[MD] SOPA and PIPA

[Tuukka Virtaperko]

Mark,
> Hi Tuukka,
>
> Well that is an interesting proposition.  Is this only for "Artists".
> How is an "Artist" defined in Finland?  What about the rest of the
> people who do not have artistic talents?  Only work when you want to.
> Doesn't this affect production in a factory?  Can you choose anywhere
> where you want to work?  How do you apply to the factory?

Tuukka:
Artist is not defined. One can have a degree from an art school, and 
work in Pizza Hut. Or one can have no education and make a living with 
art. Foundations do not give grants only to people who have degrees. I 
don't have a degree and have never received a grant. The grant system is 
strange. It requires one to have some sort of a working plan, and I have 
found such plans to be detrimental for both the result and my own 
well-being. If the giver of the grant perceives me as having not used 
the grant for anything, I will probably never receive a grant again, so 
I don't want to apply for one unless something bizarre happens and I one 
day do have a working plan.

Basic income guarantee would apply to everyone. Anyone may choose where 
they work, if the employer wants them. You just take a normal job 
interview procedure. This is not some Soviet Union, for crying out loud! 
This is a normal highly advanced Nordic country which looks very similar 
to yours, except that there are no slums and the few beggars or homeless 
people are mostly immigrants who actually travel from Romania to Finland 
to beg, because they make a lot of money that way despite having to pay 
the plane/train/ship ticket. When they get enough money, they go back to 
Romania and don't do any work for the rest of the year. There weren't 
such people here a decade ago, and the government is thinking what it 
should do to foreign parasites. Freedom of mobility introduced by the EU 
may have a downside.

To be sure, it's really strange anyway. The outer border of the EU is 
supposed to be well protected. But if you go to Nuorgam in North 
Finland, you can just drive or walk the bridge to Norway and back with 
nobody even looking. But then again, that's not the same thing as having 
an unprotected border to Russia or some even less developed country. If 
someone is already in Norway, with the highest Human Development Index 
in the world, they have little reason to go to Finland as illegal 
immigrants! :D

> Mark:
> You call this a basic income guarantee.  How is the salary set, do you
> have a minimum wage?  Does everybody get the same salary despite an
> experience difference, or is the artist paid less.

Tuukka:
I didn't invent the expression "basic income guarantee". See: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

Basic income guarantee would regularily provide each citizen with a sum 
of money. That's it. In addition to it, you probably want to work, 
because the sum is basically only enough for your basic needs. The sum 
is surely less than a thousand euros. Maybe seven hundred or six 
hundred. There can be additional welfare to that. For example, I already 
receive three different kinds of welfare for almost one thousand per 
month, and each one of them is governed by different kind of rules, 
wasting a lot of work to bureaucracy.

For example, suppose one has coeliac disease. That means they can't eat 
bread, for example. So the bureu wants to know whether you really have 
the disease, so it can give you less than a hundred euros per month for 
the more expensive special food you require. So you have to take a 
medical test. But before you take the test, you must keep eating the 
bread even though it makes you sick, so the test will give a positive 
result. No problem with this, except if you get a negative result 
because you didn't eat bread, you'll never get a retest. Never during 
your entire life. Or so I've been told by someone who experienced this. 
She didn't know you don't get a retest.

But this, again, is a sidetrack. In any case, it displays how 
inconvenient bureaucracy can be and why we should get rid of it when we 
can. The bureaucracy is sometimes punitive and inefficient. Basic income 
guarantee arguably would save money and improve the standard of living 
of those who depend on welfare, but the idea sounds scary. However, even 
one person in the right-wing party of Finland, Kokoomus, is a proponent 
of the idea, possibly because he has done the relevant calculations 
needed to validate the assumption that it would work. And no, we don't 
have basic income guarantee in Finland. But there is some talk about it.

> Mark:
> I am familiar with the school system in Finland.  Teachers are
> required to have at least a Master's degree, and I believe they get
> paid more, "relative" (heh, heh) than the US, and have higher
> standing.  I like that system.  If we stop spending State money on
> stupid stuff, we could do this to.  But, here in the US we do not like
> to invest in our children.  California is currently being held for
> ransom by our governor.  If we do not pass his increase in income tax
> and sales tax bill, he said he would take money away from the school
> system!  There is plenty of money in California, we just spend a lot
> of money on illegal immigration and all their needs.

