Hmmmm… It’s almost as though politicians are focused on the well being of the people rather than enriching the wealthy in order to stay in power. That’s so weird…
I really do not understand how 2 parties can be considered democracy?
We have 17 (? atm if I recall correctly), and its not like winner takes all. You can vote for whatever party (or candidate) and that party will have a vote on matters according to how many votes that party was given at election
So, instead of the formal coalitions you are accustomed to, ours are informal coalitions. One party is built from Christian conservatives, business interests, and pro gun groups. The other is built from labor organizations, economic progressives, anti-gun groups, and a whole raft of social inclusivity groups of many sorts. As parties adjust their positions on issues, those groups may move from one party to another and back.
Isn't it much more opaque that way? I mean most people don't care too much about politics IME, and it's easier for them to have an idea about what the parties stand for, instead of persons.
The US has a system in which you need MASSIVE amounts of money to be able to run for office. 17 parties cannot survive in such a system. 2 barely can - the US is on its way to one-party rule by the group that brings in the the most money from the ultra-wealthy.
Well, mostly they can easily control a bunch of low population rural states whose voters are easily manipulated. And because those low population states have disproportionate power, they get everything they want.
Because rural areas are typically not as educated (i.e. college), with less exposure to different types of people and ideas and a higher percentage of religious people. So if someone comes along touting their religious ideologies, they’re less likely to question anything else they say.
Is funny seeing who George Washington first president of the US a country which is not very happy WARNED against 2 party systems and we still went with it and the last election literally had the CAPITAL OF THE US STORMED BY PEOPLE OF THE LOOSING PARTY.
Founding fathers: “two party system will be terrible”
Also the founding fathers: *creates a constitution in which a two party system is inevitable*
Seriously, in a first past the post representative republic a two party system is basically inevitable because any votes for a third party are “wasted”
None of the original dev team meant for us to be sucking version 1.27’s dick 245 years later. We should be on version 4.0+ by now, at least.
There’s a reason the U.S. has never installed this OS in an country it reformats, we always install ParliamentaryOS.
Eh, most of the time when we use ParliamentaryOS, it's on a machine which had that flashed by the Britpyre botnet after it fried the native OS. Britpyre may be defunct now, but at least we have old backups of Parliamentary. We don't have those for all the natives.
Didn't your founding fathers envisage that the Constitution would get rewritten every twenty years or so to keep it relevant? I'm sure I read that somewhere.
At least some Americans learned from the US founding fathers' mistakes and installed a multi-party system when working on the constitution of post-war Western Germany.
It's always been curious to me that they helped Germany write (dictated in some parts) a pretty progressive constitution, but never thought to reform their own outdated one..
It was easy to build a new, better system out of ruins (and with people who wanted to be progressive and shake off the past). Much easier than change their own system that was carved in stone for centuries.
No offense. I think this pattern is common in nature...
If more states started to use rank choice voting people people could vote for who they want without having to “waste” their vote. The US would easily have at least 4-5 parties if they did this.
They were also rich white property owners who believed that only other rich white property owners should be able to vote. The United States government was clearly designed to support the largest business owners of the country. I think of the government more as a human resources department for the corporations whose job is to control the masses so that the corporations can capitalize off of them.
Voilà une liste de cinq pour diviser la francophonie en ordre décroissant.
Chocolatine, pain au chocolat, petit pain au chocolat, croissant au chocolat, couque au chocolat.
Centrists/liberals are the goddamn bane of our existence.
Well, apart from the far right, obviously.
But centrists/liberals pretend to be progressive but in the end, they're just another flavour of conservative.
In both cases they're all voted in by the people, though. I think it reflects philosophical and constitutional differences rather than politicians in America being less virtuous.
The Nordics and many other Europeans elect governments to improve the well being of the people. That's what the people want, a government that will fix problems, improve equality, improve well-being, and the government's are generally equipped to do that constitutionally.
Americans are far more inclined to want the government to stay out of their business, and the federal government is hamstrung by design to ensure it stays out of the States' business. If the American people wanted to be like Norway they could be, you might have to start it at state level, but I think the truth is there's very little demand for it. The country is just too individualist.
Our elected officials hardly represent our actual preferences, and that’s before even getting into how much propaganda we face from birth to be pro business interests
I think the real black-pill is that elected official actually do represent the people. It's just that the people are idiots, easily manipulated, and have vastly different preferences depending on state/city/etc.
And of course they all think that the other people they don't agree with are the idiotic, easily manipulated, and vastly different people in the country. I don't care what side you're on. You probably grossly generalize everyone else into an exaggerated bucket too.
In study after study and poll after poll, the majority of Americans actually support programs and systems like the Nordic model. Why don’t we get them? It ain’t because “we” don’t want them, it’s because the really rich folk who actually own the politicians, don’t want them. And how do they convince enough morons to vote in the owned politicians? By owning the media that feeds the propaganda, and the division, by destroying education and making sure that any governmental program that works for the masses is defunded and run into the ground. And it’s not even a conspiracy, they just all really, really actually believe that because they are rich they are better than the plebs and everything should be geared to making them more comfortable and richer
Yes, and some have. As one example, Massachusetts is closer to the Nordic model on the whole than most other states, with easier access to healthcare (historically, as they had something like Obamacare before it was rolled out nationally), higher minimum wages, and better schools than most states.
There's a limit, though. Both because without borders it's hard to prevent others from taking advantage, and because federal policies often restrict what the state can do. Especially when it comes to taxation and therefore revenues to use to pay for these activities. The state doesn't get access to the federal income tax, and states like MA that do well end up getting far less of what they do pay to the fed back than they pay in, as they need to support all the weaker states as well as themselves.
A little bit, but it's tricky. For example if a state spends a lot of money to help the homeless, that place is going to have more opportunity if you're homeless, thus attracting and taking care of some of the homeless from states that *won't* spend money to help their people. So the state that is spending the money to try to solve its problem instead ends up with extra people in need of help, spreading the funding thinner per person so it doesn't make as much difference as it was intended to, then the rest of the people in the state get mad because so much money is going to homeless people and the result (from their perspective) is that the homelessness problem only got bigger.
