The domestic helper case is the street-level story here, not the property numbers.

A family in Hong Kong just had to pay HK$251,000 because they fired their domestic helper for having cancer. That's the ruling. Labour Tribunal, this week. She got diagnosed, she needed time for treatment, and the response was to let her go. The law says you can't do that, and now there's a number attached to it, HK$251,000, so every household with a helper in this city just got a very expensive reminder of where the line is.

Here's the part worth sitting with. Helpers live in the flat, cook the meals, raise the kids, and the moment one of them gets sick, the calculation for some employers turns cold fast: not "how do we help her," but "how do we replace her with the least paperwork." That's not every family, most people do right by the person living in their spare room. But it happens often enough that a tribunal had to spell out, in dollars, that cancer isn't a resignation letter. HK$251,000 is the going rate this month for forgetting that the person doing your laundry is still a person.