University of Helsinki To Lay Off a Thousand People (yle.fi)
jones_supa writes: University of Helsinki, the place where Linus Torvalds got his degree as well, will reduce staff by 980 people, with 570 being laid off by the end of 2017. In addition, the university will reorganize and incorporate certain divisions including continuing education. Professors, teachers and researchers are criticizing the cuts, which coincide with the university's administrative and educational overhaul. The staff cuts reflect the government's drastic funding cuts to education, which plays one part in the effort of trying to help the difficult economic situation of today's Finland. The university estimates that of the 980 positions, terminations during this coming spring will account for 570 positions. Of the employees to be made redundant, 75 are teaching and research staff and 495 other staff. The rest of the cuts will be spread over the coming years.
with the layoffs.
I get it that Torvalds went to school there etc, but this isn't any different than any other school that hundreds of other developers have gone to that have had staff cuts. Those don't make /.
Why is this here at all?
Well they need money to pay for all those refugees. Population replacement is not cheap!
This would never happen to an institution owned by the benevolent government of a nice, progressive country with constitutional protections for earning a living wage. Oh, wait...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Usually these articles are accompanied by a positive statement about how these 980 people will be replaced by bots and cashless society
It sounds like most of the cuts don't affect the people who are fulfilling the core mission of the university, the ones who teach, do research and advise the students. US universities have hired so many administrators that they need more administrators just to keep track of all the administratoring they do. When there are budget cuts, it's administrators who draw up the cost-cutting plans, so it turns out as one would expect. At least in the US, universities can just keep raising tuition. In Finland that is impossible.
A few months ago we were told that Finland is doing so well that everybody is going to get a basic income...
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/10/31/2125226/finland-begins-to-shape-basic-income-proposal
Unlike most western countries, at least they understand that these non productive jobs are part of the problem. They need to cut these jobs and cut the taxes used top pay for them. This will allow for extra demand and new jobs in productive fields that service that demand. NZ dis the same thing long ago, with gigantic cuts. Make work jobs like park rangers were cut from 20,000 to literally single digit numbers. They have had a massive economic turn around.
In 2015 Finland accepted 15,000 more asylum seekers at a cost of EU 15,000 per head. That works out to EU 225 million *more* in 2015 due to some legitimate asylum seekers mixed in with a lot of opportunistic economic migrants:
http://sputniknews.com/europe/...
Imagine if a portion of that money had gone to existing citizens instead - and the asylum seekers kept closer to their point of origin while receiving the other portion for their care - it's cheaper to help them closer to their point of origin, like in a neighboring country.
Too bad the politicians and bureaucrats in the West always consider their own citizens and tax payers last when deciding where to spend money taken from those very same tax payers.
The staff cuts reflect the government's drastic funding cuts to education, which plays one part in the effort of trying to help the difficult economic situation of today's Finland.
I have it on good authority - years of reading Slashdot posts - that European countries are enlightened, problem-free utopias. Someone must've made a mistake and replaced "America" with "Finland" when writing this. Stupid editors missed it again!
#DeleteChrome
What is happening at the lower ends of society?
Why is the EU allowing itself to be flooded with people with few or no skills that will need long term generational support if it cant even look after its own best and brightest?
If a nation is so 'poor' why accept more poor people in who will need funds from a government who cant their own fund higher education?
Time for some national interest and ensuring educational funding is placed above EU policy.
Finland was able to keep the Soviet Union out, time to look after its own funding again and stop wasting limited funds on the EU's rapid population growth projects.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Organizational downsizing and layoffs are inevitable. The difference is that these people get to keep their national pensions, will receive at least 700EUR/mo in basic allowance even if they're not qualified for unemployment insurance, and if they are, as they are likely to be, up to 85% of their normal pay for up to a year while they try to find a replacement job. Then there is the normal array of services, should any of them run into real difficulty. It's much more manageable than what you'd get in a third world hellhole like Arkansas.
Troll smarter, not harder next time.
This sort of smells of the old political trick of announcing a fire station will close. It gets a lot of people together against the bad government closing the fire station which leads to a tax increase. Perhaps they're betting on people getting riled up and getting more public or private funding. If they were hurting that much financially the layoffs would happen sooner unless there are some legal reasons not to.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
fine let's just replace it with loans at 7%-15% and no chapter 11 or 7.
TFS says:
75 are teaching and research staff and 495 other staff.
