Market economy invented in Kumpula!

HS runs a story about Kumpulan vaihtopiiri (edit: there is also another one, Helsingin vaihtopiiri, I confused these two but they seem to have the same idea). These are grassroot organizations that enable barter economy of small services in exchange for credits (alternative money). In this system, the credits are called kumpenni, a local penny, 10 kumpennis are worth one hour of work. (In the other one, it is merkkari which originally stands for "pirate coin", in fact a popular licorice candy).

That's all very fine and admirable; this is how communities have worked all along throughout history, and selling and paying for services in local trade through bi- or multilateral barter or more loosely defined gift economy is what keeps communities up and running. These movements pop up and there have been little stories like this in papers every now and then.

What baffles me is that the participants say - according to HS - that "they want to distribute welfare and have alternatives to capitalistic market economy".

Hey guys, wake up. What you have invented is capitalistic market economy: freedom of selling and buying services, freedom of pricing, freedom of who you trade with and who not. It isn't an alternative to capitalism, it is capitalism. There's even a "bank" that keeps track of value of services given, instead of the more traditional way of each person keeping track of who owns him or her what, and who he or she is indebted to.

What the participants seem to forget is that what they do is eroding the welfare state, and that what they do is illegal. I'll elaborate a bit.

1) The eroding of welfare state

Why is buying services with money so expensive? Because you have to pay tax, and because you have to pay for the related bureaucracy (which may be a higher cost than the tax itself). You pay not only the 22 % value added tax, but there are lots of other taxes, particularly the income taxes and social insurance contributions of people who work for each other, and the administrative cost of making these payments. If you hire someone to work for you legally, and pay all the taxes and statutory contributions, often less than half of the money actually goes to the person doing the work. The rest goes to the state to fund the welfare state. And if you have ever employed a person in Finland, you'll know that the process of meeting legal obligations is complex and takes a lot of work to find out.

If you evade those payments, what is that if not undermining the foundations of welfare state? Also, the welfare state has developed mechanisms to restrict worker exploitation, for instance the minimum wage (in Finland, through collective agreements). In local barter trade, all these rules are dodged.

2) The illegality

Yes, I know, it's absurd. It sounds really stupid that if I mow your lawn and then you mend my socks, we should both pay income tax and pay social contributions, and if we do more of it, we should also pay value added tax. But that's the current law; that's the very basic idea of the welfare state. A very large part of the money that the government makes and then uses for various more or less good causes comes from taxing the use of labor, and much of worker protection is achieved through the bureaucracy and the barrier of entry that it creates.

Current law is very explicit about this, and the taxman's guidance in the Web makes it absolutely clear. There are situations where people can work for free - bees (in Finnish, talkoot) for instance. But bartering services is tax evasion.

Even in the case where you and your neighbor work at the same place and only you have a car, giving a ride to your neighbor and accepting half of the gas cost from him is illegal. This is the welfare state.

The outcome

The development in Kumpula is by no means new. This kind of barter economy movements have spawned throughout the Western world for decades. For instance, in the U.S., the tax code was amended to cover them in 1982.

The ideas are the same ("let's fight evil capitalism and support local communities"), the means are the same ("let's use local money to enforce locality, avoid the taxes and bureaucracy"), and the outcomes are the same (unrestricted small-scale capitalism works for a while, it's generally a nice experience, but people grow up, the key people move away, and eventually the system fades away). If any of these trials were to become substantial, they would face investigations and criminal proceedings.

So, to summarize: the activists speaking here have become completely confused with the concepts of market economy and welfare state. They think they're doing "something else", when they are actually doing "more of the same". They think they've invented an alternative to capitalism, and what they're doing is going back to the 19th century style capitalism, just in small scale. If it stays that way, it's OK.

Foot rags

You know what a foot rag is? It's the kind of cloth, usually of flannel, about 40x50 cm in size, that is used in the military - or used to be used in the military - to be wrapped around the foot. Then you put the wrapped foot in a wool sock, and the wool sock into a boot, and it keeps your feet nice, dry and warm on long marches.

A foot rag also bears a rather accurate resemblance of the snow flakes that are falling from the overcast sky at the moment. I thought the spring is here. Won't this end?

Germans are frugal

Like, if you've bought a return ticket, you'd hate not to use it:

Two women tried to board an easyJet flight with a dead relative strapped into a wheelchair, saying that he was disabled, frail and “always likes to sleep like that”.


Actually, I understand these people. The bureaucracy related to repatriating mortal remains is excessive.

