h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You did cross the line a bit there Vip...

paulh:

"Was this supposed to be a UK-centric thread?"

Not at all. Bang on.

"One of our presidential candidates ran the Olympics in a U.S. state a few years ago"

Yeah, we know. Just before the Olympics started he popped over here to insult us repeatedly and question whether we would be able to successfully host an Olympics like he had. Our Prime Minister pointed out that our Olympics was pulled off successfully in one of the busiest cities in the world, and that it's comparatively easy to run an Olympics in the middle of nowhere.

London 2012 will almost certainly be a net financial loss, because all Olympics are, with the exception of LA. But in LA they did do anything about local infrastructure, did nothing at all that was designed to last past the end of the games, and didn't pretend to. A great deal of what was done in London will be there in decades to come, so although the money is spent and won't be recouped as such, we will at least have things to show for it - a really depressed part of the east end of London has been extensively regenerated and improved.

"Why are the 2012 Olympic Games being compared with the country's national health service? "

Because a large part of the opening ceremony focussed on the NHS as something fundamentally British that we could and should be proud of. It was the most overtly political statement in the show, given that we currently have a government intent on breaking it up and privatising it.

"Then there's the matter of 300 million pounds in foreign aid"

Please note that figure is NOT our aid budget. That's JUST the money we give to a country that can afford its own nuclear weapons and space programme. In a time when police, health services, schools and public transport budgets are being cut, foreign aid has been ringfenced so it won't drop below TWELVE BILLION pounds.

"Someone has mentioned that school playing grounds have been sold off. This makes me very sad. Is there no way to reverse this?"

Not really. What tends to happen is the fields are sold off, and somebody builds houses on them. Once that's done, there's not a lot you can do. You can't turf people out of their homes and demolish them. You can't move the school to somewhere with more space. So in summary, no, it's pretty much a one-way deal.

<> And doesn't want the money in the first place, has told Britain to stop and is growing increasingly offended at Britain sticking it's oar in. Interesting to see how our tax money is spent though -

"With officials and doctors paid a bonus for every operation, poor and little-educated men and women in rural areas are routinely rounded up and sterilised without having a chance to object. Activists say some are told they are going to health camps for operations that will improve their general wellbeing and only discover the truth after going under the knife."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/15/uk-aid-forced-sterilisation-india



Consider also that the Government borrowed over £120 billion last year (coincidentally the size of the entire health budget), so we're effectively borrowing money to give to others.

Back to the question of remaining synical about the Olympics (something which in my case I have done through the entire thing )
To the idea of the Olympics being soemthing which would encourage 'participation in sport', in the 'public', has there ever been any evidence of this happenign at other olympics?: the example that springs to mind, is the one that always peeves my Brother off; he plays tennis regularly, throughout the year, and gets annoyed he can't often do it, when the Wimbliton tennis thing is happening, as everyone* suddenly wants to go out and play tennis, for the couple of weeks, or whatever it is that the tennis is suddenly on the TV; Yet the vas vast majority of these people clearly don't continue with their sudden new interest in playing tennis, once the sport is back off the TV again for antoher year... So, is any sudden new interest people might have in a sport they saw during the olympics, mainly just sucha short lived passing interest that it doesn't relaly make any overall big a differnce to participation in that sport, in any kind of sustainible way?

Well, I seem to remember reading that the percentage of kids able to swim in Edinburgh more than doubled after the Commonwealth Pool was built .

I suspect the Olympic affect will be just like January - every January the number of people going to our local swimming pool quadruples at least, but after a few weeks the New Year's Resolutions are abandoned by about two thirds of the new people, leaving about a third of them continuing to come by summer. So chances are probably at least half of those who are currently interested will drop off in the near future, but if between a quarter and a half continue at it, it'll be worth it.

Build it, and they will come! Some may even return

<BB<

I noticed the same thing with tennis when I played regularly in my teens. Here's the thing though: of the hundreds of extra people who turn up to play when Wimbledon is on, a small proportion will stick with it. Maybe only 1%. But that's more than zero. One might ask how your brother got into tennis in the first place - was it Wimbledon?

