A small piece of news struck my eye yesterday and made me thoughtful. Theres been a restructuring of the 112 call centres into a national organization instead of the previous county-run regional units since the 2000’s, and the results have been a bit questionable. The nationalization of the Helsinki emergency centre has been blasted as the restructuring has caused and stated that the safety in the region has come down. Another question is the services in the Swedish-speaking areas.

Basically before you also had the police as well as ambulances or fire departments have their own numbers you could call for “less emergency” so you’d call the “emergency number” when the house was on fire, but the lesser number when the cat was up the tree. But now you deal only with the 112 with all kinds of nonsense. Which isn’t anything peculiar to just Finland.

The new reform into larger units also caused some problems as many villages and towns have similar or the same streetnames, and the 112 operators weren’t necessarily that versed with the area. So in 2002 a “middle aged woman” who worked on the west coast got a warning from the court as she’d directed an ambulance to the wrong city and a man with chest pains died of a heart attack.

The yesterdays piece of news said that the same woman had been fined in court for negligence of duty and stripped of her office, as she had cut approximately a hundred 112 calls that then had redirected to other operators in 2006. She had logged these as missed calls or wrong numbers. Apparently the stress and workload at the 112 centre had overwhelmed her - maybe the first mishap was a cause or a symptom, but the manager of the centre said that of course the “performance is evaluated”… Now I can understand this is a job that does not bring in profit - but now you need to remember that we are talking of peoples lives - so adding insult to injury and stressing the workers out when the job itself is stressful enough sounds they should hire comrade Stahanov.

At the end of the day, who can your stressed out 112 operator call?

Cliff notes: emergency services in emergency

(Sorry the article didn’t get all there the first time because of the database hiccups.
Hank W.)

Going once, going twice, gone… and there go the jobs in the paper industry. As the global recession dawns upon us there is going to be more and more “pops” when the weasels take our jobs and run away with the money. And what will the politicians do? Build garden cities. Yes, and meanwhile “Finland needs more workers”… sorry, did someone say “a cheap exploitable labor force”? There is always someone out there desperate enough to be brought in to do the job cheaper.

I always contradict people saying there is a “shortage of nurses”. There is no “shortage of nurses”. There is a “shortage of money and tenures” which results in people not wishing to enter the profession which has created an illusion of a shortage of nurses. Finnish polytechnics churn out about 3000 nurses per year - after 5 years maybe 500 remain in the profession. And why is that? The job is hard, the pay lousy and you have only short-term contracts. So instead of making the profession something people want to do - the answer is to bring in people from someplace where the conditions are if possibly worse and they think they are getting a good deal.

There wouldn’t be all these Finnish nurses working for the NHS in the UK or Norway unless it was the same situation - the Finnish nurses think they get a good deal. While on the one hand economically bringing in foreign nurses is a business decision - we wait 10 years. That nurse has either gone back home after saving enough money for a new house and childrens college, or then the nurse has a family here. She wants a better salary and a continuous job contract, but as the culture of exploitation is there - what is the answer? To bring in some other - cheaper nurse working for peanuts and not complaining of actually having to support a family on those wages. So it continues on and on and on without anyone needing to address the core problems of the system itself.

So I would rather say “Finland needs more jobs” - but theres always the patent answer of creating your own. Oh yes, even back in the days of the big recession of the 1990’s the magical answer was for everyone to put up an enterprise and start selling soap and vitamins. Fixed the statistics greatly but how many people selling soap and vitamins to each other do we need? Does the economy of a village run on everyone selling soap and vitamins to each other? Because the fact is that the production industries are outsourcing and if there is no production there is not much money in the economy after a while. Not that there is a lack of the “enterpreneurial spirit” in Finland. Or would this “make money and become rich” spirit. Now as everyone knows one cannot come rich in Finland with honest work. The welfare state has its hand in your pocket. But as the human animal operates on greed we have now had not only one but two pyramid schemes where someone has gotten the great idea of making a fast buck off peoples greed. The WinCapita system allegedly had 10 000 Finns “invest” hundred million euros into the pyramid… that is quite a mind-boggling sum to think of. Another smaller scheme called GPP has just unraveled selling “pension insurance”… So what does *that* say of the country? We do remember Albania had a revolution in the 1997 due to a pyramid scheme taking all the money out of the system - they were probably high up in the “global competitiveness” figures back then - before the weasels popped the bubble.