So a few are teachers and researchers, but MOST are useless administration and "overhead".
Could be a lot worse. Could be a little better, but it's almost the opposite of your claim that most of those being cut are the people actually serving the direct function of the university.
>The country has lost what were its only significant export products for several years: the mobile phones of Nokia.
Thanks Microsoft.
It's totally not Microsoft's faults that no one wanted to buy the phones that Nokia wanted to be able to keep selling, but for which there was pretty much zero market.
If you disagree, you are welcome to go into the dumb-phone market with your own investors, and I happen to know a country where you could locate your company, with a reasonable expectations of being able to hire a bunch of unemployed dumb-phone engineers on the cheap...
Let's lay off 1,000 Finnish Professors and Academic staff but let in millions of Muslim Syrian migrants that are going to immediately be placed in publicly funded houses and food provided by the Finnish Citizens. What's more important, the working class and Finnish educators or Muslim opportunists posing as Syrian refugees?
Finland sells a lot of oil?
You're probably confusing Finland and Norway...
If you didn't read the actual YLE article, only 75 of the 570 people to be made redundant this spring are teachers and researchers.
From what I've heard from friends and family who have actually studied and worked at the University of Helsinki staffing is very heavy on management compared to actual teachers and researchers. I've had people who study and work there estimate that the ration between administration and people doing actual teaching and research is something like 3:1 which would fit pretty well with the layoffs being almost 8:1 in administration vs teaching & research. There's been talk about something having to be done about this since well before the financial crisis and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the financial crisis is the reason why it's been put off for this long.
So sucks for the people being laid off from cushy administrative positions, but these layoffs have been in the making for a lot longer than this.
You realize Nokia was selling smartphones since 2002, long before Apple released its first iPhone in 2007, right?
I realize they were marketing feature phones as if they were actually smart-phones in order to try and rehabilitate their primary product into a product that the market was willing to buy.
You realize a feature phone isn't a smart phone, and Nokia didn't start selling the Nseries until April of 2006, right? And that they were still predominantly a dum phone selling company, even after that point, right?
University of Helsinki, my heart cries.
In the US we have witnessed the rise of the "Administrative University".
The Administrative University exists without classes, without research, without service to anyone or anything.
The Administrative University has a state appointed Board of Regents, a President (The Champion of the Board of Regents), Vice Presidents, Vice Vice Presidents, Superior Lawyers, Middle Layers, Submissive Layers, Patent Office Administrative Staff, Provosts, Vice Provosts, Deans.
The Administrative University exists to feed itself.
Teachers? NO.
Classes? NO.
Research? NO.
The Administrative University exists for itself and nothing else because it syphons money from the State and Federal Governments.
The Administrative University exists to uphold the lifestyles of the Board of Regents and Their Champion, The University President.
The Administrative Staff are the human shields to endure the slings and arrows of sexual lawsuits and felony complaints against The
Champion of the Board of Regents, The University President.
Example: The University of Alaska
Ha ha
I doubt they'll be "made redundant", I'd rather guess they will be missed left and right.
A basic income would fix that problem.
So true! When there isn't enough economic activity to generate the jobs that would make things like expensive university programs easy to afford, the best plan is definitely to spend more money you don't have (massive debt!) in order to just hand it out without any connection to productivity (inflation!). Excellent idea.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
With Linux replacing the infrastructure servers, they're finding they need only one admin per 100 systems, not one admin per 10.
I've actually seen this sort of thing happen....
It's working out great for Venezuela and Zimbabwe!
As in Greece, Spain, Italy, etc etc., the inability of the economy to recover is the consequence of adopting a currency that is run to benefit Germany instead of your own country.
Nokia tried to adapt, but they were pretty much caught on the hop. The road is littered with companies like that, from RIM to Motorola.
This particular university has a significant real-estate ownership and an autonomous position in the education system, which sets it a part from the other universities.
benevolent government of a nice, progressive country
Finland hasn't been a Sweden since the end of the 18th century. Although we try to be, sometimes so hard that it hurts.
"Totally News for nerds...."
It would be if we were to 3-D print the free money.
Do you have any idea of how expensive beer is in Finland?
Well, not the ones in the green suits. But I've heard the one in the pink suit has done well for herself.
Sounds like the other 495 are the groundskeepers, librarians, technicians, and support staff, not administrative staff.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
You realize they were selling the 7650 in 2002, with a 32 bit ARM9 CPU, able to run fullfledged applications like email programs and java based arbitrary applications, right?
