Month: October 2017

Red Brick Daily China, as you can see in the map below, uses “Chinese Time” for the entire nation as reality is not a socialist policy with Chinese characteristics. And, as you can see, although Taiwan sort of fits better into the South Korea/Japan time zone, it’s currently in the Chinese zone, and some want to change that. The Central News Agency has more: “The netizen who launched the petition said that the country should leave the GMT+8 time zone, which it shares with Malaysia, China, and parts of Indonesia and Australia, to the GMT+9 time zone, which covers...

Red Brick Daily Just when you thought our species had officially sunk forever into the mire of greed, along comes a story that makes you reconsider the human race. We don’t know his name, but reports say last Sunday evening, a fisherman in Pingtung County hauled up a ‘Golden Sea Bass’ — a nine-kilogram swimmer with rare golden scales. Taiwan ET NEWS posted video of the catch, after which other fisherfolks come running over to touch the fish for luck. One man is heard offing NT$90,000 for the catch, but the good-hearted fisherman declines, saying the right thing to do is release...

Red Brick Daily Raising taxes on cigarettes is a measure used by many nations to ‘encourage’ smokers to quit. It is generally effective, with every tax increase driving a percentage of tobacco enthusiasts to give up the habit. But in many places, including Taiwan, every tax rise also equals a rise in cigarette smuggling. The Central News Agency has more: http://focustaiwan.tw/news/asoc/201710170012.aspx “A shipment of smuggled cigarettes valued at around NT$20 million (US$662,669) was seized at Kaohsiung port Tuesday, (October 17, 2017) … The cigarettes, said to be the popular Feng brand, arrived in a 40-foot shipping container from Singapore...

Red Brick Daily After what seems like decades, the section of Kaohsiung’s Shuiguan Road where that road begins (after a right turn on highway 1 heading east) is no longer an obstacle course of potholes big enough to swallow a child … mixed with random, boulder-sized shards of rock and metal. Shuiguan Road runs east from highway 1 — or the GaoNan GongLu — all the way to the Gaoping Bridge that crosses over to Pingtung. The road has spent years getting torn up by large trucks and seemed to be in perpetual disarray. A multi-million NT$ project to...