P. Taipale

Guggenheim for Helsinki?

2012-01-10T19:23:00.000+02:00

Story by Telegraph.

As a Finn, I am not enthralled. Guggenheim wants license fees. Under this plan, they are guaranteed. By the taxpayer, who is giving a steady source of income for Guggenheim.

The studies alone have cost us a couple of million €. We're not the first one. There was to be another Guggenheim on lower Manhattan. There was to be Guggenheim Rio de Janeiro. For Guggenheim Guadalaraja, the city paid for plans and donated the plot, but it didn't come up. Guggenheim Hermitage Vilnius should be by now up and running but it is not. Et cetera. Most of these projects have found that the original funding plans were unrealistic, as explained by Alaston kriitikko.

There was Guggenheim Hermitage Las Vegas - now, this plan had an an impressive combination of artistic heritage and money, and they actually built it, but it didn't fly; it was shut down in 2008.

Bilbao is quoted as a success story with so many tourists visiting the city, but I think that the sudden availability of £20 flights for the benefit of British and other booze cruisers - brought to you by European flight deregulation which happened at the time - to go get some cheap wine is a better explanation than artistic ambitions. I don't say it wouldn't be a nice museum. I just don't trust the business case.

Now, if the funding structure for Guggenheim Helsinki would be built a bit differently, I would be all for it. Just make the contracts so that Guggenheim, not taxpayer, takes the risk. You're OK to use the current calculations for visitors and revenue. Just show them you're serious with them. If the planned numbers of visitors are reached, Guggenheim gets to keep 90 % of additional profits. That'll suit me.

If their numbers are to be trusted, they should have no problem accepting this. If they don't accept, that should tell us something: it could be that those who are behind this plan are keen to take risks, with other people's money, not their own.

Cynically riding a dead girl

2012-01-06T21:56:00.004+02:00

A hit-and-run drunk driver killed an 11-year-old girl in Helsinki three days ago.

The story itself is familiar- though less common than what people think - from previous cases: man is drunk, goes driving, does gross DUI. Hits a girl at a zebra crossing on a dark evening, panics, drives away leaving the girl to die, feels bad, tells someone, goes to his workplace, drinks more, and gets arrested when the police find him.

Now, people are furious. This is pretty understandable, because the man's action was deplorable. I listened to the radio the following morning:

"They should lock him up for the REST OF HIS LIFE!"
"Drink drivers should NEVER get their license back!"
"Alco-lock must be made COMPULSORY in all cars!"
"The legal limit for drink driving must be made lower! ZERO!"
"Speed limits must be lowered!"
"This must never happen again! Anything must be done to prevent another case like this!"

And so on.

I'm very sorry for the girl and her family. I'm even a little bit frightened: I don't drive under influence, but accidents can happen, and if I had an accident - perfectly sober - the reaction could still be something similar.

What happened was dreadful. But these responses are silly. What troubles me is the knee-jerk reactions, populism and cynical exploitation of a dead child. This may result in bad legislation and unwise decisions.

They should lock him up for the rest of his life!

In Finland, it is generally recognized that harsh punishment does not prevent crime. We don't have the death penalty, and even for pre-meditated murder - the most severe of crimes - the standard jail term is around 14 years. Why should DUI be more harshly punished than e.g. intentionally stabbing someone?

Yes, this man, who had a history of many drink driving offences, drove under influence and hit a small girl. But as far as we know, he didn't intend to kill the girl. It was an accident. He did take a risk that should be considered reckless behaviour. What made it worse was that after the accident, he drove away and left the girl to die. He should not have panicked, he should have stopped there, he should have tried to help the girl, he should have called an ambulance. He did not. This was bad, but it was far short of pre-meditated murder. In mitigating factors, it seems he had a troubled past but was now actually working, and had a clean record for long enough time to get his driving license back. In my opinion, he should get something that is close to the maximum penalty for gross unintentional homicide, which is six years, plus some additional time for the DUI. For that, because he is a "first-timer" (meaning he has not been inside during the past three years), he would do maybe 2 years in prison.

Now, in my opinion that is a ridiculously short sentence for what he did, but it is in line with other sentences given in this country. He should get justice, not more, not less, and this is what is considered justice in Finland. The system in this country believes that putting criminals in prison does not help. Why would we think that drink drivers are somehow more responsive to harsh punishment? I would think to the contrary.

There seems to be some kind of an emotional reaction that goes with certain kinds of crime - drink driving and sex crimes come to mind - but it's really very illogical. These are the kinds of crime where the criminal probably does less risk analysis before the act concerning the possible punishment if he is caught. I mean, who would do DUI if you were sober? If we were logical, we would rather first make the sentences tougher for crimes where there is more risk analysis beforehand, such as economic crimes, burglaries, the all-so-common organized bicycle theft racket, metal theft, drug trade, human trafficking and so on.

Driving under influence is bad but it is not that dangerous. Drink drivers kill about five outside victims each year. About 30 000 drink drivers are convicted per annum. How many are actually driving under influence? A conservative estimate is that the chances of getting caught are 1 to 200 (though it could be 1 to 2000). So, with this conservative estimate, there would be 6 million drink driving cases in a year, 30 000 caught, five people killed. It means that a drink driver's probability of actually killing someone is in the order of 1 ppm (part per million).

Really. A chance of one in a million. It's not a lot. It's not something that we should approve, but when you think of it, it is actually extremely rare that a drink driver kills someone. (It is slightly more common that a drink driver kills him- or herself, or other people travelling with him or her. This we could call poetic justice.)

Drink drivers should NEVER get their license back!

For any other types of crimes, you don't have punishment for the rest of your life. Even "life in prison" is institutionalized with a process so that it actually means about 14 years in prison, perhaps less you behave well, and even notorious criminals like Juha Valjakkala will be released eventually despite constant escape attempts. There's always a term of some kind.

It would be extraordinary and an unusual punishment to ban driving for all life. Still, for repeat gross offenders, I wouldn't consider it too harsh to really make the loss of driving license permanent.

But this helps very little. You see, very many drink drivers don't have a license anyway. The one who killed the 11-year-old did, but this I would consider exceptional (and as a sentencing factor not against him). Pretty much every day you can read news about some reckless guy who runs away from the police at dangerous speeds, with five times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood. Most of the time, the guy does not have a driving license in the first place.

So what does it help to take away the license? You don't need a license to be able to drive. What would help? Perhaps amputation of the hands. But I have a better idea: mandatory antabus for those who have a severe alcohol problem.

Alco-lock must be made compulsory in all cars!

Another knee-jerk reaction. Whether the alco-locks work to stop drink drivers is dubious. What is certain is that there is a cost that would be carried by all drivers for the installation of device to all cars, and it is not small: in the order of 1000 € per car. No one else is going to pay for this. It won't be a factory-installed feature; Finland is just a too small market for that.

It would of course be very convenient for the state, because this mandatory gadget could only be installed by "official" importers, so it would act as a deterrent against the importing of used cars to Finland. The cozy relationship of "official" car importers and ministries would no longer be disturbed by those pests, citizens.

The state already takes about six times as much money from car owners than it puts into maintaining traffic infrastructure. The Finnish state is well-known to resort to illegal practices to extort tax money from drivers in the import taxes. This is well-planned fraud, by the government. The cost of alco-locks would be on top of this, and it would be out of proportion considering how much it would really have any impact on road safety (we are talking about something like a thousand million euros, which would save many more lives if used better; drink drivers kill around five people each year in Finland, and a billion euros, if used on road safety, would save perhaps ten times as many).

A more significant impact of the alco-lock would be that your car doesn't start on a cold morning when you are supposed to go to work. They are known to malfunction, particularly in our climate. Perhaps not an issue if you get to work in a minister's limo, but for the rest of us this is an issue.

The legal limit for drink driving must be made lower!

Another illogical move. Our hit-and-run driver was already above the legal limit for gross DUI. With a lower limit, it would still be gross DUI, except that with the lower limit you would also convict people who are not really drunk. 0.02 % BAC does not impact the ability to drive a car. The driving ability may actually improve with blood alcohol content until 0.02 % or so. The driver performance only starts to weaken at 0.05 %, which is why the current limit is good.

Ministers also say that because DUI cases are increasing, the limit must be tightened. But why are the cases increasing? Two factors:

The so-called moped-cars have become more common, and under-18-year-olds drive them - and get caught. They are not supposed to get any alcohol from anywhere in the first place, so why go for the limit, when you actually should do something to the problem that minors drink?

Other drugs than alcohol are an increasing reason for DUI convictions. Now, lowering the alcohol limit when the actual drug is amphetamine or other illegal drugs is silly.

Speed limits must be lowered!

More illogical proposals. Our killer driver was probably not just drunk but also exceeding the existing speed limit. A lower limit would not have stopped him. The very next day, there was a guy running away from the police at 170 km/h. He did not care about the speed limit, and he would not have cared about a lower speed limit. He was also gross DUI. He also did not have a license. He was also under influence of illegal drugs. That's about five different severe breaches of law in one go, and a different speed limit would have made absolutely no difference.

What lowering the speed limits would do is make people more annoyed with the limits and lead us to think that it is okay to break the limits because they are not reasonable. The respect of law would be diminished, and that would be the main impact.

This must never happen again! Anything must be done to prevent another case like this!

It will happen again. People do get killed in traffic. If not hit by a car, then hit by a bus or a train or a kick-sled or just slip, fall, hit head on the ground. Humans err. What we can do is make the possibility of error smaller, make the traffic environment safer. The speed limits are already mostly low enough, or even too low. The drink driving limit is already at the right place, the BAC level where driver performance starts to be impacted negatively.

Having the alco-lock in cars of past offenders might be reasonable, as a part of the punishment. Stronger sentences would be good not only for drink drivers but all sorts of intentional, violent or economic crime. Especially multiple offenders who show no respect for any laws at all should be dealt with (like the 170 km/h police-runaway person mentioned above).

But we can't make the world a place where everything is perfectly safe. If we try, we'll just create a dystopia, a bad place to live.

Government ministers don't seem to care what really works and what does not. They'll be perfectly happy to exploit the public fury in order to get more government control, squeeze some more money from car owners, and shine up their public image. Cynical.

Comical Olli and an epidemic loss of influence

2011-12-13T23:34:00.001+02:00

If you read European news these days, you see the same kind of things being said, whatever the country. Almost every EU state is in the same, unique position.

UK: Cameron puts Britain offside and offshore in Europe. "UK has isolated itself and lost critical influence for no gain whatsoever," said Sony Kapoor, head of the Brussels economic think-tank Re-Define.

Sweden: "If we stay outside the deal, we are more in the periphery", says prime minister Reinfeldt.

Finland: "Finland must stay in the core of EU" says presidential candidate Paavo Lipponen.

Ireland: "Government must ensure Ireland is at core of EU summit"

I don't really read Dutch or Estonian, but I'd be surprised if news in the Netherlands and Estonia or Austria would be any different. Everybody says the same:

If we don't do as the EU Commission says, we'll lose our influence! We'll be in the periphery! We must stay in the core of EU!

What sort of influence is it when you have to do everything you're told to do, otherwise you don't have influence?

How is it possible that everyone is risking this horrible fate of being in the periphery: you must not disagree about anything? What does it help you to be "in the core" of EU if that just means that you be a nice boy and pay up, just as you are told?

I do understand that you do lose influence if you make a constant nuisance of yourself. If you make trouble of every little thing. Or if you screw up constantly and consistently, over a longer period of time. This is what Greece has done, and that has got people irritated. I can surely say that not many people take seriously anything the Greeks say about economy or European integration, so Greece has lost "influence". But I don't think the problem is that Greece is not in the "core" of the EU. The problem is negligence approaching criminal. This is not the case with Britain, Finland or Sweden, who are net contributors to EU budget (although themselves in debt and in need of austerity).

We won't lose influence if we sometimes disagree. I've got a piece of news for you: the only way you apply influence is that you try to change something. And a good time to change things is starting now. The countries are not losing influence. It's these guys in "think-tanks", parties and government departments who may lose influence, and some really well-paid jobs as conductors in gravy trains between Brussels and Strasbourg, to which no one has any influence whatsoever.

Well, I suppose this rant isn't going to change too much. We can continue to admire the gall of Comical Olli:

Justice served

2011-11-26T12:50:00.001+02:00

Normally it is considered bad manners to ridicule someone for the way they have killed themselves, but I can't help feeling some satisfaction with this Darwin award: a metal thief dies when trying to steal 240 VAC electricity for his power jigsaw using snap-on cables designed for 12 V.

The emergence of metal theft is a sign of a disintegrating society in West Europe. Some of these audacious thieves have appeared also in Finland, disassembling e.g. copper and iron from roofs and garden fences. In a rather amusing episode, the organised and tax-funded supporters of illegal migrants ended up having parts of the copper roof of their social center stolen.

In England, metal thieves are a much bigger problem, now "recycling" everything from electric and communication cables (disused or active), railways (the rails, I mean), church bells, garden gates and even plaques from war memorials. England built a welfare society before us, and is now reaping the harvest before us. Sweden's there, too. But we are catching up. And so is Austria, where someone stole the organ pipes from a church to sell as scrap metal.

Sure, metal theft has been a problem all the time in Russia, for instance, up to a 200 tonne bridge vanishing overnight. But that I see is more "normalnaya situatsiya", to be expected in post-Communist countries. We know the societies somewhat collapsed and public and private property was for anyone to grab if you just could. Why do we allow that to happen in formerly prosperous Western societies?

The sentences these people get for theft are generally laughable. They are no deterrence. The inability of our justice system to react to this kind of intolerable insolence is a partial explanation for why China and other emerging economies are catching up and overtaking. Sure, there is corruption there as well, but it isn't tolerated like here.

The coroner's comments for the demise of our jigsaw hero tell us how difficult it is for the officialdom to understand how deep we are:

''I very much hope that anyone who has been here today or reads the reports gives cause to consider the perils of trespassing unlawfully on to a property and then engaging in an activity like this.
''It is an absolute tragedy that this has happened. It is a senseless waste of a young life.''

No, it wasn't an absolute tragedy. It was a rather logical consequence of having a society where schools fail and the justice system is no longer capable of delivering justice. And I think this coroner is misguided in his belief that the metal thieves are going to read coroner's reports. I very much doubt they read absolutely anything.

There's one thing I wonder. Why aren't the metal recyclers, who buy obviously stolen material, prosecuted? Is recycling and material re-use such a holy cow that it's above any and all investigations?

Why banks fail

2011-11-20T11:56:00.000+02:00

Europe is in the middle of huge economic trouble. The European states promise more to their voters than they can afford. Banks and financial institutions get much of the blame, but the real reason is simply public and private overspending in practically all of the countries, except those who are selling lots of raw materials (usually oil and natural gas).

However, there are some real problems in banks as well, and they have contributed to the situation. Politicians like to blame banks, investors (or "speculators"), rating agencies, etc. This allows them to shift the blame that simply belongs to politicians and voters. EU leadership wants to control rating agencies. This is a bit like when you are flying an airplane and you get very many warning lights in your cockpit that tell you about to hit the ground, you react by reaching for a hammer and start smashing your instruments for incorrect operation. Yes, there may be faults in those indicators, but the time to do service is on the ground, not in flight. And not by the pilot who doesn't like what the lights say. Not when the rest of us are aboard this flight.

But what is really wrong with the banks? It is not that they make profits (if and when they do). It is not that they pay dividends. It is not that they pay huge sums of money in salaries and bonuses to their managers (although the latter is a symptom of the upside the banks had here: in the build-up of this governmental and inter-generation Ponzi scheme, they made fortunes.).

The problem is that the traditional separation between investment banking (which issues securities) and commercial banks (which accept deposits) was removed. This has created banks that have taken huge investment risks - such as investing in Greek government bonds. The same banks are also important for commercial operation of the daily economy - basically they have bank accounts, yours and mine, and mortgages for homes, your and mine. These banks are "too big to fail", but now they may actually collapse.

That is what makes the current economic crisis so much more difficult to handle: you can't easily just let the Greeks default and leave those evil, greedy vulture capitalists without their money. We have the deposits and pension savings of everyone at play, and our homes are mortgaged with funny money.

It looks like the U.S. effective repeal of Glass-Steagall Act - sponsored by Republicans, approved by a vast majority of Republicans and Democrats in the last years of Clinton administration with a Republican House majority - is the most serious blunder of the U.S. Republican party. It's not the Iraq war, it's not whatever spending or whatever tax cuts that Bush did. It's what they did in 1999 when Clinton was president. They messed up the financial markets.

In Europe, some similar development was done through the adoption of a single market in financial services, started 1987 and completed 1996. Now we see what it leads to in a dozen years.

Nevertheless, we shouldn't forget that the trouble of banks and other financial institutions is just a symptom. The fundamental problem in Europe is that politicians promise too much to their voters, and the result is that everyone is in debt. Public sector is in debt, and much of private spending is based on this debt as well. Europeans work much less than e.g. the Chinese, and it is difficult to understand how European leaders can expect poor, hard-working Chinese people to continue "lending" (i.e. donating) money to European central bank in order to keep up the frivolous spending practices of European welfare states where people can feed themselves without working. This is something where even North Korean news is more crebible than the eurocrats.

Will rich Greeks be repatriated?

2011-11-01T22:42:00.000+02:00

It's been obvious for a long time that Greece will default; with Georgios Papandreu's silly referendum idea this week the way we arrive at this inevitable outcome is becoming more apparent. Greece will exit euro.

What will be done is something along the lines of Argentina's default some 10 years ago. It's not a disaster - sure, there is an economical shake-up, but it won't be that hard. It's not exactly a World War.

Not many people will be killed (although some riots and political activism along the lines of to Brigate Rosso may actually cause some deaths). Masses of Greeks won't be starving. They'll eat just fine, and people will continue to live in rather nice homes, they will continue to have a level of heath care that is marvelous when compared to historical levels, and they will continue to have TVs, mobile phones, entertainment and all the benefits of modern technology.

The austerity is long due and will do good to the people everywhere in Europe, not just Greece. But one question puzzles me. Greeks will have to start collecting taxes (let alone complete construction of all those houses that were left unfinished because an unfinished house is not eligible to pay property tax) .

The country has had a few super rich. And they have left, and their fortunes with them. The money will now be stored in bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein and UK and USA and even Germany, and other assets like shares and stocks will continue to be listed in the name of Greek nationals.

So, the question: Greece will probably make laws that say that its richest people will have to pay up much more in their taxes. The new government, when one is formed, will want to repatriate some of the earnings of the super-rich, who'll be living in other EU countries and North America. This will involve court cases about tax evasion and wealth transfers, and the outcome will be that Greek courts will ask other countries to send back people and their money. Will other EU countries and the USA really do this?

Some really rich people in Greece will have taken their winnings with them and they will try to stay out of the reach of Greek taxes, and keep their money. Will the other countries hand over these people and their money? Will rich Greeks and Greek riches be repatriated? Or will each and every one hosting these people try to attract as many of these expats as they can, because the money and wealth will be a benefit to the local economy?

My bet is that the super rich expat Greeks will keep their money. It's sad, but that's the most likely outcome: the hoarders will keep what they hoarded.

Women's pay, men's life

2011-10-26T20:56:00.000+03:00

The usual suspects are making noise about "women's pay ends today", claiming that women get paid less than men, and therefore you could say that October 26 is the last day when women get paid this year. A Finnish-language news item e.g. here.

However, there is an even more important date approaching. It's the last day of life, per each year, for men. In Finland, it's December 1st. Women's life expectancy in our country is 83.0 years, while it is only 76.3 years for men. That means that the year for men has only 335 days, not 365.26 days like it is for women.

This fundamental, severe and unacceptable sign of discrimination against men is constantly ignored by the state agencies, by the media, and by third sector organisations. It would be time to do something about this inequality.

On cultural differences

2011-08-14T21:47:00.000+03:00

Cheek kisses are considered an unacceptable way of greeting people in Germany. There is a distance of 60 centimeters that people should keep for an "intimacy zone" to avoid making others uncomfortable.

Well, this sure applies to Finland as well. With a minor difference: the distance is 6 meters.

Bears in Helsinki

2011-08-14T21:46:00.000+03:00

Well, not quite in Helsinki, but in Vestra, Vantaa, within the metropolitan area (though not far from Nuuksio National Park).

http://omakaupunki.hs.fi/paakaupunkiseutu/uutiset/koiranulkoiluttaja_kohtasi_karhun_vantaalla/

Now, why is this news? OK, it is not very usual to have bears withint Helsinki area, but wouldn't we want it to be? Isn't it great that Mother Nature's diversity is accessible also to the residents of Helsinki, not just those ignorable people in The Middle Of Nowhere?

