Finland has no mandated “minimum salary”. Someone asking that question will get the question back - “what will you be doing?” as the minimum salary in each job is more or less mandated by the comprehensive union agreements that differ a bit if you’re working in the public or private sector and also between industries (A lot of strikes recently have been about a job being outsourced and the new company having a different union agreement, cooks of bank cafeterias and cleaners at the paper factory come to mind). So everyone gets “union wages” in Finland.

But what are the wages then like? Taloussanomat did a survey on the average wages in Finland according to the average salary statistics by job classification and by gender, and compared the lowest rung of the ladder to the higher within the same profession. (The categories are by the Finnish Statistics Centre). Now it is said that the “wage differences in Finland are not that big”. Lets rephrase that, about as like the “cars are the cheapest in Finland” it makes everybody laugh as you need to remember the taxes on top. So the wage differences of the bring-home-pay are not as big in Finland - due to the progressive income taxation.

So who has the suckiest average salary doing a regular 9-5 workday your 38-40 hours a week? (Military not included.) A fraction under the 1600 euro limit would be for women a “farmhand” and for men a “laundry worker”. Thats about the lowest you can get… even a “cleaner” gets in the ballpark of 1700 euros average. But does education help? Do specialists get more salary? Do managers? That again depends on your profession. The lower rung of the specialist ladder is again farm work, a seminologist is in the 1700 euro ballpark. And if you get into mismanagement, the worst salaries are in the hotel- and tourism business.

Now as we’re talking of average salaries the survey also looks into the highest salaries. A stock and currency exchange banker or then your chief surgeon might get into the 5000 -6000 euro category, but thats the top end of the average “rich guys” salary. So what is the salary difference like? According to the nifty tax calculator provided by VERO ( just ballpark figures counted with 13 mo salary ):

1600e/month your income tax% is 16,5, take home pay ~ 1336 euros a month
6000e/month your income tax% is 36,5, take home pay ~ 3827 euros a month

So before taxes the income is 3,75 times, after taxes only 2,8… yay, socialism! BTW the SDP party secretary makes 6900 euros a month… yay socialism!

Travelling especially to the USA got a bit more interesting now that all new passports should be biometric. When I heard first of this biometric thing I was wondering if they had a strip of my DNA there like in every half-decent sci-fi movie or at least a retinal scan like they have in every spy movie, but the “biometric data” is as boring as a mugshot, and starting later next year fingerprints.

Or are fingerprints boring? They’ve been used for over a hundred years in forensics to identify people, as fingerprints are unique to each person. You have every other crime movie out there having someone dusting for fingerprints, even in CSI they still do it though it requires super glue and and hot air. So its definitely something even your average joe on the street recognizes whats it for.

The Aamulehti today ripped a headline over the newly appointed Police Commissioner Mikko Paatero wanting to form a fingerprint registry of Finnish citizens. Within ten years all adult Finnish citizens would be fingerprinted as fingerprinting would be a prerequisite of getting a passport (and probably ID card as well) The reason given is that with the registry it would be impossible to use forged passports and of course it would enable the police to find out their perps quite effectively. The Data Protection Ombudsman Reijo Aarnio is all against the idea of establishing a national fingerprint register.

In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Growing up in Finland I heard a lot from the politicians “its a lottery win to be born in Finland”. When I had grown up I realized “you require a lottery win to be able to live in Finland”.

Things are expensive in Finland - maybe not that expensive in comparison with the other Nordic countries with a similar taxation and geographical structure, but expensive to the average consumer as the purchase power in Finland is low. The Finnish financial magazine Taloussanomat wrote about the purchase power in Finland earlier this month. According to the article , “Finns are paying themselves sick” for goods and services. Lack of competition is given as one of the a reasons why for example groceries in Finland cost one fifth more than the EU average. Finland has been quite notorious for keeping foreign competition out, and now that there are no more barriers it seems nobody is really interested in coming over as the volumes aren’t there. So Finland remains a keskolandia.

Now being somewhere at the EU average is one thing, but starting to compare things globally doesn’t make the prices look any better. When Phil goes to buy a chicken in Finland, his cousin in the USA can buy four chickens with the same price! The Iltalehti had a comparison of prices for groceries in Helsinki, Stockholm, London and New York, and it seems in the UK and USA (and London and New York are expensive cities), you can get by with about half of what you pay in Stockholm or Helsinki. Of course one explanation is the sheer volumes that bring the prices down, but it still is peculiar while milk or potatoes cost approximately the same, in some products, like meat, the price differences can be quadrupled.