Nokia was doing smartphones back before Apple even entered the business.
The 7650 was retconned into being called a smart phone. It was not in fact a smart phone, even though it had a 600 Euro price tag, because the JNI's were not there for the Java "apps". You could write/play games, and not much else. 3.6M of memory is not a lot, especially if you are running a JVM, since they tend to be "forgetful" about giving memory back.
But nice try.
This would never happen to an institution owned by the benevolent government of a nice, progressive country with constitutional protections for earning a living wage. Oh, wait...
The problem is that our government is far from benevolent. This is the most hard-line capitalistic government during the entire history of the Republic of Finland. This government has made it its mission to completely dismantle every remnant of the welfare state and turn Finland into a tax haven for the rich. The "difficult economic situation" is merely a pretext.
I'm veering off on an off-topic tangent, but the fact is that almost all economists, when asked by the press, have stated that the measures taken by the current government only worsen ad prolong the situation.
Lemon curry???
I like the use of "park rangers" as an example. If you want real examples of non-productive tax-payer funded jobs... you're looking at the millions of useless admin jobs/managerial posts in the civil services. Most of them women. Most of them flexible working/job sharing/endless maternity leave. All of this, in turn, propping up an HR industry that again multiplies up the costs and useless jobs.
Their debt is still lower than many of the developed nations including the US.
As a member of a different university's "other staff" let me tell you what these jobs usually are:
Secretaries, Logistics, IT, Equipment operators, Cleaning, Security. You know the jobs with the lower wages.
They are cutting where there isn't much to cut nowadays (post 2008/2011), but where it's still easy to cut (tenure is a bitch).
And then some "Fachidiot", closed somewhere in server room with no windows for 5 years, always points out that everything is connected with "refugees", someway or another.
839*929
Wow, what a shitload of ultra rightwing bullshit is propagated here! "A few legitimates mixed in among the opportunists" and "ISIS sending their suicide troops camouflaged as refugees". What a heap of stinking, populistic, braindamaged crap! I'd like to hear you talk if you'd been born on the OTHER side of the fence, where your land got raped by those who happened to be technologically superior and left to rot when they lost interest.
It is wrong to assume refugees represent a pure cost. And you are talking about 0.1% of the GDP of Finland here. Do some research before spreading xenophobia. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Every Nokia phone with Symbian OS had fully working TCP/IP stack and a few other things and definitely was more smart than Windows 3.1 era computers. Equally was smart enough to keep Microsoft with its Pocket PC phones/devices at bay. At least from 2004 you could install functional Opera HTML web browser and other apps like Internet messaging, IRC client, photo app with auto picture correction and of course games if you wanted. It is true that Java was an afterthought and most applications were written in C++. And yes, Symbian were very unhappy that few people knew about that because all those folks lacked that what Apple had.
That what helped Apple to stand out the crowd was much stronger marketing muscle (started to grow in the 8 bit computers era) and making no trade offs for crappy hardware like caring about running on systems with 4 MB of RAM. In long term it helped making them look like a quality and luxury brand. (Same applies to Apple vs Windows).
The Scandinavian countries are quite pragmatic when it comes to solving problems. Sweden did a turn towards the right in 2006 which served them very well. Finland will do something similar.
See, Finland is not that pragmatic. That's the main problem actually. The country has failed to perform the necessary agile moves, the ones that neighboring countries like Sweden and Estonia have done. We Finns just stand with mouth open and mittens in our hands, stare into the horizon and say "Gee, I guess we could do something about the problems. But not right now. And there are many regulations preventing change anyway, and we cannot quickly change those regulations either." There is a lot of the classic 1970s conservative old world stiffness still present. However, right now a lot of confidence has been placed on PM Sipilä and his government, so we'll see.
laughing my ass off. Told ya so.
That what helped Apple to stand out the crowd was much stronger marketing muscle (started to grow in the 8 bit computers era) and making no trade offs for crappy hardware like caring about running on systems with 4 MB of RAM. In long term it helped making them look like a quality and luxury brand. (Same applies to Apple vs Windows).
No, what made Apple stand out is that the platform itself was very, very, very compelling.
People wanted to program for it badly enough that they were willing to jailbreak the devices using systemic exploits to do it, and then work on developing an SDK for it, to the point of reverse engineering the APIs for all the frameworks on the thing, and then making modifications to the scratch register usage in the compiler, because Apple did not use the standard (at the time) ARM ABI or calling conventions.