Police culpability at Utøya

2011-08-14T21:45:00.001+03:00

There are a couple of things that really irritate me about the discussion around Norwegian narcissistic killer Breivik: populist knee-jerk reactions by politicians, and idiotic conspiracy theories and criticism regarding the police.

I must say it is sad to see people blaming conspiracies or police inefficiency, because it took an hour for the police to arrive at Utøya island and they might have, if they just had found the right combination of car routes, boat harbors and routes and helicopter usage, arrived at the island a few minutes earlier.

Now: get a life. The police did manage very, very well. This was an extremely exceptional attack. Beforehand, the police couldn't possibly know what exactly is happening. They just get lots of panicked emergency calls, reported by call centers who forward information to radio dispatchers and command and control centers.

A scenario where a massive car bomb explodes in downtown Oslo is very unlikely in itself. A scenario where this car bomb is just a diversion, and the actual attack is that the same perpetrator travels to a social democratic youth summer camp on an island and shoots dozens of people one by one, was totally and utterly fantastic. The police cannot possibly expect to handle such a case with a fluent routine. There can be no prepared contingency plans for this kind of a situation. The information that police command and control centers get is contradictory, unreliable, unbelievable fragments of data, panic, opinions and rumors. There is too much information; there are hundreds and thousands of emergency calls. It is not reasonable to expect that in such a situation, the police could instantly make decisions that are in every way optimal, when analysed after the event by hundreds of people working for many months.

The police has to make its decisions in a hurry, under great pressure, in fear for their own lives, based on inconsistent and incomplete data. The policemen cannot rush into a shooting scene without any consideration as to how they plan to work on the situation. They have to take reasonable care so that they don't kill any innocent bystanders, that they don't kill each other, and that they don't unnecessarily expose themselves to futile danger. The primary problem is lack of reliable information. The commander of operations just doesn't know what he has at hand. He doesn't know if there is one attacker or many, what kind of firepower they might have, what kind of traps they might have laid out. He probably works with a makeshift team that is assembled in an emergency and everyone does not know everyone else.

With hindsight, it is easy to say that if you had deployed your boat at this spot and then taken this and this route, you'd have been at your destination three minutes faster. But that is information that investigators are able to find after weeks of careful analysis. When a killer is on the loose, you make the decisions based on the knowledge you have, and considering the nature of this attack, I think the Norwegian police did very well. They got to the scene, a remote island, in an hour. They didn't shoot any innocent bystanders, they didn't shoot each other. And they detained their man.

It was an extremely well organized attack by an exceptional, lonely killer, and this must not be forgotten when assessing police performance.

The attack can be analysed in much detail afterwards, but already now it is clear that it was the act of a single criminal, it was not caused by anyone else, and it appears the killer did not even get any knowingly given material support from anyone else. It is hard to prevent such attacks, and trying to prevent them causes vastly more damage to our society than the attack itself ever could. So let's not blame the police, and let's not make things worse by making other knee-jerk reactions.

Organized terrorism is another thing: the support and command structures for such activities should be investigated, infiltrated and disrupted. But the best we can do to tackle the problem of a narcistic lone-wolf killer is to ignore him and carry on. We should support those who suffered from his actions, and not spoil any more of our lives.

So, as far as I can tell, the Norwegian police did their work well.

Regarding the knee-jerk reactions and political exploitation: Erkki Tuomioja and others immediately tried to utilize the tragedy to advance their political goals for gun control, or actually banning handguns. Stupid. Let's not allow this one crazy terrorist change the way we live. Sports shooting and hunting remain good activities that bring a lot of well-being to people. Knives kill many more people than guns do, and a determined maniac could inflict dozens of deaths with a knife - there's no way we could absolutely prevent it, and we should not try.

The best way for us to react to this insanity is to not really care about it; just care about those who were hurt. I wish all strength to them.

A definition

2011-08-14T21:45:00.000+03:00

International socialism is just like national socialism, except that you need capability for interplanetary travel to escape.

Shooting the messengers

2011-07-07T16:22:00.000+03:00

Jose Manuel Barroso wants the EU commission to put a clamp on credit rating agencies.

Heiner Flassbeck, director of the UN Office for World Trade and Development, wants the agencies "dissolved" or at least banned from rating countries.

What utter idiots. I've got a piece of advice: before you do this, try something less harmful. Like fire all of the Meteorological Office staff when there is bad weather.

I it is really quite scary to see that the commissioners are so removed from reality. The project for federal government for Europe is going to the heads of our political leaders and, increasingly, the civil servants who hold way too much power. When they hear messages they don't like, they start silencing the messengers, when in reality, they should listen, and try to understand, and act according to wisdom.

Diagnosis for the Greek disease

2011-06-30T20:05:00.001+03:00

I discovered a good term for the Greek disease: it should be called the Hellenic sclerosis. A disorder of stiffening of a structure, usually caused by a replacement of the normal organ-specific tissue with connective tissue.

That's just like the Greek economy.

Passengers in the same boat

2011-06-16T18:34:00.001+03:00

After an interesting outcome in April elections, Finland is forming a new government. The Dachshund Coalition will consist of the right, the left, and the wrong, in a true Sergio Leone spirit.

The program manifesto of this new cabinet will include the traditional alphabet-based approach to revenue generation: raise the taxes on Alcohol, Benzine (gas), and Candy, and then jump to the end of the alphabet for Oil. And do not forget T for Tobacco.

This is fine: the price increases for booze, tobacco, and sweets generally hits the poorest part of population that voluntarily wastes their money on these things. You can only marvel at the cosmic justice. Increasing prices for transportation is more problematic, because it is bad economic growth, but it can be seen as a safe way to collect money because people don't have alternatives.

The interesting thing here is that taxing the vices can be supported by different people who have vastly different philosophies and goals, but end up supporting the same means, i.e. tax increases.

The Christian Democrats support tax increases on alcohol and tobacco because these vices are bad in God's eyes, and they think taxes will reduce the amount of sinning.
The Left League and Social Democrats support tax increases because they just like big government they think they will get. It's not real money, but they'll be happy with imaginary.
Bootleggers and smugglers just love these tax increases, because they know that illegitimate sales will be immensely more profitable, and their volume will increase.

So everyone is happy ever after.

If you need an ambulance

2011-06-14T17:02:00.001+03:00

A very nice catch-22 in Sweden:

You have trouble breathing. You try to call an ambulance. The alarm centre decides that because you can still speak, you don't need an ambulance.

Call us only when you can no longer speak or breathe!

In some other countries, ambulance-chasing (sic) lawyers would have a dream target here. Not in the Nordics.

Expensive insurances

2011-06-01T22:30:00.000+03:00

Talk about strange pricing: in England, insuring a £600 Corsa may be quoted at £72 000 per year.

That is weird. They blame ambulance chasers, a computer glitch and the fact that so many people are driving uninsured. You can see this is the country of Sherlock Holmes.

In my opinion, those who do buy insurance should not be forced to pay for the costs of those who do not. Driving without insurance is against the law, so if anyone has to pay, it's the person himself, and if he/she cannot, then it's the state. Not those who do carry their own liabilities.

...that he must die young, but with great glory...

2011-06-01T22:29:00.000+03:00

In many places, the military traditions are based on the ethics of romantic ideas where it is the fate of young men to die in wars.

But now, in Japan, the nation with a rather upside-down age pyramid, this has been changed by elderly kamikaze soldiers: because old people's cells are not splitting as fast as those of the young, the risks of radiation are smaller. Besides, even if you get cancer at the age of 65 and die in 10 years, you anyway lose only 5-10 years of good life, while if you get cancer at the age of 30, you lose maybe 40 years.

Now, hats off to these guys. Not that I think it's really so kamikaze: we are talking about a slightly elevated cancer risk, not certain death, and not certain loss of health. I'd be more willing to work there than to eat fresh cucumbers in Germany. But anyway, who can now say that the baby boomers are just like locusts that leave nothing behind them?

Organic E coli

2011-05-31T17:06:00.002+03:00

Organic cucumbers seem to be dangerous, particularly for Germans: an E coli epidemic has killed at least a dozen people.

To be safe, I would propose that they start irradiating their organic vegetables. That should provide us with some good entertainment.

Combining work and family life

2011-05-08T14:48:00.000+03:00

We've been told time and time again that it is necessary to make it easier to combine work and family life at the time when people have small children. Having once had small children, I tend to agree. This is important for true gender equality. People should be able to work part time.

But most of the time, rhetoric goes that the evil forces of market economy should be tamed and regulated so that this is possible. This is a particularly popular view by people on the "progressive" or "left" side, such as red-greens - generally the people who favour "big government".

OK, now some people like doctors have actually been able to reach better arrangements for their lives. And immediately, there is a problem: part-time work agreements are threatening the public health services. "If our doctor is working only four days a week, how do we manage? Patients will not get the care they need" says an administrator.

How did we come to this deplorable problem situation? Via those evil market forces, of course. Private health care providers have been happy to agree to part time work, or show flexibility towards their employees. They then contract to do work for the public health system which is unable to hire - due to the inhumanly long working hours required. In order to avoid having too many workers to flee to work on the private side and come back via outsourcing deals, the public sector also has had to agree to part-time agreements and flexible arrangements. Now more of their employees do work in such amounts and at such times that they feel it is better for them. And with the immensely inflexible work culture of the public sector, this causes problems.

So what is the cure? Force the private sector employers to be less flexible towards their employees? Enforce a five-day working week for everyone on the private sector, so that they would not have a competitive advantage when trying to hire employees?

Somehow it seems to me that the red-greens want to both have the cake and eat it. Hey guys: you either allow people to work more flexible hours, or you don't. I think it is good that the market economy innovates and shows what is possible. The public sector then should be able to at least follow the leader.

On eating beef

2011-05-08T12:01:00.000+03:00

Prince Charles is saying that Americans should consume less beef. Offhand, I cannot think of a better way to ensure that Americans - or anyone - will want to eat more meat.

If Prince Harry said something about it, the impact just might be a little less harmful for proponents of vegetarianism.

Myself, I appreciate vegetarian food; particularly second-order vegetarian (food made of things that have eaten vegetables).

Solution on the Portugal guarantees

2011-05-06T09:53:00.000+03:00

There's a fuss about the loan guarantees that eurozone countries are expected to give to Portugal. In Finland, this was a theme in the parliament election, and it seems that it will not be possible to form a cabinet, because parties have suddenly developed a spine and keeping their election promises, and thus they are not agreeing to givnig a carte blanche to loaning money to Portugal so that German and British banks wouldn't lose their investments.

Solution found! Portugal has the largest gold reserves in eurozone, worth 14 000 000 000 €. Let's agree that Finland guarantees Portugal's debts, for up to 14 G€, and an equivalent amount of the gold reserves are transferred to the Bank of Finland.

(Okay, it is a bit suspect, given that the formerly disastrous Erkki Liikanen is heading the bank, but let's assign a couple of thugs to guard him.)

Why couldn't you do this? If they need guarantees, and they have a large stock of gold, they can give the gold as guarantee. If they don't want to do it, they don't appear to need the money.

Burmese lessons

2011-04-20T17:03:00.000+03:00

YLE reported - just before the election day last weekend - that the civil servants in Lapland met a challenge on a Burmese language lesson. They even learned that a sentence like "I love you" could be rather indiscreet in Burmese culture.

It might be news for them that the situation is same in Finnish culture: Finns don't use the l-word so carelessly. But that is perhaps beside the point.

The point is: somehow, to me this piece of news has very similar echoes to the fate of Hiroo Onoda, who kept fighting the Second World War, on the remote Philippine island of Lubang, until March 1972. He just did not know that the war had ended almost 30 years earlier.

I bet the Finnish civil servants will also go on with Burmese lessons - at least as long as someone signs the paycheck.

A trebuchet

2011-04-19T22:49:00.000+03:00

Trebuchets are every boy's favourite toys. Watch the ad video.

What they don't mention is that there is only one type of projectile that is really fit for firing your miniature trebuchet: Brussels sprouts.

Swedish democracy

2011-04-18T20:11:00.000+03:00

Expressen writes that "Don't let Soini into power, 80 % did not vote for him!"

The Swedes appear to have a weird idea of democracy. How come can you exclude some - but only one - party if it did not achieve a majority? Are you seriously saying that the election result, a considerable victory by one party, should be ignored? What you mean is that the only way to change policies in a country is through a violent revolution. The normal thing in a democracy is that if someone wins the election, then they get to try out with their ideas. Right or wrong, that's the way it works.

Let the Elementary Finns attempt to create a coalition with the others. If they succeed, fine - though I doubt it: populist movements typically have a hard time when they have to take positions of responsibility. If they don't succeed, they'll meet their fate at the next elections.

But if you keep them forcefully out of democratic process, then the only possibility to throw out the current power-that-be is having your kind hanging from the lampposts.

Don't be so stupid, Expressen.

Car insurances are up, who's ripping us off?

2011-04-18T20:08:00.000+03:00

Answer: no one is ripping us off, except perhaps the state (in taxes).

The Telegraph complains that car insurance prices are up and this is due to frivolous legal costs. The no-win no-fee lawyers in some countries, like Britain, may have some impact. But the problem of raising insurance costs is visible also in countries that do not have no-win no-fee lawyers. There's another thing that people often don't appreciate nearly enough. It's the change in cars and their safety that we've seen over the last decades.

Modern cars are designed so that they contain the impact energy in accidents: the front of the car compresses in a controlled way, but the passenger cabin maintains form and protects people. The cars also have airbags - up to a dozen of them. And there are explosive cartridges that tighten the safety belt in an accidents. There are also many other features that help people survive crashes but which increase the manufacturing and repairing costs of cars. This is the main reason for having fewer people die in traffic accidents - the number of accidents is not going down so much, but the cars help people to survive more and more dramatic crashes.

This does have a cost. In the old times, your Mini or Opel Kadett C or Toyota Corolla could kill you if had a medium crash. Nowadays your Hyunday Getz, Opel Astra or Toyota Auris deforms itself, but you just walk away. But if you have a small crash - and there are many more of those than there are medium or big, fatal crashes - the car is totalled. Large parts of the fuselage need to be replaced, as well as the airbags, the parts of interior destroyed by the exploding airbag cartridge, etc. Often the car looks more or less intact on the outside, but it's written off, because it is so deformed that the doors won't close any more. It's not feasible to fix it any more.

If you have a small crash, but just big enough to launch the airbags, the car has to be recycled and replaced. This has a big cost for the insurance companies.

Look at the bright side: the injuries people get are diminishing. The cost to the health system is smaller. But car insurers pay this in cars that are written off, and that increases the insurance prices.

BBC joins the front

2011-04-17T21:59:00.001+03:00

The BBC has joined the progressive front in Finnish election battle, for the little that it is worth.

The Beeb is often accused of leftist ("liberal") bias, and here one can see some grounds for that, because the story has more inaccuracies than you would expect.

You could start with the name that this report gives to the populist party Perussuomalaiset. They're called True Finns, although the party itself does not use that English name, and the Finnish name does not really translate like that. A better translation would be Basic Finns, or as I mentioned before, Elementary Finns. Or Little People's Party.

Beeb also says but the True Finns' nationalism has no room for Swedish. It excludes Swedish as something unfamiliar to Finnish culture. Polls suggest that most Finns share that view and want to stop the teaching of Swedish in Finnish schools.

That's not quite true, either. What Finns mostly want is to stop mandatory teaching of Swedish in Finnish schools. This is not a change to the constitutional position of Swedish in Finland; it would merely revert - from language politics point of view - to the situation prior to the school reform of 1970's when Swedish was made mandatory to everyone. Those days Swedish was doing a lot better than now when it's slowly fading to obscurity.

I have not seen that Perussuomalaiset would have said they'd want to stop teaching of Swedish in schools. That would be absurd.

Then the BBC writes Instead, young women should study less and spend more time giving birth to pure Finnish children. That is like a faint echo of Nazi ideology.

This is pure rubbish. I wonder who the Beeb has been listening to? Obviously, they don't have a correspondent in the country who'd have any idea of the local politics, so they're relying on someone who they think is ideologically reliable. And the Beeb is either naive or then it insist on following its suspected bias.

--
Anyway, the election result appears to shake the Finnish politics really deeply. It will be very interesting to see what kind of a government coalition will be formed, but none of the old bases will be workable, because they won't have a majority. And with Perussuomalaiset raising from next to nothing to perhaps the second-highest number of MPs, they have a good case to insist their point of view is taken into account. Listen to the voice of the people.

One possibility is that the largest party and nominal winner, center-right-eurominded Kokoomus, will not be able head a coalition, and the new cabinet will be formed by eurosceptics: left-populist Perussuomalaiset, center-left-populist SDP and center-right-agrarian Keskusta. That would give a big - and well deserved - headache to Brussels, because it would mean that Finland stops being the nice model pupil of the new brave Europe, implementing every directive obediently and to the point and paying up every cent whenever someone asks.

In four years, Perussuomalaiset will have lost much of the momentum they now have, and I expect their bubble will burst, but the next couple of years will be interesting.

The Church, afraid of martyrs

2011-04-09T01:22:00.000+03:00

The bishops of the Swedish church are advising their pastors that they should not baptise asylum-seekers who have converted to Christianity, because if these people are repatriated, there is a risk of persecution - in practise, being killed for apostasy.

I find the lack of religion in Swedish church rather strange. The Christian church used to celebrate people who die as martyrs for their faith, from St. Stephan to St. Paul to St. Lucia, and hundreds or thousands of others. So now they are actually saying "don't do what we've been saying is a good thing for the past 2000 years". Because it's bad for your 'elf and safety, and who knows about the afterlife.

What use do we have for such a church?

Radiation, eek!

2011-03-26T16:01:00.000+02:00

One of the big headlines of past week was that "the tap water in Tokyo is not safe for children".

Well, not for Japanese children, that is. In one of the water plants in Tokyo, the radioactivity was 210 Bq/l. Is this a lot? In Japan, it is, so much that there is a national scare, because the limit of 200 Bq/l is exceeded.

But in Finland the safe limit for municipal water plants is 300 Bq/l, and for private water sources it is 1000 Bq/l. In reality, drilled wells in souther Finland typically exceed this by many times, with the natural radiation of groundwater radon in Western Uusimaa region being on the average between 1000 and 10 000 Bq/l. This is because of the radioactivity in the Finnish rock ground.
http://www.evira.fi/files/attachments/fi/evira/esittely_toiminta_valvonta/laboratoriotoiminta/koulutus/lukkarinen_esitys_20101013.pdf

So, once again, you might be scared in Japan but running away to be somewhere else is not necessarily a whole lot safer, because that Evil Radiation is everywhere, so easily measurable.

Now, there really could be some serious problems with radiation in Japan. But how do we know? Because our major newspapers are like boys who cry wolf, they're not very believable. I suppose something worse than this tapwater scare will come out, but it's still going to be dwarfed by the natural disaster of earthquake and tsunami, as well as the collapse of the hydroelectric dam in the neighbourhood - of which we're not hearing anything, because no one is interested, because it is not nuclear.

On the other side of the Sea of Japan there is some more serious trouble.

Why do journalists want to scare us?

2011-03-26T15:57:00.000+02:00

A few thoughts regarding the scale of destruction caused by natural disaster in Japan, and the hews headlines which are almost exclusively about the nuclear reactor leakages.

There is a perception that you don't need to make news about the impact of the tsunami in Japan, because "nothing can be done about a tsunami".

That is not true. A lot can be done about a tsunami. And in fact, a lot was done in Japan. Warning systems, evacuation plans, protective structures. That's why the number of dead will be around 30,000 and not 300,000 or more. When Indonesia and Thailand were hit by a tsunami a few years back, a lot more people were killed because they had not prepared as well.

Likewise with nuclear power. The plants can be improved. In fact, besides Fukushima, several other nuclear plants on the same coast were hit by this huge tsunami - and there is no crisis. Some of them needed to resort to emergency procedures, but those were successful. We should learn about that.

What actually scares me about the Fukushima incident is people like Frigyes Reisch, head of Swedish nuclear safety, says he thinks "in Sweden it would be handled more effectively". That sounds actually scary and overconfident. You don't make nuclear plants safer by pretending that you are more effective and better than the Japanese. That's a recipe for disaster. The way to avoid trouble is that you plan ahead for all kinds of risks and make contingency plans, back-up systems, better design. You don't jsut assume that you are more efficient than the Japanese.

