The editor-in-chief of YLE (our tax-funded state broadcaster) was attacked by a hobo at a railway stop in Vantaa.
The police said "this is just normal anti-social behaviour". It's somehow worth a headline in the media when a well-known member of the elite is the target of a random attack. But why is it news?
When a random person is the target of a random attack, it's not news. If someone is killed, it's still barely news. Now this is news because the target of attack was a news maker.
Anyway, the hobo will keep doing what he does. Because it is "just normal anti-social behaviour". But what's then abnormal anti-social behaviour?
6.12.2012
When the goat is guarding the cabbage patch
Greek refusal to face facts is stunning (pun intended):
Judges in the country's Supreme Court ruled that new cuts to their own pay contained in the draft bill were illegal.
Well, they would, wouldn't they? As the clerks in parliament would go to strike to prevent cuts to their own pay. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Judges in the country's Supreme Court ruled that new cuts to their own pay contained in the draft bill were illegal.
Well, they would, wouldn't they? As the clerks in parliament would go to strike to prevent cuts to their own pay. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
18.10.2012
Refugees' right to participate in elections
A slightly weird twist regarding the right of refugees to participate in local elections:
Rahim Malalai, an Afghan-born doctor who fled her home country after being threatened to be killed (for daring to work as a doctor, which women couldn't do under the Taliban), was chosen by Finnish Refugee Council as the "Immigrant woman of the year". The purpose of this prize is "to support and advance the position of refugree women in the Finnish society". Rahim has been helping people in home country, in refugee camps, and recently she got certification for a medical doctor in Finland.
Now Rahim wanted to stand in the local elections (they are every four years, and again this autumn). She's legally eligible. But the Refugee Council says that she mustn't; it is forbidden because she's the Immigrant woman of the year. Rahim has backed down (Suomenmaa).
Now, this is a bit obscure. Wouldn't it be natural that if you want to advance the position of refugee women, you would allow and possibly even encourage participation in politics?
In fact, that's what has happened. Many of the refugee women of the year have since stood in local elections, although not for Center party, which is socially somewhat more conservative than the party of choice of the previous women. And now the Refugree Council says that she's not allowed this year.
How come? I would say to Rahim: go ahead, stand in the elections. You are legally eligible. If they then want to strip you of the status of the immigrant woman of the year, let them do so. You've defied the Taliban before. You can also defy the Miss Refugee Finland rules.
Rahim Malalai, an Afghan-born doctor who fled her home country after being threatened to be killed (for daring to work as a doctor, which women couldn't do under the Taliban), was chosen by Finnish Refugee Council as the "Immigrant woman of the year". The purpose of this prize is "to support and advance the position of refugree women in the Finnish society". Rahim has been helping people in home country, in refugee camps, and recently she got certification for a medical doctor in Finland.
Now Rahim wanted to stand in the local elections (they are every four years, and again this autumn). She's legally eligible. But the Refugee Council says that she mustn't; it is forbidden because she's the Immigrant woman of the year. Rahim has backed down (Suomenmaa).
Now, this is a bit obscure. Wouldn't it be natural that if you want to advance the position of refugee women, you would allow and possibly even encourage participation in politics?
In fact, that's what has happened. Many of the refugee women of the year have since stood in local elections, although not for Center party, which is socially somewhat more conservative than the party of choice of the previous women. And now the Refugree Council says that she's not allowed this year.
How come? I would say to Rahim: go ahead, stand in the elections. You are legally eligible. If they then want to strip you of the status of the immigrant woman of the year, let them do so. You've defied the Taliban before. You can also defy the Miss Refugee Finland rules.
Security Council membership
"Finland wants to become a temporary member of the UN Security Council", they say.
Who is this "Finland"? I don't want my country to be in the UN Security Council. It's somewhat debatable whether it's a good idea even to be a member of the UN, the whole organisation being such a bloated and corrupt beast, but the Security Council clearly is a club that is only useful for its permanent members who have a veto, and no one else.
Having temporary members as some sort of advisers is a thinly veiled attempt to whitewash a non-working structure devised over 60 years ago. The Security Council does not come up with anything useful in major conflicts where it would be needed, because one of the superpowers - USA, Russia and China - is typically involved in one way or the other. Elsewhere - such as in the conflict in Somalia - outsiders can act without the council's approval anyway.
No amount of Security Council approval has stopped USA-haters from calling the Afghanistan operation "illegal war". Therefore, even as an enabler to stop and suppress thoroughly horrible regimes the council is just useless.
