Tag Archives: Government

Step One

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Finally… having patience is starting to pay off because I’ve received some wonderful news yesterday. I’ve been invited to meet up on Monday morning to be part of a group of people who will be given the opportunity to study and work at the same time. This in itself is nothing new because there are quite a few possibilities to accomplish the same.

In this case however, the government and a few other organisations expect a lack of psychiatric nursing staff in the next three years so they have invested money in a special project to train people. It means that the required study which would normally take four years will be taught in three years instead, starting with a three months crash course.

After the crash course you’ll be working four days a week and attend school on the fifth day for the next three years to get a bachelor degree. My goal is a master degree because I’d like to finish the psychology study that I started years ago. At the time -causing disagreements- I was forced to stop because of an unwilling/unsympathetic partner.

I’m really looking forward to start the study and try to get another degree. My personal situation and this recession have forced me to think about my future in a creative way. I’ve been lucky to have turned a hobby into a career at the time, but things have changed and I’ve come to the conclusion that I need a career that will provide for the next twenty years.

Don’t get me wrong, there will be side projects and I will never give up on the creative part of me. In fact I’m still working on the long-term business plan which involves design and that along with the webdesign business will be the creative outlet that I’ll be needing to keep things interesting in that area. I’ll need that outlet because it’s part of who I am.

Although I’m totally committed and enthusiastic to make this application work for the next three to seven years it will still be ‘a way to pay the bills‘ and live a comfortable life. I’ve to choose security over current instability, people are still getting laid off and no one knows what’s gonna happen next but it doesn’t mean I’ll be giving up on creativity, far from it!

There are more steps planned ahead but for now I’m taking one at a time because that one step will cause a chain reaction once I’ll be on a roll and I’m getting all excited thinking about what lies ahead. It seems I’m finally about to get that long deserved break *wink*

Square Wheel

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I’m glad the Olympics are over, I banned it: total madness that doesn’t make sense to me. Living in London and having to pass the Olympic site on a regular basis made me realise what this madness is all about. You wouldn’t believe the amount of money that already has been wasted just to start the planning, demolish existing buildings and start the build of a different ‘updated’ infrastructure and village. I’m glad the Lowlands only hosted this once in 1928 and I bet back in those days it wasn’t about billions… Nowadays everything seems to have the ‘O’ tag attached to it as an excuse to waste more money while they’re already way over budget, four years before the opening…

Some predict it will be ten times over budget; more than £20billion and for what? Two weeks of competitive sports? Two miserable weeks… It’s sickening to see what’s going on behind the scenes: there are so many people out there in need of medication and food while on the other hand huge amounts of money is spent in the blink of an eye without having second thoughts. And then having to read all the transparent excuses published in the media just to justify certain behaviour while inflation is rising, unemployment rates have increased and people here are genuinely struggling. I’m not going to address the political side of this because I try to stay away from politics but I’m sure you’ll get my drift.

I read an article online published November 2007 about Beijing, where the author came up with the same questions and facts that I just mentioned above about London. Why is it then that exactly the same is happening over here: why do people have to reinvent the square wheel, don’t they ever learn? And what message do you send out when you decide that a 7-year old child -who won the competition to perform the anthem- is not ‘cute and pretty enough’ to represent the Opening Ceremonies and instead have her replaced by a lip-synching Chinese version of the perfect cabbage patch doll? So typical… It’s all one big puppet theatre. Doesn’t this all sound slightly twisted to you, it certainly does to me…

An excerpt:

Beyond Burma, there are more reasonable arguments against the Beijing Olympics. The total expense, mainly on construction, is in the tens of billions of dollars. This is on top of the direct hosting expense, which is estimated to be $2.4 billion and will be covered by income from NBC, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and marketing revenue. Given the fact that a mere $40 can support an entire year of education for a poor, rural child, how many children could get basic education if this money were spent on them instead?

A Chinese official reportedly said that “The 2008 Olympics Games may advance China’s GDP by 3 to 4 percent.” What he did not say, or even understand, is that such increase is on top of the already overheated urban development, at the cost of the rural poor. The gap between China’s urban rich and rural poor is already huge, and rapidly expanding. The 2008 Olympics is only widening this dangerous gap.

Contributing more to the problem is the destruction of historical structures, local villages, and the environment in general, to make way for the very expensive new construction. But it’s too late to stop such destruction now. It was something the International Olympic Committee could have done six years ago. Shouldn’t you boycott the IOC instead?