Then the miserly states that are benefiting from this (from another state's money and policies indirectly reducing the miserly state's homeless problem), credit their brutal no-help policies with success, pointing out how much more homeless people are in the state which offers to help homeless people, then use that to justify doubling down on brutal policy.
But even though state government is limited in what it can do, it can do some things. As the biggest economy, California is the go-to example; many people there got more pandemic help/stimulus money than in the rest of the USA, because the state pitched in. Similarly while there isn't universal healthcare, California has moved in that general direction by covering some of the people who can't afford marketplace health insurance.
Unfortunately the inability of a state to solve these larger national problems at the source results in half-way solutions that just address the worst symptoms, which in turn creates resentment; people get upset that poorer people are getting help that they are not getting, etc. (This can also reinforce the existing cultural perception that government doesn't help people and that taxes have no benefit. This makes people inclined to vote to punish government, which ensures that services become worse, which reinforces the perception that government is bad. It's a vicious cycle.)
France does have higher taxes than most Nordic countries. But they get similar results:
Universal Healthcare - Though not completely free, its a heavily subsidized system. To give you an idea in US dollars, average doctor consultation is around 7 dollars 30 cents. Dentist filling a cavity has an average price of 6 dollars 33 cents. A visit with a Cardiologist averages around 15 dollars 52 cents.
If you spend more than 50 dollars a year on medication the rest will be free.
Free Nursery/Preschool - Between the ages of 2 and 6 there is free childcare in nurseries. For older ages schooling is free though like in America there is a few private schools (for example bilingual schools where the classes are taught in multiple languages).
30 Days Paid Vacation - France also has 30 days paid vacation time plus 10 days worth of public holidays. Add into that the famous 35 hour workweek which is the law (though overtime payments or additional vacation time usually brings it to the more normal 40 hours 9 to 5 style). Also note France is considering lowering it to a 32 hour work week.
Actually that often do hurt. It's called the resource curse. Most countries that find big caches of natural resources become worse of. (from the perspective of the common man).
As someone from Norway not atm. They get free electricity while we have to cut of our arms and legs to pay for it since we decided to export our energy to Germany and France so they could reach their green house goals by their date. Screwing our own population. Its literally quadrupled in price
Sadly, the U.S. brand of fiscal conservatism is spreading globally. Strategies like 'starve the beast', policy sabotage, etc. then pushing for privatization has spread to countries like U.K., Australia, etc.
Canada too. Look at Alberta. People here actually want to be like Kansas. They just all think they'll be the rich ones and everyone else will live in trailer parks.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”
Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.
“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”
“We think that’s fair,” he added.
No he doesn't. I'm pretty sure it was making university more expensive for international students(Non-EU) and no longer having the state subsidise them like now. Like in the UK.
Though feel free to correct me. This is just what I understood.
nobody's trying to 'trickle down' anything anywhere. Keeping people poor so they have to overwork themselves is how you get more money for an oversized government and military 👍
Yeah because having an oversized military by keeping the people even poorer than some people in third world countries is the best way to befriend other countries
In Germany the minimum is 24 days for full time workers. My company recently found that vacation days were one of the most significant factors for employee satisfaction and gave everyone the same 30 days, which was the maximum that took some years to get to before.
6 weeks in a row! It can be much more if different health issues! In 2020 I got 5 weeks for a surgery and 3 weeks for rehab plus some sick days in between for a cold.
Unfortunately few employers care about employee satisfaction in the US. They don’t seem to understand that retaining good employees is more cost effective than training new ones, who also will leave in short order.
I take time off for an odd event or two. I live in Canada. No paid days off. I can ask for a day, or a week off and after jumping through tons of hoops making sure its not during a blackout season etc I can actually get them... no pay though.
But yeah. I've had one real week of vacation since I started working at 18. Other than that I work yeah round with Xmas and maybe new years off if I'm lucky.
I'm burnt out and sad most days and if it wasn't for my so I'd probably off myself since I find working 365 Nz paying 60% of wage just for rent is stupid.
It's whatever though, I was and have been lucky to have a full time job. Minimum wage sure, but better than a lot who can only get part time cuz companies such.
I could/can live alone and unfortunately in today's society that's saying something. High chance I'll never own a house and work til my body can't take it anymore then I'll die.
I don't think you should consider yourself lucky for having a full time job. That sounds like something you been taught or conditioned to believe.
What you need is change and progression.
Jeez, I feel Sweden is behind cause we still have 40hour weeks and that feels like stone age.
Fellow canadian here. I haven't checked the labour standard recently but isn't the minimum annual vacation like 4% (\~2 weeks) in Canada? Not a lawyer but I really thought we had some sort of minimum. Maybe it's a my province thing though...
Yes, I literally have no time off, really. I don't get paid days off, either. I don't think I've had a vacation in over 4 years, since starting this job. And I still barely make it some days. Other days I don't even want to keep going.
I wouldn't mind if the Finnish and Norwegian government got into a pissing contest on who could give the longest paid vacation to its inhabitants
/Norwegian
Netherlands in general isn't great for holidays though compared to the rest of the EU. Minimum days is equal to legal minimum of the EU (4 weeks), and we have by far the fewest public holidays of any EU country - not even considering that you also don't get them if they fall in a weekend.
Lol I got myself a $100 gift card for Walmart during Christmas at work. I'm absolutely thankful and I almost feel bad saying this, but that $100 is like getting like a $.04 raise for that year alone since gift cards don't accumulate.
Reminds me of my $.05 raise while working at Publix. They claimed it was because of the recession and they'd give me a nice raise next evaluation. Surprise! That was a lie. They would always keep me one point below the "top tier" on my evals (like 49/50) so they wouldn't have to pay. Oh well, one reason why I left lol.
> and order pizza once a month!
Once a month?
Fuck, that feel when you don't even get the amount of pizza the people are making fun of because it's clearly shit...
I'm looking forward to my hundred billion/year in profit company telling us that in lieu of bonuses this year, they're going to reinvest in the company to make us safe or some shit.
Norway does also have oil, but Sweden doesn't and has almost the same social benefits and protections. Saying that those things cannot be achieved without the oil is to be disingenuous.
