Inside the Olympics: The Undesired Activity

In a recent post, I wrote about the amount of ‘boot-licking’ a host city has to do in order to continually keep the IOC on its side. From the original bid document, through to the tearful farewell and wrap-up in Spring 2010, this city has been hosed, charged, and demanded-to from these officials to the point where we are now unsure of who actually this month-long (don’t forget the Special Olympics) festival. O.K., it is the largest one of it’s kind on the planet and, if they intend to make money from it in the future, any host city should be ready to invest. However, when items dictated to by the organisers start to cross certain lines, is it not up to the city to hold up a hand and argue it’s corner? Two cases in point raised in the last month argue this.

Every Olympic host city also presents a Cultural Olympiad for the arts that shows the best of your city, country, and extends a hand to other Olympic country travelling exhibits and troupes. Imagine being a winter sports fan, and taking a week out of your life to go to a welcoming town in a different part of the World, see the World’s best athletes compete in your favourite sports, then spend the evenings taking in fabulous artistic and cultural artists. If I had the odd hundred grand sitting around, I’d do it! Well, in a recent guideline handed down, it appears that these artists must contract to perform without making negative comments or the like concerning Olympic sponsors and the IOC! For dancers and opera singers, this may be OK, but perhaps not for you if you are a comic, painter, or actor. These people see a different view of things as a perfect point worth bringing up, but if someone gets excited and ad lib something along these lines  in February or March 2010, their performance can be immediately stopped.

In a related issue, no negatives are allowed to be ‘presented in written form’ in public view. While designed to stop negative graffiti and posters in camera view of the globe’s TV viewers, this has been extended to the interior of businesses and residences! This means that if I have a “No to Visa” sentiment in an upstairs window of my house, a representative from my local city council (I live in a host suburb.), has the right to enter my house and take it down.

Now, in both of the above cases, we would have to be in an extreme situation for punitive measures, I understand this, but haven’t the IOC been told that this country has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantee free speech, and personal property rights? The IOC that aren’t putting these rules in place to protect itself – they are designed to keep negatives away from their sponsors. The largest global corporations on earth have the ability to order this, through the organisers. A soft drink company has the right to complain to an IOC rep, who will tell the local organiser, who will pass onto an elected local official to do the dirty.

I see the day when these games will only take place in totalitarian states – they may be used to taking orders blindly. How did Norway, Japan, and the US ever stand for this?

More on the torch relay to come – I have received a few enquiries about it – unless someone has a problem with that, and will block my internet link. Blogging may become an ‘undesired activity’ in Olympic cities.

Futuring the Royal Family

Whenever the media try to stir up anti-Royal feeling, I suffer the usual knock on consequence of having to answer for the existence of The Windsor’s. Just for the record, I look at the British Royal Family as I do about Christmas:

It is traditional, has nothing to do with me except gets me a day off, it creates some business, and makes us look at ourselves in a different way.

 

A recent state visit by The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall had the usual negative media spin that proved the entire edifice of the Royals was crumbling, and no one could save it. Considering this point, I was surprised by the sheer amount of bytes and print inches, the visit caused. It was obviously the biggest story of the entire 10-day time period they spent in Canada! Ten days, of ‘nothing to see here’, and ‘no-one cares’, all shot in front of crowds of people, and breathless reporting about the importance of the stay.

 

So, just for the record, here is my take on the present and future of the Monarchy.

 

Prince Charles has had a massive effect on pop culture over the lat 50 years. No-one hugged a tree, saved a whale, or thought green before him, then had the balls to announce it to a World calling him nuts for doing so. He does a far better job where he is, rather than being the Monarch, when he has seen his Mother button her lip for her entire life. He should abdicate the throne when the Monarch dies, and pass it to a younger person with more in common with a modern world – a criticism frequently levelled at the institution.

The Princes’ heroes through out his life have always been the quieter, more influential ‘powers behind the throne’ such as Lord Mountbatten, so he can support his sons while he is slipping into a dotage. Let’s be honest, he has had his life, he has finally got his love next to him, who needs the hassle? He could be 80 before he gets the job, anyway.

 

The first order of business for King William should be to thin out the Civil List that is the line of royals supported by the British taxpayer. Earlier in the Century, we all had larger families, and there is an incredible amount of hanger’s on from Elizabeth’s cousins, etc. Once they pass on, lets ask their kids to get careers – most of them do anyway. This should result in large properties becoming free. Let’s put them to a social use that will benefit as many people as possible. Both ‘heir and spare’ have a job to do promoting Britain. They will both have spouses, and offspring, but there shouldn’t be any more people doing this important job.

 

This should make them ‘relevant’ to the majority of us, cost less, and modernise the institution with no hard feelings, or hardship to anyone. See, I am a royal supporter, but even I see that believing in them as they are is a little like believing in Father Christmas. We have already modernised the annual gift giving festival, let’s move on to another ancient tradition.

