xkbarkar

Some clarification on the comments on unemployment in the Nordics .

The nordics arent really as inviting, socialist and helpful as many US interweebs might think.

Sweden and Denmark will only pay unemployment if you have unemployment insurance. Called A-kassa. It is very expensive and you have to have paid it for a year to be able to claim benefits. If you don´t pay A-kassa you will have the pleasure of having them spam you to reel you on 3-4 times a week.

The Swedes and Danes have the highest taxes in the world but are using the US medical insurace as a model for unemployment.

Really not the welfare system these two countries claim they have.

The benefits you get from the A-kassa are extremly low. Less than average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment. You can buy another really expensive insurance to get a little higher amount.

And even if it's an insurance you have paid for you will get hounded to get any job, the Danish authorities may send you to do pretty much menial job they demand to get you off the benefits. The Swedish are not as bad as the Danish in that regard.

The way to live unemployed in Denmark and Sweden is to get into the medical system. Get a doctor to sign you have some illness. Stress is probably 90% of the cases in Denmark.

Then you get a small amount montly, it has been pre covered by your tax money so you dont need to pay the extortionate A-kassa (unemployment insurance) and no one will hound you to take some excruciating job no one wants to do.

This setup btw benefits the ruling parties in Sweden and Denmark as they can claim unenployment is at an historic low. No one counts the people on, I suppose it could be called, disability.

Iceland is a little different. Unemployment is covered in your tax payments, it's not a private (it's not supposed to be profitable, but trust me, for the A-kassa it truly is ) insurance like Denmark and Sweden.

In Iceland you have to show proof that you are actively looking for work and you will be cut off from benefits for an x number of months after an x amount of time. Do not remember the exact setup.

Bizarrely the Icelandic system is a lot more fair and less cruel than the Swedish and Danish. All three pay out a very very very low amount of money though.

Now, coming from a point of bitterness. This medical loop is exploited as you wouldnt beleive in Sweden and Denmark. I have people in my vicinty proudly admitting they are on "stress" leave because some employer said something mean to them they didnt want to hear.

So the working dane and swede has to pay minimum 44% taxes of their salary to keep this sham going.

I pay an exruciating amount of taxes in the Nordic countries. Sweden and Denmark are the highest. Iceland a little less.

It pisses me off royally to see the tax money gamed in this way and this has turned me to voting for parties I never thought I would.

Social democrats are a poision, maybe they were useful 50 years ago but today they do enourmous damage to countries that offer tax payed welfare.

tldr;

You need savings in the Nordics too if you are going to quit your job. If you can get a doctor to sign a medical paper that claims you had to leave work because of stress, you can game the system and let the taxpayers pay for your hobbies for a few years.

This is amazing.

I have 3 email in-boxes. One ancient rarely used since the early 2000, my personal daily email and my work email. Between then there are some 100k unread emails.

I am not the target audience for this service.

“services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users" will be excempt.

Sigh. Good luck with that. Not at all vague.

The greyed out downvoted comments in this thread makes it look like that dreaded echo chamber that must not be named here.

HN threads are usually much better quality than this ( anyone with opposed ideas are downvoted to oblivion ).

Rubbish thread. Nothing to learn here.

Cannot in any way understand why this is an actual issue. Sheesh If more newspapers would stay out of endorsing political parties we would live in a better world.

Frankly leftist newspaper propaganda has done little but make the rightist ( especially the ones with a racist agenda ) political parties expand massively.

Every election i. almost any european country is showing this trend.

Why on earth are you all flaming this? Because it means its a hidden Trump support? Kamala is immensly unpopular, outside of all the glam endorsements. She is no Obama thats for sure. How abour adressing the root cause of that?

Wow I wish every newspaper was properly unbiased.

tldr I think you are all idiots for outrage over lack of proper political bias in a newspaper.

I think this is a naive article trying to stop a huge wave that is already here.

I know developers that fret over younger devs that have never even seen assemby and thus do not understand the code they write and so on….

Learn how to use AI to be better and faster than everyone else.

No one in a decade will pay top dollar for a slow dev that knows their handwritten code indside out.

Its all about scale and speed. Now you can argue that it takes the artisanship out of development but truth is, no one cares.

Learn how to use AI to get faster and learn how to teach the AI to be better and more accurate.

They are not coming for the tech jobs, they are already here. Just get on top of them and youll survive.

Disclaimer I have never been obese or suffered obesity.

If it was easy no one would be fat. The whole body acceptance movement is a sham and always will be. We dont find obesity attractive and we do not want to be obese. However for some reason 60% of us in the west are overweight. And it is extremely hard to lose the kilos. We are eating too much and we shame eachother for eating small portions or skipping meals.

But put simply, we have normalized large portions and eating five times per day.

And its super hard to cut the volume after a lifetime of large portions and eating ever two hours nonsense.

I sympathise with obesity sufferers and hope that the outcome of all of this is to normalise smaller portions and fewer meals again.

ACE score 5 My abusive parent luckily died of cancer almost 30 years ago.

Me and my siblings turned our lives around in the first few years after that.