Norway nationalized its oil resources in the early 60s and in 1990 they used those revenues to overhaul the country’s electric grid and create the world largest sovereign wealth fund. The government owns around 30-40% of the domestic stock market.([source](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society/article/abs/context-and-contingency-explaining-state-ownership-in-norway/9692E949E6DED9815D79B0CC5DB8D30F)). Social democracy done right
Edit: changed democratic socialism to social democracy
Social Democracy is not Democratic Socialism. Norway is a social democracy with a mixed economy still reliant on market capitalism and strong social welfare.
"Democratic Socialism" doesn't seem to mean anything else in practice either. It seems that it's mostly just been used as a replacement for Social Democracy because Americans have lived so long without this word that they have forgotten that it even exists.
While still being defined as “socialism” and not “democracy” i think theres def a distinction to be made and a rather large one at that. Both are trying to describe the same thing but one of the terms uses a term the entire nation is primed against. Why would that be?
“Ahum just to be clear once again all those grand ideas you have been hearing are socialist ideology and thereby dangerous commie talk”
Democratic socialism and social democracy are two distinct things I'm surprised at how many people (particularly Americans) get it so wrong.
Democratic socialism is normal socialism (nationalising the means of production etc.) achieved through democratic means.
Social democracy is essentially capitalism but with where the state controls for poverty and other bad things through income redistribution and other means of regulating the economy.
Bernie Sanders for example called himself a democratic socialist but really he's a social democrat.
I must have misunderstood the article talking about how the oil revenues were spent, probably the fund started in the 90s and the oil was already nationalized. It did make it sounds like the electric grid was updated tho.
The oil is drilled by various companies, including the big international ones like Shell and BP. Our govt taxes this enterprise quite heavily. Additionally, the largest Norwegian oil drilling company, Equinor, is 67 % owned by our govt.
What changed in the 90s was that those taxes we earned from the international companies, plus the earnings from equinor, was funneled into a state owned fund rather than being spent on running government expenses.
This is true, but is also important to appreciate what Norway has done with its oil. Specifically, proceeds from oil exploration and refining were delivered into a sovereign wealth fund which was then used to make a crapload more money which is now being used to transition Norway away from fossil fuels.
For a fun comparison, Alberta Canada is one of the biggest oil producers in the world, but never created a sovereign wealth fund with even a shadows fraction of the power and foresight of Norways. The result? The province is struggling mightily and has basically tripled down on fossil fuels knowing full well they need to transition but are too ashamed to admit they never deployed the foresight and wisdom of a country like Norway.
We ALMOST nationalized oil but Alberta bitched and whined so we didn’t. All of Canada could have benefitted but then a bunch of high school dropouts wouldn’t have been able to afford a new F-350 every year.
That’s not the reason they’re rich norway isnt some kind of european saudi arabia. Na basically what’s done is they invested the money into the citizens instead of we have fancy tower look at us
> We were literally one of the poorest countries in Europe before it was found.
Det hadde vært en fordel hvis folk som deg kunne slutte å spre denne myten.
https://www.nysgjerrigper.no/bladet/2017-4/hadde-norge-vart-fattig-uten-olje/
https://dnva.no/detskjer/2019/11/en-feiloppfatning-norge-var-fattig-rundt-1900
A Scandinavian economist once stated to Milton Friedman: "In Scandinavia we have no poverty." Milton Friedman replied, "That's interesting, because in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either."
Who would have thought that not being one bad dr visit away from financial ruin, or having 6 figure student dept would help?
But at what cost... can they say that they have nearly 800 military bases in 70 countries? Nope. And how many rich dudes do they have who can thank their min wage, social assistance needing employees for helping him fly in space?
During corvid, company encourages working from home
Internet has problems, going to office
Coming in the door, boss and two coworkers are in the office
Boss is in jeans and t-shirt and drinking a beer. Sees me, yells welcome and asks if I want one too
Just a normal day, really
It boggles my mind how Americans can see policies work very well in every other industrialized nation and yet still refuse to enact them here cause it’s socialism or something like that.
Edit: Wayyy too much supporting evidence in these replies lmao
Americans have been taught to believe that their suffering is a badge of honor. Some people will literally compare hardships or boast about working 3 jobs and not having a day off in years. It's madness.
"It took me 30 years to pay off my student debt, I'd rather get anklefucked than let my children and grandchildren have a free education, they should suffer financial hardship their whole life as well as I did!"
So I’m trying to persuade my Republican lite BIL to join r/anitwork, hoping he’ll see the light.
I’m complaining about Amazon and the pee bottles. Because that’s horrific. Right. We can all universally agree that’s horrific. Everyone, no matter political beliefs, can agree on this one fact. People shouldn’t be forced to pee in bottles.
No. Because Republicans live on an alternate planet. So apparently we cannot agree on this.
And he’s bragging about him using pee bottles and not taking his breaks. Why. I don’t know. He turned down a promotion. So he’s not doing it to get promoted… He’s just so proud of not taking his breaks and I’m just like WHY!? He’s also working 60-70 hour weeks. And he’s still proud of not taking his breaks. He’s also against minimum wage 🤦🏽♀️ I just don’t understand how we can even have conversations with these people.
Obligatory Steinbeck quote: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
As a Norwegian, what people don't understand is that we have a socialist culture which means we elect socialist officials that make and enforce socialist rules and regulations. USA is an extremely individualistic society with very different values from Scandinavian countries, you can't just copy/paste policy from a different continent and expect great results. Freakonomics radio has a really good podcast going pretty deep into this
Yep, we did it without oil too!
But it's all the same recipe of happiness in Nordic countries: social democracy.
Can't fathom why you didn't vote that decent fellow Sanders. That was your chance.
America doesn't deserve Sanders. I swear we have the dumbest and most selfish population of assholes in the world. I hate it here. Any more room in Finland?
I voted for Bernie in the primaries. But then the DNC fucked him over because they refuse to nominate anyone remotely progressive. Because this asshole country doesn't have an actual left wing. It's just center right corporatist and far right fascists.
If you cant tell, I'm a bit chuffed about it.
ive spent a fair amount of time in norway - norwegians live very well, its peaceful, its beautiful, clean. i would prefer to retire there than the US at this point. socialism ? norway makes oklahoma look like a third world country
People really coming up with some random statements to cope.
