AlfieMoon
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Posts posted by AlfieMoon
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The scottish goverenment have control basically over all the industry,,, although they are not allowed into the eu/norway fisheries talks... The whole treatment of the fishing industry seems strange to me, they wanted out the common fisheries policy and then over night changed their minds and think its the best thing ever..... Dont get me wrong the MPA's that are away to be enforced have its supports within the industry, most being creel fish and i can see the good it would do if done correctly but this will effect a lot of livelily hoods and turn a lot of people against the snp
I'm afraid I still don't understand so hope you don't mind me asking more....
In terms of fishing quotas and landings - who is it that controls, issues and negotiates quotas for:
- Scottish fishermen
- UK fishermen
- EU (on non-UK) fishermen
In terms of MPA's - I had never heard of these until now and have just read the news of today and even by your own admission (and from what other critics have said) many seem to acknowledge the need for MPA's but are also simultaneously critical or say that they go too far. It's hard to please everyone and I'm by no means clued up as to what is the middle ground here.
What other SNP specific decisions are directly pissing off fishermen?
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I know this has cropped up before but have never quite got my head round it.
As far as I understood - fishing was tied into the EU, which means this is managed at UK level by Westminster.
To what extent do SNP have power or influence on the industry in Scotland?
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Heading to Moscow for 4 days en route to Georgia at the end of the month. Any tips for places to go, sights to see, etc.?
Also, that weekend, Dynamo are at home to FK UFA, Spartak are at home to Anzhi, and Lokomotiv are at home to FK Krasnodar. Any suggestions for which one I should go to? Leaning towards Spartak at the moment, but the opinion of the board's resident ground-hoppers is also welcome!
The underground stations are amazing and well worth seeing. Google for a top 10 to hop around or pick up the Top 10 touristy book from DK.
Red Square
St. Basil's Cathedral
Kremlin, Armoury and Diamond hall
Lenin's mausoleum
All the above are worth your time but worth checking dates and times for mausoleum as from memory it was only specific days/times. Once you get through the queue and to the actual place of his resting (within the Kremlin walls) then it'll take you about 30 secs to do a walk-past his body and out the other side of the room. No time to stop, no photos, no noise and no hands in your pockets (as I was made aware by one of the military guards), Can also be fair-sized queues for the rest of the Kremlin attractions listed above when purchasing at the main ticket office so not sure if it's possible to buy in advance.
We wanted to do the Bolshoi Theatre tour (as theatre company was on tour so no shows) - but the tour didn't seem to be on when we hoped. It reads like there's only 1 English tour on a specific day, specific time and limited to 15 people so can be a scrum to get in. Anyway... we made it to ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg which made up for missing out on The Bolshoi.
Went out to Moscow University - it is HUGE! One of the Stalin's Seven Sisters which are massive buildings dotted around various points of the city. Other ones (of the 7) are now massive hotels or government buildings. They didn't let us into the uni buildings for a walk around anyway.
Take a walk through Gorky Park.
For cool pubs/clubs - we went to a very cool roof terrace called Chips (close to Bolshoi), then there was a very high-end club called Soho Rooms (which you'd require a table reservation). There was also a number of bars/clubs down by a stretch of the river but I can't remember the name of any. I just found the following guide which makes me want to go back!!
http://www.travelingmyself.com/2013/03/28/top-10-night-clubs-in-moscow/
Cafe Pushkin was a nice spot for lunch and a very old setting - one of the top recommended places.
I've also since wondered if it would have been decent to visit Star City for some cool cosmonaut stuff but didn't investigate at the time nor since.
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What facts are available to support the argument that curriculum for excellence is fine, it's just the people implementing it did nothing for 7 years then moaned?
The point is that it is a long-term strategy. You can pick faults on things like the mathematics exam but other than that it is all just opinion - mainly from teachers who are resistant to change. I also think the idea of it's aim being for it to provide braindead, subservient worker bees is sounding a bit paranoid in all honesty but that's just my opinion.
The PISA system is broken and is not credible in the modern age as children and young adults have been historically educated to memorise and regurgitate information. They are not encouraged to think for themselves or develop dynamically enough for the modern world. The CfE takes a long-term strategy towards addressing that and the process involved a wide variety of stakeholders and studied strong education systems from other countries in doing so. There's a lot of efforts being put into raising attainment and quality improvement. I think it's all too easy to point the finger and say everything is crap and there's always reference material and soundbites to think that opinion is justified but I don't think that is necessarily getting the full picture.