I think it's a responsibility of parents, and to a lesser extent of the state as represented by local authorities, to present kids with the *opportunity* to try as many different sports as possible. Before I was sixteen, I'd tried:
- rugby
- football
- squash
- tennis
- badminton
- table tennis
- athletics
- discus
- shotputt
- javelin
- cricket
- dinghy sailing
- windsurfing
- basketball
- crown green bowling
- ice skating
- possibly some other things.

Now... as it happens, I don't regularly participate in any of those things today, mainly because I was diabolically bad at most of them, particularly the team sports. Curiously, the three sports I'd say I enjoy most, and DO most, hadn't been invented in any recognisable form when I was sixteen - snowboarding, paragliding and kitesurfing.

The point, however, is that I had the opportunity to try those things. And I've had the opportunity to try other things - fencing, Tae Kwon Do, rock climbing and other things - since. Some of the things you try stick, some don't.

And for some people, maybe nothing will stick and they'll spend their life playing video games. I don't think you can force people to enjoy something, and if they don't enjoy it there's no point forcing them to continue doing it. I do think there's a case to be made for forcing people to TRY things, though. And the focus should, I think, be on forcing them to try as many different things as possible, rather than, as my school did, forcing me for five years to play games I was no good at and was never going to be good at.

There is a tiny, tiny number of boys for whom sport will be a career, and an even smaller number of girls. And yet school sports seem focussed on identifying those people early and using the rest of the kids as practice fodder for the best.

Here's a radical idea - all school sports times in a town should be synchronised (Universities used to do it - do they still?). On any given sport day, there should be no more than one or two football or rugby matches being played, and that by the very, very best player only. All the rest of the kids should be doing something else sporting instead, something different. Obviously, that means we'd likely need more PE teachers, but you can pay those people in tracksuits, can't you? It's not like there's a shortage of people with "Sport Science" degrees and no jobs. (I know this for a fact because I sifted CVs for the post of a science teacher at a secondary school last year, and fully half the applicants appeared to think they could teach GCSE physics because they'd done a degree in PE).

I never played tennis at school, or golf, squash or badminton. I was mainly forced to do sports I loathed in teams of people I hated because we didn't have enough teachers to supervise anything more individual than 20-a-side football.

If you've got kids, don't play football with them - take them down the velodrome, or the BMX track, or the ice rink, or the lake, or anywhere where they can do something all their friends HAVEN'T done. Give them breadth of experience, and show them that sport can be something fun rather than a chore to be got through.

>Universities used to do it - do they still?<

Yep and it's still Wednesday afternoon. Untouchable for teaching purposes.

Just a quick aside back to the NHS theme.

Is the NHS free to use by EU members. For example parents of a polish menial worker coming over to receive free (?) NHS treatment.

But, at a purely finanncial way of looking at it, will it really 'be worth it', if the percentage sticki8ng at the sports is so low, when an alternative way of spending the money, perhaps on more facilities for sports, spread out in more local areas of the country, may have been a butter way, or providing these more experiences for more young people to try a wider range of sports, than maybe is currently even availible for many of them where they live...
The only team sports I vaguely liked at school were rugby, cricket and hockey, hockey I liked the most, but being male (or/and at the time), males were if anything wildly encouraged not* to do hokey, as it was, seemingly a 'girls thing' I mainly enjoyed things like hiking and canoeing, sailing etc, though for sailing it was just too expensive to really get into at all, so I mainly stuck to cannoeing and hiking and cycling (non competitively mind)

"Is the NHS free to use by EU members"

No.

It's free to the individual, but the cost is re-couped from the country. There's deals like this in place throughout the entire EU that allow countries to recover costs for other citizens visiting them.
It's not a flat-rate type cost though. For example if an emergency operation was needed and cost x amount of pounds, it's unliky that the full amount will be recouped, but *some* will.

Thanks for post 62, Hoovooloo.