The Rogers News

Author: Chris

  • Golf Course Development In China

    “All the Tees in China: The Chinese Go Golf Crazy” (Link) does not paint a good picture of the state of golf in China or the state of China in China. I could have told you this from personal observation. What I saw when I visited was a bustling culture, but it seemed like the wheels were turning fast and going nowhere. While the Chinese economy may be growing at dangerous rates…

    The economic slowdown means things are not as they were a couple of years ago, but China’s economy is still expected to expand by around 8 per cent a year.

    …the way of life for many of its people has not improved dramatically.

    With regard to both housing and golf, I saw little of either during my visit. I remember remarking at how few houses I saw -neither city type houses on a small lot nor larger country estates. I don’t know where everyone lived, but there were not many visible houses. This is why the golf course development strategy being employed in China is absurd:

    The primary motivation behind developing the game of golf in China is property, not bashing a little white ball around a course. Plush villas pay the green fees.

    What make money in most clubs are the villas and apartments ringing the courses. The golf itself is a loss leader, and many of the courses in China are chronically underutilized.

    In extreme cases, developers buy up large tracts of farmland on the outskirts of the boom towns of New China: Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Tianjin, Beijing and Shanghai. They then start building flashy villas – reasonably priced by UK standards but more than most Chinese families would earn in a lifetime. The courses are often an afterthought, hastily-constructed – even unplayable. The developers don’t care; they can charge a lot more for property near a course.

    Sometimes this land is taken illegally with the connivance of corrupt local officials, leading to social unrest as disenfranchised farmers take to the streets and demonstrate, attacking building sites and picketing government offices. China’s arable land is scarce, and the government is worried about a growing wealth gap between the rich of the cities and the poor in the countryside.

    Now that sounds like the China I know. Forget the growth, technological advances, and health improvements. It’s about ravaging the masses by taking arable land and replacing it with unaffordable developments that only an elite few can use. I want to know who buys the houses on the courses! Better yet, I want to see the courses and houses!

  • Thoughts on Trust & Estate Law

    Towards the end of law school I became interested in Estate Planning, so today I was pleased to find in my Google Reader a post titled, “Small Law Firm Open Thread: Trusts & Estates.” (Link) The meat of the post is in the comments section, which was surprisingly thoughtful and focused for a popular blog comments section. I’ve noted below some of my thoughts on points made in the comments which I found insightful.

    • Tax and Real Estate Knowledge is a Must – This should be obvious to anyone who knows even the slightest amount about Estate Planning. In school it was often difficult to distinguish tax planning from estate planning, especially when we started talking about bigger numbers. I can only imagine the levels of tax that must be considered on some larger estates.
    • Billing – There’s mention in the comments of fixed fee billing as opposed to hourly billing. For example, charging a client per will or trust as opposed to billing for the number of hours put in. This is irrelevant as far as I am concerned. A more experienced attorney will be more efficient and will thus complete more work – whether it’s more hours or more completed projects, it matters not. (The concern about not getting enough work seems to come from those attorneys commenting from “BigLaw.”
    • Referrals – The comments emphasize the importance of developing solid referrers of work. Initially, making connections who then, via word of mouth, refer business to you, is more about marketing than legal skills. However, doing good work may be the best marketing you can do for yourself, so we kind of have a “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” situation.
    • Criticism – There is some criticism of the Trust & Estate area as being soft, stuffy, or proper. I can understand this, however, because, regardless of the client, what they are discussing is both very private and very important to their livelihood and that of their family. It doesn’t seem too much to ask of a lawyer dealing with such clients to come off as professional and reserved if that’s what it takes.
    • How to Break In – “One way to get into a trusts & estates practice from a non-law firm profession is to try to get a position with a bank that has a trust department. Many banks have them but call them “private client” groups. That is also a good way for trusts & estates lawyers to take a break and learn how to properly administer a will or trust. Also, once you have had to administer crappy documents because the lawyer who drafted it did not think outside the box when he said to keep a house or business in trust, you will never make that same mistake.” ~ Comment 23
    • Small/Medium Firms – It seems that most estate planning takes place in small/medium firms. This appeals to me as I’ve never been interested in BigLaw. (I was spoiled by working for a start-up company out of college.)

  • Why I Am Online

    I’ve made significant changes to my online identity lately in an effort to tighten my personal brand. I did this because it seems like the right thing to do at this point in my life. I’m currently searching for work as an attorney, and hope that anything a prospective employer finds online will strengthen my image, not hurt it.

    Managing one’s online brand is no easy task. The privacy settings on Facebook, alone, require a graduate degree in Gen X to decipher. Add to that Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Delicious, Flickr, and a dozen others and there is significant room for negative exposure.

