The big waste over Olympia

[Jimbuna]

I'd heard of the Berlin Airport fiasco but surely there would be insufficient funding to create the new builds necessary to host an Olympics?

[Skybird]

What do you mean by "insufficient funds" if a.) the whole country has to pay for it via direct federal aid contributions by the national government and via the socalled financial equalization scheme between the federal government and the federal states/Länder, and b.) money is understood as a crediteline that can be infinitely pushed into the endless future?

[Feuer Frei!]

Soon the whole country will be broke. Not just Berlin.

Italy says hi.

[Oberon]

The Olympics is supposed to be about hope and cheer, a joyful event to bring people together.

I think it's safe to say that Berlin will probably be ruled out by the IOC, so I wouldn't worry about it.

[Schroeder]

Originally Posted by Oberon

The Olympics is supposed to be about hope and cheer, a joyful event to bring people together.

I think it's safe to say that Berlin will probably be ruled out by the IOC, so I wouldn't worry about it.

If we can find enough guys to pay off the officials there is hope....isn't that how the game is played these days?

[Otto Fuhrmann]

At least Germany can still afford to build and maintain roads, let alone airports.
Ireland is always broke AND we probably have the worst infrastructure in the whole of Europe. Hosting anything is a dream Ireland would love to have, but we can't even afford to dream at the moment.

Originally Posted by Otto Fuhrmann

At least Germany can still afford to build and maintain roads, let alone airports.
Ireland is always broke AND we probably have the worst infrastructure in the whole of Europe. Hosting anything is a dream Ireland would love to have, but we can't even afford to dream at the moment.

Ah come on, be fair now.
Albania could probably beat us to that title.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Schroeder

If we can find enough guys to pay off the officials there is hope....isn't that how the game is played these days?

This is true, very true.

To be honest we all felt the same thing about our Olympics, I mean, the very next day after it was announced that London had won the 2012 Olympics, 52 people were killed and 700 injured in four suicide bombings in the same city, and then a week after that another attempt was made to carry out terror attacks. If that wasn't a sign of foreboding I don't know what was.
The UK is not exactly known for its recent public works projects, I mean the Millennium Dome was a white elephant that has only just found a use for itself, and Wembley Stadium spent most of its time being rebuild after parts of it had fallen over, and true to form as the months got nearer to the Opening Ceremony more and more news reports came out that things were running behind and over budget, and dire predictions were made that the public transport network in London would seize up, the roads would gridlock and terrorists would rain fire from the skies. London would be the laughing stock of the whole world and the financial effort to create this mess would finally send us off the edge and into oblivion.

None of that happened. The Opening Ceremony was an epic mix of humour and culture, none of the stadiums collapsed, traffic and the public transport was busy but not broken, and for businesses across Britain 2012 turned into one of the best financial years we'd experienced since the recession began.

So who knows, having the Olympics could be the best thing that's happened to Berlin since 1989.

[Wolferz]

I guess we're all in the same basket to hell these days.
Practically every government on the planet is running in the red.
Perhaps they're just waiting for the house of cards to fall in before they wipe the slate clean and start all over again.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Skybird

What do you mean by "insufficient funds" if a.) the whole country has to pay for it via direct federal aid contributions by the national government and via the socalled financial equalization scheme between the federal government and the federal states/Länder, and b.) money is understood as a crediteline that can be infinitely pushed into the endless future?

You need what little you've got left to keep shoring up the EU member states that weren't anywhere near as prudent in the past as they should have been

[Catfish]

I have an idea though, if the Stuttgart 21 underground railway station is a success, we could build an underground airport, in Berlin.

[Tango589]

That could work. All you need are 2 large holes dug at angles to serve as the entrance and exit from the runway tunnel, and everything else is subterranean!