increased privatisation is happening all over the Nordics. I don’t know how much in Norway compared to here in Finland, but being in my fourth decade I can definitely see it happening and intensely. I can’t get a fucking public dentist anymore. Hell, children aren’t given free dental care anymore.
The whole point is that the floor is the important thing. In Scandinavian countries, they have a fairly firm upper bound. But they don’t suffer when people above that upper bound flee to avoid taxes
We don’t have a “firm boundary” on people being rich. We just don’t have multi-billionaires. Or if we do, they’re the silent type, not the Musk/Bezos type. And even those are pretty different.
But like, how many multi-billionaires do you know from like Minnesota, Louisiana, Oregon & Oklahoma?
The progressive taxation we have is for income, not capital gains. So essentially you can never get rich by working, but if you’re just profiting from having a lot of capital (renting properties etc, even airbnb, and tons of other ways for rich people to shift their income from “labour income” to capital gains), then you have a flat 30% tax rate. And if you’re actually a billionaire, you’d just shift it all to a tax haven to avoid even the 30%.
Sure, yeah, I agree there’s a certain type of bottom — insofar that we don’t allow people to die to starvation or the elements — but that’s a fucking low bar, don’t you think?
I bet you’re one of those people who actually believe Finland is the happiest country in the world. (It’s like North Koreans talking about freedom lol.)
Our ultra-wealthy pay literally nothing in taxes. They take out loans against their holdings, and when they do sell they use losses on paper to offset their gains, so they get away with paying nothing
And most of ours fly under the radar too. There’s around 300 resorts and compounds worldwide where the billionaires live their social lives away from cameras, not counting their more personal compounds
We do let people die of starvation and to the elements. In fact, we regularly have fights over if poor children deserve to be fed, and the results recently have been “no”
Lately, we’ve been criminalizing homelessness to put a capstone on decades of regularly tearing down whatever shelter they manage to cobble together.
Hell, a church got sued for letting homeless people shelter during a cold snap. People get arrested and charged for feeding the homeless in some places
And don’t get me started on medical care… It’s literally worse than you could imagine. You wouldn’t believe me even if I sugar coated it
I’m sure your life isn’t perfect, but have no idea how bad it’s gotten over here. I’d kill for a system as imperfect as the one you take for granted
You probably think I’m exaggerating about all this, but I’m really not. Luckily the administration is incompetent, because otherwise we’d be neck deep in a genocide right now. Instead, both of our political parties have settled on mass death, just so long as it’s indirect
Sheesh I hate it when Americans are like “you have no idea”.
Yes, we do. We have the internet here as well and you can’t really avoid hearing about American shit.
Why would you think I don’t know what a tax-haven when I specifically mentioned that any “proper” billionaires can get around paying even the 30%. And that’s private citizens. Google is equally a tax-avoiding scumbag company for us Nordics as it is for you. There’s just so many laws the extremely wealthy corps and individuals can use to avoid paying anything. Google’s tax rate is literally zero.
We do let people die of starvation and to the elements
Yes, we know. Hence me explicitly mentioning we don’t?
Lately, we’ve been criminalizing homelessness
And that’s clear here as well, despite there being very few homeless and practically none of them live on the street. For some 9 months at least it’s mostly too cold to sleep outside. Yet the silly hostile architecture for benches and whatnot has pervaded into the Nordics as well.
We don’t need it, but they’re still there. So there are people here working on getting rid of even the most basic securities that allow us to function like this. Also, I’m on the same latitude as Juneau, Alaska, about. And I’m in the very SW corner of Finland, on the level of Stockholm.
Does Alaska have a large homeless population? I doubt anything like in the States where the winters are milder?
People get arrested and charged for feeding the homeless in some places
I’ve seen the videos. You’re still pretending as if we don’t have selfish people here who would rather just kill all the poor. You at least have people who care and help others. Here in the Nordics, due to there being a system people can point to, personal responsibility for anyone doing badly is extremely small. People are apathetic and just default to “the system should be helping them.”