With the global food shortage being blamed on the biofuels is causing food prices to go up, it still doesn’t quite explain why in Finland you need to pay your ass off just to buy your basic stuff. Then again if Norwegians come to buy “cheap booze” from Finland, we can say theres a place where things are worse. Or are they - the purchase power in Norway is higher than in Finland . Your avarage consumer is faced with the problem of rising prices and already now the shopping habits of people are changing. Maybe next year this time I’ll be sharing a potato and brown sauce recipe.

One small piece of news in the Iltalehti today struck me as a reminder of a past era. I guess it was the so-called “IT boom” in the late 1990’s in Finland that drew me along, so much I decided to change careers. Of course those guys who were in the forefront starting it went much higher up catching the stars - but they also burned in re-entry. According to the IL Jaakko Rytsölä was sentenced for more or less for “deliberately misallocating money from his debtors - read: tax office” to a year and six months in jail (probational) and 50 hours of community service.

Now you might ask “who”, but the Rytsölä brothers, Antti and Jaakko especially were branded as the icons of the new success story Finland was launching in the late 1990’s. Two brothers from a regular family had started from scratch in 1995 establishing DLC, one of the first ISP’s. Jaakko had started his own IT business when he was 16 selling computer parts, and when his little brother Antti joined him in Helsinki, he was selling hotdogs at the Helsinki Railway station to make the ends meet while the ISP business was in its fledgling state. A few mergers later the Saunalahti was formed and the young men in their twenties were all of a sudden millionaires, remembering that in 1992 the whole country had been more or less bankrupt. Of course the press hounded the new IT millionaires - after all a Lamborghini Diablo as a “company car”? The two young men were favorites in the tabloid headlines. Finnish envy nonwithstanding the flamboyant lifestyle annoyed some, so the police found a red Ferrari in Helsinki traffic a red flag and Jaakko Rytsölä was fined a whopping 100 000 euros for speeding in his Ferrari (oh, he had about seven cars at one time).

The laws of physics say what goes up must come down, unless the escape velocity is fast enough. A Lamborghini is too slow in Finland. When the “IT-boom” as the “dot.com bubble” was called in Finland turned into the bubble that burst, Jaakko Rytsölä lost overnight a record 6 million euros of his calculated wealth of 10 million in the autumn of 2001 when the Jippii group stock crashed 90%. By the spring of 2002 the tax office had filed him bankrupt, but the tax office was still after money, and the result of the trials that followed was handed out today. Jaakko Rytsölä has claimed innocence and stated that the money wasn’t hidden anywhere but was invested and thus was lost in the stock crashes.

The boom/bubble era had a lot of similar from rags-to riches-to rags stories. Many of the people were young and maybe perhaps been hearing from their parents the “no money” saga growing up so once money was coming from the doors and windows the “crazy years” of the 1980’s came back overnight. It was an era to seize the moment - but there were other people running away with the money. As the dot.com bubble burst in the USA, the flash downed several Finnish companies who had gone venturing to Europe such as Jippii and Sonera which lost huge investments in Germany. And the aftermath was bankrupcy trials, insider trading suits… USA had Enron but we had our own scandals we remember the 2000’s for.

Comparing to the “crazy years” of the 1980’s the dot.com bubble years in the 1990’s could be called “riot years”. If you haven’t seen it before, try to find the documentary Riot On!, its about a small Finnish gaming company Riot-E which got 20 million dollars of venture capital… and ” where the f*ck did it all go?”.

But at the end of the day - regardless of how far the frontier is - the tax office is the last man standing.

I’m trying to do a community service and clear the spamtrap moderation queue that got a bit out of hand due to the database glitches. So yeah, theres been a few genuine messages there, some of which I’ve found, and some that have been flushed as the finger was faster than the brain. Now I am still facing about 10 000 messages in the queue, which I noticed my first one is dated 2007/10/28 and the last one 2007/10/18. So ten days worth of spam, thats like a thousand comments *a day*. Sweet Jebus on a dinosaur. No wonder people like me would like to go chop off the fingers of nimble little “electronic marketers”. The approved comments queue is riddled with spam that got through the trap, but I think the one we are using is pretty good in catching the drivel. One thing to implement would be to disable commenting on old posts, just today theres been about a hundred spam comments added to a post made 31.8.2005. It seems viagra and porn are still winning over insurance quotes and kayak passage walden… really obscure links. I used to gather real businesses and send the people extremely rude abuse back in the day you got email spam… seems futile. I still just hope a bear shits into waldens kayak. 9800 to go…

As it is summer we need to dig up old crap according to the best journalistic traditions of Finland.

Old news from around Easter - I think we were out to lunch when this happened, but Phil mentioned he got RickRolled… I guess he can count himself in good company.

The “minister of information” is saying “it is not a (security) breach before we have confirmed it is a (security) breach ourselves”.

Don’t know how far the “primitive system” has evolved from that, but its almost been… 4 days from the last time any “problems” were reported.