If you are asking why there are problems in Swedish reactors, I think the biggest reason is the rather foolish referendum 30 years ago where there was a decision to shut down the plants in Sweden. Which was unrealistic, couldn't be done, and wasn't done, because the nation needs electricity. Instead, the utilization of the plants has increased, without much investment.

Why? If you are going to shut down the plants, the owner cannot invest in further development and renewals. And these are the things that would introduce new safety features, better reactor designs, safer plants. So Sweden voted to increase nuclear power but not develop it to be safer.

Otherwise, I'm quite shocked by the way media in the Nordics are exploiting the Japanese disaster politically to oppose nuclear power. There is a huge humanitarian disaster there. Even though the Japanese did prepare well, there was still huge damage and a lot of loss of life due to tsunami. The crisis in Fukushima plant is a very minor issue compared to the direct impact of the tsunami itself, even despite the extensive preparations and evacuations. The life has been changed for millions. But all that has gone from headlines, because fearmongering about nuclear plants sells better.

Some basic information:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
http://mitnse.com/
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/plecture/bmonreal11/ (from March 16)

A mine in fire

2011-03-14T18:31:00.001+02:00

While the Japanese still struggle a bit at the Fukushima nuclear plant to limit any damage, the world is a the brink of hysteria. Googling around, I ran into an example of the downside of the practical alternative to nuclear power:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

This mine fire has been burning since 1962, i.e. it will be 50 years old next year. The borough of Centralia is now a ghost town, with just seven people living there who still refuse to leave despite orders to evacuate.

Imagine the uproar we'd have if a uranium mine or depot would have a fire that would last 50 years and force the evacuation of an entire town... No one I've spoken to had ever heard of Centralia, though everyone has heard of Chernobyl.

The story is interesting: people didn't quite know that the earth under their feet was burning. Until a gas station owner noticed that the fuel in his underground tanks was very, very warm indeed: 78 °C.

--

An unrelated observation: I have not noticed anywhere any reports that there would be looting, rioting or other types of crime waves in the areas that tsunami destroyed in Japan. I suppose that could be called civilization.

How to get rid of a dictator

2011-03-12T16:00:00.001+02:00

Last week's news is that Muammar Gaddafi is facing investigation for crimes against humanity. Is this really wise?

I mean, in all honesty, Gaddafi of today is not much different from Gaddafi of one month ago, and I don't think it is a surprise to anyone that when his power is challenged, a dictator's reaction is thoroughly violent. How come his government was until so very recently deemed fit to judge others as a member of the UN Human Rights Council? To get commendable peer reviews from Venezuela, Zimbabwe and North Korea?

Just a few weeks ago, the rest of the world was willing enough to play along with Gaddafi, and no one should pretend that his attitude towards humanity today has somehow suddenly changed. We all knew all the time who and what he is. So what do we reach by trying to drag him to a court now, and not then?

What actually is the impact of trying to get Gaddafi to the International Criminal Court? I think the only thing that can be achieved is that Gaddafi has to cling to power in fear of his life and liberty. Wouldn't it be much better if he was able to collect a moderate proportion of his savings - yes, taken from his people and nation - and retire quietly to some place safe, like Nicaragua or North Korea? Let him have a nice villa, 24h security, the Ukrainian nurse, and a few million $US on his bank accounts. No need for more, but let him have enough to live comfortably. Forget the stupid civil war, just don't have it at all. The net impact is that whatever Gaddafi gets to keep is probably less than what is destroyed during one day of civil war. Let him have it, and be rid of him.

You could of course ask, what about justice? Isn't it valuable that dictators are brought to justice?

Well, the ICC does not seem to be able to deliver it. It suffers from the same problems as the tribunal for Yugoslavian wars, where Slobodan Milosevic was allowed to play around for months and years, and in the end, he's still as much a hero for some and as much a villain for others, and not the tragically condemned and convicted man he was supposed to be. There's no end to the various conspiracy theories.

Let's just all admit that Gaddafi has been playing us for 40 years; if he agrees to retire quietly, let's encourage him to do so, forget about the hassle, and try to help building a new, better Libya. Which I hope, possibly in vain, is not going to be a crazy theocracy.

Echoes of Chernobyl

2011-03-12T15:58:00.001+02:00

Today's news claim that "a serious nuclear disaster threatens the Earth", things look real bad.

I'll make another threat to the Earth: behave, or I'll kick you! Who gave the permission to move Japan 2.4 meters to a wrong place? Now people will crash to traffic signs if they trust their satnavs.

But other than that, I fail to see what's the big deal. Sure, not having any radioactive leakage would be preferable, but the damage caused by leaks at the Fukushima plant are a fairly minimal aspect when compared to the immense destruction caused by the tsunami itself - even if the damage escalates from today, which is not that sure.

If anything, I think this shows how safe nuclear power is. For me, the question was resolved at Chernobyl. Even if you have a large nuclear site, designed for production of nuclear weapon material as a by-product of energy, with a completely reckless and incompetent leadership screwing things as bad as is humanly possible (here I'm not talking about many of the brave firefighters and soldiers etc who worked there, just the leadership), the damage was less than spectacular. Sure, there was a sizable radioactive leak which is easily measurable far away, including where I live - radioactivity is always easily measurable. Areas around the town were deemed uninhabitable - although at the same time, this created a rather interesting nature reserve.

But the damage is minimal when compared to the impact of mining and burning coal (excluding any impact of CO2 emissions, just considering the mining accidents and the particles and radioactivity emitted from burning), or the impact of collecting wood and burning it, or just about any alternative.

Friends and statesmen

2011-02-23T22:00:00.000+02:00

Libya is all over the news, and of course a civil war in North Africa is something that interests pretty much everyone in Europe. This made me go googling around, and one just cannot help feeling that not so long ago, Gaddafi was a great friend to many statesmen in Europe and the world, even though everyone knew he's quite a dictator. Look at the parade:

Great African heroes, champions of human rights and freedom.

Silvio is chummy with Muammar. Well, they're just neighbours across the pond. And Silvio has long been a pretty divisive figure in Europe, so this is no surprise. The guys probably share the same taste regarding women, political ideals, and other things.

Tony looks a bit embarrassed but there were some good oil deals to be done. Send Mr. Al-Megrahi home and things will be smooth.

These guys surely got along just fine.

Gordon was a not-so-bright shooting star compared to Muammar.

Obama looks quite cordial although not hugely enthusiastic.

Apparently Bill Clinton didn't meet Muammar, but here Hillary is shaking hands with Muammar's son Mutassim, to congratulate the people of Libya on their Revolution day (that is, the anniversary when Muammar took power).

But the one picture I just did not find: Muammar and George W. Bush. He seems to be the one contemporary leader (in addition to Angela Merkel) who did not go to the cameras with Muammar.

Human Rights Council

2011-02-22T20:29:00.001+02:00

I wonder what the UN Human Rights Council is going to say about the situation in Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

But one shouldn't underestimate the impact of liberal democracy on Libya's leadership.

Nokia and Microsoft

2011-02-12T19:01:00.002+02:00

Many of my friends have expressed various degrees of shock after yesterday's announcement that Nokia ramps down Symbian, gives Meego out to open source and starts to use Windows Phone 7 in its new smartphones.

Well, it is indeed a shock if you have worked for a technological gimmick for years, and then the company leadership just abandons the whole thing. Been there, done that. I worked for Nokia and NSN from June 1, 1989 to June 1, 2009 - for 20 years and 1 day, and there were quite a number of good times and bad times during these years.

Many people in Nokia-Finland are quite devoted to the technology they work with - there's more loyalty and emotion than towards the company itself. That makes it hard to accept this change.

Now it is easy to see that this decision wasn't something that Stephen Elop came up with after he became Nokia's CEO. Clearly, this is a strategy chosen by Nokia's board, under the leadership of Jorma Ollila, and Elop was chosen to execute it.

What I'd like to say to this situation is that we shouldn't get too depressed about it. Yes, it is a big change. Many will feel that their life's work and commitment has been thrown over - and the company given to the jaws of the big, ugly, unfair, dirty Microsoft.

Indeed, I'm no fan of Microsoft. I use Windows at work, and some of the tools are pretty OK, but as the developer tools and APIs and that kind of stuff go, I am definitely a Unix man. I write this on my home laptop that runs Linux. The amount of broken logic, weird conventions, hordes of inexplicable legacy... that's Windows. However, it's not as bad as Symbian, which as far as I ever saw - not recently, I admit - was only slightly preferable to syphilis, if you consider the damage it does to your brain, not to mention your social reputation.

But Nokia was clearly in need of change. The Ovi Store is just astonishingly unbelievingly miserable. What I ask you to notice is the time Nokia decided this change. It may be relatively late as Nokia goes - because Nokia has always been quick to react to problems - but still, Nokia did make this decision before it lost its position as the world's No. 1 mobile phone maker. The next year or two may be a bit difficult because there is not yet a load of new WP7-based smartphones, and the old Symbian base is eroding, with customers losing interest right now. That's why the share price took quite a dip: clearly there won't be that much dividends next year. But Nokia is still the largest phone maker, with an amazing machinery of production and purchasing power, and an impressive delivery chain that covers the entire world - and it intends to stay there. I think this move with Microsoft improves the possibilities.

It's a bit sad for MeeGo and the lots of bright people I know have been working there. I think there's been some internal back-stabbing that has kept Maemo/Meego from coming to phone near you sooner. Now developers and Nokia internal organizations need to adopt Windows Phone 7. There's quite a curve to learn the new environment, but I'm pretty sure that given some time, the engineering talent in Finland will be using its time better than before (with the exception of those who were working on Maemo/MeeGo, I'm afraid - I think it should have been kept as a second strategy, because dependency on Microsoft has always been a death's kiss for vendors).

What disgusts me is the schadenfreude that some commentators express in public comments and in blogs, the kind were people say that it's so nice that some of those big earners lose their jobs. Indeed, the income distribution in Finland may become more flat because of lay-offs in Nokia, and the Green "welfare metrics" will improve, but I just abhor people who say that's a good thing. Some certified idiots blame this on political parties in Finland - as if the product and web shop strategies of Nokia were the result of policies of Kokoomus or Keskusta. Scavengers.

A particularly ugly example of this political scavenging is Paavo Arhinmäki, who claims that Nokia did this move because it is so easy to lay off people in Finland and some generous packages like those in Germany are a birthright. What utter rubbish. Does he really think that it is more difficult to reduce staff in the US, where Microsoft does their OS development, or in China or in India? High-tech jobs aren't going to be preserved by making employers more hesitant to invest, hire and train. These jobs are to be preserved - and renewed - if they are productive; if they are perceived worth the cost to the shareholders. Why doesn't Arhinmäki just go hiding under the bed like Jutta Urpilainen - wisely- does regarding the current Nokia story? The world might not be a better place, but it would at least look cleaner. There are some well-meaning but utterly, and I mean utterly clueless proposals, like Jouko Skinnari's idea of a new state company acting as a sheltered employment center. That anyone who was even a child at the time of Valco has such ideas is beyond belief.

To all the former colleagues at Nokia I wish good luck and successful change. I should remind that these are not bad times - compared to what things were in 1991-1992. I wasn't a regular employee but a trainee, had a stream of fixed-term contracts, many times continuing to work even though a new contract wasn't even signed until weeks into the new contract period. The company was truly struggling for existence. And it renewed, and it rebounded, to an extent where it literally saved the Finnish economy after the collapse of early 1990's. Look at where the company is now: yes, there is a bit of a crises, but it is still the largest phone manufacturer in the world, and it can stay so if it just keeps going ahead.

Hooligans games and gentlemen's games

2011-02-12T18:07:00.001+02:00

There's a saying that football is a gentleman's game played by hooligans, and rugby is a hooligans game played by gentlemen. One would expect that when football fans arrange a demonstration, things would get really bad.

But now Inspector Gadget reports that where "intellectuals", students, make a demonstration, the actual outcome is violence and destruction, and the whole place is a wreck with weeks' work of cleaning up. When the English Defence League - basically a really scary-looking bald-headed islamophobic bunch of football hooligans - arranges a demonstration, they can be kettled and policed and, surprise, now one is injured, no one is attacked, and the place is spotless the moment the demonstrators leave.

It's all about what you want to do. The police tactics in demonstrations do not cause violence; the demonstrators do - if they are violent.

Alas, the most impressive thing about this demonstration is how quiet the mainstream media like BBC is about it. Somehow it isn't news at all that thousands of hooligans go to a march and no one gets hurt.

A nomination

2011-02-09T08:22:00.000+02:00

Every once in a while, you learn some funny things about the English. Like this one: members of the parliament cannot resign. Actually, in the history, MPs were sometimes elected against their will - presumably there were some occupational hazards and anyway it was financially not such an attractive job as nowadays.

OK, so when an MP has disgraced himself in the expenses scandal, how do the English get rid of him? They appoint him to the job of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham. This is a ceremonial position of profit. An MP accepting an office of profit under the Crown must give up his or her seat. An MP applies for the office to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who usually then signs a warrant appointing the now former MP. And thus the MP has effectively resigned.

Ingenious.

Marching for a goverment

2011-01-23T22:13:00.000+02:00

Every day, you can read how people here and people there are marching against their government.

Beware, you might get what you ask for. And it's not always fun. Today, in Belgium, thousands of people have been marching for government. That is, marching for having a government. However much you oppose this government or that, in the end, you'll want to have one.

Putting down dogs and people

2011-01-12T21:45:00.000+02:00

There's the death penalty in some U.S. states. However, performing executions by lethal injection has been difficult lately because of a rather absurd reason: lack of sodium thiopental, which is used in the process of killing the convict painlessly. Nobody seems to be willing to manufacture this drug, and thus it is now "effectively unobtainable" in the United States.

I consider it absurd because so far the human race has shown incredible ingenuity in the art killing other people. It's really quite amazing that a modern developed nation cannot find a good way to kill those it has decided to kill. At the same time, owners of dogs, cats and other pets shed tears as they perform the last service to the creature they love, and contract a veterinarian to put the animal to sleep forever.

But of course, what works with dogs will mostly work with people. According to CNN, the Oklahoma death row inmate John David Duty was executed with pentobarbital, drug often used to put down animals. His lawyers were protesting because the drug is "unproven in humans". Well, not any more. For once, we've had lots of animal testing. Would we need more human testing?

Myself, I'm for the death sentence for some crimes, but only with one approved execution method: lock the convict up in a prison until he or she dies.

The unpleasant fact about other ways of execution - however human and painless - is that they are too quick. It sometimes happens that a wrong man or woman is convicted. And once the execution is carried through, there's no way to undo it. But if the execution is performed by just keeping the person in prison, it is always possible to interrupt it if new evidence comes up.

Naturally, it may happen that the person dies in between the wrong conviction and its revocation. But when you consider that many death row inmates probably have a longer life expectancy in death row than outside - drug-related violence is a common reason for convictions, and incarceration reduces that risk; prison food is probably low cholesterol, low salt etc, in other words much healthier than what the convicts would otherwise be eating - this is a bearable risk. And remember, we have the same risk of miscarriages of justice with regular prison sentences as well. If you find a wrongful conviction, you can pay reparations, but you cannot give back time. And finally, the legal costs related to other types of execution seem to mount up so huge that the cost of a hundred years of prison meals is nothing.

The one question where I haven't quite made up my mind is whether people sentenced to death, and being executed for the next day or year or 100 years in prison, should be allowed to voluntarily choose a dose of a drug that gives them sleep. Right now I think not, both because it might be a too easy escape and because it might be a wrong escape.

Recruitment ad for the secret police?

2011-01-12T19:58:00.000+02:00

According to The Guardian, PC Mark Kennedy had sexual relationships with a number of women in the environmental movement during the time he infiltrated the organizations, while working for the Public Order Intelligence Unit. He was "just not hippy in a way", for example because he ate meat, but he did have a pick-up truck and money, and he was very popular.

Hey, it sounds like this is actually a recruitment ad for the somewhat-secret police. Join the force, and become the spy who shagged hippie girls. Almost like James Bond, with a license to spill.

Pot calls kettle black, pan needed

2010-12-30T18:07:00.000+02:00

The Swedish bureaucracy watchdogs, Ombudsman for Justice (Justitieombudsmannen, JO) and Chancellor of Justice (Justitiekanslern, JK) have been actively criticising various authorities in the country for unduly long processing times. For a good reason.

At the same time, it has turned out that JO is unable to measure its own processing times and the JK's processing times have doubled over the past five years.

So, the bureaucracies in the country are slow and arrogant, and therefore these two bureaucracies have been set up to monitor them. Now that the monitoring bureaucracies have become slow and arrogant, what to do? Obviously, set up a new bureaucracy to monitor these two!

I am quite convinced that the Finnish authorities (Justice Chancellor / Oikeuskansleri, Parliamentary Ombudsman for Justice / Eduskunnan oikeusasiamies) face similar challenges: insufficient resources, more things to do than they can achieve. And they crave for more resources so that they could do good things.

Of course, everywhere the laws of nature are the same: bureaucracies can only expand and get more responsibilities; they very seldom scope down on their own, because every organization wishes to prove how useful and important it is.

In the private sector, companies run out of money, and when owners do not get any dividends, they'll order changes in leadership until something happens. The companies then start to really think what they actually have to do and what not. That leads to rationalization. Not always pleasant, but unavoidable and, in the big picture, extremely useful.

But the public sector does not run out of money, because it can always rise taxes (until it meets the Laffer curve). If the voters disagree, the public organizations can always drop the bottom layer of the bureaucracy: if budget cuts threaten police leadership, you take out the cops from the beat. If cuts threaten hospital bureaucracy, you reduce nurses and doctors until the budget is in balance. The voters soon learn.

Therefore, I think it is an extremely good thing that the Greek and Irish governments are defaulting. It just might make people think. Of course, there's no guarantee that anyone wakes up, but there's a chance.

Ice-fishing on Lake Pielinen

2010-12-25T22:17:00.002+02:00

Christmas day. Peace on Earth, at least on this corner of Earth. Went to check up the fish nets with my in-laws and my son. In case you don't know how ice-fishing is done over here, I'll tell you.

This is fishing with nets under the ice. You might wonder how to put the fish nets under the ice in the first place. I don't have any pictures of that, but there are two ways: either you can leave a thin nylon rope underwater before the lake is frozen - mark the end points with floaters and tree twigs so you find the rope later - or just wait for the lake to freeze properly and then make holes in the ice, and use long poles or sticks to put the nylon rope in its place under the ice cover. This is bronze age technology - except for the nylon.

For one fish net, the rope is about 30 meters long, and the ends are attached to sticks or fir-tree twigs that stick up from the ice so that it is easy to find them. So, now that you have two holes in the ice and a rope between them under the ice, you attach your net to one end of the rope and pull the other end to pull the fishnet to its place under the ice. And in a day or two, you can go back and open the holes and check if you caught any fish. Repeat every other day or so, through the winter. That's what we did today.

We went by car, driving on the ice. The ice layer is maybe 30 cm thick so it carries a car very easily and without risk, though the usual procedure is still that we take off the seat belts when on frozen lake. There's nothing you can collide with, and it's not even possible to stop very quickly, so the belt is not adding any safety, an it's nice to think that should the ice turn out to be weak, you can get out of the car quickly.

Note, the pictures are a bit blurry - today we went to the ice around the time of sunset, 2PM, so it was getting dark, and it was a cloudy day, so even with f/1.8 the pictures are grainy. But though the day is short, it doesn't get dark very quickly, and you can work for an hour or two even after the sun has gone down. It's all white around you, so even the tiniest light is enough for working, if not for natural-light photography, or finding your way around.

This Christmas, there's not that much snow yet in Karelia - just 15-20 cm, much less than in Helsinki - so fishing is convenient: you can drive anywhere on the ice, and just park right next to the bigger of the holes in the ice. This is the main hole which is used for pulling the net up and seeing if there's any catch. Most of the equipment is left at this place for all winter so that you don't need to carry it back and forth: there is a shovel for snow, a drill called kaira to make small holes in the ice, a large iron-pointed ice pick called tuura for breaking the ice, plus some smaller things.

The main hole has two or three nets going out to different directions. The hole is about 50 cm x 50 cm and has a styrofoam lid - with some soft snow on top of it - that insulates it from frost so that the water doesn't freeze too thickly overnight. When you arrive at the spot, first you take out the snow that is on the lid as additional insulator, then take away the lid.