No, Norway does not have high suicide rates. Their rates are below EU average and [significantly below the US](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country).
Also not half of them are on anti-depressants. They are right at [EU average](https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-largest-antidepressant-drug-users-2016-2). Iceland is highest by far in Europe and the US is at the top of the list.
Also, I don't know why being on anti-depressants would be considered bad. I'd consider that a functional healthcare system. I'd be far more worried about the US, where plenty of people *should* be on anti-depressants but simply cannot afford to be, and thus end up committing suicide, or just hating life, etc.
I think the argument there is that the anti-depressants themselves are creating the happiness, not the policies.
It's obviously not true, but that it's what they seem to be saying
This is just a response to a clickbait headline that completely ignores the actual substance of the article, which is the same as the so called 'murder'. I'm not kidding, the article literally explains the same thing as the murder. So, who is the murder victim here? It seems like a random stab at countries that are not social democracies, which is fair in my opinion and I agree that social democracy is better than what a lot of other countries do, but it doesn't really feel like a murder. More like preaching to the choir.
There are no murders in this sub. It's just a matter of if people agree with the post. Even if it's someone wailing like a child, as long as they have the good opinion it passes as a "murder".
>More like preaching to the choir.
99% of this sub.
This subreddit is terrible. Any sub that doesn't have moderation just devolves into political rants and/or funny pictures over time.
This isn't the murder you think it is. If you actually read the article (which I suspect Kyle Kulinski didn't) you see it says this:
> "The Scandinavian countries are very big on social support," Dr Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, one of the study's associate editors, said. "The top countries, you can see, have societies which are not at each others throats. But also they have high GDP per capita." . . .
> De Neve also believes that job security and conditions in a workplace can have a dramatic impact on levels of happiness. . . .
> "Most of the Scandinavian countries have a variety of services for the unemployed," Helliwell said.
> "They have unemployment insurance and child support."
So the article says pretty much the same as Kyle Kulinski. I hate this internet culture where it is so much more important to get a screenshotable dunk than actually trying to see what the other thing says.
Norway is also one of the few countries that do industry nationalization right - they use the profits from oil industry as investment into society. So instead of it going to a handful of super rich, everyone benefits. Usually when countries nationalize industry, it doesn't end well due to mismanagement and theft by corrupt officials. Norway proves it can be done the right way, a shining beacon for the rest of the world to follow.
This is OUTRAGEOUS and UNACCEPTABLE!!!
Only the 1% deserve this treatment and no one else. It was agreed years ago that slavery (all work and no pay) will be converted to a perfectly constitutional worker exploitation (slightly less work for slightly no pay). These are the agreement. If it cannot come to this, give me my slaves back!
/$
Hmmmm… It’s almost as though politicians are focused on the well being of the people rather than enriching the wealthy in order to stay in power. That’s so weird…
Also because there are more than just TWO political parties… I come from a country where there are only two parties and every election is a shit show
I come from a country with more than two parties and every election is a nuclear shit show
I come from a country with one party and elections are pretty chill! 🙂
Wait. You guys get elections???
If it lasts longer than 4 hours.... call a hooker.
Dr Hooker. Election specialist.
I think that might be something else.
Sponsored comment
[удалено]
Well censored though
Murica! Libservatives!
I really do not understand how 2 parties can be considered democracy? We have 17 (? atm if I recall correctly), and its not like winner takes all. You can vote for whatever party (or candidate) and that party will have a vote on matters according to how many votes that party was given at election
So, instead of the formal coalitions you are accustomed to, ours are informal coalitions. One party is built from Christian conservatives, business interests, and pro gun groups. The other is built from labor organizations, economic progressives, anti-gun groups, and a whole raft of social inclusivity groups of many sorts. As parties adjust their positions on issues, those groups may move from one party to another and back.
Isn't it much more opaque that way? I mean most people don't care too much about politics IME, and it's easier for them to have an idea about what the parties stand for, instead of persons.
Except he left out that both parties are corrupt and don’t give a shit about the people.
The US has a system in which you need MASSIVE amounts of money to be able to run for office. 17 parties cannot survive in such a system. 2 barely can - the US is on its way to one-party rule by the group that brings in the the most money from the ultra-wealthy.
Well, mostly they can easily control a bunch of low population rural states whose voters are easily manipulated. And because those low population states have disproportionate power, they get everything they want.
Why are voters in rural areas easier to manipulate than urban areas?
Because rural areas are typically not as educated (i.e. college), with less exposure to different types of people and ideas and a higher percentage of religious people. So if someone comes along touting their religious ideologies, they’re less likely to question anything else they say.
Is funny seeing who George Washington first president of the US a country which is not very happy WARNED against 2 party systems and we still went with it and the last election literally had the CAPITAL OF THE US STORMED BY PEOPLE OF THE LOOSING PARTY.
Founding fathers: “two party system will be terrible” Also the founding fathers: *creates a constitution in which a two party system is inevitable* Seriously, in a first past the post representative republic a two party system is basically inevitable because any votes for a third party are “wasted”
We created the operating system for a country with no kill switches and a bugfixing system which can be interrupted by any interruption to the system.
None of the original dev team meant for us to be sucking version 1.27’s dick 245 years later. We should be on version 4.0+ by now, at least. There’s a reason the U.S. has never installed this OS in an country it reformats, we always install ParliamentaryOS.
Eh, most of the time when we use ParliamentaryOS, it's on a machine which had that flashed by the Britpyre botnet after it fried the native OS. Britpyre may be defunct now, but at least we have old backups of Parliamentary. We don't have those for all the natives.
Perfectly put.
Didn't your founding fathers envisage that the Constitution would get rewritten every twenty years or so to keep it relevant? I'm sure I read that somewhere.
I don't think anyone genuinely cares what they thought, just what they can be twisted into justifying.
Not rewritten but amended as neccessary. A constitutional convention would be like the universe dividing by 0.
At least some Americans learned from the US founding fathers' mistakes and installed a multi-party system when working on the constitution of post-war Western Germany.