    I’m taking three steps to ensuring I have the positive and respectable online brand I wish to have:

    1. Socialize with upstanding individuals – I read once that you’re only as good as your five closest friends. If they’re not going anywhere, it’s likely that you’re not either. This passes double for the internet. I friend true friends whom I know in person and I trust their level of maturity.
    2. Vigilant use of privacy settings – When number one fails, it’s nice to be able to contain the damage. By setting the privacy settings such that only friends can see comments I don’t like, I can keep them from the public.
    3. Abstinence if necessary – Sometimes it’s just not worth it to be on a certain service, either because of the people attracted to it, a lack of privacy settings, or another reason. In these cases, I would rather sign off permanently and not have to worry about it.

    Some people fear having an online presence, and I’ve always fought that. There are two main reasons I like sticking my neck out:

    1. Having an online brand is a reality of today. It’s easy to connect and communicate online. I’ve kept up with far more friends – even on a digital level – than I otherwise would have.
    2. Another positive specific to blogging is that I am able to establish myself on dozens/hundreds of topics. No other medium would allow me flush out my thoughts or you to access them. I can take a stance, argue it, and create discourse – for better or worse. Whether my beliefs change or are strengthened by the process, only time will tell.

    Blogging, twittering, and facebooking are worth it, to me, for those two reasons.

  • Movie: Departures

    I saw Departures at the State Theater in Traverse City, Michigan last night. The movie is a Japanese film by Yōjirō Takita that won the 2008 Best Foreign Picture Academy Award.

    The movie is about a cellist, Daigo, who, because of the dissolution of his orchestra, is forced to move from Tokyo to a house his mother left him in rural Japan. He unknowingly becomes a mortician and his life becomes complicated from there.

    There were a couple things I loved about this movie.

    • Diago’s wife, Mika – Ryoko Hirosue is the actress who played Mika. I thought she did a wonderful job opposing Diago’s emotions throughout the movie. She’s sweet and understanding in the beginning of the movie, but lacks a true sense of her husband. By the end of the movie they a more linear understanding of each other.
    • The construction of the movie – As my sister pointed out, music is used sparingly. In the few instances that it is employed, it is very powerful. This seemed appropriate to me, considering much of the movie is about death, a topic that is often uncomfortable to focus on for any length of time. The stillness of life allowed the celebration of death to resonate – scenes of the family huddled over their deceased, the family’s many thanks to Diago for making the deceased beautiful, and the muted emotions of Diago, who finds himself through comforting the families. The process is beautiful, open and, eventually, accepted.

    I recommend the movie. It is well acted, interesting, and thought provoking.

  • What Happened?

    It’s true that the best writing assignments are usually straightforward and simple. I’m a fan of the 20 minute story exercise where I start with an idea and write for 20 minutes. Sometimes it turns into more, but often the idea is extinguished when the time is up and I’m happy with where the story leaves off.

    I’ve just come across another writing exercise, which I will call, “Telling something that happened.” I am to write about something real that happened in my life. There are a few reasons why I like this assignment. First, it allows me to write to my strengths – writing about my experiences. Second, I’m a nostalgic person, so I enjoy any chance I get to look back on things. Finally, for the most part, telling about something that happened should be a succinct story. I like that.

    I look forward to implementing this “assignment” in the future. Stay tuned!

  • Two Good Quotes

    I rarely post material created by other people on this blog because it’s my space, not theirs. I usually use my tumblr blog for posting clips of others’ works. However, I’m making an exception for this post because T.S. Eliot is one of my favorite poets and I almost bought the Tropic of Cancer a week ago. Now I have to!

    “The Rock”

    The endless cycle of idea and action,
    Endless invention, endless experiment,
    Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
    Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
    Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
    All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
    All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
    But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
    Where is the Life we have lost in living?
    Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
    Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
    The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
    Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

    ~ T.S. Eliot, “The Rock”
    Found via Caterina.net

    Excerpt from Tropic of Cancer

    There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books. Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which gives direction and motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d’habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or of deep sea life, or cellular activity we derive more…

    ~ Henry Miller
    Found via been thinking…

  • That Shower

    The piercing stream of water from the corroded shower head sounded like Indian calls made by young innocently racist boys and girls of the 1940s as they played Cowboys and Indians in the streets of some supposedly Utopian town that hid all of its horrible truths from the collective conscience of anyone with the power to make a difference or the will to care. My body was chilled and pale as I stood in the center of the dimly lit bathroom. As I stepped into the upright shower, I noticed the grout, dirty brown between the small cream tiles. On the rack hanging down from the shower head was a thin bar of marbled green and white soap cracked from non-use. Beside the soap was a brandless bottle of generic watered-down shampoo so thin and mild that I could have poured it in my eyes and felt nothing but a twinge of pain before blinking it away. The water was lukewarm, even after running on hot for ten minutes.

    Written from 11:15 pm to 11:35 pm on Monday, August 24, 2009 in my bedroom in Traverse City, Michigan.