And that in most respects it has be a disaster, I've lost count of the number of scandals and resignations... [2] Rather than being good PR for Japan, it feels like it's been overwhelmingly negative.
On top of this, COVID19 infections are rapidly increasing (now at their highest level). While the government expands the state of emergency, asking people to restrict their activities while holding the largest sporting event in the world...
[1] https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14351670
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jul/19/tokyo-olympics...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/world/asia/yoshiro-mori-t...
Los Angeles is looking forward to having the games in 2028 because it gives them extra money to pay for infrastructure that they've been planning to build anyway.
San Francisco really wanted the 2028 games as well because it would have allowed us to finish building BART/CalTrain around the Bay, and we would have already had all the venues necessary with the various pro and college facilities around the Bay.
Do you have a source? From https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/economics-hosting-olympic-g...
> As a result, in 1979 Los Angeles was the only city to bid for the 1984 Summer Olympics, allowing it to negotiate exceptionally favorable terms with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
> The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles were the only games to produce a surplus, in large part because the city was able to rely on already existing infrastructure. As the costs of hosting have skyrocketed, revenues cover only a fraction of expenditures. Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics generated $3.6 billion in revenue, compared with over $40 billion in costs, and London’s Summer Games in 2012 generated $5.2 billion compared with $18 billion in costs. What’s more, much of the revenue doesn’t go to the host—the IOC keeps more than half of all television revenue, typically the single largest chunk of money generated by the games.
Of course in the usual London fashion most of the money came out of UK govt coffers, national lottery funding etc - so it was just a form of London sucking cash out of the rest of the UK to build infra, via the handy "Olympics" excuse, so I can see how a londoner might argue it was good as it was a means of extracting resources from the rest of the country.
In the aggregate, it was just a giant waste of money especially for the 90% of the UK population that isn't in London.
I can give some examples;
1) Newham was a very impoverished area before the olympic stadium was set to move there. Now Stratford and Newham are desirable.. More desirable than Hackney which has been "up and coming" for as long as I lived there.
2) Internet in London is/was _abysmal_. Genuinely awful. I even wrote a exasperated blog post about it[0]. This was due to degraded and faulty ADSL being he only option and grossly oversubscribed even if it worked well- and the large providers only followed each other with fibre installations.
When the olympics rolled in there was an enormous infrastructure improvement - I even remember talking to some Telecity employees about it. -- That infrastructure was later sold on to last mile providers who expanded it a bit and I went from speeds worse than dial-up with frequent route drops to symmetric gigabit and IPv6 using a new company called "Hyperoptic". That was a real improvement for everyone in my area because they had given up on home internet. (no netflix, youtube, only basic banking websites possible).
[0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/the-true-state-of-london-broadband
So, what are you contributing to the conversation?
London, like most modern cities, generates a surplus that subsidizes surrounding suburban and rural areas[1].
It was still an awful waste of money, but it wasn't part of any trend.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...
[1] https://www.ippr.org/news-and-media/press-releases/revealed-...
There is a lot of self-fulfilment when it comes to London spending vs London generation of revenues.
It's famously the case that London props up almost the entire rest of the country. Scotland itself being a net-loss in terms of GDP.
I come from a City called Coventry, "investment" in the city is non-existent; the only investor right now is the University which has essentially bought the entire City over the last 10 years.
Why? Because "Coventry doesn't make money". Why does Coventry not make money? -- well, companies would never headquarter there because the infrastructure is not good enough and the networking connections are not compelling; even if you think it will save you money because it's cheaper to hire in Coventry (somewhere in the order of 1/3rd london salaries, 1/5th London commercial rents) it's still awkward because navigating the city requires making use of the awful public transport or buying a car[0] (which the city is close to capacity with already!)
Birmingham, Britains "second city" has only moderate investment compared to London (though insanely more than most other UK cities), but also feels destitute in the majority of areas, _especially_ when compared to London, the infrastructure is marginally better than Coventry but the prestige/networking/access is nearly no different.
