In all fairness, it’s been warmer in Sochi for almost the entire duration of these Winter Olympics than it has here in Florida.
One of my colleagues went. He’s a cynical and sceptical kind of a guy. He said don’t believe a word of the hatchet job being carried out by the media, and the games have been fantastic.
Or to put it another way: see my post #19, plus add a good solid helping of “it may be 2014, but some people haven’t stopped fighting the cold war”.
My journalist friend who has been to every Olympic since Salt Lake says much the same. Last minute problems were apparently worse in London.
But how are they ever going to drive traffic to their blogs with headlines like that?
Part of me wanted some horrendous breakdown of Russin infrastructure (preferably hilarious: all the wild dogs breaking out of their holding pens and running amok through the opening ceremonies?).
But the rational side of me is relieved to see no huge tragedy (so far) due to terrorists or Putin.
San Carlos de Bariloche. That way we can have summer AND winter games at the same time.
Plus it’s nice, exotically far away, and has the infrastructure (minus some ridiculous stadium), hell it’s even got ex-nazis hiding out so the reporters will have all kinds of stuff to babble about!
Regards,
-Bouncer-
I don’t know by what conceivable standard you think Russia is a ‘train wreck’. Standards of living in Russia are a bit higher than Brazil, and much higher than South Africa or China. South Africa, in particular, has seen a decline in their standard of living in the last twenty years, mostly due to the HIV epidemic.
I’d think that most reasonable people would much rather live in Russia than in South Africa.
Train wreck in terms of having a particularly ridiculous leader who has been pretty ridiculous about the Olympics. It’s not generally a horrible place to live. Really none of the listed places are- unless you happen to think that anything outside of the US and maybe Western Europe is horrible.
I don’t think Putin is ridiculous. His economic policies are much too right-wing for me, and I wouldn’t vote for his party if I lived there, but he’s far from the worst leader imaginable, and most things in Russia (economic growth, unemployment, abortion rates, birth rates, etc.) have actually improved under his watch, which is more than you can say for (say) South Africa.
Yes, Russia have come a long way. Especially Moscow is booming right now.
I dated a Russian girl, and Russian people have a lot going for them
Moscow may be boomng. And they’ve obviously spent a lot on Sochi. But how much has their oil wealth served to improve the lives of the average Russians? Because in many cases, the countries that are sitting on vast amounts of oil seem to be very corrupt with many people still in poverty despite the billions being earned. (For example, that appears to be the case in Venezuela and Nigeria.)
It’s not really the case in Venezuela. They have a socialist government, and between 1998 and 2011 saw a very sharp reduction in economic inequality, according to the CIA factbook:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html
Russia is a more unequal place than in Soviet times, of course, but both Russia and Venezuela currently have less economic inequality than the United States, as measured by the Gini coefficient:
That’s not saying all that much - the US is one of the most unequal societies in the developed world- but perhaps in the United States should hesitate before criticing unequal income distributions in countries like Russia or Venezuela.
Venezuela may have reduced economic inequality but my understanding is that there is still a massive shortage of housing for the poor. With all of that oil money, I’d expect the situation to be better.