5.2.2014

A winter day

January 14, 2014. It's a nice winter day.


And it's a bit cold. Not extreme, just -12C.
















And this is the status report of the Nordic power market system.

Total electric power consumption in Finland is about 12500 MW. And wind power production is... about 1 MW. It actually oscillates between 0 and 1, so sometimes it rounds down to 0 and sometimes up to 1.

So wind power produces about 0.005 % of our electricity consumption - which in turn is only a part of our total power consumption, as I can attest as I watch the fireplace in my living room.

Yes, it is true that in Denmark there is just now currently quite a good availability of wind power and the electricity we buy from there is wind power. Unfortunately, it seldom works the other way round: we can't really sell wind electricity to Denmark, or anyone. So my point is: why do we subsidize the stuff to such an outrageous extent? I'd rather have us sell some other energy to the Danes when there is no wind either in Denmark or Finland. They are, after all, a producer with large wind energy capacity, which means that they have huge coal power plants, and if we care about CO2 emissions, we should be selling them hydroelectric and nuclear power.

Or we can go the way Germany does: extraordinarily expensive energy, large subsidies, and firms going belly up.


Developing a country

There's only one thing that is worse for people than international capitalism exploiting the workers of a poor country. It's that international capitalism does not exploit the workers of a poor country.

Poor countries can be roughly divided to two classes. One is "developing country", and its main characteristic is that it doesn't develop. The other is "emerging market", and it's the one that develops.

Eventually, that may of course be something that we later start to dislike. At one time, it was every third-world-activist's dream that China, a country with socialist government and hundreds of millions of extremely poor people, would become richer, that people would not be starving any more. That was to be achieved through socialist market economy.

Now that the dream has come true after China adopted capitalistic communism, many of these activists are uncomfortable: they are taking our markets, they are making the workers in formerly rich countries unemployed - because they work harder.

Crime and punishment (Finland edition)

When a man has lost his driving license due to DUI, you'd hope he learns a lesson. Of course, your hope is in vain. This one guy in Lahti did drive without a license, and of course he was drunk. So drunk that he did not see a woman on the street. So she hit her with his car and dragged her with the vehicle for 80 meters under the car. And he was so drunk that he didn't notice even then - even though  his passenger told him. So he just left the woman to die.

But this is not extraordinary, of course. Such things happen. What is extraordinary is the sentencing of this case in the local court: then man got a 30 day jail term, converted into 26 hours of community service.

26 hours of community service for driving drunk without license - repeat offence - and killing someone. The dead woman's spouse was seeking damages, but got none, because the court thought "the act was not intentional".

Of course, one can say that I'd never drive under influence unless I were so drunk that I wouldn't know what I'm doing, so it was an accident, not intentional. But normally that doesn't pass.

Well, the woman who was killed was also drunk, and was probably on all fours on the road. But still. You should be able to see someone on the street, particularly since this was in an urban area with a 50 km/h limit.

But wait! There are worse criminals. Such as the guy who sold chewing tobacco in a kiosk. His crime? Buying the stuff in Sweden and selling it in Finland, i.e. smuggling and tax fraud. His punishment? Two and a half years in prison.

And that tobacco is not so dangerous. It is certainly much less dangerous than regular smoked tobacco which is replaces.

Consider this. 26 hours of community service for repeated DUI and killing someone, and running away from the scene. Two and half years in prison because the state loses tax money.

This really shows where the priorities of our justice system lay.