I am getting so many spambot comments lately, that I have decided to turn on word verification. If you want to leave a comment you will have to type in the letters and numbers below the comment box before it will be published. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I hope this will stop the spammers from using this blog as a free tool to promote their sites and products.

Last week several blogs asked the question what happens with the RMB 30 deposit that you pay for your Shanghai transportation cards (these cards that you can use to pay for the metro, bus and taxi). The argumentation was that this money (@ 15 millon cards this is RMB 450 million) should generate a lot of interest, and people wanted to know what that money is used for. Even the Shanghai Commission on Consumer Rights and Interest Protection got involved, and argued for “the right to know”. Suggestions for the usage like ‘for mistresses’ or ‘for karaoke’ were made.

As a business person I did not really take the posts or comments too serious, because even every business student should know that this kind of cash is normally used for business operations (it reduces your cost of capital for investments, and it makes is possible to lower operational costs). And strangely nobody even thought of a much bigger chunk of money: the money people store on their cards. That’s on average much higher than RMB 30, probably more around RMB 100, meaning that an additional 1.5 billion in cash is available to the metro company.

But it seems the blogs had some effect. This Sunday I wanted to take the metro and realized I forgot my card, so I bought a new one. And to my big surprise they suddenly reduced the price of the cards, I only had to pay RMB 20 for a new card! And a much nicer one than the old one, a red card commemorating the Long March 70 years ago.

Since a couple of weeks the JZ Club in Shanghai has a Big Band playing on Saturday night, the JZ All Star Big Band. And it’s a huge success, despite the fact you have to pay to get in (30 RMB), which is still quite unusual in China.

The band is led by Rolf Becker, a very talented band leader who also arranges a lot of the music himself. Over the past year Rolf and his wife have become good friends of us, and we try to watch his performances in the JZ Club and other venues at least twice a month. I actually met Rolf through this weblog: I once wrote about the first performance of the Shanghai Jazz Orchestra (also set up by Rolf) and he read that post and contacted me by email.

Before watching the show Qi and I had dinner at Latina in Xintiandi. Latina is one of the many Brazilian BBQ places in town, and in my opinion one of the better ones. Xintiandi is a very upscale and therefore pricy location, but the all-you-can-eat buffet is still only 128 RMB per person. They compensate that with the drink prices, a Tsingtao is over 40 RMB for a small bottle! The meat is excellent here. The waiters keep coming to your table with freshly grilled steaks, pork, sausages, chicken wings, and all other kinds of meat. So you have to seriously watch out that you don’t eat too much.

Around 11 PM we then arrived at JZ, just before the performance started. We managed to sit quite close to the stage (thanks Amira!), but soon afterwards the jazz club was so crowded that new arrivals had to go upstairs to be able to see the band. The big band played two sets, with mainly famous songs. During the second set they even put the club into Christmas mood by performing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”, the first time I heard a big band play that! The whole performance was great, and the audience even asked for (and got) an encore.

Although the JZ club is getting too small now already, I would absolutely recommend you to watch one of the big band’s performances at this club, located on Fuxing Lu, close to Ulumuqi Lu. It’s fantastic. They start every Saturday around 11 PM, but that can be a bit later as well. But come early if you want a seat. I was told that JZ made a live recording last night, so soon the JZ Big Band will be available on CD as well.

I made a back-up of my blog earlier today, and came across an interesting post. If you go to the archives (on the right side of this blog, scroll down), and click on August 2005 you will get all the posts from August 2005 (of course), but also all the posts that I wrote on my old blog between Sept. 2004 and Juli 2005. I just went back to October 2004, and noticed an interesting post.

The post was about a round of golf that Gary an I played on Sheshan Golf Course. I will quote some of it here:
We had a great morning, enjoying the sunshine, the views and the silence on the course. Very un-Chinese actually, normally it’s crowded everywhere and it’s never really silent anywhere (at least not in or around the big cities). And as an nice thing to top if off a potentially great business idea was born during the ‘19th hole’. In case it works out you’ll read more about it here in about 3 months.
10/16/2004

And that ‘potentially big business’ idea was Tudou! Cool to find this post back, I did not realize I had archived back so far, and thought I had lost it when I switched blogs last year.

