The Great Nordic Thread

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Sweden still won’t pass a mask law.

It's interesting that starting in August, I began seeing more and more people wearing masks on their own, and every month more people start wearing them.

Overwhelmingly it's younger people in their 20s, followed by older people, but very few other groups wear them. Meanwhile, public transit gets progressively more crowded every week, and we're seemingly almost at pre-COVID levels

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Sweden still won’t pass a mask law.

It's interesting that starting in August, I began seeing more and more people wearing masks on their own, and every month more people start wearing them.

Overwhelmingly it's younger people in their 20s, followed by older people, but very few other groups wear them. Meanwhile, public transit gets progressively more crowded every week, and we're seemingly almost at pre-COVID levels

Even with case numbers rising?

Yes. While Stockholm was basically a ghost town between March 17th and end of May, by June there was a small bump in activity, then back to a ghost town in July during the summer holidays, but then in August people returned to the city and through the end of October it felt like COVID was just not a thing. We were almost back to January 2020 levels of activity.

But over the past month the warnings have gotten more and more shrill/urgent with stricter limitations, and I think people are starting to get a bit scared again. But I doubt we'll go back to the level of caution that existed in the March - June period.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

SWEDEN

The Moderate Party introduced a labor immigration proposal for non-EU workers:

• only granting a work permit if the agreed upon salary exceeds the average monthly wage for all of Sweden (currently 31,000 SEK per month, or approximately $3800 per month).
• Implementing a grant ceiling for those on work permits
• Remove the possibility that those who submit an asylum application and are rejected can then apply for a work visa, citing the time they've already lived in Sweden
• Deny work permits for those applying for "personal assistant" jobs, since this category is abused and associated with crime and trafficking
• New maintenance requirements for those who wish to bring their families along with them
• New requirement for employers to submit a copy of an employment contracts along with work permit applications to help ensure they stick to legitimate working conditions

For the most part I don't really have any problems with these proposals, other than two very specific things:

1. The proposed minimum salary of 31,000 SEK is a bit high. I agree that the current salary requirement of 13,000 SEK / month is absurdly low, but a more reasonable minimum would be closer to 25,000 per month or so. Right now a lot of jobs that have shortages (especially healthcare and elderly care) pay between 25,000 and 30,000 SEK, so the situation in these areas would be made even worse if there is no mitigating proposal to raise wages in this sector. Furthermore, 25,000 SEK per month is not actually a bad salary, and outside of major cities, that's actually quite a solid middle class salary for one person. The 31,000 per month suggestion is too "one size fits all", which makes no sense given the extreme cost of living differences between the big cities and the rest of the country. Furthermore, the rural regions are the places where the worker shortages are most extreme and also have larger budget constraints compared to wealthier cities.

2. The maintenance requirement for families is weirdly specific and rigid. I have no qualms with the salary requirements for families, but the proposal also mandates what kind of living space you need to have. I'm not really sure how this is going to actually be enforced, unless Sweden starts sending police to people's homes to check in on them, which is absurd and a huge waste of time and resources. It reminds me of the drug testing of welfare recipients here in the U.S. that's part of being "tough on deadbeats" that ends up costing far more money than it saves.

The Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) and Federation of Business Owners (Företagarna) are both very positive towards these proposals, with LO suggesting issuing permits based upon a limited list of career categories to prevent saturation of lower-skilled, lower-paying jobs, while Företagarna criticized the proposed "talent visa" as being a useless tourist visa since applicants can't start working on it and the requirement for a masters degree is too restrictive, and says that professional experience and other qualitative characteristics should be taken into account. They also said the 31,000 SEK per month salary minimum was too high, given that it's equivalent to a starting salary in Stockholm for someone with a masters degree.

The Work Permit Holders Association welcomed the proposals, but also criticized the maintenance requirements regarding housing as being needlessly blunt, and said the proposals to stop the deportation of talented workers over minor administrative errors were too vague and not good enough. They also lamented the lack of any proposal to deal with work permit holders who lost their jobs due to COVID-19, lack of clarification regarding how probationary periods are treated, and the lack of anything to improve the situation with the Migration Agency, which is known for being bureaucratic, arbitrary, punitive, slow-moving, and generally just difficult to deal with all around.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Don't see a general Denmark thread, but seems like this mini-scandal about Frederickson deleting text messages related to the mink slaughtering investigation is getting more serious? Ministry of State refuses to answer questions the commission investigating this.

Danish posters, how serious is this actually?

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Don't see a general Denmark thread, but seems like this mini-scandal about Frederickson deleting text messages related to the mink slaughtering investigation is getting more serious? Ministry of State refuses to answer questions the commission investigating this.

Danish posters, how serious is this actually?

It’s potential serious. If the Social Liberal wanted a excuse to change from left to right this would be a perfect excuse to let the government fall. But they would be massacred in the election which would follow. The good point for the government in this is that outside the Social Democrats themselves there’re zero sympathy for fur industry on the left, so it would be hard for Unity List and the Social Liberals to explain to their voters why they let the government fall over this.

