The Beach

Went to the beach the other day. It is still 85 degrees here so the beach is still an option in Mid-Nov. There is a very long coast line close to Tainan, and what they call "The Gold Coast", however it's pretty dingy. It could be nice, if it was cleaned up, but it is too dirty. Here you can see the pier and me on the sea-wall. I was watching the crabs fight the giant sea-cockroaches. It was a good battle. Actually you could train them and have bets on who will win. In China they have professional scorpion fighting. So its possible. You can also see the people fishing on the pier. Pretty normal right? Well, except the sign in Chinese clearly says "no fishing on the pier".
OK, so you figure "when the cats away the mice will play". They will fish as long as no cops/authority types are around. Well this may apply in the US, but not in Taiwan. The pier is actually right next to the coast gaurd office, which has several boats, and do not even need them because they could easily walk over (it is so close) and say "hey guys, read the sign, no fishing". But of course they don't. This points to one of the major problems of Taiwan, which I call the "Chiang-Kai-Shek system of Management" (copyright pending). This consists of making a bunch of rules from the top down, some of which make sense, many of which don't, and then largely failing to enforce the law while lecturing (or haranging) the people about moral values in a cheesy boy-scout harry Potter type of way, so then largely the people ignore the law so that they can live their lives. Then the authorities will randomly crack down and enforce the law (maybe 10% of the time, but that is just a guesstamate). Sometimes this is good, like traffic cops pulling people over for not wearing helmets. Sometimes this is bad like when the cops start shooting in the middle of a crowded street at a guy driving recklessly because he's been sniffing glue. Sadly this same concept of management (or mismanagement) also applies to parenting. I have often seen parents in public just let their kids run wild, running, screaming, kicking, everything. The parents will calmly sit there and ignore it for as long as half an hour, then suddenly get up and grab, hit, smack, or yell at the kid. Then they will go back to doing whatever, and the kid will be calm for a while, and then slowly start acting up again, as the cycle repeats itself. So the moral of the story is, if you make reasonable demands, and then follow-up to see if what you want is being done, then you won't have to freak out later when you find that the exact opposite of what you wanted is being done. The Chiang-Kai-Shek system of management is, by the ay, also a major part of the reason why the Nationalists lost the war and had to come to Taiwan in the first place.