Then you apply the large ice pick and break the ice cover from the main hole, and take out the slush from the water.

Standing right next to the main hole, there's a post on which there is a roll of nylon line in a sort of winch. You take the end of this nylon string, and pull it to the marker at the other end of the fish net, letting the string unroll from the winch. Once at the other end of the net, you drill a hole in the ice - the hole needs to be only about 10 cm in diameter. Through this hole, you push a stick which has a steel wire hook at the end, and use the hook to pull up the part of nylon string that is at the end of the fish net below the ice. Get the end of the net, untie it from the nylon string under the ice, and tie it to the end of the string that is attached to the winch.

Now, come back to the main hole. Use the stick with hook to pull up the other end of the fishing net through the main hole. And voilá, you can start pulling up the fish net through the main hole; the nylon rope is extended from the winch roll next to you, as the net pulls its end under the ice.

Get the net from under the ice - you don't need to take it all out from under the ice, just enough to see where the fish are. And here's your catch!

The fish is alive and struggling, so the next thing to do is to take the killing cudgel. Hit the fish at the back of the head to break its neck, and it won't suffer. And won't squirm.

Then take the fish out of the net. Here my father-in-law uses his patented tool - made of a piece of wood and a nail - to help the fish through the net. By the way, latex gloves are nice here. In the bad old days, you would do this with your bare hands. I can assure you that very healthy exterior blood circulation is necessary.

Now the fish is out, dead but fresh. It's cleaned on the spot: cut away the fins with scissors, cut open the belly and remove the guts, and use a scaling iron to remove the scales. No need to mess up the kitchen.

And then, just put the fish in your box. Once all of the net is checked, use the winch to pull the net back to its place. Go back to the other end of the net, untie it from the nylon string on top of the ice, tie it again to the string that is under the ice, and release it through the small hole so that it again fully under the ice, ready for catching new fish.

Repeat this procedure for all your nets, put your fish in your insulating box - the point is to not let them freeze as that spoils the taste - drive back, and your fishing trip complete. Drive home and heat up the stove for cooking!

A couple of years ago we did the same thing, but weather had been much warmer. Thus, the ce was too weak for driving, but a bicycle also works nicely!

Can most people be better than average?

2010-12-25T22:17:00.001+02:00

There is a popularly referred controversy: "most individuals think they are better drivers than the average". People think that this is not possible, and that this shows how individuals falsely regard themselves superior to others. But I think the statement is actually at least partly true: most people are better drivers than the average, although not perhaps in the way people themselves think about it.

A common belief is that it is a mathematical impossibility that most people would be better-than-average drivers. But people are confusing average with median. If we take "average" to mean arithmetic average, things become different. For driving skill, you do not have to assume that the skill function has a "normal" Gaussian distribution.

Of course, mostly it is down to the definition of "what is a good driver". I'll take a simplified definition that a good driver gets from place A to place B, safely and at reasonable speed, without causing distress to others. I tend to think that most people are normal drivers, a minority are better than normal, and a small minority are really horribly bad, dangerous and irritating drivers.

Let's put this into numbers, with a population of 10 drivers, their driving skill graded on a scale from 1 to 10. Six of them are ordinary drivers, and get a score 7. One handles the car very well, gets score 8, and one handles the car very well and is also exceptionally well aware of other traffic, can handle difficult environmental hazards such as rain and snow safely etc, so she gets a 9.

Then there is the grandpa who is 85 years old, half blind and drives according to a rule book from 1954, though slowly. He gets a score 5. And, finally, there's the young bloke who thinks he is The Stig, but does not control the car nearly as well as he thinks, ignores rules, and drives recklessly. He gets a score 3 for driving skill.

And voilà, we have a population of 10 where the average driver score is 6.5, and 8 out of 10 drivers are better than average. Not everyone can be better than average, but it is possible that most people are.

Male Genital Mutilation

2010-12-06T19:12:00.005+02:00

OK, I'm falling for it. I know this is what the Greens wanted - it's a provocation and the more people talk about it, the happier they are.

But still, I think this might backfire on them. I mean, of course, the new election campaign logo, which takes the Finnish coat of arms, puts is on a green background and includes the text "Uusi Suomi" (New Finland).

Twisting national emblems is always a bit risky. Sure, there is a good point. The Finnish heraldic lion has been adopted (as a tattoo, necklace or T-shirt emblem) by some of the skinhead idiots who just hate any foreigners, particularly dark-skinned. Therefore it's nice that others also use it. The lion shouldn't belong only to the obnoxious xenophobes. But mutilating the coat of arms with ugly colours isn't proper (and could be unlawful).

Strangely, although the lion is now set in a background of faded, slightly dirty green, the lion is still wielding a straight Western sword, and trampling on the Eastern scimitar, which for the Finns, traditionally reminds of the swords of the Cossacks, who the Tsars used for intimidation of their subjects and enemies alike. The scimitar is down there, and has been since the times of Gustav Vasa. I would actually have expected Greens to switch the blades, because that would have been consistent with their policies.

But the Greens didn't stop with changing colour. They just couldn't resist castrating the lion. Why on earth do you have to take the distinctly male heraldic lion, leave everything else there, but remove the symbolic genitals? What does it tell about you? That you want to wuss along with the Swedes?

And then, Uusi Suomi website isn't thrilled about this trademark infringement, either.

War, war, war

2010-12-06T17:58:00.000+02:00

It's Finnish Independence day. Time for celebration, right? Well, yes, but what I see is very little celebration for independence. What I see is just more and more talk about the wars, fighting, war veterans.

Hey, wake up. It's too late. The youngest Finnish veterans of Second World War are now around 85 years old. There's not a lot more we can really do for them. There are so few left that they can be adequately taken care for. They've earned the respect they now enjoy but I see little point in glorifying their sacrifices. After all, to repeat some of my earlier posts, I have the Pattonesque idea that war is not about dying for your country; it's about letting the other poor bastard die for his.

The veteran issue has been becoming more and more obsessive, although 20 years have now passed since the USSR ceased to exist and fewer and fewer of the actual fighting men are still among us. At least on TV and official celebrations, the independence day is mostly focused on wars.

So, what does independence really mean now? Many say that Finland is not really independent after joining EU and adopting the euro. True, joining this federalist-obsessed crowd has limited our sovereignty. I don't think that switching Finnmarks to the euro currency means nearly as much as the European treaties, some of which limit quite a lot what we can and can not do in this country. But of course the international treaties also have their good sides. And whether a member of EU or not, small countries like Finland are more and more dependent on international trade, globalization, exchange of people, money and ideas.

I think our current president Tarja Halonen has done remarkably little to point out any new direction for the country. Still, 2.2 million Finns are today going to watch tonight's reception where she shakes hands with an array of more or less colourful guests. Is that the best content we can give to our independence day? Watch on TV how our representatives get drunk for us?

What I'd give as an example for a suitable action on an independence day would be to announce that we withdraw from the utterly stupid Ottawa treaty and will continue to take care of our defence independently, thank you. That we decide ourselves who can immigrate to this country and who cannot, blast the ECJ. That we enforce legislation that guarantees equal rights and equal obligations for each citizen, forget the ECHR. That would show some independent spirit.

Give the emperor what belongs to the emperor

2010-11-29T13:30:00.000+02:00

There are lots of austerity measures being taken in Europe, and for a good reason, but limiting EU officials' payrises isn't one of them.

Elementary Finns

2010-11-27T00:06:00.008+02:00

A few of my English-speaking friends have asked what is the fuss about this party "Perussuomalaiset" in Finland, and what it actually represents, and whether people should be afraid of this extreme right populist party - a particular concern for those who have a non-Aryan skin colour. And what even the name of the party actually means.

Well, no. No need to be afraid.

Basically, the party does not have much coherent ideology except anger towards the elite. It is not "far right" for any meaningful definition of political "right". If you look at their policy statements, they are mostly somewhat to the left of major political parties, quite close to the Greens and the Left League (Vasemmistoliitto) though with some exceptions. Their views on big corporations, taxation, redistributive policies, etc are definitely on the left. They just take distance from the more absurd forms of radical feminism, statism, political correctness and immigration frenzy that are prevalent in the red and watermelon parties, thus Greens and Left League plus the traditional "left" SDP like to brand them as far right.

And the name of the party, what does "Perussuomalaiset" mean? Their own translation to English (well, not their own, since they have none, but the one in Wikipedia) is True Finns, but don't be confused; it's not really about racial purity of the Ugric tribes. Another translation would be Basic Finns and that gets closer. I would perhaps call them Elementary Finns - just like "peruskoulu" is "elementary school". People perceive that they are low-income and unemployed people with poor education, but that's not quite right. The ethos is more about the "betrayed workers, pensioners and middle class". Ordinary people. A Tea Party that speaks for a welfare state.

And why Perussuomalaiset is not dangerous to anyone is because they are not going to gain much real power, whatever the number of seats in parliament. They lack proper internal organization and discipline, and they don't have support in the large and important public sector machinery. You cannot do serious politics in Finland unless you have a significant share of your own, devoted agents in ministries, quangos and other organizations that distribute our tax juice.

There surely are a few racists among Perussuomalaiset, but they're on the fringe, and generally, Finns are not easily attracted by extreme, violent political movements. Events around 1918 provided a fairly long-lasting vaccination, since the civil war and the bitter feud that followed taught us a lot. But the primary reason for Elementary Finns not being a danger is their lack of disciplined organisation. There's not much tradition of adhering to party line and shutting up - rather to the contrary. Defections in and out of the party are the norm. Timo Soini is very popular but he is certainly no Führer and his supporters are no stromtroopers.

The long-time established power party, Social Democrats (SDP), is naturally horrified, because they are staying permanently behind Kokoomus (the conservatives) and fell behind Keskusta (Center party) again, and they now risk becoming the fourth largest party, with Perussuommalaiset closing in. That effectively means an end to the era that lasted for 50 years where they could build a power base of political figures in government, high officials in ministries, and domination in the trade unions. Now, only trade unions are left to them, and worldwide economic changes have eroded even that power base (and even there, some big ones fall).

Yes, Perussuomalaiset is a populist party. They have hardly any actual policy, they have little new ideas about how to build the economy for the nation. "Tax the rich" and "stop the waste" does not carry very far. The requirement for better immigration control is a contribution to actual policy, but there the other parties have quickly come along the same lines. However, overall we could say that Perussuomalaiset is not really any worse off regarding having some vision for future than others - particularly SDP who is utterly lost after it achieved its historical goals (the targets of the SDP party program of 1903 were largely achieved by the 1960's, and since 1980's the party's been just a machinery to be exploited by opportunists) and cannot admit that it is now a conservative party that only reflects on its own past and does not even know what it wants to conserve.

Therefore SDP has to try some gambles. When a fire erupted at a Tampere pizza restaurant that was run by an Iraqi man, and three inhabitants in the house were killed by smoke, senior SDP frontbenchers Päivi Lipponen (wife of former chairman and PM Paavo Lipponen) and Kimmo Kiljunen (who had his very own expenses scandal a while ago) condemned racism and required everyone else to perform purity rituals and join a front against the xenophobic elements behind this attack.

This backfired. In about one day the police cracked the case. It turned out that the arson was not motivated by any racism. The restaurant keeper himself, and three of his friends and relatives, are now held for aggravated arson and involuntary manslaughter. It's not been handled in court yet and police is not releasing all details, so it's largely speculative, but the case looks like an attempt at insurance fraud that got severely out of hand. And SDP looks now even more discredited and ridiculous.

So, it is possible that Elementary Finns will overtake SDP in terms of number of members in Parliament, but since it does take decades to renew the machinery in ministries and other politically appointed posts, they will not be able to run policy in this country. No worry. And even if they could, no worry from that point of view. Their socialist policies would be the real concern if they were to get any real power.

What you measure is what you get

2010-11-26T23:54:00.000+02:00

The Helsinki metropolitan mass transit authority says that rail traffic is more efficient than buses.

They're doing a clever sting here. The comparison is based on passenger kilometres. X passenger kilometres means that the vehicle moves for one kilometer with X passengers on board.

What passenger kilometres specifically does not measure is that people get from their places of departure to their places of destination quickly and comfortably.

It's a no-brainer that if you concentrate more of the public transport to fewer radial lines that make the trips longer, you get more efficient setup for producing passenger kilometres. At the same time, you are worsening the services for people, because people don't want to perform passenger kilometres. People want to get from their home to work, and from work to home, and from home to places of sports, culture, friends, whatever, and preferably as quickly and comfortably as possible.

Reducing direct bus connections, particularly the "lateral" buses that do not go to metropolitan centers but directly between regional cetres, would surely improve the efficiency of passenger kilometres, but will make people suffer.

Here you can see the management principle in action: what you measure is what you get. If you measure passenger kilometres, that's what your organization will deliver to you. Forget the end users, they're just a nuisance.

Grumpy politicians

2010-11-26T23:52:00.001+02:00

When Jeremy Clarkson called the UK prime minister Gordon Brown a "one-eyed Scottish idiot", at least two and possibly three groups of people were offended.

The visually impaired had their feelings hurt - The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) said: "Any suggestion that equates disability with incompetence is totally unacceptable. We would be happy to help Mr Clarkson understand the positive contribution people with sight loss make to society." I think this is a misunderstanding: Clarkson did not equate disability with incompetence. He just said that in this case, the two properties are present right there in one person. I am actually quite convinced that Jeremy Clarkson appreciates any positive contributions to society that blind people make, and that he would be happy to have a half-blind but competent Scot for a Prime Minister, because competence - and fairness, and other admirable properties - are what count.

The Scots were offended. Lord Foulkes, a former Labour Scottish minister, said he was "outraged" at Clarkson's comments. Well, he would be.

Representatives for idiots did not turn up to tell how inappropriate it is to associate them with Mr. Brown, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that somewhere, the League for the Mentally Impaired (LeftMI) expressed their outrage. They just couldn't write the address of Guardian correctly so that the letter would get through.

The British have a tradition for colourful parliamentary insults. In June, health minister Simon Burns called John Bercow, the speaker of parliament, a "stupid, sanctimonious dwarf" in the Commons. He had to apologise and say he was sorry for any offence he had caused after the insult was branded "derogatory and deeply offensive" by the Walking with Giants Foundation (WWGF). BASists (British Association of Sanctimonousts) has not yet come forward with a comment, nor has LeftMI which represents the stupid as well as the idiots.

In a more recent case, David Cameron said that Burns's driver had accidentally hit the Speaker's car while reversing. Bercow said he was "not happy" about the incident. Mr Burns retorted: "So which one are you?". And, again, Bercow was offended, as well as WWGF.

I think Bercow should just have said one word: "Grumpy". With that, he would have scored.

Some very surprised women

2010-11-26T23:52:00.000+02:00

Green Women in Finland are "surprised about the amount of violence experienced by men" and require that this phenomenon is discussed in public.

How surprised they are. In 2004, the Green Women in Finland, along with many other women organizations, expressed their outrage for funding plan for research on violence against men (the money was to come from RAY, the Finnish state monopoly of slot machines.

Well, I suppose this could be called development.

Armistice Day

2010-11-11T15:07:00.000+02:00

English and French papers make headlines like The nation falls silent for 'the glorious dead'.

I think it is time to agree that the World War I is over. Germany paid the final part of war reparations a few weeks ago.

But what buggers me is that the dead are "glorious". How is it glorious to be dead? Some of those who died lived glorious lives, and even performed gloriously when they were killed, but many were, well, just killed. Very ungloriously. The polished pictures about war remembrance are hiding the ugly fact that in war, people kill and get killed. Sometimes it is justified and worth it, sometimes not. Very often, it's something in between. Just like any human activity, it has good sides and bad sides, but the side impacts of war are usually of a different magnitude than most other things.

And my view to the whole business war is that of Patton's:

Don't be a fool and die for your country. Let the other sonofabitch die for his.

Now that's not very glorious.

The warlike Swiss

2010-11-11T09:54:00.000+02:00

According to the Telegraph, Herman Van Rompuy says that Euroscepticism leads to war and a rising tide of nationalism is the European Union's "biggest enemy".

Somehow I don't see that the Swiss are attacking everyone around them, even though they are eurosceptic indeed and most male citizens even have a gun at home.

But I understand van Rompuy. He's concerned that the EU citizens aren't entirely happy with the way EU is being run, so it's time to shake up some controversy.

Hey, perhaps you could call the eurosceptics Nazis and declare they are enemy to the people? But this is a good start. Anyone who does not believe in a United States of Europe is a warmonger.

Lengthening work careers by shortening holidays

2010-11-06T13:15:00.006+02:00

What utter rubbish!

The resigning chairman of board of Confederation of Finnish Industries, Sakari Tamminen, is saying that annual leaves of Finnish workers should be made shorter in order to "lengthen the work career".

Again, what utter rubbish!

Finnish holiday benefits are fairly good compared to the U.S. or Japan, for instance. People generally have 4 or 5 weeks of annual leave. Bank holidays and other public holidays are not very extensive.

Finnish holiday scheme is also fairly good when compared to any country in the Third World, where only the nomenclature has nice holidays, and everyone else works more or less all the time, because they cannot afford anything else.

But the Finnish scheme is not that excessively good. There is no significant competitive advantage to gain by shortening holidays. Any addition in nominal annual working time is likely to result in added sickness leaves and other things that effectively reduce productivity. In my opinion, we have reached a perfect balance here and the world is now ready. Let's not rock the boat.

Yes, there is some actual need to lengthen the average working career of people in this country. Far too many people are retiring from working life long before the actual nominal retirement age. Many of these go to "unemployment pension" which is basically a track for people are cannot or will not be employed, for various reasons. Many are also pensioned because of physical or psychological ilnesses that render them incapable of working. The burden of financing the pensions is carried by the working age groups, and that burden is increasing to a point where people don't feel it is feasible to pay high pension contributions and know that you're not getting any real pension yourself. It's a Ponzi scheme.

How does shortening annual leaves from current level help this? In no way whatsoever. To the contrary, even more people will feel that the compensation they get from working is not fair.

This feeling is not at all helped by the fact that many representatives of nomenclature - corporate leaders, staff of these think tanks saying how important it is to work to an older age - are themselves taking generous early retirement packages.

If I had a good share of ownership in some Finnish industries, and therefore had a vote, I'd tell my servants - these people working for employer organizations etc - that they should forget the early retirement packages, because they are making very, very bad PR work.

Entirely not credible.

The State loses tax income!

2010-11-06T10:34:00.009+02:00

Pravda announces that the Finnish government loses approximately 18 000 million euros per year in various tax subsidies. That sounds like a lot, but... caveat emptor. Beware if you buy this.

The largest of these "subsidies" is the imputed net rent, which means that if you own the house or apartment where you live, you don't need to pay rent to someone else. You save money, thus you get an imaginary income. Since this imaginary income is currently not taxed, the state is losing money.

Economic theory is abused here to create an impression that the State would somehow be entitled to get more tax money if this imaginary income was calculated and taxed "correctly". The idea is popular among those who oppose the idea that people own their own homes. In a truly developed, progressive state, all housing belongs to government; this makes people less attached to their homes, and they can more easily be ordered to move from one kolkhoz to another. This increases productivity and makes it easier to achieve the targets of the next 5-year plan. Everyone benefits! If you don't believe in this, you deserve to be re-housed in Kolyma.

There have been attempts to impose this tax, at least in the U.K. and Finland in 1970's, but the trials weren't all too popular.

Why? Because the income is imaginary. It's absurd. It's arbitrary, and people who are taxed never see that money and never hold it in their hands. Why do people want to own their homes? First, because they like to be in control of their own lives, particularly the place where they spend most of their time, and secondly, to manage it well and save in the cost. But is saving (in the sense of not spending) some kind of income? No.

Or, if it is, then the State is losing much more money somewhere else.

Let's take another example of imputed income. This is much more significant.

Let's assume that instead of walking, or driving, or taking a bus to work, people would take a helicopter taxi to work. Sure, it is costly. Half an hour helicopter ride costs around 350 €, and there are the transitions for the chopper from the base to the place where you take off, so going to work with helicopter costs about 700 € one way, 1400 € a day. There are 2457000 people in a job in the country, 260 working days. This means that the imputed net income gained by people in Finland not riding helicopter to work is about 894 000 000 000 € per year. As the average income tax rate is 23,2 %, it means that the State loses 207 000 000 000 € per year! About a hundred times the amount of the imaginary imputed net rent income. (In fact, the amount should be larger, because of course also those who don't go to work but go to school etc also get a similar income).