So, what can a small country achieve by being a member of the council? It can set itself on a collision course with one of the superpowers. Or it can give blank votes and stay quiet. Who benefits of the membership? A few career diplomats in the Foreign Ministry. Who can suffer? All of us, by paying for it. All of us, by potentially getting inconveniently involved in the clashes of the great powers who are returning to a more and more Cold-War-like setup.
Fortunately, we won the vote and - along with Bhutan and Cambodia - can stay out of trouble.
Who is this "Finland"? I don't want my country to be in the UN Security Council. It's somewhat debatable whether it's a good idea even to be a member of the UN, the whole organisation being such a bloated and corrupt beast, but the Security Council clearly is a club that is only useful for its permanent members who have a veto, and no one else.
Having temporary members as some sort of advisers is a thinly veiled attempt to whitewash a non-working structure devised over 60 years ago. The Security Council does not come up with anything useful in major conflicts where it would be needed, because one of the superpowers - USA, Russia and China - is typically involved in one way or the other. Elsewhere - such as in the conflict in Somalia - outsiders can act without the council's approval anyway.
No amount of Security Council approval has stopped USA-haters from calling the Afghanistan operation "illegal war". Therefore, even as an enabler to stop and suppress thoroughly horrible regimes the council is just useless.
So, what can a small country achieve by being a member of the council? It can set itself on a collision course with one of the superpowers. Or it can give blank votes and stay quiet. Who benefits of the membership? A few career diplomats in the Foreign Ministry. Who can suffer? All of us, by paying for it. All of us, by potentially getting inconveniently involved in the clashes of the great powers who are returning to a more and more Cold-War-like setup.
Fortunately, we won the vote and - along with Bhutan and Cambodia - can stay out of trouble.
29.8.2012
Those evil capitalists and their gains
Conventional media as well as bloggers and other net sources are full of lamentation about how the income inequality is growing, as a few rich people get capital gains (which grow) and those of us who need to make our living by working get less and less in wages and salaries (as they don't keep up with inflation). This message gets repeated over and over again. Examples in Finnish, in random order: Demari (2011), Kansan uutiset (2004), University of Tampere (2012), Taloussanomat (2002), Society for the Study of the Juche Idea (2010). People actually believe this, it's the standard narrative.
Now, how does this show up in statistics? The Cabinet Office has got numbers from Statistics Finland and the picture looks like this:
What do we see here? Over a period of 35 years between 1975 and 2010, the compensation of employees as a proportion of national income has fallen from about 65 % to about 60 %. Why? Because the proportion of taxes on production and imports has gone up by about 5 percentage points, from 10 % to 15%. The proportion of income from property and entrepreneurial income is about the same.
Of course, if we decide to cherry-pick our reference point and make it 1992 - and intentionally forget the immediately preceeding history - then we get a different picture. This is what many, many commentators do, particularly now, in 2012, which is 20 years after the biggest recession in our history.
1992 was the year of economic collapse, huge hardship for companies and public sector, and start of rapidly increasing unemployment due to a wave of crashes and bankrupcies. For a moment, employee compensation as a proportion of national income went up rapidly - simply because wages and salaries are less flexible than profits and capital gains. But what you don't see in the picture is that as the share of employee compensation went up strongly, the actual total compensation fell off a cliff, as did the tax revenue. You can conveniently see this in the number of people who needed/got social assistance:
Big surprise. You have a wave of companies making losses. Capital income plummeted first. Then came the bankrupcies and the amount of wages and salaries plummeted as well, because employment plummeted. And then people were poorer.
Wasn't that nice time? Don't we all - except the few evil capitalists - enjoy it if the proportion of employee compensation grows? No. I can tell you that 1992 wasn't a very good time for anyone, and the fact that employee compensation as a proportion of national income was growing did not give jobs or prosperity for the many of us who went through the uncertainty and economic hardship - and for the fewer, many of them failed entrepreneurs, who crashed completely and never recovered.
The breakdown of national income above shows that after 1993, the proportion of capital and entrepreneurial income went up. This was, in part, due to a capital gains tax reform which essentially cut the tax percentage dramatically, but at the same time removed lots of deductions that companies had been eligible to get. It removed tax loopholes and encouraged companies to declare profits, pay dividends, and be taxed.
What you don't, again, see in the above picture is that total amount of tax revenue went up dramatically. You can see it below.
Now, in 2011, we again can witness a phase where proportion of employee compensation goes up - and both total income and total tax revenue drop. Is this fun? No. The government is going hugely to debt.
