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Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5326 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian
| Message 529 of 672 29 June 2012 at 2:44pm | IP Logged |
I will not be able to come on the Skype session. I have an open garden on Sunday, and will be busy. Wish you all a nice session, though!
1 person has voted this message useful
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5048 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian*
| Message 530 of 672 29 June 2012 at 3:11pm | IP Logged |
Tecktight wrote:
To Mark: Sorry if I got snappy. The visa thing can get very frustrating, especially
when it's discussed as a political
item, rather than a logistical issue.
Best to stick to language-discussions only, methinks.
Hope everyone has a good weekend, and I hope to see (talk) to some of you on Sunday!
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Never mind, I can't be offended with that. I found some information about this issue
and we have discussed it on the Lingvoforum. The topic is rather complicated and laws
are changing constantly, so I found out a lot of things. But here, I agree, it was not
a
useful discussion.
Edited by Марк on 29 June 2012 at 3:30pm
2 persons have voted this message useful
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5548 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona
| Message 531 of 672 29 June 2012 at 5:17pm | IP Logged |
@Solfrid Cristin
How are all your roses coming along by the way? I bet your garden is a little parcel of paradise around this time of year... :) I have small gardens at both the front and back of the house (an occupational hazard of being British I guess), nevertheless it's still quite a weekend workout to keep on top of it all (everything's growing so quickly with the copious servings of sun and rain we've been having lately). The roses, you'll be glad to hear, are also blooming, but I must confess in all ignorance, I only know each variety by their most basic non-Latin name: i.e. "that red/pink/yellow bush over there" (lol).
Edited by Teango on 29 June 2012 at 5:24pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5326 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian
| Message 532 of 672 29 June 2012 at 5:29pm | IP Logged |
Teango wrote:
@Solfrid Cristin
How are all your roses coming along by the way? I bet your garden is a little parcel of paradise around this time of year... :) I have small gardens at both the front and back of the house (an occupational hazard of being British I guess), nevertheless it's still quite a weekend workout to keep on top of it all (everything's growing so quickly with the copious servings of sun and rain we've been having lately). The roses, you'll be glad to hear, are also blooming, but I must confess in all ignorance, I only know each variety by their most basic non-Latin name: i.e. "that red/pink/yellow bush over there" (lol). |
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They are coming along quite nicely - next week you can ask ReneeMona who will come and see them on Monday, and I am sure she can give a more objective view than I can :-)
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| Tecktight Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States Joined 4968 days ago 227 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian Studies: German, Russian, Estonian
| Message 533 of 672 03 July 2012 at 10:19am | IP Logged |
Everyone, I'm sorry about the disaster on Sunday. I couldn't get my internet connection stable for even 2 minutes--it
kept logging me on and off.
I've gone off to a cafe with my laptop just to write this..
I'm getting really sick of my internet situation here. I've been to my internet provider four times already, and today
will be my fifth. I hope they can do something right this time.
Anyway, to that end, is there anyone else who would be willing to initiate the Skype sessions for the next month or
so (until August, when I get back home, where I have blissfully quick and stable internet)? After that, I can take over
again, and I expect my internet to be just fine in Berlin, too, otherwise I will no longer consider Germany a civilized
country.
1 person has voted this message useful
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish
| Message 534 of 672 03 July 2012 at 10:57am | IP Logged |
It's ok - you only disappointed me, and we all know how hard I am to disappoint X)
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| drsarvo Diglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 4704 days ago 143 posts - 149 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Russian
| Message 535 of 672 04 July 2012 at 7:50pm | IP Logged |
Hello everyone:
I keep using euronews for Russian reading practice. I am just reading an article about the Ukranian Parliament and a law about Russian language. I learned what the Rada is and that there is something called the Party of Regions. Quite interesting. When I finish reading it, I'll give you my opinion :) By the way, this article reminds me that novel of Frederick Forsyth, The Devil's Alternative. Has anyone read it?
1 person has voted this message useful
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5038 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French
| Message 536 of 672 05 July 2012 at 1:04am | IP Logged |
Imho it makes a lot of political sense for Russia to keep reciprocally tough visa laws with the US and the EU. Sadly having visa policies is even more consistent with regulations on internal population movement dynamics -- wouldn't make sense to allow foreigners enter anytime while controlling its own citizens movements.
It's also true that in practice Russia's visa and other processes are horridly slow and inconvenient, beyond what could be considered acceptable in this century. It's a consequence, I think, of the fact that Russia is a true bureaucracy and the point of bureaucracy, as we all know, is to keep itself going. So every day a visa applicant has to wait warrants more jobs for bureaucrat-cogs in the bureaucrat-machine and more money in those department budgets.
I'd suppose that if we shoved aside the political agendas and the back and forth kowtowing, it would still make sense for Russia to keep visa control. For all those who argue that more tourists is more money. The argument goes thus.
Tourism is a really minor part of GDP in Russia. I think currently there's maybe 2.5M tourists per year. Guess where those 2.5M people go? I'd guess 60% Moscow, 30% St.Petersburg, where else are they going to "tour"? Certainly sea voyages to the north pole don't attract 2.5M tourists a year. If tomorrow Russia doubled its number of tourists guess where they'd all go, hint M&SP? So sure, tourism would bring an inflow money to the two capitals but consider how much harm it would also wreck on the economics of those cities and the rest of Russia. Imagine that tourism makes your wage ten percent higher and doubles your rent. Moscow and St.Petersburg are already the two most expensive polities in Russia, and Moscow and St.P rival most European/American cities on most economic rankings, and Moscow probably overshadows most, save maybe NYC or London.
So think what happens when the economic centers of Russia get flooded with even more capital, it makes the economic inequalities between M&SP and rest of Russia even bigger and makes M&SP even less accessible for the rest of Russia. And even insofar as M&SP are polities unto themself by now, they're far more dependent on the rest of Russia than they are on the extra tourism capital to risk it.
So before some of you yell out that more tourists means more money, it would do you well to consider what effect that money will have on everyone involved.
Don't get atop that soapbox unless you know how to climb down, i.e. unless you have more data that allows you to model the specific changes in the situation and predict concretely what the effects of your proposed course of action will be.
TLDR: tourism = money != purchasing power
And now to shot myself in the foot: I'm not an economist and do not purport to have analyzed this situation in detail, this is more of a cry for reason before jumping off the cliff with a banner declaiming visas.
I just saw war cries for tourism and Twoflower with his infamous hungry chest of gold popped into my mind. So go read the Colour of Magic, or at least watch the movie before you would unleash such evil upon the Ankh-Morporks of Russia.
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