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.

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.

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.

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.

I work in a Dilbert cubicle style office environment, and there is always an irritating level of noise around: computers buzzing, people talking, phones ringing, alarms alarming, etc. I am also a very social person, so I am easily distracted and drawn in by the conversations and joking going on around me. The employer has been gracious enough to supply everyone with a set of Sennheiser noise cancelling earphones (NoiseGard Mobile HDC 451). They are quite good and definitely reduce noise. When I put fresh batteries in and turn them on, they definitely reduce the level of ambient noise.  However, they are quite old. I think that the technology has probably progressed since the time these were brand new. Also, they are the type that sits on top of the ear with a plastic flexible U bracket in between. I want to try something that either goes in the ear, or covers the ears completely. I started looking around in the stores. Soon I found a set of earbud type earphones in Anttila of the Philips brand. (Philips Active Noise Cancelling SHN 2500). I paid the 44 EUR, thinking it wasn’t too much and went home. I opened up the package, put the battery in, put them in my ears and turned it on. It was nothing like the Sennheisers at work. They did not reduce the ambient noise at all. In fact I heard more noise after turning them on. I heard a slight hissing sound plus the same level of ambient sound.  When I put music through them and turned them on, they slightly amplified the music. They sounded OK, but they did not have the “active noise cancelling” that I was expecting. I started reading customer reviews about them in the Internet. Many customers said the same as what I noticed: they sound alright, but they don’t reduce noise - they only amplify the audio going through them a bit. What I also noticed was that the average price I was seeing was about 20 dollars, or about 15 euros. I paid 44 euros in Anttila. So I got ripped off 300%. Needless to say, I took them back and got my money back. After reading customer reviews, it looks like I might buy a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7 QuietPoint Active Noise-Cancelling Headphones, listed for about 100 dollars in Amazon.com. They seem to have very good reviews and many compare them favourably to the Bose model that costs 300 dollars. I definitely know the name Bose, which is associated with professional audio systems.

 Pretty soon I want to blog about how every article I have ever read about the “open office” style workplace has been negative, saying things like it reduces peoples’ productivity, increases stress, and it takes 15 or so minutes for a person to get over a distraction and get back into their work. Some of the studies use empirical evidence, such as looking at the amount of stress hormones in peoples’ urine or how they behave. This basically means that a large part of office type workplaces in Finland are bad for your health and therefore the people are much less productive than they could be. This doesn’t just mean Finland either - many countries use the Dilbert cubicles and some workplaces even go so far as to have totally open offices. For now, I have to make my head swim in music and “active noise cancelling”. One person at work actually uses a pair of Peltor ear protectors, which is what you use for chainsawing, grind-cutting metal, using a jackhammer and stuff like that.

I am thinking of making a motorcycle helmet type thingy with air ventilation or peltier air conditioning, noise reduction, with high quality stereo speakers. At least I can put my head in a closed office that way. As I write I am unsuccessfully trying to ignore a conversation next to me that has been going on for about 20 minutes.

The Germans have gotten all riled up and tossing their Nokia handsets to the Rhine because Nokia has decided to close down its assembly lines in Bochum and move the production to a cheaper location, namely Romania(*). This spells out axing some 2000 people and effecting the related subcontractors. (Considering Nokia had 68,483 employees at the end of 2006, that adds up to 2000 people being as significant as a flys fart in the Sahara desert. Of course for the individual it is a tragedy.)

Why yes, it was a fully profitable factory… so why did the Germans then close down the “fully profitable” Fujitsu-Siemens assembly plant in Espoo in 2000? How does it feel to taste your own medicine now? Why do you cry now that you can have Oktoberfest every day.  After all is this “free movement of labor” in the EU not something the German government has been defending?

Meanwhile Stora Enso is closing its pulp plant in Kemijärvi, killing the town, so what should I do - if I boycott them, so where will I wipe? Most of the Germans frothing over the boycott don’t realise its probably them that own more Nokia stock than say Finns that own say.. was it 10%? Close by. So the Germans can have an 1% complaint edge over the Finns.

Lets face it fellow europeons. Its called Globalization. The pink-haired old ladies in Florida own Nokia, and as they need their pensions, so its Quarter Capitalism that rules the world, making the quick buck and sending your job somewhere else.

(*)As we need an evil conspiracy theory as the explanation, the Nokia HQ have been approached by the City Fathers worried about the Romanian beggars in town asking if there was any way the Romanian Question could be resolved.

I recently visited the USA. I found some things there that are ripoffs, and found some prices there that show me that some things here in Finland are ripoffs.

 Property taxes in the USA can be around 1% of the taxation value of the property per year. Imagine trying to make money on investments in property with that as a constraint. The problem is that the counties and cities who take that taxation are very limited on ways that they can collect tax for the services they provide. And they are the ones who provide most of the services that people use everyday like schools, school tranportation, medical care, libraries, etc. However, collection of taxes on property can be seen as being in conflict with human rights. Owning land does not necessarily indicate the ability to pay and property prices have skyrocketed in recent years. Some people in the US have been forced out of their homes of off their land because their property tax has become too high. The way counties typically collect taxes in the USA using property taxes is wrong and must be changed. In Finland, the municipalities collect what is called “äyrit”, which is a flat percentage of your income, ranging from 16 to about 20 percent. In my opinion, the Finnish system wins, except in the cases where the municipality collects the tax but does not provide the services or provides substandard services keeping people illegally waiting in line for necessary medical procedures, for example.

A new basic chainsaw of a known brand, Poulan, was 107 dollars in Walmart. That is about 75-80 Euros. I have never seen a chainsaw for under 150 EUR in Finland. Rumour has it that Hong Kong has them for 99. It is probably from some brand like “Leaping Tiger” or something similar. I have to go check that out.

One of the worst ripoffs, and perhaps one of the most dishonest, is the price of rechargeable batteries. They are twice as expensive or more in Finland. A pack of 4 Energizer rechargeable AA batteries is under 10 dollars in Walmart. Here they are 15-20 EUR a pack, so 2-3 times more expensive. So next time you make an order through the Internet or travel, don’t forget to throw in a pack or two of rechargeable batteries. Nowadays, you can even get pre-charged rechargeable batteries that hold their charge. A pack of Kodak pre-charged rechargeable AAs was about 7-8 dollars. Rechargeable batteries can be recharged 300-500 times, and will save you a lot of money in the long run, even if you do pay the ripoff Finnish price. It is much more green to recharge your batteries 300-500 times than to buy at least that many packs of disposable batteries. Also disposable alkaline batteries are a ripoff in Finand, but not such a drastic one.

While I was there in the USA, I needed to travel to an island that was 8 miles offland. The only way to get there was on a postal delivery boat that goes there twice a day, every mail delivery day. In order to ride the boat that goes there anyway, I needed to pay 16 dollars per trip. So I paid 32 dollars to get to and from an island, 16 miles total. That was a dishonest ripoff, in my opinion. In Finland, the Ã…land ferries cost me around 50 marks to ride with my car. They are free with a bicycle or by foot. I don’t expect it has increased much since then. And that trip was much longer than 8 miles. The Ã…land ferries are a good working part of the the Ã…land transportation infrastructure that people actually use a lot.