There is an old saying: “The manure pile won’t stink unless you go poking it.” and it seems there is nothing better to do than go poking during the summer. In the beginning of the summer there were some remarks made of doping in Finland, and as a few former skiers denied vehemently the use EPO-hormones or any knowledge of blood-doping - last week the ex-coach Kari-Pekka Kyrö came forward making a number of statements implying that the Finnish Skiing Association wasn’t as clean as they presented themselves during the 2001 Lahti Hemohes scandal. And his stories have been corroborated by others, so the story is opening up daily. As the Finnish News Agency chief editor and reporter were convicted of libel in 1999 due to claims of doping that were at the time “unfounded”, the NBI has reopened the investigation. Better late than never I guess.

Another case not as ancient re-surfacing is the infamous Sonera-book which the supreme court returned to the assizes overturning the inadmissibility of evidence. Now the public opinion on the case would be rather than trying to find the author to find “Where disappeared the money of Sonera” as the book title reads. They bought some air in Germany if I recall it correctly.

Maybe I should start a properly to go with the retro feelings and buy a Jopo.

When I was a little boy, I got to play in old trenches that were virtually in my backyard. And no, I didn’t live in Suomenlinna. Back in 1914-1917 the Russians fortified an important naval base, Helsinki, against the German threat. The fortress was never used in action, except for some skirmishes during the civil war and parts of the underground bunkers used by the army and some locations as AA-turret bases in WW2.

So, if you have a day to spend in Helsinki and you think you’ve seen it all, go see the Patterimäki between Pajamäki and Pitäjänmäki, take either the bus 14 to the terminus and or the commuter train to Pitäjänmäki station and take the bridge over the tracks towards the paint factory and continue straight up the hill, there are two AA turret bases on top along with trenches and bunkers. The Helsingin Sanomat has a number of pictures in a reportage they made of the current remains of the fortress along with maps, and theres a website, also in English, dedicated to the fortification with more old pictures Krepost Sveaborg. The fortress line winds more or less along what now is Ring I, so a little off the road into the forest there might be something interesting.

And I’d say this is a pretty remarkable piece of news. Traditionally the combination of alcohol and boating has resulted in at least half a dozen drownings. The statistics this year weren’t looking good as the thin ice caused a whole lot of fishermen to get into peril. The least drownings during Juhannus was in 2003 when the toll was four.

Otherwise the death toll so far has been 6 people. The most violent incident was in Kouvola, where three army conscripts were stabbed, one fatally and another in critical condition. A middle-aged couple had a beer-fuelled argument and the woman stabbed the man dead in Helsinki. The heavy holiday traffic went relatively safely but with several accidents, two fatal, and the police otherwise has been kept busy by drunk drivers. In Keuruu two men were found in the sauna, one dead and the other unconcious - possibly from cabon monoxide poisoning. Another man was found dead on a beach in Lappeenranta ant the police state they’re not suspecting a crime.

Otherwise the country has been doused with rain and hailstorms, maybe inhibiting the partying a bit. The police has had its share of domestic calls, and a man was shot in the leg while threatening the police with an axe. While the police say the amount of calls has been regular for a midsummer, the Coast Guard has stated it has had approximately half of the amount of calls to assist boaters than usual.

Update: By Sunday the death toll has risen to eight with another stab victim, and of a boating party one man found drowned and another missing - so that makes the inevitable drowning statistics. The Finnish swimming and lifesaving association’s spokesperson says that the bad weather did contribute, but he says he hopes that the downward trend is due to the efforts in public awareness as well. The return traffic is expected to be slightly congested even most people have started their summer vacations.

The Helsingin Sanomat has written about some British & Irish paving labourers who apparently have not had “trouble finding work without speaking any Finnish”. So that proves false the assumption Finns are discriminating xenophobes and racists. Doing a paving job for 3500, sans receipt, when the Finnish quote is 8500-10K and the material cost alone is between 2-3K though might have something to do with the equation. Also the claim that Finnish officials are xenophobes and racists is proven wrong, as if a local Finnish resident would be driving drunk, stealing and doing black labor without paying the social fees and VAT; they’d be in serious trouble. But EU citizens are free to do whatever they effin please. So apparently there is a “need for workers” in Finland indeed and the EU has once again proven to be the source of multiculturalism that enriches the nation. Again three basic theses regarding immigrants in Finland have been proven wrong. I find this quite hilarious, though there’s an owner of a campsite full of complaining Finns (as opposed to whining foreigners) that might not think I am so funny.