Chasms in bike roads

Spring is here. Ground frost is thawing. And that means trouble for us bikers.

On some of the bike roads, chasms about 5 cm wide have opened, and they are deep - deep enough to swallow the front wheel, which is going to teach bicyclists to fly. Not for too long, though - and hopefully none of us need wings after the landing.

Councils haven't been able to clean the roads, so likely they won't be able to fix the chasms either. What would help? Perhaps a bicycle tax of 100 % on sale of new bicycles, to be used on fixing roads? Roads for cars are serviced; not too well, but it seems they won't dare to leave them completely unmaintained because car drivers pay so much tax that not fixing the roads would amount to killing a milking cow.

I suppose bicyclists need some milking as well.

Beer as a weight-loss substance

There is a myth that it's pretty okay to drink beer even if you try to control your weight, because beer is cold when you drink it and then your body heats it up, which consumes energy.

Time to do some math. If you consume a litre of 0 ˚C beer and heat it up to 37 ˚C in your stomach, it takes 37 kcal, or to use SI units, 155 kJ.

To take a particularly brutal example, the energy content of one litre of Bud Ice Light is 324 kcal, or 1356 kJ (can be calculated from here, 12 fl oz is 0.354 l; Americans speak of calories when they actually mean kcal).

Thus, heating up the liquid in your belly works as neutralization for the energy - if you mix 1 part of Bud Ice Light and 8 parts of ice water in your drink.

Someone has said Budweiser is like making love in a boat, but this is way beyond that. Try if you will, I won't...

About choosing your laptop

I get asked the question "which laptop should I buy?" more and more often. I'm not a particular expert with laptops, but since I seem to be more of an expert than those who ask, I'll give some background which is relevant today, and I'll write it down here so it's available for others as well. This is more like general advice, not a recommendation for any particular machine.

There are awfully many different laptop models to choose from, and most of them are OK for most users. What you need to consider is how you will use the laptop, what you want to do with it. Two main questions:
1) will you be very mobile, travelling with the computer, or will it mostly sit on your desk?
2) are you going to play games?

I'm not discussing Macintoshes. If you plan to do work, not play games, and don't require Windows for some specific application, a Mac is probably good for you, but they are not cheap. They are probably worth the price, if you can afford it, but not cheap. However, before you buy one, please remember that you risk becoming a preacher who is a nuissance to his/her friends, because preachers want to convert everyone else to their faith.

Now, to Wintel laptops - Dell, Acer, HP machines that come with Windows, and which some people (like me) run on Linux.

If you are going to be on the move with your computer, consider getting a sturdy laptop for good mobility. Not all laptops are suitable for this. The really big ones with 17" screen are simply too large to carry around. With smaller ones, e.g. the recent (as of early 2010) Acer low-end series don't have a very rigid body so they break easily.

For extreme mobility, look at the mini-laptops. The Asus Eee range is actually quite good. But only for extreme mobility. The small screen and keyboard are really a pain for regular use. You'll hate actually working on it if you don't benefit from the light weight and small form factor. The mini-laptops usually have Intel Atom and 1Gb RAM, so they are rather under-powered.

For (3-D) games, you need a good display adapter, plus fast CPU (dual-core). That takes you to a specific category and price range. I can't help you there, but you wouldn't listen to me anyway.

For any other use - word processing, browsing the net at home, writing and receiving e-mails, etc - practically any laptop is good. The CPU is not really a bottleneck. Just make sure you like the look and feel of the screen and keyboard. Those are your interface to the cyberspace, and you spend a lot of time with them, so get the kind that you really like.

Then, why are there so big price differences between laptops that have similar processing power, screen dimensions, memory, disk etc? This is because they are for different markets: home use is considered a different market from corporate use. The corporate models cost more, but there is a good reason and you might want to think about them even for home use.

The problem with many laptops (and Dell Inspiron series comes to mind in particular) is that you have a similar-looking laptop which is different. Components are changed during manufacturing, and there are multiple revisions. The laptop may have the same model number, but it has a different Ethernet interface circuit, different WLAN, different Bluetooth, possibly even different display hardware. And this means different software drivers for operating system, and that means different bugs and behaviour.

Saying someone has "Dell Inspiron" does not really tell very much. There are an awful lot of different Inspirons around, some of them stable, some not. So some people have very good experiences, some have very bad.

This is pretty okay for a home machine, except that some machines are more stable than others. But if someone is trying to maintain a number of computers and keep them with similar software configuration - a regular requirement in corporate environment - this is a nightmare.

