Unequal treatment
I find it remarkable that it took the government less than 24 hours to find the body of Taishin Financial Holdings president Lin Keh-hsiao (林克孝).
If it were any average person, it would take weeks — as has been proven with the death of other hikers. This is yet another example of how the rich get special perks.
If you are wondering why London is burning up and revolutions are taking place in the Arab world, look no further than these types of injustices. While the weak suffer, the rich bask in their little world of grandeur.
It is about time that rich people, investors, bankers and their kind wake up and see that ordinary people cannot survive while their companies make a killing.
I feel deeply sorry for the loss to Lin’s family, but I hope that more people will speak out against the unfair treatment we peasants receive.
HARRY ADAMOPOULOS
Taipei
Banning the anthem
No school band, from any country, should ever be asked to refrain from playing their national anthem (“School band told to drop national anthem: official,” Aug. 9, page 3). That the request apparently came from a citizen of their own country betrays the presence of a turncoat in their midst.
To invite a band to play, then dictate what it cannot play, would be like booking Elvis and telling him not to sing Blue Suede Shoes or telling the Beatles to skip Help. There is no reason for it. None.
D. H. RIDGWAY
Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Bad driving in Taipei
I have lived in Taiwan for more than eight years, and the last four in Taipei. I have always been impressed at the safety of living in this city; being able to walk the streets any time of day without fear. It is a reflection of the decency and civility of people in Taipei.
So why is it that when these same people are seated behind a wheel, all sense of decency and concern for others transforms into an arrogance that defies belief, and a sense of entitlement where other people’s safety, even their very lives, are of no importance? Not all drivers in Taipei are like this, but after observing this behavior on a daily basis for some years now, it is clearly an endemic problem.
Suggesting drivers in the city “can’t drive” is to say they don’t know how to drive. For anyone who has completed a driving test in Taiwan, it is of no surprise that the training and testing are hopelessly inadequate.
Go to any major intersection on Zhongxiao E Road at midday and watch drivers taking a left-hand turn. It involves dangerously veering into and across the other lane, establishing a personal inside lane on the opposite side of the road, even if it runs over a pedestrian crosswalk, and finally pushing through a gap of crossing pedestrians. Left-hand turns are mentioned in the written driving test; they are not practiced nor rigorously tested in an actual road test.
Suggesting drivers in the city “won’t drive properly” is to say they know how to drive, but they choose not to. This is a more unfortunate reality of life in Taipei: racing through red lights, not using an indicator before changing lanes, not stopping the car for crossing pedestrians.
The other factor in this madness is what motivated me to write now. While walking home from lunch recently, I encountered a typical scene: a small road with an intersecting street running through it; no traffic lights, but with a pedestrian crosswalk. While crossing the street, a car approached coming down the street from the opposite side of the road and heading through the intersection. When the driver saw I was continuing across the crosswalk, he accelerated toward me; I had to literally dive backwards to avoid him. This is not the first time it has happened, but it was the closest I ever came to being hit full on.
The dangerous ignorance of this particular driver is not what motivated me to write. When I turned to pick myself up, there on the other side of the road was a policeman on a scooter, who had been driving behind the driver of the car coming into the same intersection. He had witnessed the scene. He looked down at me, smiled, and then took a left-hand turn and drove on.
He didn’t use his indicator to signal a left turn.
SHANE JOHNSON
Taipei
When 17,000 troops from the US, the Philippines, Australia, Japan, Canada, France and New Zealand spread across the Philippine archipelago for the Balikatan military exercise, running from tomorrow through May 8, the official language would be about interoperability, readiness and regional peace. However, the strategic subtext is becoming harder to ignore: The exercises are increasingly about the military geography around Taiwan. Balikatan has always carried political weight. This year, however, the exercise looks different in ways that matter not only to Manila and Washington, but also to Taipei. What began in 2023 as a shift toward a more serious deterrence posture
Reports about Elon Musk planning his own semiconductor fab have sparked anxiety, with some warning that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) could lose key customers to vertical integration. A closer reading suggests a more measured conclusion: Musk is advancing a strategic vision of in-house chip manufacturing, but remains far from replacing the existing foundry ecosystem. For TSMC, the short-term impact is limited; the medium-term challenge lies in supply diversification and pricing pressure, only in the long term could it evolve into a structural threat. The clearest signal is Musk’s announcement that Tesla and SpaceX plan to develop a fab project dubbed “Terafab”
China’s AI ecosystem has one defining difference from Silicon Valley: It is embrace of open source. While the US’ biggest companies race to build ever more powerful systems and insist only they can control them, Chinese labs have been giving the technology away for free. Open source — making a model available for anyone to use, download and build on — once seemed a niche, nerdy topic that no one besides developers cared about. However, when a new technology is driving trillions of dollars of investments and leading to immense concentrations of power, it offered an antidote. That is part of
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
RSS