[jon boy]

hi,

i live in vancouver these days, the city is hosting an olympics if you didnt know. ok so its pretty much extremely unpopular with just about all who live here as the massive amount of restrictions that have been put in place on where you can and cant go, what are not allowed to wear (anything remotely anti olympics puts you in the back of a police car) plus the travel chaos that is being caused. a one hour wait just to get onto a train or bus is about normal and all this in a city with a major homeless population that is being pushed (literally) out of site and a poverty gap that gets bigger by the day, poorly functioning transport system, translink that has 28 CEO's all earning well over the standard amount for people in their position, a budget of $2bn dollars for homeless projects of which less than 1% has been used and given that they have had many many years preparation there are virtually no shelters for anyone yet the olympic village (which is supposed to be turned into affordable social housing afterwards and now is going to be luxury condo's instead) is millions over budget paid for by tax payers, VANOC basically making political requests as they see fit and getting them and also creating policy including pissing off the ambulance workers on strike over poor pay, the fact that so many streets are going to be closed to the public and when i live less than six blocks from the olympic village it means a commute of 25 minutes is now going to be 2 hours, passing through many security screens and closed off to the public areas even though we live here, the corporate sponsorship involved and the general feeling that the city is no way near ready, the 200,000 extra people that are going to be crammed into a very small space. all this plus the fact that its very warm here, the average temperature is +12 which means that must of the snow has melted, what you will see on your tv has actually been shipped in from other areas as basically its warm and raining. on the ground it basically feels like a poorly planned money making shit storm. the budget for this whole thing is mind blowing and i just wish that they could have spent the money on something else but as is most common with these kind of deals, things only change when the eyes of the world are upon you.

as a sporting event i think its fine but they should have it somewhere with snow that is able to cope with the whole thing.

i know the usual posters will post the usual thing but there you go. rant over.