It is questionable how far Finland could afford to copy the Nordic Welfare State model with its limited resources in the first place. It has worked so far, but even Sweden has been showing a hiccup… Norway has oil and gas to support their regional policies, but Finland just thinks it has resources. The current political parties - the three largest having equal 21% of the vote at the moment cannot come into consensus of what needs to be done - so everyone does something and the direction… The decisions made back during the big recession of the 1990’s was to “liberalize” the economy have now in 15 years resulted in the liberated industries escaping away. You look at the latest survey on the “hi-tech” Finland and its broadband connections. Even if done by Cisco which has its own interests. The government expects private market forces to take care of the infrastructure - and what is the result? Finland is now in 13th place. Really is this the way to go? We are living interesting times as they say in the Chinese proverb. But Finland isn’t as much alone any more - the rest of the EU is to be considered, but is the direction of the EU any clearer? Surely each country is pulling into its own direction - and is the EU not a giant on clay feet?

So what will Finland be like in 5 or 10 years with the global competition? Weasellandia 2018? Scrapped remains of a welfare state turned into a cut-throat globalized capitalist state with huge income gaps and poverty - a polarized society with ghettos with proles the weasels use as a resource pool of easily exploitable cheap labor that can be popped off when not needed?

The only thing your average Finn can do thinking about this is drink cheap alcohol imported from Estonia and look at how the country is going to hell in a handbasket - and that is my positive outlook of the day.

Cliff Notes: Paha maa

The Ministry of Social and Health affairs has plans on making a public registry of licenced healthcare professionals. The registry would be public, on the internet and would have such information as the person’s name, birthdate, qualification and registration number and any restrictions. This kind of information is available already by a phone call, but the ministry suggests that this way the public could easily verify the treatments they get are provided by licenced professionals. The medical staff on the other hand opposes this kind of public registry, and says people won’t choose healthcare professions as a career if there is such a registry. Mainly the nurses are worried of stalkers and such.

This is sort of old news, but I came across this article telling how a bloke named Colin Slater tried to take Mika Waltari’s book The Roman, change the name to Lindum Colonia, and sell it as his own work. Waltari wrote some real masterpieces, and all or most of them are also available in English. The most famous is Sinuhe, The Egyptian also know simply as The Egyptian. What an idiot to think he could take such a master’s work and try to call it his own, thinking noone would notice.

In a way it is flattering that someone would see the potential in such great works, but it is a pretty lowdown deliberate crime to take it, call it your own work, and then sell it to a publisher. If you want to make money selling Mika Waltari’s books, why not sell them as Mika Waltari’s books. The dude probably would have been stupid enough to move on to The Egyptian, and try to plagiarize it, when a Hollywood movie has even been made from it. This might also be an indication that it is time to make a new round of publishing Mika Waltari’s books.

If only more people spoke Finnish, there would be so much more good stuff that never gets translated into English that could be published.

Milk has gotten much more expensive. Juice has gotten much more expensive. Beef has gotten expensive. In the news they say bread is going to get more expensive. Fuel has gotten more expensive. My electricity bill has gotten more expensive. The TV permit is going up 4%. Day care has gone up. Housing prices have gone up. Public transportation, and so on and so on.

I don’t really believe much in what the Minister of Finance, Jyrki Katainen has been saying about lowering taxes and us getting more buying power. I will believe it when it happens. Lowering VAT on food 5% might help a bit with food prices, but if the past teaches us anything, the stores in will jack up the prices to fill the gap quickly. Salaries just are not going up at the rate of all these prices, and we are heading for a face first plunge economically, if this keeps going on. I am not the only person affected. The reality will hit when people start not having enough money to live on and we fall into recession.

Propganda video warns of U.S. jobs moving to Finland. So basically the message is, “Fuck other countries!!” ?? But point taken, the American education system is seriously messed up…

Hat Tip to z zz for the link!

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!

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.

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.

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?

Anyone who is a client of Sampo Bank better check their account statements now if they haven’t already. I assumed I was immune to all the problems they’ve been having, as I was able to login to their new website just fine - but we just discovered that they took an extra 500 euros for our house loan last month for no apparent reason. Normally I just assume they take the correct amount so I don’t check it, but my recent statement included about 10 “deleted transactions” which raised my suspicions.

I recently received a letter from Sampo apologizing for all the problems they’ve been having, and as a compensation they’re giving me four months without fees (2.90e/month value). Needless to say when I meet them this week I’ll be asking for a much larger compensation, or I’m leaving. Of course Nordea isn’t an option as they don’t (as of a couple years ago) offer some insurances to fucking foreigners. Those Swedish banks spoke English to me and treated me well, maybe I’ll move my loans to them.