The main problem is that there’re nobody between the PM and this scandal. So there’re nobody who can be sacrificed.

But in the end I suspect this scandal will cool down after the municipality election especially if the Social Democrats end up doing well.

Interesting. Let's say Frederiksen gets the knife; does this necessitate some big government shake-up, or is there someone from S who could step in immediately and be confirmed ala Schallenberg/potentially Andersson? If so, who would that be? Just the deputy PM?

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

I was waiting for something illegal like the snorting of coke, something racist like wearing blackface, or something really trashy like chugging tons of alcohol on camera but it's just a handful of people dancing and singing.

Why is this bad? Are politicians not people too? How is this different from what happens in millions of people's homes and apartments all over the world every week? Normal young person does normal young person thing, news at 11.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

A very informative article published this morning in Aftonbladet:

"The Social Democrats' shift from labor party to middle class party: before they wanted to lift the working class, now they want everyone to leave it"

(Note: the article uses the term "klassresor", which literally translates into English as "class trip/journey", which makes it sound like they are talking about school field trips, but what it really means is "class mobility")

https://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/a/nQWzzQ/bo-rothstein-om-socialdemokraterna-och-klassresor

You can roughly say that up to and including Ingvar Carlsson 's time as party leader, Social Democracy's policy was aimed at raising and strengthening the position of the working class.

During Mona Sahlin 's time as party leader, however, there is a reversal of social democratic politics that has not received the attention it deserves. Instead of a policy that elevates the working class as a class, the main aim becomes to pursue a policy that, to the greatest extent possible, makes it possible to leave the working class. In her speeches as party leader and especially in the election campaign that was her first and last as party leader, Sahlin repeated almost like a mantra that Sweden would be a country where it was easy to make "class trips".

But the message, that the central point of the policy you want to pursue is to enable as many as possible to no longer belong to the working class, is a bit strange for a party that actually calls itself a "working party".

Many of the working-class voters of Social Democracy must have felt a certain alienation in the face of this rhetoric, where one could sense a certain contempt for those who had not succeeded in making class trips.

Added to this is the education policy that the party has pursued over the past 20 years. It has assumed that, in principle, all upper secondary education, i.e. also the so-called vocational programmes, must provide university competence. This has meant that the requirements for entering upper secondary vocational education have become so high that as many as 15 percent of the young people who leave primary school lack the qualifications.

Many of these young people end up in a situation where there is no place for them in any education, but they also don't get a job because very many employers nowadays rate applicants without a high school education even when it comes to more manual jobs. The whole thing becomes even more absurd because today there is a great shortage of personnel in many traditional working class professions and that the number of places in upper secondary education for such professions has been greatly reduced. Anyone who wants to train to become a skilled (and not so rarely nowadays well-paid) professional worker often does not get into the vocational program at the upper secondary school, either because they have not passed in a number of subjects that are actually completely irrelevant to acquiring the education in question or because there are very few places.

The problems for these young people who have failed the grading system have been noticed from many different quarters. Social physicians have pointed out that Sweden now has an unusually high mortality rate for young people compared to comparable countries , and that this can be traced back to as many as one in seven 16-year-olds being labeled as "failed".

Educators have questioned whether the grading system is at all compatible with the possibility of conducting good teaching .

Experienced police officers testify that what generally distinguishes all the young members of criminal gangs with whom they come into contact is that they left school as "failed" and that this group is easily recruited into gang crime .

A more reasonable message would have been that the party strove for Sweden to both offer the best possible conditions for those who wanted to train to become skilled workers, while also providing very good opportunities for those who wanted a different career path.

This is a pretty eye-opening article, but it confirms that the debates that are happening around the world in terms of excessive focus on university preparation in the education system are also happening in Sweden. Combined with residential segregation from Sweden's ridiculous housing policies and prices, you will see many aimless young people (especially young men) drawn into criminality.

Education policy is one area, along with housing policy, where I feel that Germany really outperforms Sweden with regards to recognizing multiple valid life-career paths and not having an obsessive focus on university preparation. The apprenticeship system and strong technical training not only supports Germany's strong manufacturing sector, but also provides a place for people for whom academics just aren't their strong suit and puts value on skilled manual labor.

I still have mixed feelings about how young the German system sorts people into different educational paths, but it's good that Germany doesn't buy into the obsessive focus on universities to the detriment of skilled manual labor.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Wow this thread is dead.


Anyways, big strikes began this evening in Finland. A whopping 300,000 workers are striking, out of a total population of 5.5 million and workforce of 2.3 million (13% of the workforce).

Whole country is grinding to a halt. Railways, busses, metros, airlines, childcare centers, industry, restaurants, hotels, postal workers, retail and more are affected.

The Orpo government wants to cut sickness pay, unemployment benefits, weaken protection against dismissal, restrict the right to strike, and weakening nationwide sectoral bargaining.