Health care

Sometimes I find it amusing (and sometimes disgraceful) that the Americans don't have "free" health care. Of course, health care isn't free -- in 2006 it cost little under 2600 euros per citizen of Finland (how much people actually paid depends on their income, of course). The newspiece portraits this as expensive, maybe it is. How much do Americans pay for ther for their health plans (how much companies have to pay to cover their employees)?

On top of the above mentioned government safety web I have health insurance that costs me about 30 euros per year.

But all in all, what do you think of the safety web? Is it a great thing, or a bad thing?

Leningrad Cowboys

I never saw the original movies, but the concerts at Helsinki were something people will talk to their kids about. I didn't know they had so many music videos, though!

Where's the moon?


Thru the wire


Those were the days


I quite love all three of them.

Firefox in Europe, at the start of February 2008

I think I wrote about this few years back in the old Gulag-blog (I can't seem to find the url). I thought to take a fresh look;The average is said to be 28% (IE has 66%), which is quite high; +5% in one year, and I think closer to +10% since I last posted this graph..

I've noted the trend in my own family. One of my brothers decided to run with Firefox few weeks back after heroically defending IE6 since it came out (I never used the browser, I'm proud to say). My mother avoids IE like disease and I think that even my sister (age 12) is preferring this to IE.

The last 50%, I expect, are company computers and few hold-outs that just don't care. I think, apart of some system admins getting the whole company into converting, this would be it.

(Source)

Finnish political system

Based on my previous post and ifireball's answer, an (long waited) explanation on certain curiosities regarding the Finnish political system.

Parties
Finland has eight political parties with enough popularity to reach parliament seats. The biggest three have a popularity of about 20-25% (Social Democrats (slightly left), Centre and National Coalition (slightly right)), two midsized (Green League, Left Alliance (a bit farther to left)) and another three with popularity around 5% (Christian Democrats, True Finns (a bit farther right) and Swedish party).


This means that one party can't form a cabinet by themselves. The votes have also spread so generally over the field (with leftish tendencies) that the "winner" of the elections can't form a coalition with the smaller parties (greens, reds, swedes etc). The biggest party always needs the second biggest to gain Prime Minister's seat. To buy the competitor's co-operation, they are bribed with Foreign Minister's and/or Finance Minister's seats (the most powerful specialisation seats).

Exambles
Before I go any farther, I should note that Prime Minister is the person in charge of the state affairs. President stays out of the daily events.

In 2003 the then-Prime Minister (Social Democrat, who had ruled for eight years with the help of National Coalition, to the point that Coalition wasn't even pushing for their own pm-seat but supported Social Democrat) tried to make the elections about who will be the next Prime minister. As Coalition was only aiming for Finance Minister's seat, they lost votes, ensuring that "the bloody enemies" formed the cabinet together, leaving the trusted younger partner into opposition.
To make it even more fun; thanks to a political scandal the Prime Minister was a person nearly nobody had voted for.

Anyway, to go on: the system means that the cabinet has to be a constant consensus between two parties who are ideologically quite far from each other. To make this even more fun, neither of the big parties usually have enough steam to form cabinet by themselves, so they need smaller parties to bring up the count. Thus, who-gets-to-be-in-the-cabinet-game is very like Musical Chairs, with the expection that of the eight players about five get to be in the cabinet..

And to make things even more fun, you can't even poke fun at the main opposition party, because in less than four years they might be the leading party and trying to make a judgement call for which of the two big parties they want for the Finance Minister's seat.

What this means
The advantage of this system is that nobody gets to do any big moves without considering how it affects the whole population; people (and opposition) will accept changes to taxation, for examble, because that is what the party is about (and they can always change it back, and this is good ammunition for the next election). This means, of course, that one representative can't push agenda of special interest groups. Alas, this doesn't work on areas where the main body doesn't have any experience on - usually these fuck-ups have something to do with technology. See; Lex Karpela and the current Child-porn/Freedom of speech-scandal.

The side-effect of all this is that Finnish politics is very boring; nobody dares to argue against anything if they can't be sure of that the vast body of the parliament (and the citizens) isn't behind them. While they might be able to keep their seat in the cabinet (even over the elections) the feedback from the other parties would make ruling and forming consensus more difficult.

Similar system is in in use in all Nordic countries as well as in Germany (AFAIK). Depending on the opinions of the citizens and the power-balance (what is the normal support of parties from election to election, how many parties there are in all and what do they stand for) the "holy cows" may differ. Because in Germany it is nearly impossible to form a coalition without the Greens, the cabinet's views on many subjects may differ but nuclear powerplants are always going down..