With the exception of a handful city hotels, all our resorts have a reef for guests to dive in and to explore the beauty of corals and marine life. However for lack of awareness and ‘lawlessness’, we are sacrificing a big amount of our natural underwater beauty everyday to carelessly thrown anchors to fleets of speed boats, supply dhonis etc from each resort everyday all year round. Although divers and water sports people have been clamoring for these issues they appears not to have their voice heard where hearing matters. The problem is compounded by the fact that some of our resorts treat these issues just another small issue on the side rather than an integral and big issue. Coral reefs being as delicate they are, any amount of damage to the reef will take years and decades to recover if at all. Legislating is a solution with a concentrated drive to upgrade mooring facilities and arrangements in resorts with standards applicable to all resorts.
Month: December 2009
flight shedule
Finding flight routes from individual airlines and their websites could be a headache sometimes especially in a country so small as ours. Some airline websites does not seem to know there is a country called Maldives. So here is a helpful link of flight schedules from Male International Airports information page where each day’s flight schedule is available.
What will we get from Copenhagen?
Zilch is the short answer.
The world and its media is busy in Copenhagen following the the leaders and their agendas and our president has not tarried back. The summit to seal the world’s fate is going on full swing and looking back from a safe distance one gets the feeling that at last humans are taking over the destiny of the planet. So far the responsibility has been with god or nature for the godless.
Our papers (the few that has survived the former regime) reported that the president has not forgotten the few skeptics of this global warming scam and he has a very short message for skeptics. 350. A true numerical message no skeptic could be persuaded to global warming optimism. Such numerical messages had its day and its probably gone now. Y2K was the best such example which was exposed later as a bunch of lies and deceptions which profitted immensely those who promoted it.
Coming back to the topic one wonders what will we in Maldives get from Copenhagen? Every country is represented there for a purpose and everyone expects something back from the signatures and documents coming out of the summit. Our chance of actually getting something from Copenhagen are questionable. For sure we will get some recognition as a sinking hopeless country which according to an economic themed blog is bad news for our country because foreign investors are already being scared by the apocalyptic version of our country the media is painting. There might be other helps such as a few more radio buoys to monitor sea level rise and a few more weather balloons to attach more equipment to monitor parts per million of carbon particles to our Met Office and a few visits by distinguished global warming scaremongers (maybe Al Gore?) and that seems to be the direction we are heading. Gone are the days of big rich countries pouring money to small less developed countries apparently for no reason. Now every bit of aid is connected and given in condition of something.
Please create some Jobs for my countrymen.. Here is the background.
- Change of regime started lots of effort to streamline the government (which is the biggest employer) which means to lessen the number of salaried people. Its a good thing to streamline an overly inflated bubble of a government which is slow and unwieldy and the redundancy packages or benefits to laid off government employees were clearly generous. However just like with trees we shall cut a tree after planting two more. So for each job that is lost more jobs should be created.
- Global financial crisis came and scared off guests which meant streamlining started in earnest in resorts which is compounded with the dollar shortage in the country.
- The last batch of resort islands gambled away (yes, gambled is the correct word) to a feeding frenzy type of brainless money-less and idea-less bunch of people who for the most part were proxies of existing resort owners or former regime supporters or their henchmen were at last found out to be NOT CAPABLE of developing resorts or creating wealth and the government is now taking action at last. Some of these fraudsters (for lack of a suitable word) have been advertising the islands they got on ebay.. that’s how cheap they are. Had those islands been given to real business parties with sound bossiness plans, more resorts would have opened now creating more jobs.
- Our fisheries is still in doldrums (nobody knows why) and the memories of oil price hike is still fresh. The only cause of optimism for the fishermen was that they got double price for their catch compared to the peanuts they were served the past 3 decades.
