Your problem is that you're not thinking big enough. Were you building busses instead of SUVs and actually filling them to capacity, people probably would be applauding.
Big can be both economically and environmentally viable. Especially so in the case of air travel. SUVs, however, are neither.
Well, I'm not entirely sure about Italy and Spain, but at least in the Scandinavian countries or Germany there is no such system in place. I have never heard of such a system in Italy or Spain either, nor seen evidence of one in action during my visits.
Actually the percentage is fairly small. But I do agree that in principle it's pretty stupid to have to pay Teosto and Kopiosto (Finnish copyright organisations) for media which I use to save my own work.
However the cassette fees are actually mostly not given to artists (the royalties go there and in Finland most of them even make it all the way to the artists), but used on grants for young artists and awards. For example the Finlandia (the most important Finnish literature award) is funded by Kopiosto.
It's easy enough to criticise the organisations without using FUD, so let's keep our facts straight.
That's strange considering the amount of time and energy finns spend learning foreign languages. I'm not terribly gifted when it comes to learning stuff like that, and yet I know english well enough to get a job translating stuff into it, and swedish and german well enough to handle most situations.
But you are correct about high levels of taxation. And it's easy to get paid well, but hard to get paid really well over here. It's all a part of the scandinavian way of doing things. Personally I prefer it to the American system, but luckily people are still able to choose between the two if one really isn't suitable for them (wonder why all the biochemists I know are moving to the USA:-). I like to be able to walk around any part of Helsinki at any time of the day without fear of being robbed by somebody desperate enough to use a gun.
Funnily enough, the Finns aren't a Scandinavian people, or inherently blond haired. Their origin is shrouded in mystery, but they basically settled in Finland after the great migration of the tribes. One bunch of Finno-Ugrian people headed West from the Urals, and became the Hungarians. Another big bunch headed North until they hit the Gulf of Finland. Some stayed South of where St. Petersburg now stands and became Estonians (Virolainen). The remainder headed further North, met the Lapps and became Finns (Suomalainen) or Karelians.
It doesn't actually work quite like that. Our language is indeed related to small finno-ugric islands in a sea of slavic languages, but the finnish gene base is pretty much totally west european. The biggest mystery about the finns is why an overwhelming number of western settlers ended up speaking the language they are now speaking (especially since Finland spent a good few hundered years under swedish rule and the use of the swedish language was strongly incouraged). Personally I blame it on the inherent superiority of our language:-)
The only people with some sort of finno-ugric descent in scandinavia are apparantly the saame (or the lapps as we germanic oppressors call them) and nobody understands anything about them either. Go figure.
Seriously, I wonder how wide the gap needs to get before domestic geeks start crowding on rafts and stowing away on planes to get to a more enlightened country--like, say, Finland?
The finnish geeks have an edge on you guys when it comes to getting jobs here, because you'll never be able to learn our language:-)
Actually I don't think we have anything the americans don't have here in Finland. Maybe more services are offered for use via mobile telephone (I think Sonera is the first GSM operator in the world to be offering WAP-services), but as far as I understand you can conduct your daily business (shopping, monetary transactions etc.) on net over there as well. The big difference is, that technology being used by geeks elsewhere has become more commonplace and available to everybody here. This is largely due to the big banks, telephone companies and of course the government investing heavily into the Internet. Another big factor is the scandinavian "equality - no big pay differences - large parts of the population doing fairly well but nobody gets fabulously rich" system. When technology becomes available, it is automatically available to large parts of the populace after the phase of astronomical prices has been passed.
And the arctic circle is pretty bad. I live in southern Finland, and half the year I wish I was living in California again. Than again we do have some warm currents in the oceans around these parts, so Helsinki isn't actually much worse than central Europe when it comes down to numbers. But it gets pretty dark in the winter this far north, and that makes the weather seem a lot worse.
Is it just me, or do Linux users have an extremely low tolerance for constructive criticism. The article was IMHO fairly positive and the writer actually gave excellent advice on how to improve things. The Linux people immediately start to wonder what kind of an idiot can't use their favorite OS.
I am one of those idiots and I study computer science. I run both Linux (currentlu SuSe 6.1) and Win 98 on my machine and have installed both OSes too many times. Windows clearly beats Linux in ease of use and has a fairly frienly installation environment. DHCP was a breeze in Windows and a couple of hours of agony in Linux for me, and I really don't consider myself stupid beyond all hope.
The point about the availability of programs and drivers is also an excellent one. Until I can run Corel's and Adobe's publishing and graphics programs (or their equivalents (and Gimp isn't one by itself)) and use my USB scanner and Deskjet printer under Linux using a GUI that works as well as that in MacOs (or even as well as the one in Windows) my computer will boot Windows as the default OS.
The god-side is pretty much covered by Hermes/Mercurius. The greeks were smart enough to give their gods generic tasks so they can easily adapt to changing technology.
The use of the 'net for distributing pornography and quasi-legal purposes also goes pretty well with the characteristics of Hermes.