Hell, when I was properly suicidal, my mom literally just went “well what do you want me to do about it” and called the social workers with a care notice or something. The funny bit being that she is a social worker with higher education. What could she do? Idk, give me a ring sometime, or come to visit so I don’t feel as bad. But no. People just default to “the bureaucracy will help them, the bureaucracy is infallible”.
I’d kill for a system as imperfect as the one you take for granted
Except you’ve very clearly demonstrated that your assumed version of our system is pure fantasy.
There’s a reason we’re quite high in the suicide stats. Because we’re definitely not even close to being “the happiest country in the world”. I don’t ever remember my grandma laughing. She died cold and alone, hallucinating basically dream paralysis demons. With not even a nurse who would’ve know her, because the care home was being run down and there were just random nurses for a few shifts and then new ones again.
So I implore you, don’t put the Nordics on a fucking pedestal. Dismissing the problems we have, pretending this is some Lintukoto.
Would you rather be in prison with a dozen of your best mates, or literally forever alone without even the possibility of emotions and if you talk about them, you’ll be shunned?
You probably think I’m exaggerating about all this, but I’m really not
Again, just because you don’t know things about the Nordics nor see our news does not mean we don’t see yours.
What’s the point of competing who has it worse? That’s literally whataboutism that’s just dismissing Nordic problems. And you’re not even Nordic. Trying to have this discussion with fellow Nords is very hard, because lots and lots literally won’t allow themselves even an inch of wrong-think.
Our police seem very skilled, don’t they? I never had problems with them, always good interactions. Then I got arrested for weed. They put me in an isolation cell for 3 days while denying me my prescription medication, the lights were on constantly and there wasn’t even a mattress to sleep on or a blanket. Just the cold ground. Was the cell prolly cleaner than average jail cells in the US? Probably.
But would I be able to sue the shit ouf of them for literally torturing me, breaking Geneva conventions? At one point they turned of my water for hours. I have a congenital kidney malformation and due to that slight inefficiency in left kidney so I must keep good hydration.
I drew over 300 words in my own blood on the walls.
In the US there’d be a queue of lawyers on my door for all the violations, and I’d be looking at tens of thousands to millions in compensation.
Here in Finland, I can’t literally even get people to accept it happened. The only one who does is my therapist and he was born and raised in the UK only moved here later in life.
So we really don’t have to compete which sort of horror is the worst.
In the US, I’d probably be on the streets or in prison. But after years of literal solitude and nothing else, I’d actually welcome it. My own fucking mother went “weeeelll, you know, I can’t actually now what happened in the cell” when I phoned her to cry about my injuries and the injustice of it all. She implied it was my own fault that the police tortured me. And that’s the most anyone’s spoken to me about it. Finns always decline and refute it at first, then when I produce some photos (I only have those because they claimed I vandalised the cell. We then asked for the security cam footage as evidence of the crime. Weirdly it was suddenly completely lost and the charges dropped.
I would rather get beaten up and kicked than do that again. But again, both suck, they’re just different. So what’s the point in competing who has it worse and by how much?
There’s clearly problems in both places. I’m not critical of everything in the Nordics, but nor am I critical of everything America either, despite having been actively arguing against your foreign policies and criticising you in general for a few decades online.
And don’t get me started on medical care… It’s literally worse than you could imagine. You wouldn’t believe me even if I sugar coated it
Do you think the free healthcare here is some superior quality? No. The best in classes go to private clinics, the worst end up in the public system. And the wait times are ridiculous. Some of the doctors have confidently said things that are just plain untrue. I could genuinely list 30+ years of bad experiences in the public healthcare system. Sure it’s not bankrupting me, but it’s also not doing jack shit for anything and genuinely gets like 80% of their guesses wrong when it’s even the least bit subjective. You wouldn’t believe half the shit I’ve heard from supposed “professionals”.
So again, every different, but neither is good, is it? So don’t think you’d “kill” to switch places with me, when I’ve spent a good deal of the past few years considering just killing myself.