That is why the so-called business laptops are somewhat more expensive: there the manufacturer commits to keep the model the same (or at least less different) over the manufacturing period. The same design is being made and sold for a number of months, even years, and the same OS & driver package works (mostly) in them. I believe that is why I have had such lovely experiences with IBM T43 and Lenovo T61. They're not entirely without manufacturing-time evolution, but the changes are small when compared to the fast-changing home machines.

This is also why the business laptops and their software packages are more thoroughly tested, and that shows up in reliability. If your performance requirements are not very tight (e.g. no game-play), you might want to sacrifice some of the top-notch performance for reliability, i.e. get a so-called business laptop with lower-end CPU (but enough memory!) even if something else is faster and newer. And do take a look at the ergonomy (screen in particular).

If you look at Dell, consider the business Latitude line instead of home Inspiron. Also, there is the new Vostro product line but not in Finland yet. Personally, I've liked the IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads, they have been extremely reliable (with the exception of T42 that went away quickly). Not many people have Sony machines because of the high prices, but I have a good quality image of them. HP Compaq is nothing exotic but works fine.

So, off you go, see the one you plan to buy and make sure you like the ergonomy it offers.

The Earth Hour and a road death

Yesterday evening was Earth Hour, a campaign where people switch off electric lights for a period of time, to indicate their support for battle against man-made climate change.

I didn't participate as such; I dislike waste of energy and resources in any case, and I don't want to make a fuss about something that is fairly natural to me. Actually, I forgot about the whole thing.

But the town of Uusikaupunki participated in the campaign, by switching off not only decoratory lights in public buildings, but also the street lights.

Now, there are reasons why there are street lights. The main reason is that people are able to move about safely. Yesterday, when the lights were off, a man was walking on Levysepänkatu, on the street - presumably because it was impossible to walk on the light traffic route alongside. The hard winter has surprised most councils here, and the walking areas are generally very icy, and now with spring weather of great daily temperature variations, they thaw in the day, become very uneven, and then freeze in the evening. And walking on such an unlevel surface is just no good, at least in the dark.

As the man was walking on the street, he was hit by a motorbike and killed. He should have been wearing a reflector (cat's eye) as it is mandatory (though not enforceable by fines) when walking on unlighted roads in Finland - but he was walking on a road which is normally lighted; it is not known yet if he was aware of the Earth Hour.

The girl riding the motorbike was not hurt, nor was her passenger. She was sober, wasn't speeding, and the bike was in full working order. So it was an accident, except for the offense that the man was on the street and not on the sidewalk, and possibly not equipped to be visible on a dark road as required by law.

Now, it's an exaggeration to accuse that the man was killed by Earth Hour alone. There was some sheer bad luck around. But it seems like switching off the streetlights was a contributing factor.

I don't expect that a proper investigation will be made, because it would be politically inconvenient. The case will be signed off as a case which the Americans would call "an act of God", which in this case seems a somehow very suitable phrase, as the climate campaign has such strong resemblance to religion.

News in Finnish: Uudenkaupungin Sanomat, Helsingin Sanomat.

Perhaps we could learn something from this for the next year?

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One thing that puzzles me is that when discussing climate change, people prefer candles instead of electric lights (as in the propaganda picnic in Zimbabwe; why Zimbabwe is being selected as a showcase example just beats me, as this is just supporting the seriously flawed regime of Robert Mugabe).

Candles are romantic, yes, but if you look at emissions, the manufacturing, distribution and waste management mean that they're most certainly a worse alternative than a modest electric lighting. I like much more this approach to a showcase about climate change: http://zi.fi/earthhour/

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Also, I'm baffled that WWF praises on their campaign pages how Burj Khalifa, world's tallest skyscraper, participates in Earth Hour. As an engineer, I'm naturally fascinated by that tower, because it is such an impressive engineering feat in itself. But the wave of new construction Dubai is in my opinion a symbol of excessive waste of resources: massive artificial islands sprawl out to cover the coast - and corals underneath - in an attempt to create some kind of desert Disneyland where the wealthy can spend short or longer stretches of luxury (without alcoholic beverages). All this is funded by oil money, and laboured by Indian and other Asian workers who are exploited in slave-like conditions. If I were WWF, I'd be respectfully quiet about their participation. Unless -- possibly -- they paid me handsomely and I were prone to corruption, about which I don't know because nobody seriously tried to corrupt me yet.

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As it is, Chatham Islands did not turn off any of their 12 streetlights, on safety grounds. I must congratulate the Chatham Islanders -- all 609 of them -- on retaining some common sense.