Jailbreaks initially came about so as to rewrite the baseband seczone and then put a new (valid) TEA signature on the thing, so as to remove the carrier lock, since Apple sold the things into a limited market, but people *EVERYWHERE* wanted an iPhone. It got so bad at one point that Apple limited the number of iPhones you were allowed to purchase, and entire shipments were hijacked at gunpoint.
That never happened with Nokia phones. Ever.
When Steve released the thing, the Application story was that "You'll use web apps. Period.". Steve was deathly allergic to the idea of building another Apple Newton, and wanted it to be a closed system.
Only the damn thing wouldn't stay closed, and when it surfaced that the boot ROM had the same buffer overflow flaw in the signature validation code that was in Samsung and Sony devices which used Samsung OEM'ed processors, it was "game over" for at least two years on spinning new silicon.
Seriously: No one ever bothered with the Nokia phones.
Even if there had been a capability baseline (all the Apple phones has the same sensor capabilities, the same screen aspect ratio, and, initially, the same screen resolution) so that you could write one piece of code for a Nokia phone, and it wouldn't be missing features and/or run like crap and/or have to scale everything into ugliness due to using whatever the cheapest bulk available LCD resolution and aspect ration the thing had when Nokia was pricing parts right before going to manufacture -- the damn things were not compelling enough that people *wanted* to develop for them.
The only people who developed for Nokia were the ones the phone company paid to put simple games on then through the phone company stores, or the ones that Nokia solicited themselves, or the *very few* vertical market applications which would fit on the things and remain useful.
Nokia phones were crap feature phones with a JVM "in case", and while you *could* write binary applications for them, it was a massive PITA, and they weren't portable between models, and Nokia didn't pre-release models to developers -- which is kind of what you have to do, if you are going to be shipping a bunch of hardware incompatible devices, and the apps would only run on the older devices no longer being built.
Sorry.
Build a compelling product that developers want to develop for, and they will *break into* the thing to do it, even if it means sending the device to someone in Korea who's willing to remove surface mount chips to get at the JTAG port, and then reattach the chips to the device in a reflow oven, because he happens to have one, because he's an engineer at Samsung who works on Samsung phones, and the things are more compelling than what his company has him working on most of the time.
*That's* why Nokia took the dirt nap.
Let me add that labour unions have a huge power in Finland and have become a major roadblock when the country has recently tried to rearrange things to make the labour market more dynamic. The labour unions have a strong grip on their current benefits which they have acquired over the years. It's like a ship is sinking but on board some guys don't want to throw their superfluous goods into the ocean to prevent the doom.
make things like expensive university programs
Ok... 95.9% free. AND you have to provide your own food, water, living quarters, underwear...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Prices on some of the lemon-flavored canned drinks was decent when I was there. At least as far as alcohol content vs. cost goes. 150yen for 350ml can with 10% alc isn't that bad. Imports though... yep. 240yen for 300ml is kinda ridiculous. And even the local dive bar was 500yen for "pint" draft where I was in Nagano.
But they can't print their way out of debt like the US - they are in the Euro.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
For most parts, Finnish labour market is a about as dynamic as it is in Sweden, in some parts it's even more dynamic. This (manufactured) crisis is merely an excuse to try to lessen the power of the unions -- don't confuse dictated labour market with dynamic.
And, by the way, we here in the labour force call those "acquired benefits" actually "compensation for working".
They put all their eggs in the Nokia basket. It wasn't social programs that hurt them, it was the economic monoculture that took them down. Look at what is happening to Saudi Arabia and Russia, two countries that put everything into the oil industry. Neither country is benevolent or progressive.
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The 15 k x 15 k was the figure I put up.
I'm not saying you're illiterate... or a liar.
Just that your prejudices lead you to be afraid of brown people so much, that all you see are large numbers.
And then you multiply them until you get millions.
But let's take another look at that link of yours.
Earlier this week, the Migration Service of Finland said that all the reception centers in the country were overcrowded, and the authorities were urgently looking for new places to host migrants.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Over 15,000 refugees have arrived in Finland in 2015, local media reported Saturday, citing the country's migration service.
"During this year, more than 15,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Finland. If you look at the number of arrivals in recent days, it appears that 600 people arrive every day," Juha Simila, spokesman of the migration service, said, as cited by the Yle news portal.