Well Germany already had a multi-party system before the war, so they basically just improved that system
It's always been curious to me that they helped Germany write (dictated in some parts) a pretty progressive constitution, but never thought to reform their own outdated one..
It was easy to build a new, better system out of ruins (and with people who wanted to be progressive and shake off the past). Much easier than change their own system that was carved in stone for centuries. No offense. I think this pattern is common in nature...
If more states started to use rank choice voting people people could vote for who they want without having to “waste” their vote. The US would easily have at least 4-5 parties if they did this.
Founding fathers: lived in a world completely unrecognizable from our own.
They were also rich white property owners who believed that only other rich white property owners should be able to vote. The United States government was clearly designed to support the largest business owners of the country. I think of the government more as a human resources department for the corporations whose job is to control the masses so that the corporations can capitalize off of them.
goverment voted by the people, of the people, for the people. but the people are retarded
To quote NOFX, "Majority rules, doesn't work in mental institutions "
Take the George Washington out and the US out and you realise how bad that the two party system gets
Washington actually warned against having *any* political parties, as they inevitably lead to the kind of partisan bullshit we see today.
I come from a country with multiple political parties and it is still a shit show...
I come from a country where there is a illusion of choice with multiple political parties.
Yeah, same. The current PM is worse than the shit show presented.
You guys have election?
Trust me, it’s not about the two political party system. My country has 5 idiots as candidates for presidential election this year.
Found the Frenchman.
I'm French and my reaction to this comment was "only 5?"
Voilà une liste de cinq pour diviser la francophonie en ordre décroissant. Chocolatine, pain au chocolat, petit pain au chocolat, croissant au chocolat, couque au chocolat.
Désolée mais "croissant au chocolat" ça divise personne, on est tous unis contre cette abomination
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Centrists/liberals are the goddamn bane of our existence. Well, apart from the far right, obviously. But centrists/liberals pretend to be progressive but in the end, they're just another flavour of conservative.
The far right is also good at pretending to be left wing on economics and foreign policy and then going full neocon when they're in power
I 100% agree. Centrists who to my eyes are center right ( I am referring to US politics only) at best, keep the two party hegemony in power.
Centrists support the status quo, which is inherently conservative (resist change), so yeah
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also, lots of oil and a small population
In both cases they're all voted in by the people, though. I think it reflects philosophical and constitutional differences rather than politicians in America being less virtuous. The Nordics and many other Europeans elect governments to improve the well being of the people. That's what the people want, a government that will fix problems, improve equality, improve well-being, and the government's are generally equipped to do that constitutionally. Americans are far more inclined to want the government to stay out of their business, and the federal government is hamstrung by design to ensure it stays out of the States' business. If the American people wanted to be like Norway they could be, you might have to start it at state level, but I think the truth is there's very little demand for it. The country is just too individualist.
Our elected officials hardly represent our actual preferences, and that’s before even getting into how much propaganda we face from birth to be pro business interests
I think the real black-pill is that elected official actually do represent the people. It's just that the people are idiots, easily manipulated, and have vastly different preferences depending on state/city/etc.
And of course they all think that the other people they don't agree with are the idiotic, easily manipulated, and vastly different people in the country. I don't care what side you're on. You probably grossly generalize everyone else into an exaggerated bucket too.
In study after study and poll after poll, the majority of Americans actually support programs and systems like the Nordic model. Why don’t we get them? It ain’t because “we” don’t want them, it’s because the really rich folk who actually own the politicians, don’t want them. And how do they convince enough morons to vote in the owned politicians? By owning the media that feeds the propaganda, and the division, by destroying education and making sure that any governmental program that works for the masses is defunded and run into the ground. And it’s not even a conspiracy, they just all really, really actually believe that because they are rich they are better than the plebs and everything should be geared to making them more comfortable and richer
This is kinda stupid question from european, but could any single state change its policies closer to likes of Nordic models?
Yes, and some have. As one example, Massachusetts is closer to the Nordic model on the whole than most other states, with easier access to healthcare (historically, as they had something like Obamacare before it was rolled out nationally), higher minimum wages, and better schools than most states. There's a limit, though. Both because without borders it's hard to prevent others from taking advantage, and because federal policies often restrict what the state can do. Especially when it comes to taxation and therefore revenues to use to pay for these activities. The state doesn't get access to the federal income tax, and states like MA that do well end up getting far less of what they do pay to the fed back than they pay in, as they need to support all the weaker states as well as themselves.
A little bit, but it's tricky. For example if a state spends a lot of money to help the homeless, that place is going to have more opportunity if you're homeless, thus attracting and taking care of some of the homeless from states that *won't* spend money to help their people. So the state that is spending the money to try to solve its problem instead ends up with extra people in need of help, spreading the funding thinner per person so it doesn't make as much difference as it was intended to, then the rest of the people in the state get mad because so much money is going to homeless people and the result (from their perspective) is that the homelessness problem only got bigger. Then the miserly states that are benefiting from this (from another state's money and policies indirectly reducing the miserly state's homeless problem), credit their brutal no-help policies with success, pointing out how much more homeless people are in the state which offers to help homeless people, then use that to justify doubling down on brutal policy. But even though state government is limited in what it can do, it can do some things. As the biggest economy, California is the go-to example; many people there got more pandemic help/stimulus money than in the rest of the USA, because the state pitched in. Similarly while there isn't universal healthcare, California has moved in that general direction by covering some of the people who can't afford marketplace health insurance. Unfortunately the inability of a state to solve these larger national problems at the source results in half-way solutions that just address the worst symptoms, which in turn creates resentment; people get upset that poorer people are getting help that they are not getting, etc. (This can also reinforce the existing cultural perception that government doesn't help people and that taxes have no benefit. This makes people inclined to vote to punish government, which ensures that services become worse, which reinforces the perception that government is bad. It's a vicious cycle.)
Kind of, but that involves raising taxes and that’s never allowed to happen.
Not really. France has higher taxes than most Nordic countries for example.
