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danielweber

"IOC members will be received with a smile on arrival at hotel"

I thought this just descriptive, but (allowing for translation) it's the IOC's own words:

http://whitelines.com/news/norway-withdraws-bid-2022-winter-...

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This is essentially what killed the bid here in Norway, those outrageous demands.

The interesting thing is that these were the IOC's demands before negotiations. So they obviously didn't expect all of this to actually happen, and perhaps even many of them to be dropped. But instead, what happened was that they fucked themselves over (the Oslo bid was supposedly the preferred one) by driving such a hard initial bargain that their negotiation partner just went "Nope, nope, nope".

Yeah, cities bidding is like investors bidding. They're looking at ROI's in more than just the monetary terms. However, if you walk into a board room and ask for a billion dollars they're going to tell you yo get out.

It's a Swiss organization. What did you expect?

I'm ignorant of this stereotype, care to elaborate?

I think they are being tarred with the same brush as FIFA, or caught up in the — perhaps anachronistic — view of Switzerland as a haven for tax evaders.

What's anachronistic about it ? it's STILL a haven for tax evaders. What's changing these days is rich people are renouncing en masse their US citizenship to escape the long arm of the IRS. I find it disgraceful & immoral that people elect to abandon their responsibilities as citzien to save a few pennies. Switzerland buckled under US pressure, but what applies to the US doesn't apply to other -smaller- countries around the world , where funds of dubious origins continue to originate from & the money-laundering , let's call it what is is, business keeps on trucking as usual.

I find it disgraceful & immoral that IRS still wants you to pay income tax on your income abroad, even if your only tie with the motherland is "America" on the passport.

This one particularly stuck out "Traffic rules and traffic lights must be adjusted so that the Olympic traffic is prioritised. Meanwhile other traffic should be limited; IOC proposes closing schools and encouraging the local people to take holidays."

who do they think they are? the pope? Obama doesn't get schools closed for him. Does Putin?

On the contrary, Obama is speaking at Kellogg/Northwestern today which has closed class for the mid-morning and afternoon.

Right, but that's a school he's actually speaking at, not just a random school in his general vicinity.

The purpose of that is to allow students to attend the event without having to skip class for it.

> Obama doesn't get schools closed for him

That's true, but he does get roads completely shut down and large no-fly-zones set up wherever he goes, even it's just for a fundraiser.

For no more than a few days at a time, not weeks.

In Beijing, local car travel was put onto an even/odd system, so that you could only drive a given car every other day.

Interesting. For traffic/congestion reasons, Manila, Philippines had (has?) this on a permanent basis, not just for a special event. Your license was coded so that police could easily see if you were allowed to be on the roads that day (otherwise, it was public transit for you).

Bogotá, Colombia has the same restriction.

It doesn't help traffic at all. People just bought another car.

Mexico City started doing this in the 80s or early 90s. The rich just bought more cars as a solution.

For Putin and other VIPs Russian police usually just removes all other traffic and pedestrians from streets and roads, ever ambulance cars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxGXT2b0W2A

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=кортеж+скорая

Most ridiculous Putin's requirement is to weld all manhole covers.

In 2013 Putin decided that he dislikes drivers' booing and started to fly to Kremlin by helicopter. To build new landing site he removed huge part of Taynitsky Garden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taynitsky_Garden

http://i.imgur.com/bUuwmp4.jpg

>Most ridiculous Putin's requirement is to weld all manhole covers.

At least in the past, welding manhole covers closed for the presidential motorcade was standard procedure in the US.

But that was when the Secret Service had a clue...

Manhole covers are welded shut where Obama vists aswell, it's not like Putin is crazier than the rest of them.

What the heck did I just read? That list cannot be true, can it? What next no blue skittles in the bowl?

According to David Lee Roth he just put that in so he could see if the venue actually read the contract. Either way it seems that he was a bastion of reason and moderation compared to these IOC goons.

> According to David Lee Roth he just put that in so he could see if the venue actually read the contract.

And he provided the reasoning for that in his bio:

> Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through.

> The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . ." This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

> So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

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