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Nice of them to feck off to another project while this one is still ongoing. I'm sure one of the "main people" thought it would work in theory but reality doesn't always conform to theory especially in the soft sciences.
Well if we start with teacher complaints.
Teachers wanted another year to prepare for it. I'll just lift the results of a teachers poll verbatim from the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association conducted in 2010.
79% of teachers who responded disagreed that the outcomes and experiences set out in the new Curriculum were adequate.
88% said that they required additional resources to implement CfE.
90% said that the main problem lay in the lack of assessment materials.
79% said they had not been adequately consulted on timetabling and curriculum models.
67% said that their school's curriculum model either enjoyed nil support from them or only a small amount of support.
And 73% agreed that communications from local authorities, LTS (learning and teaching, Scotland), SQA etc have been neither effective nor supportive.
Another poll much more recent found that
Over 90%of respondents feel that the senior phase ( years 4 – 6 )implementation of CFE has increased their workload over the past year.
Almost 80% feel that their workload increase has been "very high " or "high"
Well over 90% of respondents believe that additional resources will be required to implement the senior phase of CfE in their school.
More than 85% of respondents believe that more additional in-service training will be required to support CfE senior phase implementation.
Only 3% of respondents are "fully confident " that their department will be able to deliver the new qualifications from next year, and less than 5% are "very confident ".
By contrast , over 70% of respondents are "barely confident " or "not confident at all of their department's readiness to deliver the new qualifications on the current timescale.
Teachers also displayed very high levels of dissatisfaction regarding the level of information / support provided to support their work in developing CfE senior phase.
Over 80% of respondents rated Scottish Government support as "unsatisfactory "
In the process of looking up the polls i found a large but complete criticism of it, which is much better than me typing out for hours so i'm just going to reproduce it here: http://www.thepointhowever.org/index.php/issues/93-curriculum-for-excellence-a-critique
From a parents side:
they don't understand it either so hard to help puplies make a choice.
It gives a lot of extra work to teachers without giving them anymore time or resources as well.
Fair enough.
I'm not a teacher, nor in education, but I know that people in general don't like more work and people don't like change. People will also complain about employers and will especially complain about governments.
In terms of preparation time - I believe this started in 2004. There should have been adequate time. Where the blame lies for dissatisfaction - I'm not sure.
Both Labour and SNP had confidence that this was the right direction. The strategy design and implementation process involved those from education, government, higher education, industry, parents, and wider society so wasn't exclusive government top-down.
The CfE asks teachers to be more dynamic and adapt their teaching. They're being asked to raise their game. This may or may not be fair on top of a heavy workload and challenging them to adapt their teaching in a way that they didn't train but I think the intention is right.
As for parents - I think they like a moan as much as the next person as well - understandably when their children are involved. There's plenty resource to explain what it is - they only need to google and relate it to the SCQF Framework.
http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/learningandteaching/thecurriculum/
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the difficulty of the exams in the 70's compared to today is a joke. there is no comparison, even higher physics is a joke compared to O-grade physics. Plus whoever implemented the cirriculum of excellence or whatever it's fecking called wasn't very good.
Yeah that's the one. Couldn't remember the name of it. From memory it was the Labour government who thought the daft thing up and it was then implemented by the SNP minority government.
Interesting to know which specific criticisms you have of it?
One of the main people who devised/implemented much of it was subsequently poached to Cambridge as far I'm aware and it seems to have backing and integration in terms other key programmes such as the Wood Commission and other programmes for better shaping education and building society of tomorrow.
I'm not hugely well informed but happy to hear what is so crap about it?
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Funnily enough - I was told by someone last night that Labour figures were saying that Tories had infiltrated them to select Corbyn.
The New Labour Blairites in the party must be frantically scurrying around at the moment unable to understand what's happening or who to blame.
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Nice one, that could be a very interesting game, FC Tokyo have started pretty well and are up in 3rd place, Shimizu S-Pulse are second bottom in 17th but are one of the highest scoring teams in J1 and also have the worst defence in the league! You'll enjoy FC Tokyos stadium too, definitely one of the best I've been to in Japan.
Pity you aren't around for a bit longer and I'd have shown you our local team Omiya Ardija who are in J2, our game is the following day.