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Your problem is that you're not thinking big enough. Were you building busses instead of SUVs and actually filling them to capacity, people probably would be applauding.
Big can be both economically and environmentally viable. Especially so in the case of air travel. SUVs, however, are neither.
Well, I'm not entirely sure about Italy and Spain, but at least in the Scandinavian countries or Germany there is no such system in place. I have never heard of such a system in Italy or Spain either, nor seen evidence of one in action during my visits.
Actually the percentage is fairly small. But I do agree that in principle it's pretty stupid to have to pay Teosto and Kopiosto (Finnish copyright organisations) for media which I use to save my own work.
However the cassette fees are actually mostly not given to artists (the royalties go there and in Finland most of them even make it all the way to the artists), but used on grants for young artists and awards. For example the Finlandia (the most important Finnish literature award) is funded by Kopiosto.
It's easy enough to criticise the organisations without using FUD, so let's keep our facts straight.
And they also didn't like speaking English.
:-). I like to be able to walk around any part of Helsinki at any time of the day without fear of being robbed by somebody desperate enough to use a gun.
That's strange considering the amount of time and energy finns spend learning foreign languages. I'm not terribly gifted when it comes to learning stuff like that, and yet I know english well enough to get a job translating stuff into it, and swedish and german well enough to handle most situations.
But you are correct about high levels of taxation. And it's easy to get paid well, but hard to get paid really well over here. It's all a part of the scandinavian way of doing things. Personally I prefer it to the American system, but luckily people are still able to choose between the two if one really isn't suitable for them (wonder why all the biochemists I know are moving to the USA
Funnily enough, the Finns aren't a Scandinavian people, or inherently blond haired. Their origin is shrouded in mystery, but they basically settled in Finland after the great migration of the tribes. One bunch of Finno-Ugrian people headed West from the Urals, and became the Hungarians. Another big bunch headed North until they hit the Gulf of Finland. Some stayed South of where St. Petersburg now stands and became Estonians (Virolainen). The remainder headed further North, met the Lapps and became Finns (Suomalainen) or Karelians.
:-)
It doesn't actually work quite like that. Our language is indeed related to small finno-ugric islands in a sea of slavic languages, but the finnish gene base is pretty much totally west european. The biggest mystery about the finns is why an overwhelming number of western settlers ended up speaking the language they are now speaking (especially since Finland spent a good few hundered years under swedish rule and the use of the swedish language was strongly incouraged). Personally I blame it on the inherent superiority of our language
The only people with some sort of finno-ugric descent in scandinavia are apparantly the saame (or the lapps as we germanic oppressors call them) and nobody understands anything about them either. Go figure.
Seriously, I wonder how wide the gap needs to get before domestic geeks start crowding on rafts and stowing away on planes to get to a more enlightened country--like, say, Finland?
:-)
The finnish geeks have an edge on you guys when it comes to getting jobs here, because you'll never be able to learn our language
Actually I don't think we have anything the americans don't have here in Finland. Maybe more services are offered for use via mobile telephone (I think Sonera is the first GSM operator in the world to be offering WAP-services), but as far as I understand you can conduct your daily business (shopping, monetary transactions etc.) on net over there as well. The big difference is, that technology being used by geeks elsewhere has become more commonplace and available to everybody here. This is largely due to the big banks, telephone companies and of course the government investing heavily into the Internet. Another big factor is the scandinavian "equality - no big pay differences - large parts of the population doing fairly well but nobody gets fabulously rich" system. When technology becomes available, it is automatically available to large parts of the populace after the phase of astronomical prices has been passed.
And the arctic circle is pretty bad. I live in southern Finland, and half the year I wish I was living in California again. Than again we do have some warm currents in the oceans around these parts, so Helsinki isn't actually much worse than central Europe when it comes down to numbers. But it gets pretty dark in the winter this far north, and that makes the weather seem a lot worse.
Is it just me, or do Linux users have an extremely low tolerance for constructive criticism. The article was IMHO fairly positive and the writer actually gave excellent advice on how to improve things. The Linux people immediately start to wonder what kind of an idiot can't use their favorite OS.
I am one of those idiots and I study computer science. I run both Linux (currentlu SuSe 6.1) and Win 98 on my machine and have installed both OSes too many times. Windows clearly beats Linux in ease of use and has a fairly frienly installation environment. DHCP was a breeze in Windows and a couple of hours of agony in Linux for me, and I really don't consider myself stupid beyond all hope.
The point about the availability of programs and drivers is also an excellent one. Until I can run Corel's and Adobe's publishing and graphics programs (or their equivalents (and Gimp isn't one by itself)) and use my USB scanner and Deskjet printer under Linux using a GUI that works as well as that in MacOs (or even as well as the one in Windows) my computer will boot Windows as the default OS.
The god-side is pretty much covered by Hermes/Mercurius. The greeks were smart enough to give their gods generic tasks so they can easily adapt to changing technology.
The use of the 'net for distributing pornography and quasi-legal purposes also goes pretty well with the characteristics of Hermes.