I get what you’re saying, and I’m not comparing personal experiences at all, that sounds horrible. If I thought the Nordic countries were some kind paradise, I’d be working my ass off to get there. I get that the entire world is being worn down by the billionaires
But you still don’t get it… If you lived here, your worst 3 days is something common for people who fall through the cracks. There are people kept in similar conditions for months or years at a time. Including for just having a small amount of weed
And it’s legal to do this in a lot of places. It isn’t something they have to cover up, they might not even need to justify it with a reason.
Hell, lots of people take pride in the cruelty to “criminals”.
And you don’t understand our medical system… Our outcomes are terrible. Your unhelpful free healthcare has better outcomes than what we go into lifelong debt for
And your meds… Depending on what you need, it could be hundreds of dollars a month, sometimes even with insurance. Without it, there’s no upper limit, many drugs are in the thousands… You’d have to jump through hoops with the drug companies and hope they give you enough of a discount
So yeah… You probably would be dead. And if you weren’t, you’d be just as alone, and more battered by your experiences
I get why you feel otherwise. Part of me craves disaster, because at least then it would justify my suffering. At least then my struggles would be less abstract. It’s very normal to feel that way when you don’t have hope in the future
But if we’re talking about economic and legal systems, you can’t throw your hands up and say “every system has problems”. Obviously they do. But if you want hope, and to build political momentum, you have to convince people something better is possible. And perfect or not, the Nordic model exists
On a personal level, the best advice I can give you is to fight. Find an organization pushing for people falling through the cracks, and get involved with them in whatever way you can. Whether that results in change or not, being around others who believe in the same things and doing something about it builds hope
I know, I’m a bit sensitive when it comes to people telling me essentially “you haven’t tried hard enough.”
Anyway, the one childhood friend who was a man-kebab, that dude didn’t invite me to his wedding with a bitch who was equally or more an abuser of alcohol and they didn’t because was vocally for the legalisation of weed.
If you lived here, your worst 3 days is something common for people
Homelessness is common sure. But staying awake for three days while sober, shitting the eherloving shit out of yourself while eating your fingers until they literally bleed and then proceed to paint with your own blood for 70+ hours is… common in the US? And you don’t think that could be a bit offensive to me, dismissing literal torture I went through? (Sleep deprivation is torture, not to mention anything about closing off the water and not giving me my prescription meds.)
But hey, you’re not victimblaming, just dismissing it. So it’s still not as bad as literally every Finnish person I know.
But staying awake for three days while sober, shitting the eherloving shit out of yourself while eating your fingers until they literally bleed and then proceed to paint with your own blood for 70+ hours is… common in the US? And you don’t think that could be a bit offensive to me, dismissing literal torture I went through? (Sleep deprivation is torture, not to mention anything about closing off the water and not giving me my prescription meds.)
Yes that’s literally just something that happens to people. Yes, it’s definitionally torture… But it’s normal here. Normally, people paint the walls in shit, but blood is far from unheard of
But to pretend it’s “common” is taking the piss. Either your being extremely offensive or very ignorant. I can’t decide which.
But it’s normal here.
No it fucking isn’t. Nothing about that is normal. Sure, you can find examples of nastier shit going on in county jails, but to pretend like it’s “common” shows that you have absolutely no connection to actual criminals. Unlike me. (I’m a professional one, in case that wasn’t clear.)
It’s not even something most people are capable of. I have had a high BP since I was a kid due to a congenital kidney thing. (I had extra organs and then had to go through several major surgeries.) My pediatrician told me at 18 that I’ve the BP of an “80-year old woman”.
Most people will just fall asleep automatically after aome ~26-30 hours. People have a hard time staying up 72 hours even when theyre doing pharmaceutical grade stimulants.
My body is essentially just overclocked. And that’s why it crashes as well. I can’t get to sleep for days then eventually I might find myself on the bathroom floor on top of broken glass, or in an ambulance or at the ER.
But you, just like Finns, just have to actively dismiss anything I say, even though you’re having to say ridiculous, untrue shit like that.