Just think how much good the State could do with this money!

And that's not all. Add to that the amount of imputed net income that people get when they cook food at home, instead of going to dine every day at Chez Dominique! (With a helicopter taxi.) Not to mention the imputed net value of sexual services that are exchanged by married couples (or unmarried, for that matter, not to forget registered relationships of same-sex couples, nor activities in public swimming halls).

Yeah, it's rubbish. Just like that imputed net rent income idea. In reality, both the income tax rates and other tax rates in this country are adjusted to be as tight as possible. There's considerable argument about on which side of the peak of the Laffer curve we are in, but surely it is folly to imagine that you could just hike up the income tax rate (based on calculated imaginary income) and collect 20 % more without severe impact on economic activity.

Who do you really support in Afghanistan?

2010-11-04T09:30:00.004+02:00

Some enthusiastic supporter of Julian Assange wrote elsewhere: "Do you think Afghans and Iraqis should sue the US government for launching an illegal war?"

Afghans definitely should not, because there's no war that would be more legal than the Western intervention in Afghanistan. It is a rare case in the category of wars, covered by UN resolutions and international law (like this one and many others since.)

Of course, the whole concept of "launching" a war in Afghanistan (in 2001) is a pretty moot point considering that the country has been in an constant state of (civil) war for the past 30 years. In the 80's, the Soviets occupied it and Americans supported the (largely Islamic) resistance. Now, US, UK and NATO/ISAF forces occupy it (with UN backing) and resistance is by an unholy alliance of militant Islamists and drug lords.

Calling the UN-backed intervention "illegal" is not a statement of juridical facts, it is a statement for your preference to support bronze-age barbarism that the Taleban represents, instead of the possibly well-meaning but bureaucratic and ineffective UN, or Western democracies.

It is equally folly to say that if Western armed forces withdraw from the country, it would somehow "end" the war. No, the war would not end. The combatants would just take some other targets (for instance, people whose names were exposed by Julian Assange). And the war might spread to neighbouring countries. But one thing is sure, the war would not end there.

The idea that a war in Afghanistan or Iraq would end when the US, UK and NATO/ISAF forces leave is in my opinion very, very wrong, and perhaps "colonialist" would be a good characterization. To believe this idea, you must assume that Afghans and Iraqis are not real people who would be leading their own lives; they are just targets, subjects, proxies in a cultural war against Americans; if left alone, they will be quite irrelevant and the focus moves on the the next cause where Western powers can be blamed. In this viewpoint, if the Americans have lost a war, that is a great victory, and what happens to the proxies - for instance, the people in Afghanistan - is not material at all. They're not people, they're just tools for proving what a nice SWPL you are when you "oppose the war".

It is another matter whether the intervention in Afghanistan will achieve its long-term goals; some short-term goals have been achieved (after all, there are now probably tens or hundreds of thousands of girls who have been allowed to go to school and learn to read, for instance) but the country is not stable and peaceful at all.

Iraq is then a completely different point regarding legality. There the invaders had no UN backing, and the WMD hype was made up when US and UK simply wanted attack and to get rid of Saddam Hussein. The American, British and other troops have committed atrocities in the course of war. However, when those who are fighting against the Americans and British commit atrocities, it is somehow "natural", it is an act of God, or in fact it is a fault of the Americans and needs to be added to the Iraq body count.

How come some people are not responsible for their own actions, and Americans are responsible for everything? Are they so much better and more important people that no one else needs to be accounted at all?

Finally, I'm slightly astonished to see well-educated Western people say Al-Qaida fighters are "defending" their country. First of all, much of Al-Qaida in Afghanistan is Arabs in a non-Arab country. They are defending an ideology, and that is an ideology that deserves to lose (much more so than the materialistic, reactionary but secular Western ideology).

A Finnish Monument

2010-10-30T02:22:00.019+03:00

In September 1863, Alexander II, by the grace of God the Emperor and Sovereign of Russia, Tsar of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, Prince of Estonia, etc, etc, etc, etc, arrived in Helsinki to open the parliament session in his Grand Duchy. He also visited Aurora Karamzin, who was a former waiting-maid of the Empress and the widow of Tsar's close friend Paul Demidov. Paul, who deceased in 1840, had been not only a friend of the Tsar but also one of the richest men in Russia at the time, and now Aurora, re-married in 1846 to colonel Andrei Karamzin and re-widowed by the Crimean war in 1854, possessed a vast fortune which she governed with iron will and rigid but moderate religious furor, contributing significantly to various philanthropic causes like schools and hospitals.

Aurora had a nice mansion in Träskända, Espoo, some 20 km from Helsinki. Her people were enthusiastically waiting for the important guest.

But they had a problem. A visit by the Tsar is not an everyday occasion. Any host or hostess would want to impress the important guest. How?

Finland had no great monumental buildings, the palaces were dwarfed by what the emperor had back home in St. Petersburg. The country doesn't have the tallest mountains in the world, nor access to the great seas, and no magnificent rivers. This was nice, wooded country, perhaps one of the neatest parts of the vast Russian empire, but being just neat isn't very impressive. What could we show to the emperor? What could we build, something the emperor surely has not seen before?

And now follows a very Finnish idea. Let's build something that is really novel to the Tsar.
The greatest loo in the world!

And here it stands, to this day, on the grounds of Träskända manor. A huge, six-cylinder wooden outhouse, decorated with wood carvings, and ventilated through a tall tower in the center, in the shade of the great oaks that have grown here since Aurora and other manor owners had them planted almost two centuries ago. And it's called The Imperial Outhouse (Keisarillinen Käymälä).

Alexander also participated in a hunt that was arranged on the manor grounds, and then left off to take care of other parts of his empire, which his descendants then mismanaged and lost. The manor house burnt down in 1888 and a new one was erected, designed by messiers Lindgren-Gesellius-Saarinen. The house has since then been a nursing home for the elderly.

A part of the manor grounds is preserved as a nature reserve, but some of the woodlands were chopped off after Second World war and given as plots of land to refugees from the Porkkala area that Soviet Union took for a forcible 50 year lease (but ceded back as economically unsustainable and militarily outdated in 1956). The refugees built their houses here. Later this former woodland turned suburban, and now the streets in the area are given names that remind us of Alexander's hunt: Hare Road, Hunting-hound's Road, Hunt-master Alley.

Putting the genie back in the bottle

2010-10-30T00:05:00.007+03:00

Helsinki Court of Appeal gave today a verdict in a court case related to freedom of expression. Jussi Halla-aho, a blogger who mainly writes about immigration (critically), was fined 330 euros for "breach of religious peace", as a year-old sentence of the Helsinki District Court was largely upheld by the court.

Enough of Halla-aho's case has been written (at least in the Finnish blogosphere) so I won't delve in it any further. What makes the Helsinki Court of Appeal a true court jester is the verdict which requires Halla-aho to now remove two paragraphs from his blog. Mistake:

Once it is published, it cannot be recalled

Once someone puts something in the Internet and a few other people are interested enough to care, there's no way to remove it. It just can't be done. Of course, Halla-aho could edit one particular instance of a Web page that he maintains, but that's just one page. Looking at Google as of today, I get about 2250 hits for exact replicas of Halla-aho's offending sentences. Why are these replicas there? Because of the court case, lots of sites have copied the text. Without the court case, few would have bothered. I mean, what Halla-aho publishes is not badly written but it is a little bit repetitive, and most people would not have bothered.

So, by now, thousands of Web pages are replicating what Halla-aho wrote. This is impressive, considering that it is in Finnish, a rather obscure language in the net world. Some of the sites are clearly islamophobic, some are generally interested in immigration, many focus on freedom of speech, some just like to observe and occasionally provoke a good fight.

What the court could realistically do is threaten to lock up anyone who is caught publishing those sentences, or uttering them in public, and try to enforce it in the Finnish jurisdiction. The court could perhaps issue an order to behead anyone who re-publishes these insults to Islam. This just might be reasonably expected from the Helsinki Court of Appeal. But take out sentences from a blog, to remove insulting phrases from Internet? Delusional. And decidedly counter-productive. Just a hint of censorship will ensure that lots of people will want to copy and re-publish the stuff.

Once the genie is out of the bottle, it doesn't go back in. If you ever put anything in the Web, it won't be possible to remove it; there will be countless copies around the world if the material is in any way interesting to anyone and is linked somewhere. And starting a process at a court of law, trying to censor the Internet, is a dead-sure way to accelerate replicating that page in the net. It's really an invitation to spread the word.

Mika Illman, the state prosecutor who was the real target of Halla-aho's provocation, would have been very wise to just observe the criticism against him, and if it was too much to bear, resign, because if he can't stand it, he's not fit for the job.

Halla-aho's case will surely continue in the Supreme Court and after that probably in the European Court of Human Rights, which is going to be the first level of courts of law that isn't already thoroughly offended by Halla-aho's provocation, and which will of course also provide an international platform where this storm in a teacup can reach new heights. What the Helsinki District Court and Helsinki Court of Appeal have now achieved is make hundreds of thousands of people aware of what was written about Islam's Prophet. This isn't exactly the way to ease up the relationship between religious groups. Jussi Halla-aho provokes people because he wants to, it's his mission. Mika Illman, his colleagues and the Helsinki courts do it because they don't know any better.

The Haitian housing bubble

2010-10-18T15:23:00.004+03:00

One might think that when very many of the houses in Port-au-Prince were destroyed by an earthquake on January 12, there wouldn't be a housing bubble where some nice apartments are empty, waiting for buyers or tenants.

But this is what has happened in Haiti. Over one million people are still living in tents or squatters, in improvised housing made of scrap iron and tarpaulin. Mostly, this is of course unavoidable, because the destruction is so vast. But there are also many houses left standing up, in nice condition, waiting for someone to live in them.

The NPR tells us that the prices on surviving houses defy belief. One senator put up his three-bedroom with panoramic views for $15,000 a month. (Its nine Rottweiler guard dogs are free.) Finding anything similar for less than $5,000 is a steal. Want to buy? A three-bedroom with guest apartment lists for $900,000.

I think Haiti could use some serious socialism/fascism/nationalism here. Have a government that confiscates houses, assigns them according to need, keeps up law and order. Keeps a record of people in each area, delivers food stamps, manages a rationing system for external aid. Administers a dose of the neatly calculated Official Table of Drops to armed robbers and rapists. Allows local market economy to recover. All the stuff that West European countries experienced after the Second World War, until Wirtschaftswunder.

Unfortunately, suitably un-corrupt socialism/fascism/nationalism seems to be in short supply in the West Indies. No, I really wouldn't completely trust the Cubans. But what's worst in this sort-of artificial housing shortage? In a way, it's the prospect that these housing speculators are most interested is NGOs - the organizations that are there to help the people of Haiti. "The owner isn't interested in renting to Haitians. He's always rented to NGOs." What good can the NGOs do, when their money goes to outrageously high rental costs, and keeps up structures of inefficient use of resources? In stable, advanced countries, having a few high-earners make lots of money does have the impact that the money trickles down in the economy, because the high earners buy local products and services, and hire staff. But in Haiti, I suspect that anyone who can squeeze substantial amounts of aid money out of the NGOs and quangos operating there will be depositing as much as they can in bank accounts in the U.S., or Virgin Islands, or Switzerland. And it's perfectly legitimate money.

The saddest thing is that no one, myself included, has any idea how to do it better. Sending money seems hopeless, it's just wasted. Sending people just means that the aid workers need protection and support, so that resource usage is extremely inefficient. Sending anything else is a waste.

Except perhaps a vast, efficient, un-corrupt occupation army, with sufficient firepower to quell any resistance without mercy. The downside is that no one has the economic muscle, gall and moral will to set up, arm and deploy such an occupation force. But nevertheless, I think I'm developing very colonialist attitudes regarding Haiti, at least until someone can demonstrate any success with any other means.

Heatballs

2010-10-17T09:56:00.005+03:00

Energy-saver light bulbs (CFL, compact fluorescent light) aren't very nice. Most of them produce an unpleasant colour of light - often about as inspiring as a frozen morgue on a November morning, with a zombie tapping your shoulder.

They are also slow to start, taking a minute or two before they produce their full, nominal luminosity - which usually is still less than you expected from the sales package. And, CFLs contain mercury, which is poisonous. In most other products, like thermometers, there has been a frenzy to to eliminate mercury, but not with lamps, where mercury is part of the compound that forms the luminous vapor in the tube.

Regular light bulbs are banned because they are "inefficient", i.e. consume electricity and produce heat, which in Southern Europe is then removed by air conditioning, which consumes even more electricity. But this inefficiency doesn't really matter too much in Finland, because it is almost always heating season here - except for the middle of the summer, say June to August, which is the season when you don't really need light bulbs. So, whenever we want to use light bulbs, the energy is wasted to a lesser degree than elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the EU has banned regular light bulbs, even though for many of us, they would continue to be the best alternative in some applications.

But fortunately the free market still has some innovativeness: in Germany, a new product called "heatballs" has arrived on the market.

Of course, they are exactly the same as the old light bulbs, but as they are marketed as heat bulbs, they are not banned. After all, they work just like electric heaters - which are still allowed, of course, because the pact of light bulb manufacturers could lobby on legislation allowing them to sell CFLs, but not replace the whole of heating infrastructure in Europe. And, in addition, the heat bulbs produce some light, with a pleasantly coloured spectrum.

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Note: I don't think CFLs are totally bad. For instance, at my home, all the outdoors lights are CFLs, except one (at the side entrance where it needs to light up instantly when the IR sensor turns it on). However, I find it strange that the recycling has not been arranged at the cost of CFL manufacturers and importers, as you would expect. Now most of the hazardous material ends up in landfills.

The Freedom Trap

2010-10-14T00:31:00.008+03:00

About 42000 reputable newspapers and TV channels, and about 42 000 000 bloggers, are commenting on the fantastic story of the Chilean miners who are currently being rescued from the hole where they've been trapped for over two months.

It's a really nice story. World news is mostly miserable, and this particular story started out just the same - a mine collapsed, dozens killed - but then it turned out to be a story of miraculous survival, and eventually a reality TV; something that brings to mind the Apollo 13 story and Big Brother and Titanic and the Kwai River Bridge. And it is even closer to us, because the people whose fate has been hanging from a thread for the past 68 days are not fabulous astronauts or elite military, but a group of ordinary working men, who have become a part of an extraordinary course of events due to an act of God.

Some people are complaining that politicians, as well as the media and other commercial parties, are exploiting the miners. Well, sure they are, but for once, let them go ahead, at least for some time. It's a wonderful exploit. I'm sure pretty much everyone on Earth who has heard of this occurrence is glad that it all turns out so well, so it's much nicer that everyone exploits this than the latest car bomb in Bahdad or a mutilated schoolgirl in Pakistan or a mudflood in Mexico. It's been clear for some weeks already that at least most of the miners in Copiapó will be rescued successfully, but now it looks like they'll all be up under the sun, in good health, in just a few hours.

It's a great publicity event for Chile. There's plenty of goodwill to be collected by the incumbent Chilean president Sebastian Piñera and fellow politicians. Also, I have little doubt that the gold and copper mine, which wasn't hugely rich and which did not enable the San Esteban mining company to thrive too much, will change. The mining company have been criticized a lot, but I suppose that in the general carneval spirit, the Chileans won't be too vindicative even if there were some lapses in mining security. After all, there still was a working shelter and enough training, and eventually also ambitious rescue efforts, which enabled these miners to survive - although the more un-romantic amongst us will surely tell that instead of spending tens of millions of dollars in rescuing the miners, the same amount of money would have saved ten or hundred times as many lives if it had been spent on aid to poor children in the capitalistic Chile which has such an evil neo-liberalist political leadership. Hey, their economic recover was enabled by one Pinochet, so it cannot possibly be good.

But back to the mine. I think it is quite likely that in a year or two, the Copiapó site will be a theme park that welcomes wealthy norteamericano tourists to spend an hour, or a day or two, down in a hotel in the mine, and then experience the escape lift, for a hefty fee. That may be a better use for the place than extracting copper and gold ore.

There's just one but. The miners are now famous. As I mentioned before, they will never have to go down a mine shaft again, unless they want to, because they can make a living selling autobiographies, movie rights, etc etc.

This is their biggest trap. They are now free from the mine, but they are not free from the experience of utter despair for many many dark days before contact to outside world, not are they free from the curious crowd, us. They've been sturck well out of mental balance, and now they'll be under intense media scrutiny - particularly the poor chap who had both a wife and a mistress - and unless they are strong-minded individuals, or have very honest, good and competent personal managers, some of them will be like a mix of Maradona and Matti Nykänen. That is dangerous for their well-being.

Perhaps the Chilean government should appoint someone to look after them a bit, because their newly gained freedom is the trap that ensnares them.

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(I thought I had made up a nice subject line for the post, but then I realized that I had only borrowed it from a solid thriller from 40 years back, by one of my favourites, Desmond Bagley.)

Nobel Peace Prize and Chinese agents

2010-10-10T11:27:00.007+03:00

Some Chinese people have been rather offended by the Nobel peace price awarded to dissident to Liu Xiaobo. They have also expressed their feelings in comment sections to Western blogs. The usual reaction by other people has been that the comments are either trolls (well, some surely are) or are entered by people who can only be paid agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC). Many of the comments are quite full of prejudices.

Reading the Marginal Revolution blog, I ended up commenting this in such a long text that I vary it here as well.

Having lived for some time in China, and having been in contact with quite many Chinese since that, I think these accusations are mistaken. There are Chinese who defend their government and oppose Liu, or the granting of Nobel to Liu. They are not necessary trolls, or proxies of the CPC. Opinions like theirs are not at all uncommon among Chinese. And that is why this discussion works against the goals of the Nobel Peace Price. It is a mistake not to understand that very many Chinese genuinely support the current regime. They do believe it is doing a good job. They are even prepared to defend it in net discussions, out of their own, genuine conviction.

As an overall note: it seems a lot of right-wing people (particularly Americans) are disturbed by the concept of "communism" in the name of the dynasty that governs China (CPC). Here one should note that the loyalty to this dynasty is not really agreeing to communist ideals. This is not about communism; this is about being Chinese. If you're afraid of China, or if you don't like the way it works, you should not be fooled by the communist parlance. It's just liturgy. Talk about the Chinese. The Chinese describe their system as "socialist market economy"; I would characterize it as "capitalistic communism". See the difference? Capitalism is the prevailing economic system; communism is the prevailing administrative system. But in the end, real-world communism and traditional Chinese administration are not that different. The Chinese just realized that the economic theory of communism doesn't work, particularly in the modern world. The administrative part - dictatorship - works a lot better.

And this is why many left-wing Westerners are so angry with the Chinese. The CPC has betrayed the ideals of the Left, because once in power, after many hazardous experiments, they found out that the market economy works better than centrally planned economy. Before realizing this, tremendeous mistakes were made. Tens or hundreds of millions of people were killed by various experiments, like the Great Leap Forward. The CPC is not very willing to admit this in public, but it is willing to learn and not repeat the same mistakes. And this is perhaps the main reason why Western left wing hates the new-new China.

I don't really know enough about Liu Xiaobo's work in order to say whether the Nobel Peace Price was justified. In the past, the committee has sometimes made rather doubtful selections, like awarding Barack Obama last year. There it seems that the committee just wanted to snub the supporters of George W. Bush in the U.S., with little real grounds - as Obama's merits, or lack of, in the year that followed have shown - and I'd say last year's prize hardly worked in any way to promote world peace. In the election campaign, Obama spoke differently from G. W. Bush but in the office, he has had little choice to implement any different politics. The emptiness of speech now shows up in his falling poll support, although I don't think there's anything so much wrong in his policies as such.

To get back to Liu Xiaobo: I repeat, a vast number of Chinese individuals - who are not stupid and who are not entirely unaware of what goes on in the world, either - are genuinely offended by the Nobel to Mr. Liu.

The Nobel is not without merit. It brought attention to Charter 08 and leads me to think that Liu probably has important ideas that a larger number of Chinese should hear of, and therefore, perhaps the prize is, in the end, indeed for the good. But it might only work its way through confrontation and escalation of mutual suspicions.

So, bottom line: do not be fooled to believe that the Chinese who bash Liu are trolls, or agents of the CPC. Assume they are real persons with real opinions. That gets you going in the discussion.

Racism and Finnish nurses

2010-10-08T01:00:00.008+03:00

This is an old thing, never saw this is in Finnish newspapers. Which is very very weird, considering the joke about an American, a Frenchman, a Finn and the elephant. *) I only met it now, through The Telegraph's story about Labour leadership race in Britain.