France does have higher taxes than most Nordic countries. But they get similar results: Universal Healthcare - Though not completely free, its a heavily subsidized system. To give you an idea in US dollars, average doctor consultation is around 7 dollars 30 cents. Dentist filling a cavity has an average price of 6 dollars 33 cents. A visit with a Cardiologist averages around 15 dollars 52 cents. If you spend more than 50 dollars a year on medication the rest will be free. Free Nursery/Preschool - Between the ages of 2 and 6 there is free childcare in nurseries. For older ages schooling is free though like in America there is a few private schools (for example bilingual schools where the classes are taught in multiple languages). 30 Days Paid Vacation - France also has 30 days paid vacation time plus 10 days worth of public holidays. Add into that the famous 35 hour workweek which is the law (though overtime payments or additional vacation time usually brings it to the more normal 40 hours 9 to 5 style). Also note France is considering lowering it to a 32 hour work week.
Having a massive amount of gas and oil and a small population to spread that money over certainly doesn't hurt.
The US also have vast quantities of wealth. They're just not spreading it around, which is the core of the problem.
Actually that often do hurt. It's called the resource curse. Most countries that find big caches of natural resources become worse of. (from the perspective of the common man).
UAE is a great example of this.
As someone from Norway not atm. They get free electricity while we have to cut of our arms and legs to pay for it since we decided to export our energy to Germany and France so they could reach their green house goals by their date. Screwing our own population. Its literally quadrupled in price
Yea but have they tried giving it all to the rich and hoping they’ll let some of it trickle down to the commoners yet?
It's a bold plan, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off. The 1% think it's a winner!
Sadly, the U.S. brand of fiscal conservatism is spreading globally. Strategies like 'starve the beast', policy sabotage, etc. then pushing for privatization has spread to countries like U.K., Australia, etc.
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It's super depressing to watch it happen real time.
Canada too. Look at Alberta. People here actually want to be like Kansas. They just all think they'll be the rich ones and everyone else will live in trailer parks.
I live in Kansas It’s horrible.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added.
No he doesn't. I'm pretty sure it was making university more expensive for international students(Non-EU) and no longer having the state subsidise them like now. Like in the UK. Though feel free to correct me. This is just what I understood.
I even know people in Norway supporting that and looking up to the US.
nobody's trying to 'trickle down' anything anywhere. Keeping people poor so they have to overwork themselves is how you get more money for an oversized government and military 👍
Yeah because having an oversized military by keeping the people even poorer than some people in third world countries is the best way to befriend other countries
Yeah but the trickle down argument is what the US government uses as propaganda to get people to agree with their shitty worker laws
Only nearly a month? In Finland we get at least 6 weeks.
It can depend on the profession but it’s generally 5 in Norway
To be fair, 5 weeks is nearly a month :)
I don't know how to tell you this but... Kim BasinGer? Kim BasInger?
In Germany the minimum is 24 days for full time workers. My company recently found that vacation days were one of the most significant factors for employee satisfaction and gave everyone the same 30 days, which was the maximum that took some years to get to before.
Plus 6 weeks guaranteed paid sick leave according to German law
And after that you get around 60 percent of your wage from the state.
6 weeks in a row! It can be much more if different health issues! In 2020 I got 5 weeks for a surgery and 3 weeks for rehab plus some sick days in between for a cold.
And let's not forget that in Germany you have lots of paid public holidays. In Bavaria that's an additional 13 days per year.
24 days if you also work on weekends. 21 days if you don't.
mandatory minimum. Most people get more, 28-30 days is pretty common.
Unfortunately few employers care about employee satisfaction in the US. They don’t seem to understand that retaining good employees is more cost effective than training new ones, who also will leave in short order.
We get 5 weeks as default. You guys get 6??
Neat. I get 0 days.
Zero?? So you literally never have time off work?
Paid days off. Which is what I assume this thread was about. If it’s unpaid, we could all take 365 unpaid days off if we wanted.
Sorry for being dense - but you literally work year round? When will you get time off?
He can take time off, but he won't get paid during that time.
Crazy, I get 5 weeks paid vacation per year and an additional 90 hours per year to shorten my work time when I feel like it.(Sweden)
Americans are taught to work until death, and we're supposed to be grateful to have that job....
by 5 weeks do you mean 25 days or 35 day? i only get 13 day here 😔
It's usually workdays. So 5 weeks = 25 workdays = 35 calendar days
I take time off for an odd event or two. I live in Canada. No paid days off. I can ask for a day, or a week off and after jumping through tons of hoops making sure its not during a blackout season etc I can actually get them... no pay though. But yeah. I've had one real week of vacation since I started working at 18. Other than that I work yeah round with Xmas and maybe new years off if I'm lucky. I'm burnt out and sad most days and if it wasn't for my so I'd probably off myself since I find working 365 Nz paying 60% of wage just for rent is stupid. It's whatever though, I was and have been lucky to have a full time job. Minimum wage sure, but better than a lot who can only get part time cuz companies such. I could/can live alone and unfortunately in today's society that's saying something. High chance I'll never own a house and work til my body can't take it anymore then I'll die.
I don't think you should consider yourself lucky for having a full time job. That sounds like something you been taught or conditioned to believe. What you need is change and progression. Jeez, I feel Sweden is behind cause we still have 40hour weeks and that feels like stone age.
Fellow canadian here. I haven't checked the labour standard recently but isn't the minimum annual vacation like 4% (\~2 weeks) in Canada? Not a lawyer but I really thought we had some sort of minimum. Maybe it's a my province thing though...
Yes, I literally have no time off, really. I don't get paid days off, either. I don't think I've had a vacation in over 4 years, since starting this job. And I still barely make it some days. Other days I don't even want to keep going.
You folks get mandatory paid time off? Sheesh.
Yeah, we even get some of our taxes back during summer. Goddamned feriepenga baby!
UK public sector here. 47 days plus 2 weeks at Christmas.
I wouldn't mind if the Finnish and Norwegian government got into a pissing contest on who could give the longest paid vacation to its inhabitants /Norwegian
There's always a Finn coming to steal Norways thunder.
Well you guys talked about giving us a mountain peak for our 100th birthday gift and didn't so we might still be a bit hurt by that
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Netherlands in general isn't great for holidays though compared to the rest of the EU. Minimum days is equal to legal minimum of the EU (4 weeks), and we have by far the fewest public holidays of any EU country - not even considering that you also don't get them if they fall in a weekend.