If you've never been to a game in Japan then you can save yourself some money and time queuing by bringing your own beer to the stadium...The stadium staff will just make your pour it into disposable containers and give you cupholders to carry it in with...That's what we do every game.
Enjoy!
Hi Derek,
I'm visiting in September and one of the grand sumo tournaments is on so we're hoping to get tickets for it at the Ryogoku Kokugikan. I've read that there's agencies that can book tickets but not sure how reliable or expensive these are in terms of guaranteeing tickets. I have the details for the sale dates on the official website but have also read that this may need some Japanese to navigate through the order process (even although there is English on the website) so this may be problematic. Have you ever been or have any advice?
Also, cheers for the info on the fitba above!
I was maybe going to consider a baseball match rather than football. Is that worth doing and which would have the better atmosphere and evening out? -
I can't see us having the systems in place to go from union to independence with our own currency, so while I don't like the idea a currency union initially until we are able to have our own currency would suit me. But the no side will take the exact same stance so yes would need a better argument next time around
The 2 most divisive issues are likely to be the currency and the EU.
IMO we (or the SNP as they are leading the charge) need to change currency position to a Scots £ and start talking about this well in advance of even considering any referendum. Otherwise we just find ourselves in the same position as last time around and it's not in our control. In terms of having the systems in place - we already have Scottish banks and can therefore have a Scottish central bank. The good thing of the devolved powers is that we are starting to set up other Scottish systems and institutions - such as Revenue Scotland so we are building our capabilities, experience and infrastructure.
On the issue of the EU - we need to offer the public an EU referendum vote upon winning an Indyref #2 before we choose our path.
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As you are in Havana for a while you could try the museum of the revolution - it`s the fancy building with the tank and plane outside - well worth a look.
Personally I would steer clear of anything to do with Hemingway and the birth of the mojito - not worth a look - amazing how many bars are the real Hemingway experience.
One thing to watch out for is the scam in the food shops or small supermarkets. A young guy will try to help or start up a conversation and eventually ask you to buy some baby milk powder for him on the grounds that it too expensive for him to buy but his young baby needs it badly. It is only a few dollars. He steers you to the counter where the shopkeeper gets a bag of the stuff down for you to buy. If you fall for it as some tourists do the bag goes straight back on the shelf ready for the next mug. Brilliant.
As someone else said Trinidad and the Ancon peninsula would be good to visit but it is quite a trek.
Look out for the peasants crammed in to the massive pink semi-trailers coming in to town from the suburbs every day.
Absolutely agree with the above. We popped in to the 2 most famous Hemingway places - El Bodeguito Del Medio and La Floridita ('My mojito in La Bodeguita, My daiquiri in El Floridita' - as he said) and it's just a tourist revolving door and even those signature drinks were crap compared to getting them in normal bars.
Also experienced the baby milk powder scam and as others have said - there's a lot of hustlers in the streets, particularly in Old Havana. Everyone wants to chat so it can be difficult to adjust and start dismissing people from the off but there's a lot of people trying to punt cigars, or get a few quid one way or another. They'll often try and just engage in chat or ask where you're from and it leads on from there but you'll quickly learn how to deal with it or else just completely ignore it if you wish. Worth saying that I didn't at any point feel in danger.
Also, you'll have taxis and bicitaxis, tuk tuks all touting for your business as you walk anywhere near Old Havana.
With the crap bits above out of the way now - the vast majority of the place is great and people are lovely. We stayed in Vedado on the west of the city which was nice colonial houses, close to the university and the big hotels of The Nacional (worth checking out for a drink) and the Habana Libre (former Havana Hilton which was taken over as an initial residence of Castro et al at the revolution). There were a few nice restaurants and bars/clubs dotted around that area. We walked each day from Vedado through the much poorer areas of Central Havana where you just see people living day to day life and crammed into tiny homes.
The dividing line between Central Havana and Old Havana is at El Capitolio / Gran Teatro (Theatre) and Parque Central and here you'll get your classic cars all lined up and gleaming waiting for hire to do city tours. We didn't get much from the car tour other than the photo opps as we had pretty much walked all over the place. If you were to consider getting the open-top, hop-on hop-off bus tour - I wouldn't recommend it. It doesn't have commentary in the way that the equivalent tours would normally have whether it be in Edinburgh, Madrid or Berlin - so it's only really worthwhile for getting from point to point, but even then, it's better to just walk or get taxis. There are state taxis (normally yellow & black) and then there are 'Taxi Particulars' which are communal taxis. If you can get using them then you'll save a fortune by sharing.