This is many decades in the making, there is absolutely no way to compete with a city like London which is reaping the rewards of many decades of incredible investment which creates network effects which only serve to increase the gravitational pull of the city.
Coventry has fought (as I see it) 2 major issues which have held it back.
Firstly as the center of the UK car industry and the Detroit of Britain its economic successes and failures have been tied closely to the ups and downs of UK car production. The collapse of that industry from the 1980s through to the early 2000s resulted in huge numbers of unemployed skilled and semi-skilled manufacturing workers. Manufacturing of that type and scale is not something governments can will into existence (and generally the efforts to do so have been at best non-ideal - see Rover's sale to BMW).
The other issue with Coventry is the well-intentioned but disastrous rebuilding of the city center following its flattening in WWII. The city center remains an uninviting concrete jungle with few non-retail businesses and almost no housing. Though the 1980s the inner core became a no-go area after dark and continues to have a bad reputation. Outside of University housing there is little reason for anyone to live anywhere but the suburbs (or in a neighboring town or city).
I would argue that Coventry does have excellent infrastructure and that is no part of why companies haven't wanted to move there. There are multiple trains per hour to London (and Birmingham) and is served by major motorways to London, Birmingham and Oxford (M6/M45/M69). Compared to most UK cities traffic seems manageable.
The expansion of Coventry University and University of Warwick (which despite its name is located in Coventry) may have been the best possible result for the city. How else could the UK government have spent money in the city to attract the size of employers that the city needs?
But now there is, yet another, infrastructure project that is connected to London.
Spreading investment around the UK would be a good thing, it would take the heat out of Southern property prices, if everyone wasn't compelled to find jobs in the same geographic area.
Except it is one giant international PR and brand recognition event for the host country. TV ads cost in aggregate billions too and don’t bring any revenue immediately, doesn’t mean they are a waste of money.
Not to mention Olympics getting people interested in doing sports, which amid a global obesity upsurge, could also be worth more than nothing.
Even for “name recognition” as an end in itself - cities like London and Tokyo are hardly backwaters in need of a PR boost.
If tackling obesity is such a priority, I’m sure there’s more direct and effective ways to tackle it with 11 billion quid.
How well can companies evidentiate their brand awareness campaigns? How well can an actress calculate returns from having attended a talk-show? Evidence of absence cannot reliably be inferred from an absence of evidence.
> Even for “name recognition” as an end in itself - cities like London and Tokyo are hardly backwaters in need of a PR boost.
Familiarity is not the same as salience. Coca Cola is known by virtually the entire world, that doesn't make them stop the ads or branding campaigns.
> If tackling obesity is such a priority, I’m sure there’s more direct and effective ways to tackle it with 11 billion quid.
Conceivable doesn't mean doable. There are many direct and effective ways of improving a great many things in the world, yet they don't happen.
Just like a great startup idea doesn't translate to a billion dollar revenue, political implementation doesn't spring into existence just from good ideas either.
Remarkably well actually. You can do things like ask people questions about the olympics and the sponsor city and then put them into cohorts based on their answers. From that, you can look at how much spending occurred in the target city from each cohort.
https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/buying-mortgages...
Why would you need the Olympics to have land repurposed. They were waiting for a good excuse? No need to have big expensive party if you could have done that in any other context. But then again you'd need to whole country to accept paying for making new apartments just in Sydney.
Paris might also be, as they have very little new infra to build.
> We simulated the behaviour of industries, households and government resulting from hosting the Games for each of eight Australian regions over the years from 1997 to 2005. Our results revealed that rather than producing an economic benefit the Sydney Games actually reduced Australian household consumption by $2.1 billion.
For comparison there are later reviews of the economics of the town with the 6 years after Olympics, with less simulation apparently, which come to a different conclusion https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/10360
I honestly don’t know which one is more trustworthy
Definitely not true. However, post hoc I am forced to admit it was not as colossal a waste of money as I'd expected, and honestly there was an astonishingly positive societal response. So, I was wrong, but I was not alone!