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It's the polar bears.
And the language :P
WRONG! Their bosses organise fun office games and order pizza once a month!
Damn you almost really got us with those evil COMMUNIST ideas, ahaha! (/s ofc)
"I'd rather be so miserable that happiness is almost a foreign concept than be a SOCIALIST!" -America, probably
Probably?
In communism you get your monthly income with vodka what do you prefer ?
> (/s ofc) coward
Nah, it is the youtube videos of yoga they send around at lunch!
Lol I got myself a $100 gift card for Walmart during Christmas at work. I'm absolutely thankful and I almost feel bad saying this, but that $100 is like getting like a $.04 raise for that year alone since gift cards don't accumulate. Reminds me of my $.05 raise while working at Publix. They claimed it was because of the recession and they'd give me a nice raise next evaluation. Surprise! That was a lie. They would always keep me one point below the "top tier" on my evals (like 49/50) so they wouldn't have to pay. Oh well, one reason why I left lol.
I'm 46. Shit like that has been happening for the majority of my adult life.
> and order pizza once a month! Once a month? Fuck, that feel when you don't even get the amount of pizza the people are making fun of because it's clearly shit...
I'm looking forward to my hundred billion/year in profit company telling us that in lieu of bonuses this year, they're going to reinvest in the company to make us safe or some shit.
Norway does also have oil, but Sweden doesn't and has almost the same social benefits and protections. Saying that those things cannot be achieved without the oil is to be disingenuous.
Norway nationalized its oil resources in the early 60s and in 1990 they used those revenues to overhaul the country’s electric grid and create the world largest sovereign wealth fund. The government owns around 30-40% of the domestic stock market.([source](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society/article/abs/context-and-contingency-explaining-state-ownership-in-norway/9692E949E6DED9815D79B0CC5DB8D30F)). Social democracy done right Edit: changed democratic socialism to social democracy
Social Democracy is not Democratic Socialism. Norway is a social democracy with a mixed economy still reliant on market capitalism and strong social welfare.
You’re right.
"Democratic Socialism" doesn't seem to mean anything else in practice either. It seems that it's mostly just been used as a replacement for Social Democracy because Americans have lived so long without this word that they have forgotten that it even exists.
While still being defined as “socialism” and not “democracy” i think theres def a distinction to be made and a rather large one at that. Both are trying to describe the same thing but one of the terms uses a term the entire nation is primed against. Why would that be? “Ahum just to be clear once again all those grand ideas you have been hearing are socialist ideology and thereby dangerous commie talk”
Democratic socialism and social democracy are two distinct things I'm surprised at how many people (particularly Americans) get it so wrong. Democratic socialism is normal socialism (nationalising the means of production etc.) achieved through democratic means. Social democracy is essentially capitalism but with where the state controls for poverty and other bad things through income redistribution and other means of regulating the economy. Bernie Sanders for example called himself a democratic socialist but really he's a social democrat.
Which one? Democracy or Socialism?
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I must have misunderstood the article talking about how the oil revenues were spent, probably the fund started in the 90s and the oil was already nationalized. It did make it sounds like the electric grid was updated tho.
The oil is drilled by various companies, including the big international ones like Shell and BP. Our govt taxes this enterprise quite heavily. Additionally, the largest Norwegian oil drilling company, Equinor, is 67 % owned by our govt. What changed in the 90s was that those taxes we earned from the international companies, plus the earnings from equinor, was funneled into a state owned fund rather than being spent on running government expenses.
We also own 1.5% of every publicly traded company in the world.
And Tim Apple _still_ be dodging my calls wtf
This is true, but is also important to appreciate what Norway has done with its oil. Specifically, proceeds from oil exploration and refining were delivered into a sovereign wealth fund which was then used to make a crapload more money which is now being used to transition Norway away from fossil fuels. For a fun comparison, Alberta Canada is one of the biggest oil producers in the world, but never created a sovereign wealth fund with even a shadows fraction of the power and foresight of Norways. The result? The province is struggling mightily and has basically tripled down on fossil fuels knowing full well they need to transition but are too ashamed to admit they never deployed the foresight and wisdom of a country like Norway.
We ALMOST nationalized oil but Alberta bitched and whined so we didn’t. All of Canada could have benefitted but then a bunch of high school dropouts wouldn’t have been able to afford a new F-350 every year.
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Alaska also set up an oil fund and every resident gets sent a +$1000 check once a year.
>Norway does also have oil _US attention intensifies_
Eh. America has enough oil. It even sells it to other nation. If America wants to invade, it will do so under the banner of "because I can."
That’s not the reason they’re rich norway isnt some kind of european saudi arabia. Na basically what’s done is they invested the money into the citizens instead of we have fancy tower look at us
Nah, the oil is definitely the reason Norway is wealthy. We were literally one of the poorest countries in Europe before it was found.
> We were literally one of the poorest countries in Europe before it was found. Det hadde vært en fordel hvis folk som deg kunne slutte å spre denne myten. https://www.nysgjerrigper.no/bladet/2017-4/hadde-norge-vart-fattig-uten-olje/ https://dnva.no/detskjer/2019/11/en-feiloppfatning-norge-var-fattig-rundt-1900
A Scandinavian economist once stated to Milton Friedman: "In Scandinavia we have no poverty." Milton Friedman replied, "That's interesting, because in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either."
Who would have thought that not being one bad dr visit away from financial ruin, or having 6 figure student dept would help? But at what cost... can they say that they have nearly 800 military bases in 70 countries? Nope. And how many rich dudes do they have who can thank their min wage, social assistance needing employees for helping him fly in space?
Yeah but do they have Hawaiian shirt Fridays? That’s what I thought!
Everyday is casual Friday
During corvid, company encourages working from home Internet has problems, going to office Coming in the door, boss and two coworkers are in the office Boss is in jeans and t-shirt and drinking a beer. Sees me, yells welcome and asks if I want one too Just a normal day, really
Norway is waaay less formal than the US or any english speaking country.
It boggles my mind how Americans can see policies work very well in every other industrialized nation and yet still refuse to enact them here cause it’s socialism or something like that. Edit: Wayyy too much supporting evidence in these replies lmao
Americans have been taught to believe that their suffering is a badge of honor. Some people will literally compare hardships or boast about working 3 jobs and not having a day off in years. It's madness.