Cliff notes: Snatch in Järvenpää

The Helsingin Sanomat today reports of a court case where two teenage boys aged 15 and 16 were sentenced for “sexual abuse” though “performed as a young person” so they got 50 day fines each and to pay damages amounting to 1600 euros. A slap on the wrist maybe, as 50 days amounts for 300 euros, but…  The boys had enticed a girl aged 10 to strip on a webcam through the “Messenger” net.  The details shall be obscure as the case was behind closed doors and the court records sealed until 2068.  Now I just wonder where is the responsibility of the parents letting their 10-year old strip on a webcam?

FFT has been somewhat silent of the recent politicial events in Finland. Of course this is smoking gun evidence of censorship, but as the reality is not quite as sinister I’ll do something to rectify the situation now that the database has finally stopped hiccuping.

The proverbial shit hit the fan in May,  from a very offhand statement over election funding. The law passed in 2000 states that MP’s should make a public notice of donations that were over 1700 euros from a single donor.  The Centre parliamentary group leader Timo Kalli went ahead and made  a statement in A-studio tv talkshow that he hadn’t  disclosed  some of his biggest donors - and wouldn’t - as there weren’t any sanctions for not disclosing the donors.  Now a parliamentarian who had himself been drafting the very legislation  showing such a disrespect to the law got people, both in the parliament and the public, to demand if not his head on the platter some other organs put in a vice.

After Kalli had let the cat out of the bag, several more MP’s got a miraculous cure from amnesia and  donors started to appear on the lists.  A curious  “association”  that had donated  money to several Centre party candidates was  “Kehittyvien Maakuntien Suomi” (Finland of Developing Provinces) that after several weeks of  hounding by the press was shown to be made up at the Centre party office, and the funds it redistributed were mainly by a quintet of businessmen with their hands in real estate and other development projects in the “provinces”. Now having a “friendly politician” has always been a businessman’s wet dream, and even if it was only dreaming, a few statements that have been published make the ties too close for comfort.

There were a few other than Centre party candidates who got money from the association, but most of the money was channelled to the Centre. The Centre party claimed to have had no knowledge over the dealings, until it came into public that not only the Centre party officers had been involved in the association, but namely the head of development had been in access of the bank accounts and made money transfers.  Of course, both the head of development and the party secretary have taken a sick leave. The prime minister has distanced himself from the scandal and is now in Japan learning the art of public harakiri.

The public uproar has achieved something - there is an agreement of donation caps, 3000 euros in the municipal elections and 6000 in the parliamentary. As a gentlemen’s agreement it is to be passed as a law - though if there will be sanctions that remains to be seen.

There is a lot of articles on ths case and its slow unfolding and the squirming of politicians in the HS International Edition.  The latest one today, but theres going to be a lot more unraveling. The question of the opposition trying to topple the Prime Minister isn’t quite out of  the question, and the Centre Party is having its own annual meeting shortly and the discussion there can also get somewhat heated.

This piece of news from the Helsingin Sanomat really rang up high on the bizarrometer.

OK, so we have teenage angst and too much tv:

Police suspect that a 16-year-old Helsinki girl paid a 19-year-old man to kill her mother.

And what was with this “handgun ownership” so rampant in Finland then?

A moment later the woman felt a strong blow to the back of her head… One of the men had shot the woman with a crossbow - the kind that is used to shoot small game, police say.

Kinda… medieval this one.

Police say that the 16-year-old daughter had promised the 19-year-old man a cash payment for the killing. The daughter did not live with the mother at the time of the attack. The man had persuaded two 20-year-old friends to join him. The crime was planned at the Espoo home of a fourth man, who now faces charges of aiding and abetting. The suspects, all native-born Finns, do not have any prior criminal records.

Kids, don’t eat that yellow snow.

We’ve always suspected it, but now we have proof. The Finnish europarliamentarian Anneli Jäättenmäki had to get a new passport. Reason being her old one got “lost” in somewhere between the Europarliament and the Indian Embassy. Neither party has it. As the Ilta-Sanomat says

According to Jäätteenmäki, thefts are quite usual in the EU-parliament. The member’s “boxes” where materials are transferred between Brussels and Strassbourg are missing things, such as cameras and laptops.

- “The police can not investigate the thefts, as they do not have access to the EU-parliament” says Jäättenmäki

Not only the idiotic and expensive dual seating and travelling between Brussels and Strassbourg, but also there is then nobody with jurisdiction to investigate either… Makes you wonder who designed the system.

Tö vinnis skiink asshosshasson hääs nou komments oon tö keis. Helsingin Sanomat writes:

“According to the information I have received from the IBU, I am under suspicion of a doping offence. These suspicions are unfounded, and I have requested that the matter should be examined further in the normal way. Given the ongoing nature of the process, this matter is not public. I am nevertheless permitted to bring to light the suspicions held against me, and I do so of my own volition.”

So yeah, all athletes are innocent until their B-sample is tested.