The average person during an average night in a jail definitely doesn’t stay up all night, let alone three nights, let alone literally eating themselves. Have you ever tried biting yourself hard enough to draw blood?
No OF COURSE you haven’t, because it’s NOT COMMON OR NORMAL IN THE SLIGHTEST.
“doesn’t put a ceiling on wealth”
eeeeehh. maybe we fucking should?
increased privatisation is happening all over the Nordics. I don’t know how much in Norway compared to here in Finland, but being in my fourth decade I can definitely see it happening and intensely. I can’t get a fucking public dentist anymore. Hell, children aren’t given free dental care anymore.
The whole point is that the floor is the important thing. In Scandinavian countries, they have a fairly firm upper bound. But they don’t suffer when people above that upper bound flee to avoid taxes
The critical part is the lower bound
Sounds like you don’t actually live here.
We don’t have a “firm boundary” on people being rich. We just don’t have multi-billionaires. Or if we do, they’re the silent type, not the Musk/Bezos type. And even those are pretty different.
But like, how many multi-billionaires do you know from like Minnesota, Louisiana, Oregon & Oklahoma?
The progressive taxation we have is for income, not capital gains. So essentially you can never get rich by working, but if you’re just profiting from having a lot of capital (renting properties etc, even airbnb, and tons of other ways for rich people to shift their income from “labour income” to capital gains), then you have a flat 30% tax rate. And if you’re actually a billionaire, you’d just shift it all to a tax haven to avoid even the 30%.
Sure, yeah, I agree there’s a certain type of bottom — insofar that we don’t allow people to die to starvation or the elements — but that’s a fucking low bar, don’t you think?
I bet you’re one of those people who actually believe Finland is the happiest country in the world. (It’s like North Koreans talking about freedom lol.)
Jesus Christ, you have no idea…
Our ultra-wealthy pay literally nothing in taxes. They take out loans against their holdings, and when they do sell they use losses on paper to offset their gains, so they get away with paying nothing
And most of ours fly under the radar too. There’s around 300 resorts and compounds worldwide where the billionaires live their social lives away from cameras, not counting their more personal compounds
We do let people die of starvation and to the elements. In fact, we regularly have fights over if poor children deserve to be fed, and the results recently have been “no”
Lately, we’ve been criminalizing homelessness to put a capstone on decades of regularly tearing down whatever shelter they manage to cobble together.
Hell, a church got sued for letting homeless people shelter during a cold snap. People get arrested and charged for feeding the homeless in some places
And don’t get me started on medical care… It’s literally worse than you could imagine. You wouldn’t believe me even if I sugar coated it
I’m sure your life isn’t perfect, but have no idea how bad it’s gotten over here. I’d kill for a system as imperfect as the one you take for granted
You probably think I’m exaggerating about all this, but I’m really not. Luckily the administration is incompetent, because otherwise we’d be neck deep in a genocide right now. Instead, both of our political parties have settled on mass death, just so long as it’s indirect
Sheesh I hate it when Americans are like “you have no idea”.
Yes, we do. We have the internet here as well and you can’t really avoid hearing about American shit.
Why would you think I don’t know what a tax-haven when I specifically mentioned that any “proper” billionaires can get around paying even the 30%. And that’s private citizens. Google is equally a tax-avoiding scumbag company for us Nordics as it is for you. There’s just so many laws the extremely wealthy corps and individuals can use to avoid paying anything. Google’s tax rate is literally zero.
Yes, we know. Hence me explicitly mentioning we don’t?
And that’s clear here as well, despite there being very few homeless and practically none of them live on the street. For some 9 months at least it’s mostly too cold to sleep outside. Yet the silly hostile architecture for benches and whatnot has pervaded into the Nordics as well.
We don’t need it, but they’re still there. So there are people here working on getting rid of even the most basic securities that allow us to function like this. Also, I’m on the same latitude as Juneau, Alaska, about. And I’m in the very SW corner of Finland, on the level of Stockholm.
Does Alaska have a large homeless population? I doubt anything like in the States where the winters are milder?
