Life / Fighting for your rights in everyday Poland's life (TPSA, post office, mayor...) [3]

My side street sucks in terms of road surface. we've been promised a hard surface for years now - and are seeing other streets having their brick surfaces replaced by asphalt.

This is particularly galling because I helped to build this street right at the beginning. I bought a load of rubble and took a sledgehammer to it.

Anyway, after my wife and her sister pestered the wójt (mayor) endlessly - even in person - we have eventually got a few tons of proper hard core down, but it's still not good enough. It's taken 10 years of failure to get to this point ...

Still, at least they haven't definitively refused to build a road. TPSA (relict of a telephone monopoly) signed a landline contract in 1999, and in 2007 said they wouldn't honour it after all because France Telecom had nicked all the money and they weren't investing in any infrastructure anywhere.

The post office has had a change of heart and has decided to start delivering letters again. Well, sort of. We have to chase up the utilities to find out how much we owe, because by the time the bill comes we've missed the payment deadline and are being charged penalty interest.

They did stop all deliveries for 2 years because the postie said the number of new houses in the area was too much for him and affected his sleep/drink patterns. I wrote to my local MP (email, naturally) - a fat pratface called Komor something or other (wonder what happened to him), but he didn't bother replying. Oh yeah, I remember now - he's our ever-listening president. ("Vote for me, I'm not Kaczynski" - rhymes).

Life's a *****, but I pay 19% tax, have no mortgage and keep having foreign holidays. Oh - the wife's pretty and the kids are clever ( a bit too clever), so I suppose on balance ...

News / Polish science - massively underfunded [4]

Every scientific research grouping in the world complains about a lack of money, but Poland really takes the biscuit!

2,500 researchers per one million inhabitants - it ranks third lowest in the 32-member OECD

Poland spends a mere 0.64% of GDP on R&D, against 1.85% in the EU as a whole, America's 2.8% or Japan's 3.5%. Just over a half of the Polish total comes directly from the public purse. The EU and industry account for the rest.

The govt's professed aim is for gross R&D spending to reach between 1.45-1.9% of GDP by 2020.

Wow.

Polish scientists do very well on mathematical modelling - where they need a pencil and paper and a half-decent computer.

AND YET ON A PERHAPS UNRELATED TOPIC ... in the Warsaw area, I remember reading, they outperform the UK average in cancer treatment (because they don't skimp on cheap tests, like NHS doctors routinely do). So, Polish professionals are not lacking brains - just money.

News / New budget airport for Warsaw to open in 2012 [16]

Modlin - 35 km north of Warsaw.
Allegedly, there's going to be a rail connection too.

News / Poland stabs UK in the back (Britain's annual rebate issue) [8]

EU Foreign Minister Baroness Catherine Ashton - who is also the UK's EU Commissioner - failed to attend a critical debate in Brussels yesterday on proposals to scrap Britain's annual £3 billion EU rebate because she was taking part in an anti-piracy conference at a luxurious island resort in Mauritius. The articles report that her absence meant that no one raised any objections to plans by the EU's Budget Commissioner Janusz Lewandowski to include proposals to end the rebate in the EU budget review which will go before politicians later this month. Ashton also missed the first budget meeting last month when Lewandowski said that the 1984 rebate deal had lost its original "justification".