According to Simila, Finland spends around 15,000 euros a year per asylum seeker living in a refugee reception center. The amount also includes wages of the center employees, the media reported.
Earlier this month, Finland agreed to take in 2,400 asylum seekers as part of the European Commission's initiative to relocate 120,000 refugees from southern EU member states.
According to Prime Minister Juha Sipila, Finland is likely to resettle asylum seekers to other countries of the European Union if the bloc creates a permanent and binding mechanism of redistribution of refugees.
So... to sum it up.
1 - It's 15k euros per year, per an asylum seeker, LIVING IN THE RECEPTION CENTER.
2 - That sum includes salaries of people working in those reception centers.
3 - 15000 people arrived in Finland, but ONLY 2400 would be taken by said reception centers.
Incidentally, Finland takes in 3-4000 asylum seekers yearly.
4 - Rest (that is 15000 - 2400 = 12600) will be sent on their merry way to other countries.
5 - Out of that money (those 15k euros) nearly all of it goes right back into Finnish economy.
Actual money that a single, living alone refugee gets is 314.91 euros if the reception center does not provide meal - or 92.3 euros per month if there are meals provided.
Incidentally, if you plan to study in Finland (free tuition) you must provide a proof of having a MINIMUM of 560 euros per month to your name.
I.e. Living costs in Finland are estimated to be 218.09 euros higher than what is provided per a refugee.
Actual living costs are closer to 900 euros per month, or 585.09 more than what they spend monthly on feeding and clothing (that's what those 92.3 euros are supposed to be) a single refugee.
Now... deduct those 314.91 euros from those 1250 euros (15k divided by 12 months) - and you will get the costs of heating, cleaning, electricity, water, and the salaries of the people working in those centers.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
See, Finland is not that pragmatic. That's the main problem actually. The country has failed to perform the necessary agile moves, the ones that neighboring countries like Sweden and Estonia have done. We Finns just stand with mouth open and mittens in our hands, stare into the horizon and say "Gee, I guess we could do something about the problems. But not right now. And there are many regulations preventing change anyway, and we cannot quickly change those regulations either." There is a lot of the classic 1970s conservative old world stiffness still present. However, right now a lot of confidence has been placed on PM Sipilä and his government, so we'll see.
I see from your comment that you apparently approve of the government's actions. Fair enough, I just disagree. However, your statement about the confidence placed on the PM could be just a tiny bit more accurate... PM Sipila's approval ratings have plummeted from 60% (June 2015) to 36% (Dec 2015). You simply cannot call that "a lot of confidence".
Lemon curry???
What about Nokia Communicator 9000? It had a damn 386 in it. It was so far ago (1996) that its CPU/RAM specs would have made for a somewhat useful desktop PC (with the addition of a hard drive etc. of course)
You made good points in your latter post. The Apple phone was such a baseline and step up, it's like comparing Amiga 1000 / Amiga 500 to a hodgepodge of CP/M, TRS-80, Apple II and Spectrum machines etc., or comparing the netbooks to the pockets computer that ran BASIC or did agenda/contacts/notes only.
1) Finland's total tax burden equals 44.1 percent of domestic income, and government spending is equivalent to 56.7 percent of domestic output.
2) Labor regulations are relatively rigid, and the non-salary cost of employing a worker is high.
Sounds like an argument about who everyone on the forum thinks is useless, meanwhile obviously we're getting rid of jobs we don't need filled. It's like everyone wants to halt economic progresss and go back to a wealthless shithole like the USSR, where there's barely enough productivity to get everyone food.
We make progress by reducing the amount of labor per good made. That means every person's time produces more stuff, meaning there's more stuff per person. That's why hunter-gatherers had loincloths and spent all damn day trying to find food while agrarian societies built rocket ships and put people on the moon. Steel used to be expensive--mining, refining, forming--and then we invented industrial mining machines, puddling process, blast furnace, steel rolling (this made rail production 1/10 as labor-intensive), and mechanical drop forging, and all kinds of metal stuff like cars became things the common man could afford since, amazingly, we don't have to pay 10,000 other common men's wages to buy one of these things.
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Sorry, Finland is known for its drunks and drivers. Both of which are legend.
You can out drink the Ruskys and all drive like you think you are F1 champions.
For the record those are both good things IMHO.
Of all the things to be ashamed of in the USA, I'm most ashamed of our drivers. 7 of 8 cars in the USA have slushboxes, even 'vettes are mostly autos. People think 'road armor' is a good strategy.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's not their own oil but I seem to recall a company called Neste Oil has a bunch of refineries there. It was on NPR not that long ago. They don't have their own oil but they refine a whole bunch of it.