From being fast on way to a ditch, mentally, financially and physically I found the strenth to leave my drug addicted and alcoholic partner. I learned to admit amd recognize my own toxic behaviors and and took many years on my own to learn to set healthy boundaries and learn to live a healthy life. And to be a healthy parent.

Eventually finished University as a single parent with a full time job and I work with what I love today.

Own a house, a dog and have a good economy. No means financially rich, but in a long term happy relationship and in the best physical shape of my life.

A bit myopic to disqualify someone from the credibility pool because they had a headstart in life imho.

My take is a combination of factors

- Decreased fertility ( Obesity maybe? )

- Cost of housing.

- Children in the west are now overprotected little dictators and parents are no longer allowed to be humans with their own needs.

Side rant:

I just saw a linkedin post with a woman being flamed for choosing not not attend childs first day of school because she had an important work event to attend to.

  Father attended, not mother.  Mother thus declared incompetent child abuser.    

I would never choose to have a child today. Mine are born just two seconds before the western world turned insane on parental demands. And kids are assholes. I love mine, but small children are generally selfish, oppurtunistic douchebags.

Seing what my poor younger collegues go through today I would absolutely abstain from having any.

Living on the edge of financial ruin and sleep depravation to pay half my income for a child that can threaten to call the social sevices on you for forcing them to bicycle to school instead of being driven by car is an easy choice not to make.

Oddly specific story is a danish one from a collegue. They have a kids emergency phone or something in Denmark that is supposed to be used for abused children to alarm authorities of violence etc. Said collegue was reported, by their 11 year old, for failing to drive the kid to school and giving them bicycles instead. To add insult to injury, its an expensive private school they attend and denmark is a bicycle country.

The authorities of course just dismissed the complaint and nothing ever happened. Kid had to bicycle.

They have to investigate according to law though. And file a report.

Sorry long rant. I feel genuinly sorry for young people trying to start a family.

Bringing a child to the western world demands double phds in child psychiatry and Kardashian money.

I feel the destructive behaviour of bored kids is forgotten a bit. Growing up in the late 70s early 80s we were kicked out of the house until dinner. We did a lot of really dangerous things exploring. Among these,

-Playing in storm drains. Inside the narrow tunnels I might add.

-Abandoned construction sites.

-Railway tracks. Putting things o the rails waiting for the train to see what happened. Everything from rocks to toys to coins.

-Dumpster diving in large dumpsters. There was a soap factory near us and wed dive for schampoo or hairgel.

-Jumping in the biohazard pond looking for frogs eggs.

-Throwing things off bridges.

-Climbing various constructions, houses and dubios trees.

-Competing in who could jump from the highest roof.

Kids not only could get hurt. We did. Legs were broken. No one died fortunately.

Bored kids outside is not really as romantic as many would have it. Not arguing against boredom, constant stimuli is not healthy.

That being said, unsupervised bored kids can lead to some very dangerous outcomes.

I´d also wager that some of the competition has finally gotten they sh!t together. Tried the new WV ev Passad and the latest Skoda Enyaq. Both have great battery range and when it comes to comfort are much better than the stiff bumby Tesla.

Tesla had momentum and they used it to the max. Now the competition has gotten wizer.

I do not subscribe to the interwebs anti-Musk rhetoric, most people do not care if he eats babies for breakfast as long as his cars are affordable, reliable, comfortable and reasonably green.

So before the Musk hate starts as is fashion in the forums these days, competition got better, Tesla are no longer ahead.

That's what I would bet on.

I remember 15 or so years ago a colleague of mine ( in the nordics outside of EU ) wanted to purchase a photoshop licence for personal use.

It was a crazy expensive licence ( I do not remember how much but it was more than I made a month at that time I remember ) but she is a woman of principals and refuses to run pirated software.

It took her weeks to get the licence as Adobe did not distribute to personal user licences in our area at the time. Only crazy enterprise fee.

She managed to get a personal license through US after weeks of emails and phone calls.

I however pirated until the subscription model came out, initially I thought the monthly fee was kinda brilliant as it allowed me to actually legally run photoshop for a price I could afford.

Just buy the occasional month when I actually need it and then cancel for all the 10 months a year that I don't use it. Seemed like a win/win to me.

Sadly someone at Adobe considers this a worse crime than pirating it seems and casual users are tricked into these insane contracts.

I sincerely hope this practice of a hidden cancellation fee is not only banned but heftily fined.

In Denmark, with a realkredit loan. The loan is funded by bonds that investors buy. The realkredit institution manages these loans and makes sure the investors get paid back.

The refinancing part is essentially if the interest rates go up I can ask to pay those higher interest and bit more per month and then my total mortgage debt goes down. In some cases you can save a lot of money by doing that. It depends.

Also monthly payment is misleading. You pay quarterly not monthly. So its calculated maybe 10.000DKK monthly but you will always pay 30.000DKK quartely.

Don´t know why its always described as monthly in Denmark when no one pays realkredit on a monthly basis. It could be because the mortgage you can get is based on a monthly salary. But I am just guessing. No idea.