The discussion seems to boil down to a point: is it better to have a smaller cake, as long as the majority of people - particularly those who were not involved in the baking process - get a larger proportion of it? Even if the total size of the slice they get is smaller? Is it important to "send messages" by having high nominal tax rates, and complex tax law with loopholes and special-interest-group deductions and subsidies, and live with a lower total tax revenue, as long as taxes are high in proportion to income?
This doesn't make sense to me. I think it is important that tax revenue can get us funding for public services. It is not important that tax revenues are as high a proportion of national income as possible. And right now, it's not the capitalist leeches that take the money of workers - it's the government.
And we should realise that employee compensation as proportion of national income is now at the same level as it was in the 1970's, the golden days of Urho Kekkonen and the welfare state as the baby-boomers wanted it to be.
Now, how does this show up in statistics? The Cabinet Office has got numbers from Statistics Finland and the picture looks like this:
What do we see here? Over a period of 35 years between 1975 and 2010, the compensation of employees as a proportion of national income has fallen from about 65 % to about 60 %. Why? Because the proportion of taxes on production and imports has gone up by about 5 percentage points, from 10 % to 15%. The proportion of income from property and entrepreneurial income is about the same.
Of course, if we decide to cherry-pick our reference point and make it 1992 - and intentionally forget the immediately preceeding history - then we get a different picture. This is what many, many commentators do, particularly now, in 2012, which is 20 years after the biggest recession in our history.
1992 was the year of economic collapse, huge hardship for companies and public sector, and start of rapidly increasing unemployment due to a wave of crashes and bankrupcies. For a moment, employee compensation as a proportion of national income went up rapidly - simply because wages and salaries are less flexible than profits and capital gains. But what you don't see in the picture is that as the share of employee compensation went up strongly, the actual total compensation fell off a cliff, as did the tax revenue. You can conveniently see this in the number of people who needed/got social assistance:
Big surprise. You have a wave of companies making losses. Capital income plummeted first. Then came the bankrupcies and the amount of wages and salaries plummeted as well, because employment plummeted. And then people were poorer.
Wasn't that nice time? Don't we all - except the few evil capitalists - enjoy it if the proportion of employee compensation grows? No. I can tell you that 1992 wasn't a very good time for anyone, and the fact that employee compensation as a proportion of national income was growing did not give jobs or prosperity for the many of us who went through the uncertainty and economic hardship - and for the fewer, many of them failed entrepreneurs, who crashed completely and never recovered.
The breakdown of national income above shows that after 1993, the proportion of capital and entrepreneurial income went up. This was, in part, due to a capital gains tax reform which essentially cut the tax percentage dramatically, but at the same time removed lots of deductions that companies had been eligible to get. It removed tax loopholes and encouraged companies to declare profits, pay dividends, and be taxed.
What you don't, again, see in the above picture is that total amount of tax revenue went up dramatically. You can see it below.
Now, in 2011, we again can witness a phase where proportion of employee compensation goes up - and both total income and total tax revenue drop. Is this fun? No. The government is going hugely to debt.
The discussion seems to boil down to a point: is it better to have a smaller cake, as long as the majority of people - particularly those who were not involved in the baking process - get a larger proportion of it? Even if the total size of the slice they get is smaller? Is it important to "send messages" by having high nominal tax rates, and complex tax law with loopholes and special-interest-group deductions and subsidies, and live with a lower total tax revenue, as long as taxes are high in proportion to income?
This doesn't make sense to me. I think it is important that tax revenue can get us funding for public services. It is not important that tax revenues are as high a proportion of national income as possible. And right now, it's not the capitalist leeches that take the money of workers - it's the government.
And we should realise that employee compensation as proportion of national income is now at the same level as it was in the 1970's, the golden days of Urho Kekkonen and the welfare state as the baby-boomers wanted it to be.
14.7.2012
Olympic silliness and fish finger recycling
The London Olympic games have become quite a farce, ahead of the games. Not just the general security paranoia and fuss, but now the organising committee is saying that you may only link to their site if you're saying nice things about them:
Note that my intention is to portray Olympic sponsors, such as Coca-Cola, GE, P&G and Samsung, in a derogatory manner. They have voluntarily associated themselves with a bunch of greedy fools.