A prominent British labour politician, Diane Abbot, said "blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls" in her local hospital in West London were unsuitable as nurses because they "may never have met a black person before." This was in 1996, the year when Lola Odusoga was Miss Finland.

It's astonishing that a politician - who has made a career out of claiming to oppose racism - can make such insensitive remarks. But yes, there is a double standard, at least within Ms Abbott, although in this case even she had to apologize. What really was the thing about the Finnish nurses that was bothering her? In a way, it is understandable that people would want to be treated by people who look familiar. But we're told that this would be racism. And in the end, what difference does a person's skin colour make? As long as she or he is a good nurse and speaks the language and can understand what her or his patients say and even their earlier lives?

I don't recall any Finnish commentary about Diane Abbott at the time, though that could of course be due to the fact that with a newborn baby, two other small children, and fresh mortgage, I was in a constant haze due to lack of sleep and overwork.

Anyway, Ms Abbot is now out of the British shadow cabinet, and those who would press the "like" button upon Labour Party's destruction have suffered a setback.

*) The joke: An American, a French and a Finn see an elephant. The American speculates: "How could I make most money out of it?". The Frenchman thinks: "How could I cook it to make unique food?". The Finn wonders: "What is it thinking about Finns?" We're so concerned about how others perceive our country and people that it is inconceivable that a remark about Finns in a major British newspaper would go unnoticed. Well, apparently there indeed was some commentary.

Choice of employment and beggars

2010-10-07T21:09:00.009+03:00

Finland is now arguing internally whether begging should be restricted. The same problem with beggars and squatters has come up elsewhere, e.g. in France: Roma people, mostly from Bulgaria, Romania and other East/Central European countries, have become a rather visible and sometimes obstructive and distressing phenomenon in cities. The begging is an organized industry, utilizing child labour as well as people with mutilated limbs and other disabilities. There is also a related phenomenon of pickpocketing, shoplifting, burglaries and squatting, with camps being built (with the kind support of some progressive youthful organizations, funded by the taxpayer).

"Racism. Useless law. You cannot prohibit poverty." These are slogans by those who oppose any restrictions to begging. Also, people are saying that it would be against Finnish constitution and European human rights law to restrict begging, particularly because there is the freedom of movement (of labour) in Europe and there is freedom of occupation in Finland.

Now, it is obvious that the Roma beggars (at least the foot soldier level) are poor, abused and not to be envied. But is allowing them to beg really helping them at all? I don't think so. Make up something else.

Prohibiting poverty?

Saying that restrictions would attempt to prohibit poverty is a moot point. Begging is certainly not the only option available, and giving money to beggars is not an efficient way to help anyone. Rather to the contrary. Whatever the country where I am, and whatever the nationality of the beggar, I don't give money, though I may give food or used clothes.

There are lots of poor people even in Europe, but only a few of them beg, and on the other hand, many of those participating in the begging racket are not poor. Encouraging begging is a bad way to help the poor. It's not just ineffective, but outright bad, because it sets wrong incentives. The Roma will not get out of poverty by continuing to beg; getting education is a better way, and working in the begging industry is making it more difficult to get an education.

Freedom of movement

The freedom of movement in EU is another moot point: the principle applies to labour who is working or looking for a job, not to begging, and it is limited to a 3-month period. It is perfectly legal to deport people who are abusing this.

Of course, there are no easy solutions to the beggar issue. Beggars won't go away if we just pass a law. And I don't think anyone believes so - although a straw man argument is often built around this. However, laws can be used for controlling unwanted, abusive behaviour, including things like human trafficking.

Coice of occupation

What amazes me is the argument that unlimited begging must be allowed because freedom of occupation is a human right, i.e. people have choice of employment - the principle that everyone is free to choose what he or she does for living.

Sure, let's facilitate freedom of occupation to beggars. Just like any other people offering services to the public, they will need a license. They will need to file in paperwork to guarantee health and safety for their clients and the employees in this industry - after all, the begging racket is an industry with a strong if not publicly very open hierarchy, reporting and profit structure, so the employment laws are applicable. The begging enterprises will be subject to tax law, they need to pay tax advances, file in tax reports.

What? It's too difficult for them? Yeah, right. It is. And this is a problem not only to the beggars, but everyone else as well, including far more useful occupations. There is quite some bureaucracy and cost in working as a self-employed person or setting up a company, but we just have to live with it; it's the price of the welfare state. Allowing some people to slip off legislation (because of their race, skin colour, or similar properties) would be racism.

I think everyone should be treated the same, independent of whether they belong to some ethnic group - and even if it is a hip and cool ethnic group whose cultural difference from the majority of local people is as big as possible. Somehow I don't think that the red-green progressives (and Sauli Niinistö) really want to help anyone. It's just cool to have beggars on our streets - so we have some easy puppets who can be used to show how good people we are when we want to use other people's money to help and support them.

Enforcement

Sure, a law against begging doesn't stop the nuissance completely. After all, even the law against killing doesn't stop all homicide, and making a crime of petty theft only worsens our crime statistics as the police has no time to investigate practically any of it. Still, the laws about murder and even bicycle theft have a point and they do some good.

Of course, it could be that the begging law is no good because it will be completely impossible to enforce, as the police are far too few and the cities are too broke to hire any "community officers" or the like. However, at least the police representative in the committee working on the issue seemed to favour having some legal tools that the police could use against obstructive begging. But if difficulty of enforcement is such an important criteria, we should urgently abolish zebra crossings and traffic lights, because currently few car drivers properly respect zebra crossings, and even fewer pedestrians obey traffic lights in crossings.

We're not quite that desperate yet.

For a successful fight, you need to pick a good enemy

2010-10-03T10:33:00.008+03:00

The Finnish Greens are raising up a fight against Perussuomalaiset, the old populist-immigration-sceptic-national-leftist splinter party that has recently gone up in poll ratings. (HS in Finnish.)

This is a very traditional way of waking up the spirit in own ranks: find an enemy (make it up if it doesn't exist), point at it, tell how bad they are, set up a fight. Preferably, a fight you can win (so define the rules carefully). But, in a way, it's rather sad.

The Greens are supposed to be the main liberal party in this country, with best educated and relatively young membership, new ideas, strong support in the lower ranks of the immensely strong public-sector offices such as ministries, etc - and what are they doing? They don't have much more new to contribute than Perussuomalaiset. All they can do is find a straw man and start beating it. Well, the party does have a significant Stalinist-general-leftist tradition (from the likes of Satu Hassi) in addition to those who came from the Liberals (like Osmo Soininvaara), and apparently it shows here.

Perussuomalaiset is, of course, a populist party. It lacks constructive ideas. It mainly looks behind, wanting to reverse the progress towards European unification. Tax the rich, tax the corporate world, and raise the benefits - an easy cry from the opposition, and an impossible position if you go to talks to form a cabinet coalition .

Once the party gets a large representation in the parliament, it will be held responsible for its political programme - or to be precise, the inexistance of a realistic political programme. Its lack of positive ideas, lack of internal discipline, lack of trained and experienced politicians and lack of politically-appointed supportive staff in ministries will mean that it will disappoint its voters. "Get out of EU and keep out of NATO and close the borders and tax the rich and give money to everyone else" will not carry it very far. It will fall into internal pickering and schisms, splinter up and generally not be of any good. The only real impact it has is that it forces everyone to open up the immigration debate, which has been in some ways a taboo until this year. This impact is already very visible. But otherwise the Perussuomalaiset has been able to contribute very little.

But is it now really so that the Greens are not any better? Do they think that they are in competition of the same voters? That is absurd. Those who vote Perussuomalaiset are most likely proletarian people who are disappointed in SDP and sometimes perhaps Keskusta (the Center Party). The Greens are competing with Kokoomus (Conservatives), and the most obvious property of any Green is that they sneer at proles. "Red-neck" is their ultimate insult, and the internal code of conduct in the Greens is that above all, it is important to show disdain of lower-class people. I can imagine a manual worker who is up to his elbows in grease or filth will vote for Kokoomus - even before he sets up his own company to organize and sell his labour - but Greens? Not really.

It looks like the Greens cannot beat the Conservatives, who are not really so conservative, and who are perhaps the most likely partner in any future coalition, so it might be a bit dangerous to insult them in large scale. So what do they do? They select an enemy who they can safely shout at, from a safe distance, and hurl insults. And not get involved in debate about actual issues - such as immigration, or taxation, or future development of public services, or how to arrange things for municipalities whose economic strength just doesn't carry the weight of the ever expanding obligations imposed by the state.

Why is health care so expensive in the USA?

2010-10-01T21:14:00.002+03:00

The Incidental Economist has a great article on this.

Too bad that there are no simple answers. Many would have us think so, of course. But the reality is complex.

Woman in Black

2010-09-27T07:39:00.005+03:00

The United Nations has nominated a person to act as the first contact for extraterrestrial aliens, with the title UNOOSA (United Nations Officer for Outer Space Affairs). Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman got the job.

I wonder if her tasks include assisting any aliens in applying for family unification?

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Update: Apparently, this news piece was bogus. The UNBBTTBTA (United Nations Brooklyn Battery Tunnel Triborough Bridge Tunnel Authority) denies any existence.

Neighbours

2010-09-23T07:53:00.002+03:00

Stefan Wallin says that we are a neighbour state of the Nordic countries, and that is why our schools must have mandatory Swedish, not Russian.

Panic and hysteria in Sweden

2010-09-22T22:40:00.005+03:00

The Swedish election drama is becoming a frightful circus. Judging by the headlines, the whole country is getting psychotic.

Sweden Democrats, a tiny fringe party, gets enough votes to enter the parliament, and suddenly tabloids make headlines about "dark forces". The parliament changes its rules for setting up working groups just in order to keep this little party totally isolated. Bagfuls of uncounted votes appear here and there before the final recount, in the hope that the build-up of Riksdagen could be adjusted and it just might be possible to set up a cabinet which does not need any support from Sweden Democrats. Put it in scale with the size of the country, and the whole show is more remarkable than the Bush-Gore recounts in the U.S. in 2000.

The election drama built up over a period of time. Publishing campaign adverts was restricted. The police told the Sweden Democrats not to make campaign gatherings because they could be attacked. Is that kind of situation acceptable in a democracy? On the other hand, it turns out that the SD member who claims to have been attacked and wounded with swastika marks may actually have inflicted the wounds himself - but who knows now? Paranoia is the word of the day.

Yes, some of the people in SD are probably racists. However, I think that a much more typical description of SD activists is that they are people who are fed up with the political class of Sweden. They are also politically inexperienced, enthusiastic but naive, and probably unable to co-operate even with each other, let alone anybody else.

The same is true with most populist movements. SD is characterized as an "extreme right" party, although in my opinion, their agenda is rather more typical of the political left, except for the subject of immigration. The ideology is: tax the rich, defend the poor, work against big international corporations, save the welfare system and increase redistributive actions of the state. Typical leftist policies. Again, the same is true with similar movements in other countries, like Perussuomalaiset in Finland. The movement is proletarian in heart, and perhaps that is what so scares the Swedish political elite.

This elite seems to be utterly at loss as to how to deal with the situation. Here the Swedes could learn a lesson from Finland, and also their own history.

In 1960's and 1970's Finland, the radical left - Stalinists - were popular among the young. The movement was embraced by then-president Urho Kekkonen, and effectively hugged to Brezhnev-like half-coma, if not full death.

In 1980's Finland, the populist SMP (Finnish Rural Party) attracted the votes of the neglected concrete suburbs, with a largely populist agenda. How were they then contained? They were made accountable for their campaign. Urpo Leppänen promised that he'll eliminate unemployment if his party gets enough votes to make him the employment minister. Well, he got his way. He became the minister. And he found out, the hard way, that it is easy to make promises but difficult to deliver. The party had got its votes, but it had no sustainable policy, it had no sustainable organization, and once the emptiness of this balloon was made visible to everyone, it imploded. Urpo Leppänen's policies turned out to be, although popular, too expensive and inefficient. SMP lost the next election and became a fringe party again.

Why don't they do the same to SD in Sweden?

As said, some of the Sweden Democracts are no doubt racists. More often they may be people who just want to protest the political culture in Sweden, and are unrealistic and un-co-operative. But "dark forces"? Come on, they don't look like Lord Voldemort to me. They lack the intelligence, the cunning, and the evil.

Some of the founders of SD have a background in Swedish Nazi groups. That doesn't impress me. The Left alliance in Sweden includes Vänsterpartiet, whose background is in the Communists, a similarly violent and destructive political ideology. Nobody is making a fuss about that. Hey, look at Björn Wahlroos, who was on the frontlines of Stalinist revolution in Finland in early 1970's, and see where he's now. People do change.

To conclude the lesson, here's what the Swedes should do. Don't isolate SD. That will just inflate their significance and help them grow, and continue to increase the tension. If the unhappiness of people - voters - has no way of coming out, the result will be increased violence - which so far has mostly included just unpunished rioting against the SD and the general civil unrest in places like Rosengård.

I suggest the democratic way. Engage the SD. Make them responsible for what they say and what they promise. If it turns out that their ideas were wrong, that their promises were unfounded, the best way to expose this is to debate the politics.

And remember, as far as I understand, that's what was done in Sweden with the Communists, who - despite a history of supporting murderous regimes - are now a happy member of the left alliance.

The Greens for Sweden Democrats

2010-09-17T20:53:00.004+03:00

Sweden will have parliamentary elections on Sunday. As the election day closes in, the lead of the center-right coalition is becoming stronger in opinion polls, and the red-green opposition is losing. One interesting thing is of course also what will come of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), who might exceed the 4 % threshold and enter the parliament.

The extreme left is trying to harass the campaign of the Sweden Democrats. TV advertisements have been banned, and speeches of party leader Jimmie Åkesson have been drowned by vuvuzela concerts - which really looks like bullying tactics to silence political dissent, so it is collecting sympathy for SD. Some of the harassment is going really, really far: one SD candidate was beaten up by masked men who cut a swastika to his forehead. Even Lars Ohly of the Left had to condemn this. Now, this kind of things can only embarrass the left, and give sympathy to the SD, possibly helping them to parliament.

Because some of the SD are obvious racists, and many more are just otherwise obnoxious, it's unlikely that the coalition would like to work with them in governing the country. But what if SD reaches a position where it can deny a majority from either of the blocks?

This actually looks like a dream setup for the green party (Miljöpartiet). The red-green block won't work with any of the parties of the current center-right coalition, but the coalition just might work with the greens, at least preferably to the SD. So: if SD wins, that opens a strong position for the greens. They will be holding the balance of power.

So, secretly the Miljöpartiet must be wishing very hard that Sverigedemokraterna wins votes from the moderate right.

Assassinating the Pope

2010-09-17T15:48:00.004+03:00

Five suspected terrorists have been arrested over a plot to assassinate the Pope. Weirdos. Why would they attack the Pope?

The good thing is that the Islamic fanatics appear to become more and more disconnected from reality, and therefore easier to catch. The Pope is not enemy to Islam, nor active in any way in the perceived oppression of Islam in Palestine or elsewhere. Rather to the contrary. But he's a very carefully observed and protected target.

Overall, the misconception with Islamic terrorists seems to be that they think there's a conflict between Islam and Christianity. What they miss is that Western countries are secular societies, even if historically strongly influenced by Christian heritage. For Muslims, Christians are people of the book (like all monotheists), but pagans, polytheists and particularly atheists are not really even human.

But the core of European politics today is atheist or at least agnostic: God does not play a major part there. Neither does the Pope.

Therefore, a plot to kill the Pope just shows how utterly lost the Islamists are. They don't know who they attack and why, and that kind of attackers will be easier to stop.

One last thing to note: the Five may of course not really be serious terrorists; it could be just a misunderstanding. Time will tell.

Lipstick espionage?

2010-08-29T09:46:00.003+03:00

Iran has imprisoned people who work for Oriflame, the company that sells skin care and cosmetics products through an independent sales force.

Oriflame says ""We are a cosmetics company, we are selling direct. We are of course not involved in any political activities in the country". However, perhaps they should realize that in Iran, employing people directly as an independent sales force - consisting of women - is in itself a political, possibly even hostile act.

This reminds me of a sight that I met in China: a Tupperware store. There are no Tupperware stores elsewhere, because in most parts of the world, Tupperware is marketed through direct sales, by agents who arrange "Tupperware parties", often a gathering of women in someone's home. In China, this would create a politically unacceptable independent movement, so it is not allowed, and marketing works through stores (which are certainly luxury shops, considering the humongous price gap between Tupperware and generic plastic dishes and bowls in China). Oriflame works in the same way, and has apparently run into the same problem with Iran.

Watch out, Apple!

2010-08-28T15:01:00.002+03:00

Across the pond, a U.S. District Judge Alan Kay has allowed a lawsuit to proceed: Craig Smallwood of Hawaii seeks $3M in damages because the game Lineage II is so addictive. This sounds like a completely frivolous lawsuit to me, but it's not the first nor the last crazy court case we hear of from the U.S.

But the aftermath? Judging by the number of Mac and iPhone users around me who appear completely addicted, they ought to be joining Cult Awaress Network and sue Apple.

I'm glad I'm not in a mine in Chile

2010-08-26T22:29:00.003+03:00

33 miners trapped in a Chilean copper mine are suddenly, against their wishes, part of an experiment that in my opinion is more realistic than the voluntary enclosure of six men in Mission Mars, a simulated flight to Mars and back.

The difference is that if there's a true emergency, the men in a simulated Mars flight can be evacuated instantly. But with the guys in San José mine in Copiapó, there's no such luxury. If something goes wrong, there's no way out. I really wish they do get out.

The Mission Mars is like Big Brother on steroids, but without sex. Copiapó is real reality, not just a scripted show.

There's one thing I need to say about safety in mines in Chile: there are already accusations of breaking safety standards in this mine (and, hence, plans for lawsuit) but I'm pleasantly surprised by the fact that they have such high standards that shelters have been built in the mines. In most other countries (at least outside Europe and North America), a mine accident like this would have produced just 33 fatalities. Here, the miners have a room where they can wait in relative safety and comfort. We don't exactly know, but behind the collapsed tunnel and the shelter, they might even have a kilometer or two of tunnel where to move about, walk and exercise. OK, if they really have to wait until Christmas, that is a very long time. I wish the PR people of the mine company have just taken a careful stance so that if the rescue comes quicker, everyone will be pleased, and if it really takes four months, people will not be too disappointed. I, for one, will be pretty glad if the men come up alive and physically well at all.

Although the situation of the men is difficult, and such that for most of us it would be psychologically unbearable, there is one good thing for them. I don't think they will ever need to go down a mine shaft again. They'll make their living by selling autobiographies and getting royalties from movie scripts.

Consumer protection rip-off

2010-08-26T15:10:00.008+03:00

The protection of consumers is a popular stalking-horse to protect someone's own business. The latest example is by Vuokraturva Oy, who is a rental apartment agent, and has been very visible in the media recently, possibly because they have realized how gullible journalists can be utilized for lobbying public policies (like when claiming that renting an apartment is cheaper than buying one. Yes, it is, if you don't count in that some part of the monthly mortgage payments is actually saving your own capital, while in rent there's none - cash flow isn't the bottom line).

Timo Metsola, the chairman of board, says that it should be forbidden for banks to grant mortgages to house buyers based on short-term rates, i.e. mortgages where the reference rate is 3 or 12 month Euribor. Instead, reference rates of at least 10 years should be mandatory, because this would cut down speculation and bring stability to the market.

Yeah, stability. For whom? Now, why is a rental apartment agent and owner so keen to protect the interests of consumers who are buying homes? Well, of course, there's money to be made: if those who buy their own home are forced to commit to 10-year rates - which are typically higher than short-term rates - then owning rental apartments, and the money-making chances of rental apartment agency business, are more lucrative. You see, the limitation would apply to people who buy their own homes, but it would of course not apply to investors who buy apartments for leasing out.

12 month Euribor, which is the most typical reference rate for Finnish mortgages, is currently around 1,4 %. It's been a bit lower and it's been a considerably higher, but it's almost all the time lower than the 10 year rate, which has since mid-90's been between 4% and 6 %. During this time, the 12 month Euribor has only twice peaked over 5 % but most of the time stayed below 4 %.

Now, if people who buy their own homes are not allowed to mortgage on short rates, what does it mean? It means that the investors can take the rate risk. Also, it means that the cost of investment for professional investors is lower than for people who buy their own homes. The investors can make more money. Home buyers pay more. How convenient.

