are women past middle age, and who have long formed a cult reminiscent of zombies in apocalyptic movies, are annoying and worrisome enough to warrant a blog post. *** While Keung To's lack of natural talent may not be his fault, the fact that he seemingly has not improved over the past few days and still sings and dances at the abysmal level is shocking. l watched a couple of his live performances.  What perplexed me was that he often cou...

About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions American economist Richard Posner's economic formula on free speech can be highly useful in determining whether laws are good, which, from an economic perspective, means economically efficient.  It was inspired by Judge Learned Hand's simpler formula, which compares the harms of the expression (L), discounted by probability (P), to the costs of suppressing it (V, which is equivalent to the social values of the expression).  Posner improved Judge Learned Hand's formula by adding "legal error costs" (E) to the costs of suppressing the expression, given that it can be challenging to distinguish harmful expressions that need to be suppressed and good ones that are not meant to be suppressed. In addition, given that the foreseeable harms may not happen immediately and may instead take place over a long period, the harms, measured in dollar terms, need to be discounted to the...

About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions   Fujian/Hokkien fried rice--one of my favorite dishes at Chinese restaurants. Where should I begin? While I was at Vancouver's  ETEA , I remembered another family-run restaurant, called  "No. 10 Restaurant,"   at 10 Hogarth Place, London , which I visited multiple times in March 2023. It is in a hectic district in the capital of my great motherland. When I was at it, the restaurant was very small. It had only a few tables, with seats for about 20 people in total.  The Chinese name of the place was 粗茶淡飯, which can be literally translated as "plain (or even more literally--coarse) tea, bland rice," a very humble and self-deprecating expression alluding to the host's admission that he or she doesn't have a lot of money and resources and so can only afford cheap ingredients to prepare food for the guests.  (This was how it looked like this before renovation.) I ord...