Its a good system though. IMHO Denmark is very much a delusional capitalist country with socialist tax rates but this realkredit system is really superb.

We still had country wide lockdown just a few months after a +90% population wide vaccine uptake in my home country. Omicron opened up society, not a single other pandemic measure and that includes masks.

On another note. With EU countries being so loud about green transitions I would have thought encouraging WFH would have enormous environmental benefits.

There is a plethora of green fees on every single transportation fuel source that we have come to depend on.

Whats greener than not clogging up the roads at all ?

Wonder why EU simply does not ban mandatory in office attendance for work that can be done from home, unless you can show that it is detrimental. WFH school teachers for example. Remote learning for children was a catastrophe.

Imagine the tonnes of CO2 saved.

I feel the article makes ECMO sounds like a viable common treatment for lung ailments. I have personal experience with ECMO.

Disclaimer: I have no medical training. But I have had two loved ones in ECMO in my life.

An adult age 48 and a premature infant that weighed a little over 600 grams at birth.

The adult died after a very successful month in ECMO during routine change of tubes. Bled to death after a ruptured artery.

The infant survived and is thriving today.

ECMO is highly specialised, very expensive, incredibly intrusive and also requires large amounts of blood plasma. Blood plasma is not an abundant resource.

Just the cost is almost twice that of a standard, expensive cancer treatment.

"The mean estimated total hospital costs, including pre- and post-ECMO procedures, was 213,246 USD". https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19699650/#:~:text=Results%3A...).

Cancer treatment cost example

https://www.asbestos.com/featured-stories/high-cost-of-cance....

So adding to the dangers of using ECMO it is also very very costly.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to promote ECMO as casually as this article does.

Uff another awful childish reddit conversation "PreVEnTs CoMPAnieS frOm bEiNG aBLe tO hIrE MoRE QuaLIFIeD CaNdIDaTEs bEcAuSe tHeYRe WhITe. "

Shudders....

Looks like Prabhakar Raghavan has become interwebs enemy nr1. Interesting.

Yeah I agree. The personal tone makes it clear that this is the authors’ opinion and not unbiased fact. I thoroughly enjoyed the article and the writing style. Excellent job.

Is there any other field that normalizes this type of insane interviews. They are even applauded by the vast majority in this thread.

Do mathematiticans have to interiview like this? Medical doctors? Police officers? Rocket scientists? Chemists? Architects? I cant think off a single profession apart from the IT domain that does this.

I dont think there is a single profession that gets mocked on their interviewing strategies as much as IT still I see senior devs defending this insanity.

Thanks for the tip. Looks really interesting. I'll check it out.

I just finished this book. I felt the author could have done more with Charlies genius stage. Not sure why, that part just felt flat somehow. The rising and the subsequent decline stages were really gripping though. Like he was describing the thought process of a surprised friendly dog. Id give it 4/5. Really good story.

When privacy is criminalized, only criminals will have privacy.

Cant be bothered to search for who said that to give credit.

Phrase still stands

Nature papers are really diminishing in quality.

A small paper with a linited study on 300 students from Pakistan and China and the result is “Accepting AI without addressing the major human concerns would be like summoning the devils” .

Who knew Nature could sound like a bible thumping southern baptist.

Personal prediciton. AI fears on human IQ is about as valid as fears of the television and computer games have historically been.

Aka incredibly powerful teaching tools wjhen used right, damaging propaganda when used wrong.

Autonomois warfare is what scares me, not this hysterical crap everythime humans get a new useful technology.

Why are you downvoted? Perfectly reasonable comment.

I don't think it's PR. The transition to EV is comparably piss poor to anyone who is using their cars for more than short commutes. We go skiing every year and we drive approx 1200 km to the same spot. This year on the brand new EV with 500km range. Well not so much 500 in -20°C. More like 200. We had to stop every 2.5 hours and charge. And in some places wait in line for maybe 30 minutes in supercharging stations. The trip is usually about 12 hours with regular stops. This year was close to 20. And it was the same during the stay at the cabin, closest supercharger was 35km away and there were only 2.

The EV is a company car and policy bans non EV, not even hybrid are allowed. For a 4 hour trip to a customer in winter cold, if I am lucky, I charge twice. A minimum of 20 minutes per charge. And no wait times on a good day. Waiting 30 minutes to charge for 20 minutes. Well you do the math.

In my old car Id just drive the car on full tank the 4 hours front and back. Maybe 1 short rest stop on the way back. Now with the charge max to 80% hysteria and battery range being non existent in cold weather and endless lines in the charging stations I am starting to hate the EV. I do have a home charger but we do not drive only 20 minutes per day. We live outside the main city and works as consultants.

I am seriously considering changing employer because of this.

I smell troll

Iff designers sometimes kill functionality for what is perceived as stylish. I wonder how colorblind persons deal with these pastels. I know kindergarten colors may not fit the rest of the sites colorscheme but consider that charts are often relaying important information that should probably be accessible to everyone.

Taupe, salmon and sage may not be the best choices.

Just sayin….