So there's a good reason why the consumers should be protected: kill the competition that comes from individual home owners. Lesson to be learned: a lot of things are said to be to protect us poor consumers - and in reality, the meaning is to rip us off.

A really weird idea of totalitarianism

2010-08-18T08:14:00.004+03:00

According to Helsingin Sanomat, Jaron Lanier warns that anonymous Internet leads to totalitarianism.

That's a weird idea. I think rather the opposite: the official tendency to require that everyone must be authenticated, everyone must be trackable - these are things I traditionally associate with totalitarian regimes. In the German Democractic Republic, typewriters needed to be registered. Not just typists. Now some seem to be willing to have a system where you give your fingerprint or iris scan or a DNA sample before you can log in. The fingerprint could then be compared against the prints collected for biometric passports (which were, when making the law require them when applying for passports, never ever going to be given away to police use.)

Is Jaron Lanier a bit nuts, or is he just being seriously misrepresented by HS? I suspect the latter.

Newsweek, PISA and Finnish schools

2010-08-17T15:08:00.007+03:00

Newsweek ranks Finland as the best country in the world based on assessment of education, health, quality of life, economic dynamism and political environment, and this is all the rage in Finnish news. There's a lot of hot air around.

I'm a bit surprised by the outcome, considering that Finland's score in health isn't so great - if not abysmal, either. Finland is only 17th among the group of 100 countries. Still, in total score, Finland beats Switzerland, although the Swiss outperform in 3 out of 5 categories, and in health by a large margin (elsewhere, differences are minor).

The Newsweek study seems to put an awful lot of weight on education here. Anyway, good result for Finland. The PISA result, which is such a dominant factor, in turn of course results from the priorities set in determining PISA results: it's not important that you have some good students and the system make the jewels shine; it's important that the weakest students get some useful education.

There's no piece of news without a good conspiracy story: some say that the sudden urge to get Finland on top of a comparison like this is actually because the international capitalists need to find an American boss to replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in Nokia leadership, and something has to be done so that his family won't scare off when hearing about an idea of moving to Finland.

--

So, the good result seems to come mostly from the schools. This reminds me of the story that BBC made in the spring: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

As the BBC text mentions, the good thing about Finnish schools today (*) is that teachers really are quite well trained. They are also genuinely interested in helping the kids to learn (mind you, they're not doing it for big money). And the pre-school/kindergarten system isn't too bad, either, although actual school starts later for Finnish kids than e.g. in Britain. What amazes me with the British public discourse is that people dismiss qualification requirements for childcare professionals with sentences like "we don't need university degrees for people who change nappies". That's nonsense. The job and mission of a kindergarten teacher is far more than just changing nappies or pushing food to the mouths. It's much more about encouraging the children to learn. I suspect that the attitudes to school teachers may be similar.

The BBC story manages to put in a major inaccuracy, though. It says: Primary and secondary schooling is combined, so the pupils don't have to change schools at age 13. They avoid a potentially disruptive transition from one school to another. This is generally untrue. Most kids in Finland actually do have to change school at the time when they move to 7th grade at the age of around 13. There are a few "unified" schools that have all the grades 1-9 under the same roof, but they are a rare exception. And even there, the kids move from a one-teacher-for-class system to having a different teacher for each subject. In grades 1-6, only the foreign languages and sports (and sometimes music and art) lessons are by designated teachers for these subjects. After grade 7, this changes completely. Thus, what the BBC story implies here is not really true.

Finally, what of course matters for Finnish schools, and for the integrity of the Finnish society in general, is that the immigration has been on such levels that newcomers have mostly been able to adapt, and no parallel societies have been created in the style of many European cities (examples can be taken from Bradford, Paris, Malmö or others, where you have places where a fireman cannot go to put out a fire without having a police escort, and a police escort cannot go alone with just a policeman or two, you need a plan and reserves and riot equipment and stuff.)

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(*) Today the situation of teachers' training is good, but it wasn't so when I was in elementary school in 1970's. Our teacher was an electrician by profession, and his major academic achievement was the rank of a captain in artillery during WWII. And I can tell you that he had a good idea of how to order us to a line and perform close order drill things like Right, FACE! and Close ranks, MARCH! ("Tahdissa, MARS!"). But teach things, except the correct V angle of your feet when standing in attention? Nope. That was left to myself.

Thankfully, today's teachers seem to be far more competent, trained and sensible, as I've witnessed when dealing with my own children's teachers.

Missing Metusalehs

2010-08-12T15:30:00.004+03:00

Japan has been known as a nation with exceptionally long life expectancy. Now a slightly embarrassing partial explanation has been found: the exceptionally old are often not actually alive. Many 100-year-olds are missing. The person who should have been Tokyo's oldest male resident at 111 years, Sogen Kato, had been dead for about 32 years. The "oldest woman" - or so thought to be - hasn't been seen by her daughter in 20 years.

There is concern that the loss of connection between the very old and their offsprings is because of loosening family ties, traditionally important in Japan. However, there is a simpler explanation: while Sogen Kato's body was mummified in his apartment, his pension payments kept coming, and they went to the family. Strict privacy laws helped this to go on for decades.

Perhaps the inverse age pyramid problem in Japan can be relieved simply by requiring old people to show up every now and then.

Note: this can't happen in Finland. We actually can do a very reliable census without hiring lots of officials to knock on every door. Here it is enough to say something like SELECT COUNT(personid) FROM vrk WHERE alive = TRUE; and there you have it. A few people of selected minorities might cause minor inaccuracies, but it'll be insignificant.

How dumb can you be?

2010-08-12T15:19:00.002+03:00

Sometimes you just shouldn't pursue your rights as a consumer.

At least if you were trying to purchase sexual services from a 13-year-old and want a refund.

Language recognition

2010-08-12T13:32:00.007+03:00

This is not about recognizing what was said. It's about recognizing what language was spoken.

HS reports that a woman was raped in Helsinki, and the perpetrators were speaking either Russian or Romanian.

I'm rather suspicious of this detection of language. Of course, first of all, there is the point that reports of abductions and rapes aren't always entirely to be trusted (sometimes they are made up); secondly, there is the point that yes, women do have a right to do anything and not get raped. Women should be able to go in the middle of a night to a strange van, driven by completely unknown men speaking an unknown language, and not get raped - but still, why on earth should a woman take risks like that? I don't get it. But here my attention mainly goes to the claim that the language was Russian or Romanian. How does she know?

I claim to be rather good at languages; I find it easy - more easy than most people I know - to pick up elementaries of a language that is new to me, and understand bits and make myself understood. But as I haven't traveled in Eastern Europe, I don't stand a chance in recognizing Central and East European Slavic languages apart from each other, and telling which is which. Polish or Chech or Croatian, Slovakian or Slovenian or Serbian or Sorbian, Bulgarian or Macedonian. To me, they all resemble Russian a little bit; I do realize they're not actually Russian, but if someone speaks Ukrainian or Belarusian, I can't tell those apart from dialects of Russian, nor from Polish. From written language I can deduct more, starting from the alphabet used: Cyrillic or Latin, and how prolific it is with consonants - the Polish are poor and cannot afford vowels.

I can pick which one is Hungarian, because that is entirely different. I know a number of Hungarians and have heard them speak, and when I go to a public space like a railway station in Budapest, although I don't understand a word of what is being said around, the tone and note of speech is somehow familiar - the relationship of this Fenno-Ugric language to Finnish is somehow evident to me.

But we should realize that Romanian does not belong to the group of Slavic languages, either. It is a Romanic language and resembles French or Italian much more than Russian.

So how come the woman can say that the language spoken by rapists was Russian or Romanian? She (or the police) may of course think of Romanians because there has been so much talk about Romanian beggars and thieves in Finland, and Russians are always good suspects for anything bad here, but I'm afraid the guilt was passed far too easily. If she says Russian or Romanian, the linguistical distance between these two is fairly big and most of Europe lies in between. The men could have been speaking some other Slavic or Romanic language - like those listed above, or Romansh spoken in Switzerland, or Romani (Gypsy). Or they could have been speaking Albanian, which is also an Indo-European language (as most European languages are, except Fenno-Ugric languages and Basque). Or, who knows, Greek, as the saying in English goes that "this is all Greek to me". (When applying the same proverb, Finns refer to Hebrew).

Perhaps the only safe statement she could have made would have been that the men spoke "an European language that was strange to me", and the part about European is probably a bit uncertain, since it might just as well have been e.g. Turkish or Kurdish. Not very appropriate to pinpoint Russians or Romanians only.

Naturally, the responsibility for this is more with the newspaper and the police than the poor woman, who was probably shocked. If things happened like it was reported, she was violated, and that was wrong. But still, the linguistic method to point out who did it doesn't really work out so easily, and mostly seems to reflect currently popular prejudices.

Candy tax on mineral water

2010-08-12T12:59:00.005+03:00

The Finnish government is bringing back the so-called "candy tax", i.e. a specific tax for sweets. However, the definition of "sweets" seems rather odd: it includes not just candy, but also things like lemonades, and any bottled water, including mineral water. Also, fruit juices will be taxed. However, other sweet (and somewhat unhealthy) things like biscuits and bakery products would be excluded.

I don't really mind the price of candy as such: sweets are today incredibly cheap if you look at historical price trends, and they put a burden on people's health. The purchasing power of children and adolescents enables them to get ridiculously large amounts of candy. But still, I feel very reluctant about guiding people's behaviour with taxes, because the side effects are often excessive and generally, I'd prefer that people are responsible for their own lives, not the state.

The food industry proposes that instead of the candy tax, there should be a sugar tax. I must admit that this makes a lot more sense than taxing mineral water as "candy".

Investigating fuel thefts

2010-08-12T08:06:00.005+03:00

I think the Finnish police is a bit short-sighted when it announces it would not like to investigate fuel thefts, and wants petrol stations to change to an operational model used in many other countries: fuel pumps are either fully automatic card/cash machines, or you first go to the cash counter and pay, and fill your tank only after payment. In Finland, the typical way to act at a gas station is still that you just drive your car to the pump, fill your tank, walk to the counter and tell the cashier which pump number you used and pay. Some people - very few, but enough to make a nuisance to the police - skip the part about visiting cashier, and just drive away.

Fully automatic card/cash dispensers are becoming more common as well - not really because of thefts, but simply because they can be operated 24/7 without significant staff costs.

But why is the police's idea short-sighted?

1. Because it increases the perception that the police is unwilling to solve crimes and apprehend criminals. They're concentrating on easy money that can be collected with speed cameras that in Finland are often more like traps than tools for road safety (hint: the road safety message would be more credible if the speed limits were clearly marked at the location of the cameras, as is done in other countries where I've been driving, like France and Germany).

2. Because the petrol thefts are typically rather unambiguous and clear crimes to solve and doing so leads you to find people that are in danger of slipping to a career where they commit other, more serious crimes. No, I don't mean that it leads you to just some car drivers. The pattern of stealing fuel is connected with other forms of petty theft, unsocial behaviour and, of course, dangerous driving. Visiting these people early in the career just might make a difference for how they behave in the long run.

3. Because it means we're giving in to anti-social behaviour, and I dislike that.

Fuel is often stolen by people who've stolen the car as well, and are often driving under influence. If you look at the statistics and analysis of deadly road accidents (see previous post), you can see that this group is well represented in the set of drivers responsible for fatal accidents.

The same argument can be made about the speed cameras, with whom the police (at least police leadership) have fallen in love. And the same thing indeed does work to some extent: you can spot some of the reckless drivers like that, and this helps to locate them. However, there are also some differences: often the most reckless drivers don't need to care about speed cameras because they drive stolen vehicles, so someone else will bear the brunt of police investigation. They even do the extreme speeding on the wrong side of the road, because then the speed camera won't get them. On the other hand, it's fairly easy to exceed the speed limit by moderate amounts accidentally; the speed limits are these days set rather illogically and are also poorly marked (as a number of senior policemen can testify when they themselves have been caught). With minor speeding, there was no intent for crime nor harming anyone.

So, I'd recommend that the police just stops complaining and does their work.

I understand it is frustrating. Career criminals are seldom jailed, and even if they are, they're soon back out, because keeping them inside is expensive. They don't pay their fines. Still, I don't think it is fair to concentrate on minor offenses by middle-class drivers just because it is possible for the state to collect more money from them.

Finally, yes: sometimes absent-minded people really forget to pay. That has happened to me a couple times over the 25 years that I've been driving. I did notice pretty soon, and turn back and pay, before the message reached the police.

Why is it so difficult to cite sources?

2010-08-11T19:22:00.004+03:00

Particularly, why is it so difficult for major newspapers to cite and refer to sources properly?

I ran into an example: Both The Guardian (3.8.) and Helsingin Sanomat (11.8.) mention a study by International Energy Association, about subsidies for fossile fuels. But they make absolutely sure not to link to the IEA Web resource. (HS is also a bit slow, but come on, it's barely the end of our holiday season.)

Of course, there is a good answer: if a newspaper would cite sources, it would be too obvious and easy for the readers to see how far the ready-chewed opinion offered by the paper is from the actual facts provided by the source.

This is particularly apparent with The Guardian, whose agenda was shown (in rather aggressive terms) by Tim Worstall. The Guardian article was severely misleading by comparing figures that are very much apples versus oranges.

Hey, wake up. In the Web, it increases your credibility if you link to your sources. Being a big and mighty newspaper won't carry you too far into the future.

The North Karelia Project

2010-08-11T13:41:00.004+03:00

One of the bloggers that I follow regularly, Tim Worstall, wrote about the North Karelia Project, quoting The Guardian.

I can see his point, but I think he missed a thing when pointing out that there was nation-wide decrease in coronary heart disease at the same time with the local project. As is visible in the WHO article, the vertical line in 1977 indicates a point of time when the project in North Karelia was expanded to a nation wide activity. Thus, it is conceivable that both the local collapse and the nationwide decrease of coronary heart disease in Finland are partially due to actions adopted in the North Karelia Project. The nation-wide trend had its reasons.

Regarding Guardian, it isworth noting (though not very surprising, given that it's The Guardian) to see how the North Karelia project is used for arguing for income redistribution, when the actual findings are about something quite different. Professor Puska writing for WHO may of course want to highlight the achievements of a young MD Pekka Puska who happened to be in charge of the project, and one way to ensure funding for future projects is to preach for "equality" which means redistribution, which means taxes and related projects, which means tax money funding for his projects.

However, as far as I remember, the actual point of the North Karelia project wasn't income distribution at all; it was teaching better diet practices to people. If we start to talk about distribution of information instead of redistribution of wealth, then things start to make sense. The inequality is not about income, it is about how much people know and understand their own behaviour.

So, to get back to the WHO article, in my opinion, it goes wrong when it repeats fashionable mantras about inequality. But I think that is mostly just because the author wants to please the potential funders of expanded projects.

The North Karelia project is not without its merits: eating excessive amounts of pig fat probably might not be good for your health. And although many men in North Karelia still have an agreement with the hares (“I don’t eat your food, you don’t eat mine”), the consumption of fresh vegetables has increased.

This is, of course, not only because of the project: the change is also due to the introduction of refrigeration, international transport and globalized food trade to such an extent that the oranges and bananas these people see are no longer models made of porcelaine displayed in school classes, as they were for my parents’ generation. Rural Finland in 1940’s was vastly different from today.

Some researchers have argued that the significant reduction in deaths over CHD are not really due to North Karelia project and its nationwide expansion, and people eating more lettuce; it is because the generations that suffered extreme poverty and malnutrition in their childhood have passed away, and the age bracket 35-64 is now filled by people who grew up getting a daily meal at school and enjoyed a generally much better diet in their youth (“better diet” actually meaning “enough calories”) and this change was achieved already before the North Karelia project.

There was true, wide-spread hunger and undernourishment in North Karelia the first half of 20th century, and that was removed for the children of 1950’s.

Note that North Karealia of 1960's was a very different place from North Karelia of 2010, not to mention any British place of 2010. It is argued that much of the health problems that middle-agers of 1972 suffered - resulted from malnutrition and hunger experienced in their childhood, 1920's to 1940's, some of this caused by war. Malnutrition was solved, more than adequately. But that solution is irrelevant and possibly counter-productive if applied to modern British or Finnish cities, where the health problems are caused by too much pizza and carbonated sugar water - not lack of calories for children.

Starting in 1970's, the men in North Karelia also changed from back-breaking heavy forestry work (tools: a bucksaw, an axe, and if you’re wealthy, a horse with sled) to use chainsaws and tractors, and then onwards to different jobs (or unemployment benefits). And even if they stayed in forestry, they started to use advanced equipment from the likes of Ponsse ( http://www.ponsse.fi/ ) which, incidentally, is nowadays responsible for the municipality with the greatest amount of income inequality in the country – because in the small town where the company comes from, everyone is relatively poor except the one man who owns a large portion of the stock-listed corporation that he created to make these machines that have liberated thousands of forestry workers both from their jobs and from a need to eat horrific amounts of fat to produce enough energy to survive their jobs.

Michelle's vacation

2010-08-10T09:27:00.005+03:00

Michelle Obama's rather extravagant vacation in Spain has irritated some people.

As many commentators have pointed out, America's First Lady has right to do this. But still, is it wise? Is it setting a good example during difficult (at least economically) times?

By the way, it was interesting to see that criticism of Michelle's vacation was quickly labeled as "right-wing" in the comment section. It seems that "right" and "left" and "liberal" are things which are utterly confused in the U.S. "Liberal" means something which is as far away from Adam Smith as possible.

A suitable crime category will be devised.

2010-08-05T19:39:00.005+03:00

Stalin is quoted to have said something like "There are no innocent people, only people who have not yet been investigated thoroughly enough." I don't know if Stalin ever really said that, but his regime certainly worked based on that principle to the maximum effect.

Now the police in Turku has started to work along the same lines: first they decided that an act is a crime, and then they applied a law paragraph that is the closest match, although it doesn't quite fit.

A man in Turku was fined and sentenced to lose his camera to the state for photographing women's fannies in a public place.

Some people found the man's behaviour creepy. That is understandable.

However, I find even creepier the fact that the police did not really know which law was being broken, so they used the Criminal Law Chapter 17 § 21, "indecent behaviour" to give fines and confiscate the man's camera. I don't quite see how taking photographs in a public place is indecent. The law text doesn't fit this act. Nor does the background work as published by the parliament. To the contrary, so far it's been a human right, and the Chancellor of Justice has repeatedly issued statements where he asserts that it is permitted to take photographs in public places - also when the subject of the photo (e.g. a guard at a mall) would not like to be photographed. (Publishing the photographs is a completely different matter, but here that wasn't the issue.)

Another thing then is that the journalist in HS are about as clueless as usual when they say things like "the police sentenced the man to lose his camera to the state". The police cannot sentence the man; it is up to a court of law. The police can issue a paper called "rangaistusvaatimus", effectively a statement of prosecution, to which you can plead guilty and agree to pay a fine, but that is not a sentence. Sentences only come out from courts.

There's a generic principle which has a fine Latin name, Nulla poena sine lege: there can be no crime committed, and no punishment meted out, without a violation of penal law as it existed at the time.

Although this is a marginal case, it's slightly worrying that the law is applied like this. The paragraph about "indecent behaviour" is meant to cover things like showing an unclothed fanny in a public place. It's not about photographing clothed fannies in a public place.

However, if we agree that photographing women's fannies in a public place really is indecent, the first one to be prosecuted shouldn't be a creep from Turku, but a journalist of Iltalehti whose main feature about the new prime minister in the country was her backside.

Wearing nappies in prison

2010-08-04T15:09:00.005+03:00

Previously, I was wondering how someone could get just four years of youth detention for a cruel, premeditated murder in Sweden. Here's the opposite story: a 78-year old man goes to prison for assaulting a police officer, although he is so frail that he moves with a walking frame and wears a nappy and a catether. The assault incident happened at a nursing home where the man was in a confused state.

Somehow it looks to me that a young heavy offender is given an astoundingly light sentence, and an old light offender is given a heavy sentence. Why?

Perhaps the young offender is so scary that the police, courts and witnesses are afraid of him. The old man, on the other hand, is no danger to anyone, so it is safe to lock him up in a prison for an act for which he is hardly responsible. He might require some duct tape treatment at the nursing home, of course, like children at Helsinki day care (though this appears to be a universal practise).

Should bicyclists know traffic rules?