I’ve seen the videos. You’re still pretending as if we don’t have selfish people here who would rather just kill all the poor. You at least have people who care and help others. Here in the Nordics, due to there being a system people can point to, personal responsibility for anyone doing badly is extremely small. People are apathetic and just default to “the system should be helping them.”
Hell, when I was properly suicidal, my mom literally just went “well what do you want me to do about it” and called the social workers with a care notice or something. The funny bit being that she is a social worker with higher education. What could she do? Idk, give me a ring sometime, or come to visit so I don’t feel as bad. But no. People just default to “the bureaucracy will help them, the bureaucracy is infallible”.
Except you’ve very clearly demonstrated that your assumed version of our system is pure fantasy.
There’s a reason we’re quite high in the suicide stats. Because we’re definitely not even close to being “the happiest country in the world”. I don’t ever remember my grandma laughing. She died cold and alone, hallucinating basically dream paralysis demons. With not even a nurse who would’ve know her, because the care home was being run down and there were just random nurses for a few shifts and then new ones again.
So I implore you, don’t put the Nordics on a fucking pedestal. Dismissing the problems we have, pretending this is some Lintukoto.
Would you rather be in prison with a dozen of your best mates, or literally forever alone without even the possibility of emotions and if you talk about them, you’ll be shunned?
Again, just because you don’t know things about the Nordics nor see our news does not mean we don’t see yours.
What’s the point of competing who has it worse? That’s literally whataboutism that’s just dismissing Nordic problems. And you’re not even Nordic. Trying to have this discussion with fellow Nords is very hard, because lots and lots literally won’t allow themselves even an inch of wrong-think.
Our police seem very skilled, don’t they? I never had problems with them, always good interactions. Then I got arrested for weed. They put me in an isolation cell for 3 days while denying me my prescription medication, the lights were on constantly and there wasn’t even a mattress to sleep on or a blanket. Just the cold ground. Was the cell prolly cleaner than average jail cells in the US? Probably.
But would I be able to sue the shit ouf of them for literally torturing me, breaking Geneva conventions? At one point they turned of my water for hours. I have a congenital kidney malformation and due to that slight inefficiency in left kidney so I must keep good hydration.
I drew over 300 words in my own blood on the walls.
In the US there’d be a queue of lawyers on my door for all the violations, and I’d be looking at tens of thousands to millions in compensation.
Here in Finland, I can’t literally even get people to accept it happened. The only one who does is my therapist and he was born and raised in the UK only moved here later in life.
So we really don’t have to compete which sort of horror is the worst.
In the US, I’d probably be on the streets or in prison. But after years of literal solitude and nothing else, I’d actually welcome it. My own fucking mother went “weeeelll, you know, I can’t actually now what happened in the cell” when I phoned her to cry about my injuries and the injustice of it all. She implied it was my own fault that the police tortured me. And that’s the most anyone’s spoken to me about it. Finns always decline and refute it at first, then when I produce some photos (I only have those because they claimed I vandalised the cell. We then asked for the security cam footage as evidence of the crime. Weirdly it was suddenly completely lost and the charges dropped.
I would rather get beaten up and kicked than do that again. But again, both suck, they’re just different. So what’s the point in competing who has it worse and by how much?
There’s clearly problems in both places. I’m not critical of everything in the Nordics, but nor am I critical of everything America either, despite having been actively arguing against your foreign policies and criticising you in general for a few decades online.
Do you think the free healthcare here is some superior quality? No. The best in classes go to private clinics, the worst end up in the public system. And the wait times are ridiculous. Some of the doctors have confidently said things that are just plain untrue. I could genuinely list 30+ years of bad experiences in the public healthcare system. Sure it’s not bankrupting me, but it’s also not doing jack shit for anything and genuinely gets like 80% of their guesses wrong when it’s even the least bit subjective. You wouldn’t believe half the shit I’ve heard from supposed “professionals”.
So again, every different, but neither is good, is it? So don’t think you’d “kill” to switch places with me, when I’ve spent a good deal of the past few years considering just killing myself.