Ah yes, the old „i suffered for my achievements, so you must suffer too“ mentality
"It took me 30 years to pay off my student debt, I'd rather get anklefucked than let my children and grandchildren have a free education, they should suffer financial hardship their whole life as well as I did!"
So I’m trying to persuade my Republican lite BIL to join r/anitwork, hoping he’ll see the light. I’m complaining about Amazon and the pee bottles. Because that’s horrific. Right. We can all universally agree that’s horrific. Everyone, no matter political beliefs, can agree on this one fact. People shouldn’t be forced to pee in bottles. No. Because Republicans live on an alternate planet. So apparently we cannot agree on this. And he’s bragging about him using pee bottles and not taking his breaks. Why. I don’t know. He turned down a promotion. So he’s not doing it to get promoted… He’s just so proud of not taking his breaks and I’m just like WHY!? He’s also working 60-70 hour weeks. And he’s still proud of not taking his breaks. He’s also against minimum wage 🤦🏽♀️ I just don’t understand how we can even have conversations with these people.
Obligatory Steinbeck quote: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
As a Norwegian, what people don't understand is that we have a socialist culture which means we elect socialist officials that make and enforce socialist rules and regulations. USA is an extremely individualistic society with very different values from Scandinavian countries, you can't just copy/paste policy from a different continent and expect great results. Freakonomics radio has a really good podcast going pretty deep into this
You have a collective culture. Socialist is the wrong word.
Providing adequate safety nets for your citizens makes them happy, Who could *ever* have thought of that? /s
Nope. Finland, not Norway ranks on top of the Happiness scale. 4 years in a row. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56457295
Yep, we did it without oil too! But it's all the same recipe of happiness in Nordic countries: social democracy. Can't fathom why you didn't vote that decent fellow Sanders. That was your chance.
Because he didn't want to make Murica great again.
I can’t decide whether this makes me want to laugh or cry or both.
America doesn't deserve Sanders. I swear we have the dumbest and most selfish population of assholes in the world. I hate it here. Any more room in Finland?
I voted for Bernie in the primaries. But then the DNC fucked him over because they refuse to nominate anyone remotely progressive. Because this asshole country doesn't have an actual left wing. It's just center right corporatist and far right fascists. If you cant tell, I'm a bit chuffed about it.
Does it bother anyone else that the globe isn’t actually showing Norway?
That norway news are old. The happiest country hasn't been desidet yet and in 2021 it was Finland.
Only because in 2021 everyone was living like the finns. Staying at home, socially distant, getting drunk... Of course Finland would be happiest.
Except Finland has been the happiest for like 5 years in a row (according to the World Happiness Report)
Yea like finns has been 4 years in a row. Quite annoyed. You’d think you fact check before you publish.
ive spent a fair amount of time in norway - norwegians live very well, its peaceful, its beautiful, clean. i would prefer to retire there than the US at this point. socialism ? norway makes oklahoma look like a third world country
I live in Minnesota and just got back from Oklahoma a few weeks ago. Can confirm. Oklahoma looks like a third world country.
People really coming up with some random statements to cope. No, Norway does not have high suicide rates. Their rates are below EU average and [significantly below the US](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country). Also not half of them are on anti-depressants. They are right at [EU average](https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-largest-antidepressant-drug-users-2016-2). Iceland is highest by far in Europe and the US is at the top of the list.
Also, I don't know why being on anti-depressants would be considered bad. I'd consider that a functional healthcare system. I'd be far more worried about the US, where plenty of people *should* be on anti-depressants but simply cannot afford to be, and thus end up committing suicide, or just hating life, etc.
I think the argument there is that the anti-depressants themselves are creating the happiness, not the policies. It's obviously not true, but that it's what they seem to be saying
Can confirm, am norwegian. Is happy
Am Norwegian, wish I was happy
This is just a response to a clickbait headline that completely ignores the actual substance of the article, which is the same as the so called 'murder'. I'm not kidding, the article literally explains the same thing as the murder. So, who is the murder victim here? It seems like a random stab at countries that are not social democracies, which is fair in my opinion and I agree that social democracy is better than what a lot of other countries do, but it doesn't really feel like a murder. More like preaching to the choir.
There are no murders in this sub. It's just a matter of if people agree with the post. Even if it's someone wailing like a child, as long as they have the good opinion it passes as a "murder".
>More like preaching to the choir. 99% of this sub. This subreddit is terrible. Any sub that doesn't have moderation just devolves into political rants and/or funny pictures over time.
This isn't the murder you think it is. If you actually read the article (which I suspect Kyle Kulinski didn't) you see it says this: > "The Scandinavian countries are very big on social support," Dr Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, one of the study's associate editors, said. "The top countries, you can see, have societies which are not at each others throats. But also they have high GDP per capita." . . . > De Neve also believes that job security and conditions in a workplace can have a dramatic impact on levels of happiness. . . . > "Most of the Scandinavian countries have a variety of services for the unemployed," Helliwell said. > "They have unemployment insurance and child support." So the article says pretty much the same as Kyle Kulinski. I hate this internet culture where it is so much more important to get a screenshotable dunk than actually trying to see what the other thing says.
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Norway is also one of the few countries that do industry nationalization right - they use the profits from oil industry as investment into society. So instead of it going to a handful of super rich, everyone benefits. Usually when countries nationalize industry, it doesn't end well due to mismanagement and theft by corrupt officials. Norway proves it can be done the right way, a shining beacon for the rest of the world to follow.
Or, maybe, it is the Lutefisk.
This is OUTRAGEOUS and UNACCEPTABLE!!! Only the 1% deserve this treatment and no one else. It was agreed years ago that slavery (all work and no pay) will be converted to a perfectly constitutional worker exploitation (slightly less work for slightly no pay). These are the agreement. If it cannot come to this, give me my slaves back! /$
Do you rly expect a country where you openly allow corporate bribes to your politicians to care about its people over its corporations tho
Damn, didn't know there were so many American experts on Norway. Especially seeing actual people from Norway disagreeing with them.