You can never say that for sure because the money spent on organizing Olympics could have been used somewhere else (or not used at all, therefore decreasing taxation). It was certainly a waste for anyone not living in London in any case.
I think the majority is for a non-COVID olympics.
There’s a state of emergency in Tokyo (now expanded to surrounding areas). But this doesn’t really restrict people very much.
Yes, the majority are against holding the Olympics now (or cancelling it if it’s not possible to postpone). But you’d likely find support for delaying the Olympics until after COVID-19 (whenever that might be).
When you phrase it like that it has me imagining make the 100m sprint for Covid athletes (maybe 80% SpO2?). It sounds quite interesting. So I guess I’m now part of the 20%.
You are basically describing every olympics I can remember and most that I’ve read about before my birth.
Assassinations, at least 5 decades of doping scandals by East Germany and USSR, ice skaters’ husbands attacking competitors, Hitler, etc.
The Olympics is a rage-inducing waste of taxpayer money, but I love watching gymnastics.
Japan's Law incites and rewards Child Abductions by giving sole custody to the first abductor. Judicial visitation decisions are not enforced.
By refusing to protect the fundamental Right of Children to access both their parents directly and regularly, as per the CRC, Japan is a massive and frequent Child Right violator.
In 2019, Japan Minister of Justice publicly and cynically qualified the CRC of "non-binding", and the European Parliament's resolution denouncing the violations of being "unfunded".
Is is estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 new children each year, the majority Japanese, have this basic Human Right violated in Japan.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-cust...
The UN's CRC is indeed about Children's Human Rights. The specific article in question being Art 9.3
And just because the UN says it doesn’t make it so.
Clearly not.
You can go to many places on earth, even major western countries, where people do not have these rights.
However, they are sometimes not respected and it's the duty of the international community to lobby against the perpetrators especially when they took the moral engagement to recognise them officially.
It not the wild west, there are voluntarily agreed upon international treaties that can be brought as a base for these discussions.
Many people do not have these rights. This cannot possibly be a surprise to you?
> That's the definition of Universal.
We know. That's why they aren't universal rights.
> However, they are sometimes not respected
If you live under an authority that doesn't think you have these rights, then you don't have them.
If someone the other side of the world tells you that you have the right to freedom of religion, but the authority you live under disagrees, and the people on the other side of the world don't do anything about it, then in what sense do you have the right?
You don't - it's meaningless.
If I say I have decided that you have the universal inalienable right to beer, but where you live doesn't agree, and I don't do anything about it either, then have I really given you that right? Of course not.
I think what you're saying is that you think people should have these rights. Great. But they don't in practice, and so they aren't universal.
The vocation of tyrants is to have their head cut at some point, more or less figuratively.
So even you know they aren't actually universal or inalienable.
232 years of pretending people have rights that they demonstrably do not have.
Yes. What is the meaning of a right that nobody enforces?
It's just an aspiration, a wish, something you'd like to have or other people would like you to have. If nobody's enforcing it, it's not really a right. By definition.
> Hence events like the French Revolution, the Abolition of slavery, or the Civil Rights Movement.
These were fights to create rights. They didn't have them before.
This does not mean I dispute that there are human rights. Politicians have every incentive to claim something as a right when it’s not.
For example, the UN could announce the newfound “Right to a Gun-Free Society.” Despite the name, it’s not Universal or Unalienable.
Already during our visits to Japan in 2017 and 2019 we could see a lot of infrastructure work going on all around, lots of optimistic Olympic advertising and countdowns. It really should have been an even presenting modern Japan to the whole world, with the expectation that many of the countless tourists who would go for the Olympics would like Japan and return.
But with covid this is all gone, a lot of expensive infrastructure that will take many years to pay back without all the tourists and possibly bad image of Japan on the international stage & dissatisfaction with the government and foreign organizations in the Japanese population.
Oh well, at least Akira did not happen. ;-)
COVID blew them all away though.