I get what you’re saying, and I’m not comparing personal experiences at all, that sounds horrible. If I thought the Nordic countries were some kind paradise, I’d be working my ass off to get there. I get that the entire world is being worn down by the billionaires
But you still don’t get it… If you lived here, your worst 3 days is something common for people who fall through the cracks. There are people kept in similar conditions for months or years at a time. Including for just having a small amount of weed
And it’s legal to do this in a lot of places. It isn’t something they have to cover up, they might not even need to justify it with a reason.
Hell, lots of people take pride in the cruelty to “criminals”.
And you don’t understand our medical system… Our outcomes are terrible. Your unhelpful free healthcare has better outcomes than what we go into lifelong debt for
And your meds… Depending on what you need, it could be hundreds of dollars a month, sometimes even with insurance. Without it, there’s no upper limit, many drugs are in the thousands… You’d have to jump through hoops with the drug companies and hope they give you enough of a discount
So yeah… You probably would be dead. And if you weren’t, you’d be just as alone, and more battered by your experiences
I get why you feel otherwise. Part of me craves disaster, because at least then it would justify my suffering. At least then my struggles would be less abstract. It’s very normal to feel that way when you don’t have hope in the future
But if we’re talking about economic and legal systems, you can’t throw your hands up and say “every system has problems”. Obviously they do. But if you want hope, and to build political momentum, you have to convince people something better is possible. And perfect or not, the Nordic model exists
On a personal level, the best advice I can give you is to fight. Find an organization pushing for people falling through the cracks, and get involved with them in whatever way you can. Whether that results in change or not, being around others who believe in the same things and doing something about it builds hope
Oh wow quite a few broken thoughts there.
I know, I’m a bit sensitive when it comes to people telling me essentially “you haven’t tried hard enough.”
Anyway, the one childhood friend who was a man-kebab, that dude didn’t invite me to his wedding with a bitch who was equally or more an abuser of alcohol and they didn’t because was vocally for the legalisation of weed.
Homelessness is common sure. But staying awake for three days while sober, shitting the eherloving shit out of yourself while eating your fingers until they literally bleed and then proceed to paint with your own blood for 70+ hours is… common in the US? And you don’t think that could be a bit offensive to me, dismissing literal torture I went through? (Sleep deprivation is torture, not to mention anything about closing off the water and not giving me my prescription meds.)
But hey, you’re not victimblaming, just dismissing it. So it’s still not as bad as literally every Finnish person I know.
Yes that’s literally just something that happens to people. Yes, it’s definitionally torture… But it’s normal here. Normally, people paint the walls in shit, but blood is far from unheard of
Yeah in a country of hundreds of millions.
But to pretend it’s “common” is taking the piss. Either your being extremely offensive or very ignorant. I can’t decide which.
No it fucking isn’t. Nothing about that is normal. Sure, you can find examples of nastier shit going on in county jails, but to pretend like it’s “common” shows that you have absolutely no connection to actual criminals. Unlike me. (I’m a professional one, in case that wasn’t clear.)
It’s not even something most people are capable of. I have had a high BP since I was a kid due to a congenital kidney thing. (I had extra organs and then had to go through several major surgeries.) My pediatrician told me at 18 that I’ve the BP of an “80-year old woman”.
Most people will just fall asleep automatically after aome ~26-30 hours. People have a hard time staying up 72 hours even when theyre doing pharmaceutical grade stimulants.
My body is essentially just overclocked. And that’s why it crashes as well. I can’t get to sleep for days then eventually I might find myself on the bathroom floor on top of broken glass, or in an ambulance or at the ER.
But you, just like Finns, just have to actively dismiss anything I say, even though you’re having to say ridiculous, untrue shit like that.
The average person during an average night in a jail definitely doesn’t stay up all night, let alone three nights, let alone literally eating themselves. Have you ever tried biting yourself hard enough to draw blood?
No OF COURSE you haven’t, because it’s NOT COMMON OR NORMAL IN THE SLIGHTEST.