2010-08-03T20:53:00.004+03:00

When reading on a news item where a car hit two children at a zebra crossing, I encountered several people who were saying:

"Because bicyclists do not have to go to driving school and they do not need a license, you cannot expect them to know traffic law".

This is nuts. It's a general principle that all people are supposed to know all laws that apply to them, even though they have not passed a law degree in university. Not knowing a law is no grounds for not obeying it. That is a good reason to keep legislation simple, so that all people could understand it and obeying the laws is reasonably possible.

Yes, there are lots of car drivers who don't know the rules either. Some of the Finnish traffic law is actually rather unclear and poorly formulated - like the roundabouts, which are not really covered in the law resolutions of the government; here Finland is closer to Anglo-Saxon case law, which I think is a bad thing. Or the rules regarding crossings of regular roads and bike roads, which were changed a few years back and although clear in law text, are unintuitive, and most people don't know them correctly. But many bicyclists also seem to have serious attitude problems towards traffic law.

One thing that makes this more understandable is simply the astoundingly poor design and implementation of bicycling roads, particularly in the Helsinki area. Bicyclists do not see even the road designers care about safety and legality, so that decreases their motivation to obey the rules (that they sometimes know, sometimes not).

This is going too far

2010-08-03T15:48:00.005+03:00

Yes, child porn is bad. But now, in Sweden, one can be sentenced for possessing mere drawings, as a comics collector has found out:

http://svt.se/2.22620/1.2094549/vansinnigt_-_det_handlar_ju_om_serier

I think this is going too far. Using a camera to take sexually explicit pictures of children is understandably a serious offense, and children can be hurt severely when preparing the pictures. And in any case the personal privacy of real children must not be breached by making porn pictures... but hey... we're talking about comics. These are drawings. Just drawings, made with pencils and ink, or drawing tools in a computer. No child was abused in making the picture. It's pure fantasy. Prosecuting based on this means it's purely a thought crime.

I suppose I should be careful when writing this. Anything that could be (mala fide) interpreted as being in favour of child porn is these days so bad that your messages in the Internet should be censored, you should be prosecuted, you should lose your family and children, you should lose your job... scary.

Atlantis found!

2010-08-03T12:34:00.005+03:00

The lost city of Atlantis has been found. Or at least a grid in the bottom of Atlantic Ocean, as reported by The Telegraph.

However, there's a slight mismatch. The perfect grid looks like the city plan for Milton Keynes... but is the size of Wales. Someone isn't figuring out orders of magnitude here.

Additional edit: Telegraph also reports that the grid was an artifact of the data collection process, not real findings about the ocean floor...

Invoices for nutty behaviour

2010-07-15T22:09:00.001+03:00

It's warm in Finland. It's holiday season. People like to swim. Vartti.fi reports that when people jump to water from places like the Lapinlahti bridge to cool themselves, and to fool around, someone calls 112, and the emergency services typically deploy the full set: a rescue unit, a heavy pioneer unit with diving gear, an ordinary ambulance, a doctor ambulance, a skylift, plus possibly boat units and a helicopter. In addition, a police patrol car arrives. As this procedure costs a whole lot of money, the emergency service chief Markku Rissanen plans to send invoices to the swimmers. The sums would be tens of thousands of euros per instance.

Fine, but… on what grounds? Jumping to the sea is not forbidden. Even suicides are no longer criminal in Finland. People who go to swim from such places are engaged in an activity which may be dangerous - and bystanders are entirely justified in reporting it to 112 - but what is the legal basis for making a bridge jump verboten? What is the basis for invoicing the rescue cost? Much of the things that emergency services handle are result from extraordinary stupidity and thoughtlessness, but so far, AFAIK, no invoices matcfhing the real cost are sent for ambulances or fire extinguishing if you fall asleep when smoking in your bed.

Wouldn't it be more logical to start by invoicing the rescue costs from actual, serious criminal activities? Like, if someone murders people, she should actually pay something to the victims, and compensate the cost of ambulances, police investigation etc to the state/authorities? If you were preparing for an armed robbery of a bank, and were intercepted, you could be invoiced for the cost of the Karhu squad being alerted.

Yeah, right: planning an armed robbery is not a crime until you really step into executing the plan, and courts have kept a high threshold for determining when a plan becomes an actual attempt. But at least possessing illegal firearms is a crime, so why wouldn't we start there? And yes, sending invoices only works as a deterrent when dealing with law-abiding middle class people who have homes and other property. The criminal underclass arranges things differently, so there is no hope of collecting anything.

In the meanwhile, perhaps the emergency services really should consider how much manpower and equipment is alerted to attend to each case of nutty behaviour.

Sentences for capital crimes

2010-07-15T22:04:00.003+03:00

There's been quite some discussion in Finland over the triple murder in Porvoo, where a person called Esa Åkerlund shot three people at a McDonald's drive-in queue. As usual, the fanatics like Pekka Sauri are advocating a ban on legal handguns when someone commits murder using an illegal one - just like with the case of Ibrahim Shkupolli half a year ago. The good thing is that the Ministry of Interior is not completely bollocks.

Many other people who have some common sense are, justifiedly, asking that how is this possible: a man is sentenced to life in prison for murdering his wife, then released and kills again so soon.

Before murdering his wife, Åkerlund was convicted of a manslaughter using a knife in a restaurant, but in the Kouvola court of appeals, the sentence was revoked. The technical evidence was compelling: it was Åkerlund's knife, and the victim's blood. But unsurprisingly, in the court of appeals there were new witnesses defending him, and the witnesses against him did not want to testify. The latter were obviously smart enough to figure out that the law offers them no protection, while a murdered can definitely reward them with death, and there is nothing that the police or courts are going to do about it before it happens.

So, 15 years after executing his wife, half a year after he was released, he has an illegal handgun duly supplied by pals, and he murders three other people over a petty argument concerning the horsepowers of a vintage American convertible car.

Why was he released? Why was he not followed up?

However, while we should be asking these questions, it seems that the sentencing in Finland is not nearly as bad as it could be. Compare it to this case in Sweden: http://www.thelocal.se/27768/20100713/

A man murders his sister's boyfriend as a so-called honour killing, using hot oil, knives and blunt instruments. And the sentence? Four years of youth detention. And no, he's not been deported back to Afghanistan.

The bad news is that as is the historical trend, we're probably heading towards the Swedish model.

But I have to type it again.

Four years of youth detention for a premiditated murder commited with hot oil, knives and blunt instruments.

Tolerating biodiversity, but NIMBY

2010-07-05T09:37:00.009+03:00

The police in Helsinki have become very active in killing elks. In a couple of days, one elk was shot when swimming towards the Korkeasaari zoo, the other was executed in Myllypuro.

It makes sense in one way, of course. Large animals, like elks, can be rather irritating and even scary when they get too close, and dangerous if you hit them with a car or a motorbike. But isn't that rather the fault of the motorist?

I see a double standard here. People who live in Helsinki are generally very unhappy if reindeer herders in Lapland kill wolverines, or people in North Karelia shoot wolves and bears in order to protect their domestic animals (and even people). There's no end to the mocking of dumb peasants who irrationally fear animals and kill these beautiful things. Many people in Helsinki call an end to all hunting. But still: wolverines, wolves and bears are predators. They kill other animals routinely, and in rare circumstances they even might attack people.

Elks, on the other hand, are vegetarian pacifists. They don't kill people, they don't eat other animals. But whenever elks approach the central parts of Helsinki, they are exterminated on the spot. Couldn't people in Helsinki area practice the biodiversity and peaceful cohabitation also in their own turf, and not just outsource it to other people somewhere far away?

I remember there was quite a hysteria when, a few years ago, a bear passed our house in Espoo, on a lakeshore about 100-200 m away. It was tracked down in Kauniainen and shot. Not many people complained, although the bear had done no more and no less wrong than the other bears that are killed by illegitimate hunters in Karelia.

It is always more comfortable to sit in ants' nests with other people's arses. People in Helsinki area seem to be very willing to preach for biodiversity, as long as it's NIMBY.

(Note: I'm not advocating for open season for killing wolves and bears in remote areas. However, I think people should be always justified in shooting a wolf or a bear when it is on their front yard or attacks livestock.)

--

PS. A great fuss today about a bear in Tampere. They actually employed the country-wide emergency notification system, which changes channel in my car radio, turn volume up HUGE and then tells me that there's a bear loose. 150 km away from where I live. Elsewhere, that's supposed to be entirely normal, and people should actually feel proud of having wildlife around.

This won't make news in Finland.

2010-07-04T20:42:00.004+03:00

There was a time of a few years, when all kinds of news from Russia were available also in the Finnish media. But interestingly, it seems that this won't make the press any more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/world/europe/04detain.html?_r=1&hp

(Tatjana Listvjanka filed charges against a resort operated by the FSB - and faces major harassment and possibly years in jail. I'm using intentionally the Finnish style of transliteration for hew name.)

So we'll - again - have to start looking at Western media to get news of the East.

Al-Qaida Cookbook

2010-07-01T12:02:00.004+03:00

Al-Qaeda launches an English language magazine, in the hope of radicalizing
Western citizens.

But do they realize that the most likely targets for bombs cooked in Mom's kitchen are, of course, mosques and other Islamic targets? The idiots who bomb Al-Qaida's favourite targets (like synagogues) are most of the time somewhat literate in Arabic. English instructions aren't helping them too much. The idiots who would bomb Western Muslims or their religious targets most likely are only able to read English instructions. So they will be able to use this cookbook.

Naturally, you may say that Al-Qaida is not even trying to fight for Muslims; what they want is just to escalate things and have more war of everyone against everyone. And the people who kill most Muslims are, of course, other Muslims.

Anyway, I fail to see what good this publication does to any Muslim.

Apologising to witches

2010-06-30T23:56:00.003+03:00

In Britain, homeopathy is no longer in favour of the national health service, as there is no clinical proof that it works. OK. But I like particularly this twist, in Telegraph: The most outspoken supporter of the motion, Dr Tom Dolphin, had earlier compared homeopathy to witchcraft, but then apologised to witches on the grounds that this was unfair.

Documents of moronity

2010-06-25T09:48:00.015+03:00

The Finnish Automobile Association (Autoliitto) is a tame pet of the Traffic of the Ministry, and rather lousy as a defender of car-owners' rights. However, their monthly magazine, Moottori, has in each issue a list, with brief descriptions, of all fatal road accidents that occurred in the same month one year ago. This is a gem.

Reading these laconic descriptions, you start - at the very latest - to understand the enormous gap between how people get killed on the roads, and how this is used as grounds for more control and taxation. Little of the actions taken up by the state really help in preventing these deaths. The investigative boards never arrive at the correct outcome "job well done, Darwin award granted". Instead, they propose measures that just collect more money from ordinary drivers who do sometimes make mistakes in traffic and drive a bit faster than the speed limit, but do not take absurd, senseless risks like many of these guys.

And then there are the few freak accidents that you may or may not blame on someone, but which are in any case very hard to prevent, and which are just tragedies.

Let's take the list of July 2009:

A man, age 44, drives 70 km/h, in a 50 km/h zone, in dark and wet conditions, under influence of alcohol and drugs, and does not wear a seat belt. He hits a traffic light pole and a tree, and kills himself.

A man, 32, drives under influence of alcohol and drugs, in the dusk, between 120-150 km/h in a 80 km/h zone, loses control, rolls over, and a woman passenger (guess: no seat belt) falls out of the car and dies.

A man, 85 years, does not realise that the oncoming trucks, which are transporting a pre-fabricated house, have a payloads that are much wider than normal. He ignores the warning car that precedes the transportation, hits the second of two trucks (or, to be exact, the house carried by the truck), and dies. Both the prefabricated house slices and the old man were driving slightly above their speed limits (60 and 80 km/h, respectively).

A man, 25 years, rides a Suzuki GSX-R1000, overtakes a car in poor visibility at very high speed of 120-130 km/h, in a 80 km/h zone, loses control, flies to the trees and dies.

A man, 51, hits an oncoming truck and dies. Not an accident, clearly intentional - the man had had mental problems and had threatened suicide, and appears to have intentionally steered at the truck.

A man, 62, falls asleep while driving 75 km/h on a 80 km/h road and hits an oncoming truck, and dies.

A woman, 26, hits solid rock at 155 km/h, no seat belt. Clear suicide.

A woman, 18, comes to a crossing with some other traffic. She does not see a 125cc motorbike which is ridden by a man, 60, and bumps into him. The man slides on the road, is hit by oncoming traffic and dies in hospital.

A man, 54, drives with a woman, 53, in the dark, on a highway. The man sees an oncoming car that has stopped, and drives on, just slows down a bit and switches to low beam headlights. Hits an elk. (That's why the other car had stopped.) The woman dies.

An 18-year-old man drives with his 17-year old pal, crosses a highway ignoring a STOP sign, and is hit by a Mercedes that drives on the highway. The driver is killed.

A man, 18, drives at night, drunk, tired, loses control at a bend, hits trees, dies.

A man, 63, runs away from the police in a BMW 750, does 120 km/h on a small road, loses control, hits a tree, dies. The police was chasing him because he was on their wanted list and was spotted in traffic. The man had a history of alcohol and drugs misuse and was slightly intoxicated, but not over the DUI limit.

A man, 63, drives calmly, until he slowly drives off the road to a field, and dies of a stroke. The woman riding with him is apparently unharmed but she must have been shocked. This was death due to illness, not a traffic accident, although it happened in traffic.

A 85-year-old man comes to a familiar railway crossing very slowly, but does not see a freight train coming at 40 km/h, nor does he hear the warning horn used by the train driver. The old man is killed by impact.

A woman, 27, drives to a railway crossing with a girl, 9. Does not stop although there is a STOP sign, does not see the train that comes. Bum. The girl dies. Presumably, the driver was her mother or other relative.

A man, 28, on drugs, does 90 km/h in a 60 km/h zone, makes incorrect steering moves and loses control, rolls over, falls out of the car because does not wear seat belt, and dies. A passenger, who wears seat belt, is slightly injured.

A man, 19, is distracted or falls asleep on a highway in 120 km/h zone, no speeding. Hits a railing which does not flex out as specified, and the V70 is damaged severely. A woman passenger, 51, dies.

A man, 20, drives at night, 80 km/h in a 60 km/h zone (intoxicated but inquiry not complete yet), loses control and hits tress. Driver and a 17-year-old passenger are killed.

A queue on a highway, a 46-year-old truck driver does not keep a safe distance and when the queue stops, he hits a motorbike, killing a 59-year-old passenger and injuring the 59-year-old biker.

A car turns left, does not see a biker who comes the other way at high speed. Biker: too much speed, driver: a misjudgement. 29-year-old biker dies.

A woman, 62, hits an oncoming truck and dies. Reason unknown.

A man, 46, runs away from the police, drunk, drives off the road, dies.

That was July. August 2009 has even more intoxicated and severely self-destructive Darwin awardees, plus a couple more strokes, and some more complex, tragic accidents that are the result of many small things.

Then, what do the investigative boards propose? Lowering the DUI limit to 0.02 %, lower speed limits, more training to drivers. Bah. How many of the people killed in July 2009 would have been held back by that? Those who were DUI were DUI already with the current DUI limits, and it didn't stop them. One was with some alcohol but under 0.05% limit; since he was running away from the police already now, I sincerely doubt that a lower DUI limit would have made him stop and talk nicely to the officers.

Same with speed limits. So many of the cases involve outlandish risks where people just completely ignore not only the speed limit, but also any sense of reality. What will lower speed limits achieve? The only outcome is that everyone will start to consider them nuts, and breaking them will be even more acceptable than it is today.

And then there are the suicides. People often kill themself with their cars; it takes just a moment's decision to turn the wheel - although if it is a truck that you hit, not a solid object, that is really a dastardly thing to do, because the truck driver has to live with what happened even if you don't.

You could ban cars, but that does not help. People will jump from a bridge. You could ban bridges, but then people would find some other ways to kill themselves. The end of this road is not just a nanny state; it's a state where everyone is tied to a bed, in diapers and force-fed through pipes, just to avoid any chance of harming themselves. That's not worth living.

I would say that the single thing that has helped in reducing road deaths is not the more restrictive limits, controls and general pestering of ordinary people. What has helped is that car manufacturers have improved the safety of vehicles that they make. Nowadays people often survive really impressive accidents - if they just wear a seat belt.

And what has the state been doing? Trying to make it as difficult as possible to import safe cars, even resorting to methods that are clearly illegal under EU legislation. The tax revenue is holier than life.

Jews don't own the Holocaust

2010-06-23T15:46:00.005+03:00

Yann Martel writes in the Guardian, that Jews don't own the Holocaust.

I tend to agree. I'd say Jews don't own the Holocaust, they are just the majority shareholders.

Now this is a thing where jokes seem to be dangerous. Plenty of other people besides Jews were murdered as well, but with Jews, the destruction was more systematic and more massive than with anyone else. And a common view in some parts of the world is that "The Holocaust did not happen, Jews were not murdered, and besides, they deserved it."

DUI and traffic control

2010-06-17T23:44:00.004+03:00

It's so difficult to write a parody about the Finnish traffic policy, because sometimes it's a joke in itself. Not always, some things are not so bad, but this one...

We're told by HS that people who drive under influence often have a problem with alcohol and they may be not entirely functional as members of modern society.

Big, big surprise. Who would ever have thought of that? That people who are sober would not drive under influence? And people who do DUI are people who regularly drink themselves out of their senses? At least this does not seem to appear too obvious to those numerous officials at the Ministry of Traffic and Communications, who prepare tightened legislation for traffic.

Yes, we do have occasions of utmost recklessness and stupidity in traffic. Far too many of them, although much much fewer than in most countries of the world, the nearest worse example being Russia.

The most extreme cases combine many, if not all, aspects of risk behaviour, something along these lines: a 17-year-old boy drives (a stolen car) with a 0.25 % blood alcohol content (legal limit being 0.05 %), at the speed of 165 km/h (in a 50 km/h zone), against a red light, past a car that had stopped at the lights, and hits a pedestrian who was crossing the street. Or just hits a tree and kills everyone in the car. This is the fifth time the driver was caught DUI with a stolen car, and he has a row of so-called "conditional jail sentences" in his history. (Usually it's a he, not a she, although we're developing in equality.)

So, what does the investigation board set up by the ministry propose as actions from lessons learned? Usually, the list is:

Reduce the legal limit of BAC from 0.05 % to 0.02 % (but what difference does this make as the guy was already ten times above this limit? The only outcome is that DUI will cease to be a shameful offence, because 0.02 % BAC does not impact driving capability negatively, so the DUI fines will be just yet another random tax.)

Reduce the speed limit on this road from 50 km/h to 40 km/h (though the criminal in question did not care about the existing speed limit in the first place, so why should this change anything?)

Make an alcohol-sensitive lock mandatory in new cars (although the guy was driving and old, stolen car whose any kind of locks were already circumvented, so how would this help?)

Raise the age of getting a driving license from 18 to 21 and tighten up the requirements (altough the guy was already now too young to have a license, and wouldn't ever have got it under current rules because of repeated offences)

Increase the number of mandatory driving lessons in driving school (though the guy never went to driving school - but other clients will pay more to owners of the schools, who happen to be pals of the guys at the Ministry)

Arrange traps for ordinary drivers. (Park an unmarked police car 4,80 meters in front of a zebra crossing. Fines to anyone who doesn't stop as the distance is less than 5 meters.)

Enforce an obligatory, GPS-based tracking of all vehicles (except vehicles used by professional criminals, who'll be able to avoid this without any real punishment, because you can collect fines only from middle-class people, and professional criminals don't belong to prison, they need help and support.)

What I would propose instead? I'd say that we should lock up people who repeatedly drive recklessly under influence, and enforce an anti-drug and anti-alcohol programme to them. First keep them in jail and give treatment, then slowly release with mandatory antabus capsules. Things like that.

This would help traffic safety, but it wouldn't collect money to the state and to the friends of ministry employees (like driving schools), so it is not going to happen.

Buffet lunch

2010-06-14T14:45:00.001+03:00

This guy takes the price of a Buffet lunch to a whole new level: 2.6 million US$.

Probability that mangles the mind

2010-06-06T02:00:00.003+03:00

Here's an impressive blog entry about "recreational mathematics", in the area of probability:
http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2010/05/probability-that-mangles-mind.html
Briefly, someone asks: I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?

The answer is not 50 %.

This is even more mind-boggling than the Monty Hall problem, a variation of which I published in the web about 14 years ago:
http://www.pcuf.fi/%7Epjt/problem/p-04-p-e.html