Umm... That's according to NPR and I'm a bit too lazy to Google. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that they do process billions of dollars worth of oil. I believe they do a lot of Norway's oil? My memory is really not that good so feel free to Google.
How much of an impact this has on the economy, I do not know nor will I speculate as I am unqualified. I just happen to recollect the name Neste and thus I remember the story. Err... It was the afternoon show with that old lady, I've forgotten her name. I still manage to listen to MPBN because they're on the 'net. It works out well enough even if I'm in Florida for the winter.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Both of you are using inaccurate, old and/or false information. The situations is much worse than you seem to think. Here are just some examples where you are using false information or misinterpreting it:
-During 2015 the number of asylum seekers in Finland was about 32000 persons and not 15000 persons
-That 15000 euros doesn't cover all costs
-That 2400 persons using relocation of 120000 persons would come on top of that 32000 persons. However, even this relocation scheme is more or less dead (*).
-"Finland is likely to resettle asylum seekers to other countries of the European Union if the bloc creates a permanent and binding mechanism of redistribution of refugees": There doesn't seem to be much political will for this and in any case, it wouldn't make the asylum crisis any better. It would only spread it to even more countries and buy little more time, but the flood from developing countries is in practice endless and accelerating. It is simply unsustainable and must be stopped or Europe as we know it, will collapse.
*) The relocation of 120000 persons from certain South-European countries was one time test. Finland took about 100-200 person of the promised 2400 persons, but all other countries took much less, even if those countries were much bigger and had promised to take much more people than Finland. It seems that this process failed miserably. And in any case, 120000 is only small fraction of persons that are in Southern-Europe. It would not have solved anything, especially as so many persons come in daily, that it would hardly make any difference.
Just that your prejudices lead you to be afraid of brown people so much, that all you see are large numbers.
Ah, the old "your a racist" canard. Always pulled out just when a Leftist is about to rob you - and in this case, rob the tax paying citizens of Finland from the benefit of their own money. You don't even know what my skin color is (not that it makes any difference, except to racist Leftists who think virtue is determined solely by skin color).
And you advocate for robbing the Finns just so you can 'virtue signal' and feel sanctimonious with unearned moral superiority. How about instead of demanding the Finns pay you instead work harder and put up YOUR OWN money? how about you practice what you preach and sell your computer right now and give it to the "brown people" you worship? you don't. You are a repulsive hypocrite of the worst kind - and the citizens of the West are getting tired of your slanders and tantrums, bullsh!t and demands to steal our hard-earned tax money while depriving our fellow citizens of the fruits of our labor. Bugger off, Comrade.
Unlike USA, Finland has to EARN dollars to buy 331,200 barrels of crude oil every year;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
But hey... you said racist. I just called you a coward.
But it's nice to see that when faced with your own ignorance and inability to refute any of the arguments (which IS kinda hard to do when facing truth) - you run and hide behind a fallacy. Or two... Or more...
While even the punctuation fails you. Or are you secretly a 12 year old? Or maybe a dog?
What a truly pathetic creature you must be.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Here... Let me quote you.
Everyone there pays for it through large taxes
Someone else is forced to pay for it.
Who is that mythical "someone else" if "everyone" is already paying it? Martians? God? Smurfs?
When "everyone pays", everyone pays LESS, and everyone gets to have the same (and much higher) quality of service due to the pooling and sharing of resources.
And there is no "someone else" - cause "everyone" already includes EVERYONE.
Thus everyone pays less and gets more.
That's why a bus ticket costs less than a ride in a taxi and a ride in a taxi costs less than renting a car which costs less than buying a car - same resources get used by many people thus reducing per capita costs of being driven or driving from A to B instead of walking there until you can afford a car of your own.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
He pulled that article out of his ass, without being able to read it properly.
I frankly don't care about Finland or refugees or what will both sides end up telling themselves about themselves and others five or ten years down the road.
I just refuted his "arguments" by pointing out that he can't read - which leaves only the question "Why did he read something that was not there?" on the table.
Which he provided with an answer by replying with a "sell your computer right now and give it to the "brown people" you worship" tirade.
Just remember to give sources to your quotes - cause he clearly can't even google up anything for himself.
You apparently have different sources. Feel free to source him up.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens