Things one notices living in Adler

These days we're in St. Petersburg, visiting relatives and the city. The place is very nice, and so far we're enjoying the trip.

This has also allowed us to see another part of Russia, a big city this time. After seeing these two sides of the country, one can start knowing what may be usual and what is just happening in Adler (or maybe in little towns in general).

First thing, i already commented it, but in Russia, looks are very important. There is clearly a lot of time and efford dedicated to it. Our apartment looks like an old palace, and other apartments in the same price range had similar styles. If they didnt resemble a palace, they resembled an executive secret apartment for lovers and parties. Practicality is ignored when there's money, and the important thing is to look impressive. More normal apartments look like anywhere else, practical and cozy.

The importance of looks also applies to women (not so much to men). Its not the same for all of them, but lots of women wear very high heels, little dresses, make up and complex hairstyles, etc. For office work it may not bother, but we were rather surprised by a hairdresser with 10cm heels, which we cannot understand how did not hurt her enough to change to slippers after the first client.

We've been told by Russian women that they're not really integrated yet at work, and people usually treat them as mere decoration in worplaces, so i guess that's part of the reason...

We can confirm that driving is rather aggressive everywhere, but i believe Adler has proven to be much worse than a big city. In here traffic seems more normal. In Adler it was easier to see people burning tires in preparation to start moving their cars at high speeds...to stop 5 meters later and let people cross the street.

There is a lot of soviet-made blocks. In Adler it was harder to see this type of building, but i've seen the same type of neighborhood in Vilnius. These buildings look in bad shape from the outside, and they seem to have been made from small cubes. You can still see the lines of union quite clearly in the outside. Inside the apartments, they can be very nice. However, any public part (elevator, stairs) are usually not in good shape. The buildings are usually tall, 15 floors or more. They are separated from one another with wide streets that serve as parking spots for the cars of the people living in them.

There is lots of poverty. Sometimes not very evident, but still there. Lots of little cheap shops, lots of shady-looking markets, lots of people with clearly low-qualified jobs. These same people seem to have had no access to good educations (lots of low-level workers here do very, VERY stupid things, specially in construction).  Lots of these workers wear leather black jackets, dusty and old. Feels like some unofficial uniform sometimes. Lots of these people follow a curious clothes-conservation system. In order to avoid damage when cleaning clothes, they don't clean them. The result is....not good. In Adler it was much more noticeable, thanks to all the workers brought for the olympics, but in here we've also noticed cases like this around the city.

On the other hand, there are lots of luxury shops of one kind or another. Its easy to find jewelry shops, expensive restaurants, bosco shops (which charge a lot for any simple sports clothes), electronics, etc. You can also see lots of clients of these shops, and it seems lots of people also have a lot of money. There are lots of very expensive cars in the streets (specially in Adler, considering the total population). It seems that there is little middle class in here, just lots of lower and upper class.

There's lots of flower shops, that seem to be doing well. It's common to give flowers for lots of dates and reasons after all...

There's lots of dust in the streets. As mentioned, maybe as part of the socialist years, people pay lots of attention to personal possessions. Public things are more abandoned, and less clean. The subways in St. Petersburg are impressive, and the center is very clean. However, less turistic spots, or turistic for russians only, are more abandoned in general (Adler is very dusty).

St. Petersburg is a normal city, like Vilnius or London. Adler, in comparission, is more like the result of providing shops and services for a few hotels and resorts that happened to be there. These services needed their own houses, and more houses were build around them. It doesnt have a city feeling, or a town feeling, it's more like something that spontaneously grew, and now they're trying to adapt it so it works as a town.

Adler has a weird weather. In general, it is warm and nice, while having rainy days, more than in Spain (which is normal). However, it can be VERY windy. This winter, there were 2 days when we had strong warm winds. Walking in the street felt like being under a giant hairdrier. Temperatures went from 10 to 30 degrees, and the wind was strong enough that one of the dish antennas that we have in our apartment (and we don't use) got ripped off from its metallic hanging place. That was an extreme case, but other times it has been windy enough to make it hard to close windows.

And well, thats all for the moment, just some impressions and things we've noticed around here...

Protests and unemployment

Time for another small rant about things in Spain.

I try to follow the news in Spanish newspapers, and things are, as usual, bad. The latest report, from today, is saying that around 6.2 million people are currently unemployed in Spain. From the active population (people searching for a job or working), that represents around 27%.

This is retarded. I mean, the government is showing that they cannot do shit. The old government was exactly the same. Aleix Saló explained the problem very well in his last video, but it's still surprising how stupid and useless they can be.

Spain needs to make it easier to create companies and to make contracts. Last reforms only made it easier to fire people. Again, this is a faulty logic. The idea is that companies that do bad could fire more people so they get better. The problem is that said companies usually depend on people buying their stuff. That same people who do not have jobs any more. Ergo, you're just making the problem worse, not better.

Latest reports are also showing that the whole idea being followed against the crisis (to reduce public debt) does not work, and it was based in faulty studies. An important economist is explaining something quite evident and basic: countries in crisis have big debts because of the crisis, not the other way around. Things will not get worse just because your country has debt.  It's because things are getting worse that companies are closing, work-related taxes are not paid and the country has less money overall, thus increasing the debt.

Anyway, I'd like to talk about a form of protest that is lately happening in Spain, the "Escrache". This type of protest consists on bringing the protest to the house of the persons responsible for the problems. So, instead of making a demonstration in some central square, you do it in front of a member of parliament, explaining that their ideas are doing bad stuff, and trying to convince them to change their opinion and talk about it.

The main organizers of this type of protest are the people affected by the lack of consumer protection that Spain has regarding mortgages. The European union has already said that the Spanish legislation regarding mortgages is unfair and not compatible with European law. The current government has ignored this and hundreds of people are kicked out of their houses daily.

These people have started to organise themselves, to prevent police from removing them from their houses, and they have presented to the parliament a petition to eliminate the debt after giving the house. Basically, with Spanish laws, it's not enough with being kicked out, you still need to pay whatever you owe to the bank, minus the house price. These people are saying to modify that, so at least, if you give the house, your debt is cancelled. This is already done in other countries, but not in Spain. Besides, in Spain the bank has all the rights when executing these agreements, and the consumers have almost none.

These people presented this idea to parliament, and the ruling party has ignored it completely. So, these people have started going to the houses of the parliament members, to tell them and their families, in person, that not having a house is a big problem and to reconsider their vote.

The ruling parties (several of them) has started to scream that this is an outrage, this is antidemocratic, it's pure terrorism, and things like that. They have concentrated attacks towards Ada Colau, a spokesperson for the affected, as if she's their leader or something  when she's  only a spokesperson. They're following the traditional attacks against other parties, in a situation that doesn't fit, and it's confusing them, making them even more moronic.

This "Escrache" brings in me opposed feelings. They have a point when they say it's not very democratic. After all, if 100 people protesting in front of your home could change the opinion of a government, it would not seem fair. It's the majority of people the ones who would be able to change your opinion, not a few that  just happen to know where you live and go there to protest. They are free to do so, but if they could change politics like that, it could be abused. It should also be pointed out that they have been very pacific so far, and therefore considering them violent or "terrorism" is stupid.

However, this would be true in a true democracy, where the government actually tries to check what people want (with polls and referendums and votes), and tries to correct their policies to match the opinion of the majority of the population. Spain is not like that at all. In the newspapers it has been proved already that the current government accepted more money than what's legal from big companies, specially banks. The same banks that are rescued, protected, and have special laws that defend them and strip their customers of rights. These payments have been distributed among the leaders of the ruling party, and have not been declared. They are clearly illegal, and represent the fact that big companies are asking for favours to the government, which does what the big companies tell them. Last government probably did the same, it's just the evidence has not surfaced yet.

In this situation, where the big companies, a minority, is actually controlling the government, I think Escraches are the only possible protest. When you live in a dictatorship, the ethical thing to do is to overthrown the dictator. You cannot expect to do it nicely and legally, since the laws are imposed by unethical bastards who need to be kicked out.

If you are ruling only for your rich friends, dictator style, you need to be pointed out in the street and be told you're a bastard. And if (or when) somebody gets too tired of living in misery and poverty because of you and instead of killing themselves they just shoot you in the face, you will have it coming.....

Mansions of Madness

I don't remember if I've mention it before, but we really love tabletop games. We love making meetings where we can play them in group, and we have a nice selection of them that we have moved already a couple of times around the world, when changing houses.

I believe that around one year ago, for christmas, we got as a present this big game, Mansions of Madness. The game is set up in H.P.Lovecraft world, with cults, monsters from other dimensions, elder gods and stuff like that.

We already had one game from the same universe, Arkham Horror. We really like that game, its hard and compelling. It doesnt have any exploration component, but the feeling is similar to a Survival Horror, managing your resources and always having some shortage. There is lots of combinations in the game, and a certain randomness, but it adds to the excitement, and you get really involved while playing.

Mansions of Madness is different, but with a similar feeling. For starters, one of the players is the bad guy. The game is based on fixed scenarios, that allow several combinations, but they are more limited. Before the start, the bad guy needs to prepare everything according to that scenario.

The combat is much more random, based on cards, the attacked monster and the weapon used. In general, the game tries to set up everything as an ongoing story, even random events. All the cards have some little story, and after some turns special cards that advance the story are revealed.

The game has little figures representing the players and the monsters, and each player and monster has different stats and skills. The players need to explore the map, find clues towards their objective, and kill monsters. The "evil" player needs to command monsters and play nasty cards against the players, while trying to complete their "evil" objective.

The game sounds and looks awesome. However, it has problems. We've played it twice, and both times the same problems became apparent.

The first problem is that only one player explores. Most clues are protected by some key, and most keys are part of former clues. Therefore, the first player who gets the first key will be the only one finding all the clues (unless they drop one of the keys, which is a waste of time if done voluntarily). The other players are left with the task of killing monsters...which is not boring, but there may be moments with no monsters, and in general it feels as if you're not part of the important things in the game.

The second problem is that the "evil" player is overpowered. Its really easy to play game-breaking bad cards, which makes things less interesting. Cards, seems to me, should be more balanced.

The last problem, which seems to me the worst, is that there is no mistery, except in one scenario. You can find what you need to do by simply visiting all rooms, and just using the keys in the order they're found. The game advertises itself as a mistery, but most of the time you're just dragging the players from one side of the map to the other, with no possible thinking.

I believe that the game has a lot of potential. It has really great ideas, and the mechanics are really good and innovative, but the scenarios need to be improved. Mistery should be added, and there should be more posibilities and actions to take.

I believe that adjusting the rules and creating some scenario with more story parts and a bigger range of options can make this game a great one. However, i haven't made these changes yet, and the game as it is now feels like something is lacking...

Liberal Policies

There is a new video from Aleix Saló, Europesadilla. I'm sorry, this time I could not find English subtitles yet. The video, as always, explains the situation in Spain in a funny but direct way, while showing that we're totally and utterly screwed unless we kick some current leaders and their friends out of the power.

In the video, they explain two economic and politic ideas that are currently clashing in the democratic (or "democratic", like Spain) countries around the world. I thought I'd made a rant about these ideas, specially regarding the public services...

At heart, both ideas want to make life easier for everybody. The idea towards socialism defends that government has to control companies, offer services, give money support and redistribute wealth, so people have jobs and money and are not exploited. The liberal idea says that this control and redistribution makes it harder for companies to prosper, and without companies people will not have jobs and will not have wealth.With more freedom, companies thrive and hire more people, and share this wealth with their employees, redistributing it. It also defends that public services are inefficient, because they don't have as an objective to create wealth. All this money lost in the public services makes wealth to be lost for no reason. It also defends that we should be free to choose which service do we want, and by having a public service this freedom is denied, since we need to pay for the public one.

Lately, both sides are being considered as worthy options. However, I'm taking a side, and I consider the other one unethical, for several reasons. I'm talking about the liberal side, of course. I believe it can only make the situation much worse.

So, let's concentrate on the public services issue: The idea is that services will be more efficient being run by private companies, plus we will have the freedom to choose which service we do prefer to pay. If presented like this, it may sound reasonable, specially in a moment of crisis.

The problem is that private companies have a clear objective, to make more money. Please notice that the objective is not to make money, but to make more of it. A company that always wins the same amount of money is not considered successful, and may even be considered a failure. The point in the modern world is to always grow, forever (an impossibility), so when you're not growing, you're failing at your job as a company.

When these abstract services become things like healthcare or education, you can see the problem: These services are vital in making us, as a society, able to deal better with life and work. If your only concern when making these services is how much money they will gain, while keeping the service barely acceptable, you will cut costs in any way you can. It's good not to waste money, but in these services a cut in expenses may mean thousands of dead people that would have lived otherwise, or thousands of idiots who are unable to think higher thoughts when doing even the most basic tasks, which will result in poorer results in these tasks.

I'm not saying money should be ignored in the equation, but that the equation should prioritize first, the quality of the service. Then, it should try to equalize expenses so the balance gets closer to 0. If you have benefits, invest them in growing. In private companies, the directives and the stock owners get part of these benefits, so they will try to increase this amount. Some directives will even try to maximise short-time benefits, so they get a big chunk of them and then the company can crash, since they will be retired and enjoying the bonuses they got. Eliminating them from the equation guarantees that money will be dedicated only towards the improvement of the service. As per motivation (people say that public workers are unmotivated  with some truth to it), I kind of agree that, sometimes, public workers do not do as much as they can. However, I believe that this problem can easily be solved: Treat all public workers like private ones. Make it easier to fire people according to their productivity, and establish productivity evaluations. Offer also the possibility to ascend in ranks (and salary), if you choose to do so. If you make somebody unfirable, no matter if it's public or private, you have a problem if they turn out to be lazy, so make sure you can do something about it....

As per improvements, another argument is that without the motivation of money, the services will not try to become more efficient. About that, you can always make public evaluations of the services, auditories and plans for improvements. Since it's a public company, it's easier to implement. Private companies, unless demanded by law, will not have such checks, and I agree to the fact that the law should not interfere too much with private companies, apart from requiring some taxes and guaranteeing a certain level of well-being and security for the employees. Also, when a private company tries to make improvements, the underlying cause, as mentioned, is money. With the public one, these improvements can be triggered by other reasons, and problems that would be considered too expensive to fix can be resolved in the public ones, since the economic benefits are not as important.

Of course, I'm not saying all services should be like this. If you want to get rich, go ahead and create a private company that offers some non-vital service, and do whatever you legally can do to increase your money. However, there is a list of services that should always be available in a public way, that are too vital to be left only in the hands of private companies. Services like healthcare, education, security (firemen and police, and even the army, although I believe armies should not get a big part in modern, civilized countries with no problematic neighbours) or some basic transportation should be always available for everybody, in public form.

One of the arguments against that is that your freedom to choose a service is denied: Part of your money is taken to pay taxes for those services. This argument assumes that you're rich enough to pay for any service you want. One of the things that is usually said about freedom is that your freedom ends where the freedom of another person starts. Basically, you're free to do things as long as you're not decreasing the freedom of another person to do them. If we try to follow this, if you force people to choose such vital services (instead of having always the public option available), your're decreasing their freedom. Not everybody is going to have enough money to pay for these services in the first place, so if there is no public services, you are denying their freedom to use these services and to choose what to study, or even more basic, their freedom of getting better and live after falling ill.

Defenders of liberal theories will usually be rich, or people that believe they are rich enough to have freedom in paying the service. I believe that those critical services can be offered by private companies, as long as there is a public service offering the same, and if you have enough money to pay for the private one, please go ahead. However, eliminating the public one because you have the freedom to choose does not mean everybody shares this same freedom, so the public one should always be available. Denying it destroys the freedom of the people who do not have enough resources, and the only thing that does to the people who do have the resources is to charge them taxes, not killing them.

Anyway, just a rant about the latest decisions taken in Europe  where some bastards are trying to turn everything private, even when examples like USA and UK show proof of the big disaster that this will cause...(ask USA about their healthcare, or ask UK about their private train system and some of their hospitals....)

Some other day I'll rant some more about politics....

Doctor Who

We just finished watching the last chapter of Doctor Who, aired last Saturday, apparently. Other times I have mentioned this series, but I have never explained much about it...

Doctor Who is an English series, very VERY old one, that started as a way to teach some science things to kids, mixed with fiction. It evolved quite rapidly into a full science-fiction series with different plots, the teaching part mostly forgotten. The tone varied, and even if considered for kids most of the time, there were more adult themes thrown into the mix.

We're talking about lots of years and changes here, it started in 1963 and continued for a long time. In 1989, a big break in the series started, and it was not continued until 2005, with a movie in the middle of it, in 1996.

They got away with all this changes by the fact that the Doctor, the main character, is an alien with human form, that can regenerate when about to die. Using smart applications of that theory, they have changed the actor playing him all along these years. The Doctor is also accompanied by a "Companion", usually a girl, although later years there has been some more variety. To change companions, they just need to show that one of them got tired from travelling with him, and then the Doctor just finds another one (after some brooding). In some cases the companion has accidents and dies or is lost somewhere, but well, the end result is that they change.

The important thing, of course, is that the Doctor travels in a spaceship that is also a time machine (in the shape of a blue police box), so they can explore other planets and universes, the future, the past, even the present, and in some extreme cases, complete other dimensions.

Depending on the writer, things try to make more sense or less, from a scientific point of view, but it always tends to the "less sense", just for the fun of it.

We started watching it after the big break happened, and we have only watched the chapters emitted after 2005. Alba recommended them, and we really enjoyed them^^.

Anyway, the main writer for the first new seasons after 2005 had been Russel T. Davies. The plots had  been complex and interesting, plenty of times with some common theme present in most of the season's chapters.

The actors playing the Doctor in the first 4 new seasons were Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant. Tennant in particular has done an incredible job, and is one of the best Doctors ever.

Of course, being the main writer does not mean you write all the chapters, there were other writers. One of these writers was Steven Moffat, a fan of the series since he was a kid, that has done work as the writer of other successful series. In the first 4 seasons, Moffat wrote one or two chapters in each of them. And they were awesome. Truly incredible chapters, scary, creepy, interesting, touching, funny chapters, all at the same time.

The chapters are The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
.
Watch them, even if you're not going to watch the rest of the series. Specially, watch Blink.

When Davies decided to end his period and leave it to someone else, that someone else was going to be Steven Moffat. The actor playing the Doctor would change and Tennant would leave too, but the fact that Moffat would take charge promised to be awesome.

The new Doctor ended up being Matt Smith, and even if not as good as Tennant, his doctor is quite interesting too, more goofy and in another world, less serious, but still giving a nice touch to it.

Moffat, however, was a disappointment.

His plots are usually much more simplistic than Davies, and make much less sense (when he starts getting into time travel, the amount of bullshit that doesn't make any sense with everything established beforehand is astounding). He made some awesome chapters before, but when he got free rule over it, lots of chapters resemble pure fan fiction, where he crams 6 different alien species (that appeared in the old series that he watched as a child), without making any sense of why they are here or why they're fighting with or against the Doctor.

Moffat is a fan of not explaining things too much, but you need to draw the line somewhere, and if you killed an entire dangerous alien species, and/or locked it inside some other dimension, when they appear again without further explanation it feels kind of...cheap. As I said, like cheap harry potter fan-fiction, where all of a sudden Hermione falls in love with Draco, logic be damned.

That's half of the chapters...the other half, the problem is another one. In the other half of the chapters, where things make sense, the world feels...empty. Davies was an specialist of showing probable real-life consequences of some alien attack over London (for example, people leaving London for Christmas because every previous one some dangerous thing was happening in there). It's little things that help to create a world that has internal workings and makes sense.

Terry Pratchett, I believe  has mentioned several times that the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork, that he created, makes sense because you can imagine it working even when the heroes are not around. It has a life of its own, it's not only a background scenario where plot happens.

Moffat missed precisely that for a very long time, and there were lots of chapters that felt as if there was no other world population than the 6 characters shown in screen....the feeling was that something was weird in that world, it was not really logic, it was half empty.

The last 2 seasons where Moffat has participated had these big problems, the plot was going all around the place, made little sense, introduced 5 minutes-characters as some kind of star guest and other similar bullshit.

There were good chapters (for example, I liked a lot The Doctor's Wife, done by Neil Gaiman, a writer of books that I really like), but the overall feeling was a disappointment.

However, even with problems, we could enjoy chapters, it's just that not as much as before...and the two-three companions of these 2 season managed to become interesting and nice. After a while, the companions had a life that made sense, and this added much-needed logic to the world.

Anyway, we've noticed that the chapters are getting better, and I really enjoyed this last chapter.

The current season, that stopped months ago and just now is being continued, has had already 2-3 chapters where the "world half-empty" feeling has disappeared. Maybe it's a little thing, but with these chapters, I finally got the feeling that we were in the same universe as the one done by Davies. There was a retarded chapter too (Moffat doesn't understand time travel at all sometimes, or contradicts everything we've seen, including things he has said), but overall things seem to have improved, and it's getting back to a very interesting place...

We'll see how the next chapter goes^^