1997 And All That.

Pandas are nice, but Democracy is better.
I love this quote, I have been mulling it over all day, and it just makes me smile, a little, internal, evil smile.
I heard this on the BBC news this morning, they were talking about the two giant pandas that have been given by the People's Republic of China to Hong Kong, to 'celebrate' the tenth anniversary of the handover of HK to China.

People that they interviewed however had mixed views on the past ten years. Mixed..... but in a consistent way.
The rich seemed to be richer, and the poor were poorer. And what they really all wanted was to be able to hold democratic elections. Still, they have their pandas to keep them warm.

Egypt has banned female circumcision.
What? Egypt? People go on holiday there. Surely people don't go on holiday to places where women are routinely mutilated do they?
No, relax, it was made illegal in 1997.
Phew. Er...so how come it has been banned now?
Well, a 12 year old girl has just died as a result of it.
But, hasn't it been illegal for ten years?
Yes, well, except in exceptional circumstances.
Do what? What exceptional circumstances could there possibly be that might warrant mutilating a young woman?
Well...pretty much seems to be 'being egyptian'.
???
From the Guardian,
"In 2005, research by Unicef found that 96% of Egyptian women aged 15 to 49 who had ever been married reported they had been circumcised. The Egyptian government says a more recent study found 50.3% of girls aged 10 to 18 had been circumcised."
And they don't even have pandas. Progress is slow, very, very slow.

And in Canada, progress is slow in cell phone technology, service and pricing. I know, I know, I've said this before, but it was brought home to us once more today.

My son Laurence went out and spent $100 on a pay-as-you-go phone. Ok, except that we don't have that here, what we have is non-contract phones.
Again, as I've said before, for the non-contract phones to stay active, you have to buy a voucher every month, but these aren't like the vouchers you buy in Britain which you just use until you've finished them up.
No, no, no. If you buy a $20 voucher, in 30 days, your voucher runs out, so if you have only used up $5 worth of calls, well, turns out you made some enormously expensive calls.
And you are automatically charged an amount for 911 calls. So let me run that past you again. YOU ARE CHARGED FOR EMERGENCY CALLS, and that's even without making any.

In the Vancouver Sun in March, they ran an article in which they showed that Canada had the highest cell phone charges among the 30 member nations of the OECD.

"Canadian cellphone bills average $56 per month, and have increased by six per cent since December 2005.

By contrast, Vodafone -- Europe's largest cell-phone provider -- charged an average of $38.28 per month across the 17 countries it serves, and has decreased its prices by 11 per cent since December, 2005."

One of our biggest providers still doesn't have GSM and one of our others has only recently switched to it.

We still have a system where most users are charged minutes for incoming calls.

We explained all of this to Laurence and took the cell phone back to the shop. They gave him his money back with no questions asked.

So we may have shit mobile phones and no pandas, but we do have democracy.