Tuukka:
Like I said, the salary of the teachers is not so much the golden goose 
than the nearly complete absence of private schools. In Finland, 
students are paid to study, for maybe 300 or 400 euros per month. I 
don't remember, I've never received that benefit, because it doesn't 
apply at high school level and I don't have a Uni degree. And I don't 
need to waste energy for getting one as long as I can't study things 
relevant to my work in a Uni.

In the US, parents invest to their children, because nobody else will. 
And you probably have to raise the tax in US if you want to have the 
kind of stuff people in Finland do. Both legal and illegal immigration 
can pose problems, though. Even if the immigrants do not adapt, you 
won't necessarily ever get rid of them. You have to adapt.

> Mark:
>
> Speaking of which, in Finland I do not believe you have to deal with
> at least two languages.  Your population is homogenious for the most
> part (lots of blond people).  What is the GDP of Finland, and its
> growth rate?  What kind of factories do people (such as yourself) work
> in?

Tuukka:
Finland has a small Swedish minority, and a smaller Sami minority. Both 
are official languages of Finland, although... the academics who defined 
the written form of Sami made it have so many special characters it 
can't be typed with an ordinary keyboard. :D What a bitch! :D The 
written language is extremely valid with regards to pronounciation, but 
not that useful in real life. =) Too bad...

Every Finn has to learn Swedish in primary school and even at Uni level, 
even though many of them don't use the skill nearly at all. Swedish is a 
hated subject in school ecspecially in rural areas, where many kids have 
never met anyone who speaks Swedish. Russian would be a better choice 
with regards to trade, but politicians dislike the idea. Finland's East 
border is also a part of a profound border between the East and the 
West, and I guess the older people still remember the times when 
foreigners occasionally thought Finland was a satellite of the Soviet Union.

Almost every Finn is also quite proficient in English, even to the point 
that many people, who move to Finland or are exchange students, do not 
learn Finnish because almost all Finns switch to English when 
interacting with them. Finns generally like to take every opportunity 
they can to practice English with a native speaker. TV series and movies 
are practically never dubbed except for children who can't read. 
Instead, they have subtitles, and Finns don't like dubbed shows.

There's been some immigration. The population is less homogenous it was 
10 years ago. It's an issue and people have voted against immigration a 
lot recently. I think a little immigration is good, but I don't think we 
necessarily need much more than what we already have.

GDP (PPP) per capita is over $34 000, nominally a bit under $45 000. 
Seems like US PPP GDP and nominal GDP are bit over $48 000. Those 
numbers in Wikipedia are the same for the US... I wonder what causes that.

Actually, Human Development Index is 0.91 in the US (4th in World) and 
0.882 in Finland (22nd in the World), so I was very probably wrong about 
there being more wealth per capita in Finland than in the US. But Norway 
is #1 in HDI, and it's also a welfare state. GDP PPP is $52 000 there 
and nominally $84 443. And the price of beer there is twice of that in 
Finland! How much does a bottle (0,33 l) of cheap beer cost in the US? 
I'd say it's one euro in Finland.

I've never worked anywhere because I got symptoms when I was 18 and just 
about to finish high school. And I did finish, but couldn't do much work 
after that. Right now I can't go to work, even in a factory, because of 
the welfare trap. I'll risk losing more money than I will gain. My 
health would allow me to take a short term part-time job for a few 
months to get money for something I really need, but the welfare trap 
won't allow that.

> Mark,
> If I could just work whenever I wanted, I would take lots of
> vacations.  Is that what you do?  Sounds like a good life to me.  Only
> being responsible to oneself, not to society.

Tuukka,
Finns maybe have a little more vacations. I don't know of statistics 
about this. On the other hand, there is a tendency to underreport 
working hours in Finland and to do unpaid and unmarked overtime. It's 
probably the same in the US, but I've gotten the impression that in 
Greece it's the opposite. Or at least used to be until their economy 
crashed.

-Tuukka