- A country is as progressive as the people of the country are. We have a tourism industry which is said to be 50 years old and yet we are importing skills from abroad which means lost opportunities for those eligible from among us and a drain on the foreign currency which is in a precarious situation. Our share of skilled and unskilled expatriate population became a problem under the former government which committed every mistake in the rule book and the current government seems undecided and ill focused on the issue. The only measure which the former government installed to curb the expatriate workforce from taking over the country was to suggest a 50% ratio of workers which is flouted by most resorts in the country with all sorts of excuses and direct and indirect links to the ministries in question. This measure has lost its effectiveness now and the criteria should be raised now. Rather than a blanket 50% ratio we shall classify particular jobs which can easily be filled with local talent and restrict employment of foreign labor to those positions.
Our team played well but lost the game….
kind of like loosing the war and winning the peace…
Despite playing a better game we lost. Many are heartbroken.. especially in resorts where only a common cause connects diverse people from remote islands! What is apparent from the game is that there is some more work to be done to improve the striker skills. India is a cricket crazy country which can take a defeat easily but for a football crazy country like ours, a defeat is a big blow.
Global warming scam
• Our country is not in imminent danger of being sunk at any moment but media persistently presents this story. We have seasonal surges of waves which happen infrequently and up until the tsunami of 2004 we didn’t had much to fear from big waves. Every dhivehin knows all the big noises they make about Maldives sinking are rubbish but to get some more loans or assistance from foreign donors.
• Those who clamored for this issue got fame, money and clout. Al Gore got the Nobel and his film which should have been made free to download still earns money… 49 million $s. They got what they want and we shall not have to follow them just like unthinking robots. Remember the Y2K scam? Books were written about it and films were made about it and they made us think that airplanes will from sky. I remember that night exactly 0000 hours on 20001 January and several of my friends ran outside to see if they can see falling objects like satellites and aero planes from the sky. Nothing fell and I was watching TV. Nor did the TV station crash…
• Coming from politicians we have to be wary about it. These are the same people who said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction which he did not and they have still not apologized for 1 million killed in Iraq and ruining another already ruined country which is Afghanistan. They have an issue with oil which is almost drained and fast depleting in US and they want the infrastructures to change to other forms of energy before this happens. That’s exactly why the Iranians are keen to develop their own nuclear power stations. Because once the global demand for oil starts to wan the Arab Disney type kingdoms will come to face with reality after eons of supporting innumerable princes and princesses and forgetting the masses. Everybody knows that just because Iran has a missile they would not shoot at Israel. Politicians are a dumb lot but they also know that much. For Iran to develop one nuclear missile and send it to Israel is suicide. Iranians know that, so does Israel, EU as well as the US. They all know that but they never say that because everybody has a way to gain from their positions. For the already established nuclear states they cannot let others join their group because that would mean one customer is lost. Also historically Israel was created in the midst of oil rich Arab nations to have some leverage on global oil economy and they are not ashamed of saying this. Contrary to popular media line Israel was not created by a sympathy factor because of what Germans are alleged to have done. Now that the world is getting impatient with Israel for their human rights violations and the the creation of Israel has not had the leveraging affect they wanted on global oil markets they are thinking of switching over from oil to something else which is good but associated with fraud.
• People like George Soros who in his own words does not have a problem with exploiting the masses for legitimate gain are in this scam with multibillion dollar financial schemes to fleece the average American household 600$ per year. His vision is to be the intermediary between rich and poor governments and do some carbon trading which scam is all too known.
• Our last president played the environment card and our current one also is doing the same thing. What is lacking here is honesty and clear thinking. This global madness about impending environmental disaster is fiction and fad which in a few years will be exposed as another scam played on us by the shaithaan who makes us believe somehow we are controlling the elements
Canteen woes
Canteen woes are a never ending tale of frustrations in most resorts. It might have something to do with the monotony of having to eat at the same place each day many times. Although few resorts entertain staff with monthly staff parties or picnics most resorts are still struggling where services to staff are concerned.
Here is a small list of small irritants which sometimes makes life tough while eating at canteen.
- Running out of plates, spoons, forks etc.
- Blaring music or football matches or whatever on canteen tv
- Smelly staff entering to drink water in staff canteen in full football or exercise gear after practice or gym work out.
etc etc
Maldives Resort Workers 