I also filmed a bit during the very first weeks of Tudou (when it was not even called Tudou yet). I will try to find that material back as well, and maybe put it on Tudou.

For exactly a week I was not able to get my posts published on my blog. Readers who were using RSS could see the posts that I wrote (mainly tests that I deleted already), and also in the archives they were visible. But not on the main page. The same for the comments, they showed up in the archives, but not on my blog’s main page.

I tried everything, but could not figure out what happened. This afternoon I finally asked Davin, who is in charge of all servers and technical issues at Spill Group Asia, to take a look. And I should have done that earlier, because he quickly figured out what happened. Blogger.com changed the standard directory for ftp, and therefore the posts did not show up anymore. After changing this in the settings and republishing the whole blog, things are working fine again. Davin, thanks a lot!

But I still don’t know why blogger.com changed this. Is it related to the new blogger.com version, and they are somehow trying to force me to use that? Did other users also encounter this problem? I am now considering to change my blog to WordPress, even though that is going to take me some time (which is the one thing I hardly have).

It seems the tobacco lobby is quite powerful. Just a couple of months ago a homegrown Chinese innovation, the electronic fake cigaret Ruyan, still received an innovation award. But now the Chinese State Food and Drugs Administration says that after testing they found that the product is dangerous. Of course the Chinese government receives about 20 billion USD in taxes from smoking, so that might give an incentive to make the results look worse than they really are. And the Western media likes this kind of negative stories, and the news is spreading quickly through the foreign press.

The Ruyan is meant to help people to quit smoking. It is an electronic cigaret that does not produce smoke, and that you do not have to light. You can therefore “smoke” it everywhere, I even noted someone using it on a plane to Europe a few weeks ago. The product is becoming popular quite fast in China, where it is sold in drugstores for about RMB 800 (EUR 80). A steep price for this country, where most people do not even realize that smoking can be dangerous.

What happened is that the FDA released a statement saying that one cigaret contains the same amount of nicotine as a whole pack of cigarets. Now that may be true or not (I assume it is correct), but what they do not mention is that the Ruyan comes with capsules in different strenghts. You can get a very lowe dosage, or a very high one. The highest may indeed be equivalent to a whole pack, for someone who is used to smoking a pack a day. You also don’t need to smoke a whole cigaret at once, because you don’t light it, and therefore the comparison is already flawed.

But think about it, what is the most dangerous thing about smoking? The nicotine? Of course not, it is the smoke and the tar that ends up in your lungs. And that is of course missing in the study and in the negative articles in the press. If this product gets banned in European countries (or even China) it will be worse for public health, and the tobacco industry will have another win.

The Shanghai police has found a new way to reduce traffic jams: just close the exits where they occur. They already used to close entrances (among others the Nanjing Road entrance to the North-South elevated road), which causes a lot of extra jams on the normal roads. Of course people will use the elevated roads less, but it will only move the traffic jams to other locations.

According to a police spokesman in today’s Shanghai Daily the major reason for the problems is the increasing number of vehicles. That is certainly true an important reason, but the biggest reason is in my opinion the fact that most people just cannot drive. The Shanghai Daily mentions today that 5115 accidents took place in Shanghai on the elevated roads. And that is not the figure for one year, but the figure just for November. That is almost 200 accidents per day, just on the highways in Shanghai!

I have said it here before, but driving schools in China are causing this. They do not teach the people how to drive in real conditions (students learn to drive in a “driving park”), and even teach them the wrong things. A friend told me that her teacher taught her to drive in the left lane on an expressway because that is safest… That’s probably the reason why the right and middle lanes on Chinese highways normally move much faster. If people would just learn to drive before hitting the road, learn the correct traffic rules, and if the police would enforce them, there would be a lot less traffic jams. Wishful thinking on a Friday afternoon before hitting the weekend rush hour.