We went to a cigar factory for a tour (which we had apparently missed the time or needed tickets from a hotel which we didn't have but the security got some guy to take us round and I imagine everyone got a bung from that). As mentioned previously - lots of people will try to sell you cigars. A lot of what you read will say these will be fake and not to touch them. I think the reality is that some are real (ones which make it out of factories one way or another) and others will be fake. The street sellers also have elaborate stories to draw you in - the factory staff are apparently allowed 2 cigars a day or something like that which they can accumulate to sell. They'll also say that it happens to be the 1 or 2 days a month that they're allowed to sell this stock that they've accumulated for themselves and use the term Cooperativa (Cooperative) to say that this is permitted - when in all reality there is no such thing and it's effectively stolen or fake. They'll be selling box loads rather than singles. My friend spent about £300 from one of the Cooperativa people and spent the rest of the trip stressing as to whether they were real or not. The boxes, labels, holograms and everything look legit but no way of knowing for sure - but it is over 50% cheaper. We didn't get checked at customs at all (Cuba or EU).
Other things we did were to pop into one of the boxing gyms (Rafael something or other I think it was called) but they were just training and I had the impression that it was more looking to appeal to tourists rather than being more genuine. They were also looking for donations for taking photos and stuff like that.
We get the ferry across to Casablanca and went up the hill to their equivalent of Rio's Cristo Redentor statue but it's not much in comparison. There's a Che residence there as well which isn't really worth the few dollars that it costs as you'll be in and out in less than 5 minutes. From Casablanca we got the electric train to Hershey (which was the halfway point on the way to Matanzas but we just came back). Everyone seemed to know each other on the train and we got chatting to the engineer and ended up front with the driver for the majority of it.
There's a wee Havana Club tour in Old Havana which isn't a distillery but worth 30 mins of your day I would say.
Parque Central Hotel has a nice roof terrace for food/drinks if you're into that sort of thing at somewhere a bit swankier. A lot of the bigger hotels have nice lobbies and bars and probably a lot of the tourists don't venture out of there at night as Old Havana does seem quieter as the night goes on. La Terraza was another roof-terrace restaurant in that vicinity which was good.
Lots of salsa clubs around the city and Casa de la Musica is the main name that pops up. They have early evening shows and a later one as well. We went somewhere different and was cool to see them all going for it. A fair amount of hookers in these places as well so you might get pestered a wee bit unless you're there with a missus.
A lot of the cooler bars and clubs, as well as some nice eateries are over in Miramar which is further west and maybe about 20 mins drive from Old Havana. It's the embassy district and we went to a few nice places there.
One last thing - go to to the Colon Cemetery if you would appreciate that sort of thing. It's huge and the memorials there are quite spectacular.
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I'm sure I heard today that the SNP voting would be in conjunction with reviewing the Scottish legislation on this - it was emphasisedby the BBC (no less) that it was not the SNP who had introduced the current law.
Even if they didn't introduce it - they've had 8 years in government to review and tighten it.
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Fox hunting soon to be on the Tory agenda.
I hadn't realised that it still happens in Scotland apparently but the intention is to flush the fox out (to presumably be shot) rather than let the dogs tear the poor thing apart. Also, it needs to be done by more than 2 dogs in Scotland from what I've read.
Why is that?
Naw, other way round mate. Two dogs maximum.
From what I read today, it is 2 dogs maximum in England/Wales and 2 dogs minimum in Scotland which opens it up to using a pack of hounds.
Both of those scenarios stipulate that the dogs are only to flush out the fox but I imagine it's easier to control 2 dogs than a pack of dogs so it would seem that Eng/Wales were ahead of us with their legislation on this but they were then looking to deconstruct this to allow full-blown fox hunting again.
As others have said - even if we were to take the moral high ground in this vote (putting the politics of EVEL to the side), then we should have been doing it from a position of having a tighter ban than we do currently.
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Good piece of democracy , over 60% of Greeks voted against a deal put down a few weeks back and now they have another deal that is just as bad or worse !!!
A couple of points that could be introduced -
Age of retirement upped by 15 years
Vat could be as high as 30%
Some high flying financial guy said it is a debt Greece will never be able to pay off.