But perhaps the silliest thing in London is that McDonald's has a monopoly for selling fries. This would be understandable inside the venues, to prevent outside vendors from taking in unfair profits when McDonald's has entered a sponsorship deal with the organisers. But: even existing, established businesses in the neighbourhoods have been harrassed and intimidated. That's not in line with the Olympic spirit as I learned it - admittedly, some decades ago.
So, now restaurants have been banned from selling fries or chips, except if sold with fish.
I have been defending McDonald's against various stupid boycott campaigns, but this time I think it is reasonable that I'll actually quit eating at McDonald's (and more importantly, sponsoring my kids and their friends with lunches there), until another, even more stupid (probably leftist anti-corporate) campaign gets my attention so that I have to reverse.
Advice to London restaurants: if you really have to serve fish in order to sell chips in London, I suggest you take the same strategy as we had in my country back in the bad old days of more regulated alcohol policy. Those days, it was forbidden to sell beer in a restaurant most of the day, except with food.
To counter this silly requirement, restaurants had special sandwiches made to be delivered with beer. No one actually said it anywhere in writing, of course, but the idea was that beer is served with a sandwich (in a wrapper) so that the restaurant meets the legal requirement of only serving beer with food. You never ate this sandwich. It was returned with the empty beer glass, to be served with the next beer to next customer. At the end of the day, the recycled sandwiches were thrown away as pig food (alas, no longer possible due to EU regulations).
Of course, every now and then a stupid foreigner would come and eat the sandwich (and possibly even complain about poor quality). Then someone would have to explain that this is just a way to get around stupid regulators.
Now, you Englishmen, formerly free, can do the same. Just deliver a fish finger, wrapped in plastic, with every portion of chips. The happy customer can then return it to be used with the chips of the next customer.
This, or just serve Freedom Fries instead of chips.
a. Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner.I wonder how anybody can be this clueless? Particularly, some lawyer who presumably reviews and approves these policies? How are you going to enforce it? I, for one, will here say some objectionable things. The LOCOG is ignorant, and to confirm that, I link to their site in a graphic format - their policy is from this place: (Y)
Note that my intention is to portray Olympic sponsors, such as Coca-Cola, GE, P&G and Samsung, in a derogatory manner. They have voluntarily associated themselves with a bunch of greedy fools.
But perhaps the silliest thing in London is that McDonald's has a monopoly for selling fries. This would be understandable inside the venues, to prevent outside vendors from taking in unfair profits when McDonald's has entered a sponsorship deal with the organisers. But: even existing, established businesses in the neighbourhoods have been harrassed and intimidated. That's not in line with the Olympic spirit as I learned it - admittedly, some decades ago.
So, now restaurants have been banned from selling fries or chips, except if sold with fish.
I have been defending McDonald's against various stupid boycott campaigns, but this time I think it is reasonable that I'll actually quit eating at McDonald's (and more importantly, sponsoring my kids and their friends with lunches there), until another, even more stupid (probably leftist anti-corporate) campaign gets my attention so that I have to reverse.
Advice to London restaurants: if you really have to serve fish in order to sell chips in London, I suggest you take the same strategy as we had in my country back in the bad old days of more regulated alcohol policy. Those days, it was forbidden to sell beer in a restaurant most of the day, except with food.
To counter this silly requirement, restaurants had special sandwiches made to be delivered with beer. No one actually said it anywhere in writing, of course, but the idea was that beer is served with a sandwich (in a wrapper) so that the restaurant meets the legal requirement of only serving beer with food. You never ate this sandwich. It was returned with the empty beer glass, to be served with the next beer to next customer. At the end of the day, the recycled sandwiches were thrown away as pig food (alas, no longer possible due to EU regulations).
Of course, every now and then a stupid foreigner would come and eat the sandwich (and possibly even complain about poor quality). Then someone would have to explain that this is just a way to get around stupid regulators.
Now, you Englishmen, formerly free, can do the same. Just deliver a fish finger, wrapped in plastic, with every portion of chips. The happy customer can then return it to be used with the chips of the next customer.
This, or just serve Freedom Fries instead of chips.
28.6.2012
Welcome to the Brave New Welfare State
As always, Britain is a decade or two ahead of us in building a modern, multicultural welfare state. Here's tomorrow's guidance also for Finnish schoolchildren:
For health and safety reason, schoolchildren should not stand up to give sitting room for old or disabled people.
Way to go! This may not be what we think we are aiming for, but it is clearly what we're heading for.
For health and safety reason, schoolchildren should not stand up to give sitting room for old or disabled people.
Way to go! This may not be what we think we are aiming for, but it is clearly what we're heading for.
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