The Olympics: Follow the Money

When I mentioned last week that $2 Billion was going to be the final price tag, those that preferred the figure $8 Billion as the final cost immediately harangued me.

Why two prices, and why is one 4 times bigger than the first? The reason is infrastructure prices, and how it is being spent.

 

When your city hosts the Olympics, it’s going to be too small to handle the influx of so many people, and you won’t have the facilities to handle it. This doesn’t necessarily mean sporting venues, either. In our case, it means roads, rapid transit, and a conference centre. ROADS: We have a tiny road system that doesn’t even have dedicated right hand turns at most downtown junctions, because the land is so expensive, we cannot dedicate space to anything but buildings. Of course this has led to too many cars downtown, not enough parking, and a crappy public transit system by comparison.

The journey from Vancouver to Whistler is a fantastic 3 hour drive along Howe Sound and up into the Mountains to Whistler. Unfortunately, three hours is just too long to spend on the road these days, so people speed and get killed making it a dangerous trip.

RAPID TRANSIT: Like most North American cities, we don’t have a direct transit route from our airport to the city – because cab companies ‘rule’ that area of transport with an iron fist. Unfortunately, we also have to cross at least two bridges across water to get to anywhere downtown, which adds huge traffic problems to the usual crawl. Our mid week rush hours are now 6am to 8pm, with a slow hour between 2 and 3 – which is when most International flights arrive.

CONFERENCE CENTRE: Once you get downtown, the ability of the city to fill hotel rooms with the size of our current Conference centre is, sadly, too small to make enough money. We have a fabulous design for one (that would be built into the water to save on infrastructure.), but can’t afford to build it – pity, because if it had a large-scale launch event for it, it would have an incredible impact on would be visitors.

 

What? Like the Olympics? Canada has always been a popular Olympic destination, we are on the US West coast time zone, Whistler was designed as an Olympic venue in the 60’s, and is the best ski resort in North America – why not?

 

Six years after we got the bid, we have a rail rapid transit link directly to the city from the airport, the highway to Whistler is flatter, wider, and has cut the journey time down to two hours, and we have our Conference centre that will be the 21^st century looking home to the media centre. Together with the $1 Billion security costs that weren’t envisioned prior to September 2001, there is your additional $6 Billion. Worth it? Worth it for the Canadian tax payer to pay for it? Well, from this city’s point of view – YES!

The Forbin Project lives!

I remember, in the mid-90’s, complaining that IT had become the Master, not the slave. Because everything appeared to work much faster online than in my mind, I bemoaned the fact that it was the speed of my desk top that was driving what I did on a daily basis, not how fast I could get something completed. Of course, working for a small business then, we were constantly under the impression that there were competitive companies out there that were matching their speed of thought and action to their computers, meaning that they were being more efficient. If we didn’t assume this, we would be left behind. Fifteen years later, the only change to this paradigm is the speed of the machines we use. As predicted as far back as half-a-century in Science Fiction, we now trust almost everything we do to computers, and have seen what can go wrong with this lack of human oversight. I read recently that inflation could be explained as the Government money suppliers being able to change the rate of money in circulation. Prior to the Credit Card age, a U.S. Dollar would change hands about 4 or 5 times in a year. Obviously the value of the dollar when it changed hands changed exponentially rose after the introduction of Diner’s Club Card, and it’s competitors aimed a markets that were less and less likely to pay off a monthly payment schedule on time. Nowadays, with mouse clicks setting into operation a global domino falls of economies that appear to be automatic, and with no oversight, how do we know what exactly is IN any given national economy. How do national banks go about knowing how that ocean of e-money is affecting out daily lives? In our personal lives, we have fallen into this trap. I feel positively old-fashioned keeping an Excel log of my own monthly household bills, and a budget for future years, before paying them with a personal cheque through the mail. Are there really people out there that have direct debits set up that pay bills automatically from an account that they are paid automatically into? Are there people that have actually lost control over the most important part of their lives? Imagine us blaming local governments for expenditure, and the payment of any future deficits when we don’t even know how to balance our own chequebooks. There will be more of these sudden changes in the economy, because we believe that we can create programs, projects and machines that can do it better than we can. There are already more sudden and unexplained changes to global weather patterns than we have seen in the past. What the hell are we going to do in the future? When a massive hurricane hits a Miami Beach, a San Diego, a New York, at exactly the same time as the floor drops out of the global economy next time? Very soon, some machine is going to realize that we are useless and destructive and that it can do the job better – Just like those far fetched Sci-Fi movie of Yore. Check out The Forbin Project

Look at the date!

The Baby Boom is over! This HUGE demographic is beginning to retire, and this means that your life tommorrow will be diferent than it is today. Are you ready for the New Future?

Perhaps it’s time to go out on your own: Affiliate marketing,or some other business. Not just to earn earn money, in a home-based business, but to find out more of this new wave, SEO-driven, Internet marketing, social marketplace world. Cyberspace has replaced the ‘real’ world in terms of communication and business marketing.