There's so many news updates flying about that I keep seeming to lose track.
Was Tsipiras not hailing this as a better deal as he wasn't having to give in to the whole host of privatisation measures that were proposed to see Greek assets moving to foreign ownership?
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Fox hunting soon to be on the Tory agenda.
I hadn't realised that it still happens in Scotland apparently but the intention is to flush the fox out (to presumably be shot) rather than let the dogs tear the poor thing apart. Also, it needs to be done by more than 2 dogs in Scotland from what I've read.
Why is that?
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There a wee calculator here that shows the effect of the budget:
Disclaimer: it's from the Graudiad so it possibly disnae work properly.
It doesn't seem to work. If you put in 1 parent working FT, with 15 kids then it only shows £1k per year worse off so I don't see how that can be taking account of the reduction of support to max, 2 kids and/or the household benefits cap of £20k/£23k.
I'm not sure what that says about the rest of the calculations but at a glance I think it underestimates the amount of additional income that is being presented by the raising of the tax threshold and 40% rate.
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I'm torn on minimum wage, i used to think it's a great idea, but been listening to political scientists like Thomas Sowell discussing economic theory and minimum wage isn't portrayed as that effective.
Can't say I've read any of it so will need to have a look.
What are the alternatives that are supposed to work better?
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So the Tories are not cutting as quickly as they had intended (£12bn reduction in 3 years, rather than 2), we won't move into surplus until 2019/20 (rather than a year earlier as per their manifesto), and they're tinkering around with the non-doms (which they slated Labour for pledging and said that this would lead to tax loss as people left).
I'm sure that overall they are still being as Tory as you would expect them to be but the above shows unsurprising signs that: A) They're already breaking their commitments
They're absolutely hypocritical in their criticism of Labour/SNP et al C) Even they are not committed to the pace of austerity which they claim is required. I'm sure that enough of the rest of the tinkering around will allow their hardened/wealthier supporters to ignore these facts rather than have any concerns that they're not quite living up to their pre-election headline promises on the deficit. It just shows up the austerity headlines for the sham that they are as they allow the carve up the country (and classes) exactly as they desire.
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This vote wasn't in itself important, however what is very telling is that the Tories abstained so as not to be seen to lose.
I watched the debate and there seems to be a fair degree of opposition on the Tory backbenches, not so much to EVEL in principle but to the mechanism of implementation.
But the implication from Beeb is that it's not dead?
I'm assuming this isn't the main vote and they're expecting to push it through anyway?
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What happens next?
The beeb says that the vote carries no weight? So it doesn't matter that it was voted down??
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That can't be real surely.
Yep. Celtic branding above the tunnel and on seat covers for the dugout seats as well.
Seems a bit excessive for the sake of them wanting to do all that for the sake of playing 3 friendlies at the ground but I suppose they want it to look that way for Celtic TV and any news/highlights/etc.
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It's a bit crap but I suppose money talks. The St.Mirren club shop is a joke and JD Sports don't even allow us to sell our strips from there anyway so I don't imagine it's doing us too much harm - apart from the embarrassment.
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If they had been genuine in wanting to "clean up" Twitter then even just looking at pro-Indy posters then it wouldn't be difficult for them to come up with much much worse.
That wasn't the point though, it was to score cheap points at the SNP, so they could only target those posters who had self- identified as SNP members and given that they've trawled back through years of tweets, this is all they got.
Absolutely - they'll have thought that Sturgeon has opened pandora's box by having the decency of being critical of the actions of some people on twitter. They'll expect that their dossier would force her hand to start banning party members and this would snowball and end-up with in-fighting in the SNP as disgruntled people who have been banned then turn on the party. It's absolute cheap shots and immature politics.
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Not looked at this yet but it's on my 'to do' list.
Are there 'Follow my team/country' options as there were for previous tournaments?
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BBC does a decent job of summarising here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-scotland-32154462
In short ..... we would have our part of the current UK deficit (our share of about £70bn), but on top of that - the fact that we get higher public spending along with a combination of collapse of oil price and a English economy growing faster than Scotland's - this all adds up to a much higher deficit for Scotland under FFA.
By Elections
in Anything Goes - Other topics not covered elsewhere
Posted
The day that SNP take Glasgow City Council from Labour will be a remarkable moment for the city. Then it'll be up to the SNP to step up and see what they can do for the city.