The healthcare is included (not to 100%, but the fees are low). The quality of the healthcare is not very good though, a lot of the time you have to go private companies to get decent treatment. And that can get expensive.

Public transportation gets some subsidies from the government, not a lot though AFAIK.

What we do get that is really good is free university level education for anyone who's qualified.

Personally I would prefer the taxes to be lowered, to stimulate growth and reduce unemployment. At the moment my impression is that Sweden is losing international competitiveness due to the high cost of labor here, brought on by the taxes.

My Volvo 960 can do that (in winter mode it only uses gears 3 and 4). Not that I disagree with you, I do like the control a manual transmission gives you. I just prefer the comfort of an automatic (been driving manuals for ~7 years, switched last year to automatic).

If your lawn requires an emergency brake, you better get off it.

"accidentally"... sure!

Nitpicking: Some modern cars (BMW has a few models for example) have completely electronic drive-by-wire systems. Wouldn't want to get hit with this thing while driving one of those :)

Reminds me of something I saw on "Cops" which I was surprised was actually shown on TV. The cops were chasing a random drug-dealer or equivalent, during the chase / apprehension he was resisting. Then once the criminal was on the ground and in handcuffs, a female cop was screaming something about "never put your hands on me", and then said to the other cops "let me tase him". Which she did, while reiterating her previous statement.

I'm Swedish, so I'm not sure about laws and practices in the US. But in Sweden it would definitely not be acceptable to intentionally harm a person who is safely in custody, no matter how much they've resisted. I understand that the cop was pissed off at the criminal for resisting so vigorously, but that doesn't seem like a good enough reason. It was surprising to me that this part was on the show.

The Universe is very large and possibly infinite in volume; the observable matter is spread over a space at least 93 billion light years across. Wikipedia - Universe

d'oh, obviously I did not mean to write implosion.

This is correct. It can also be noted the by present standards (reactors being built now) the TMI reactors would be considered unsafe. Reactors with triple containment barriers could even withstand a Chernobyl-style explosion with no release of radioactive material (not that such an implosion is even theoretically possible in most designs).

This is offtopic, but from Wikipedia - Coal Plant

As most ores in the Earth's crust, coal also contains low levels of uranium, thorium, and other naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes whose release into the environment leads to radioactive contamination. While these substances are present as very small trace impurities, enough coal is burned that significant amounts of these substances are released. A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could have an uncontrolled release of as much as 5.2 tons/year of uranium (containing 74 pounds (34 kg) of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons/year of thorium.[19]

This has been known for decades, yet nuclear plants (which allows controlled handling of the waste, as opposed to releasing it in the atmosphere) is still incorrectly assumed by many people to release loads of radioactive material while coal exhaust is assumed to be "just carbon dioxide".

It is correct that using a purely Thorium fuel cycle is hard, and requires alot more research. Closer to actually being implemented on a commercial scale is the closed fuel cycle, where spent fuel currently considered "waste" is used in fast breeder reactors.

Everyone that has nuclear reactors does not build bombs. 50% of Sweden's electricity comes from reactors, and Sweden has never built a single nuclear bomb.

These reactors are not being built because the technology is not fully developed (as I understand it, better materials are required because of the high temperatures). Though some prototypes has been built.

On this subject it can also be worth of mention that all Gen-IV reactor concepts (which include molten salt reactors) are designed to make it very hard if not impossible to extract Pu-239 from their fuel or waste.

You are correct on the subject of Iran, they want to build a reactor based on a Gen-IV concept (i forget which one right now) but modified to facilitate production of Pu-239. That design is not accepted as a Gen-IV reactor.

Generation IV Wikipedia article

In certain IDE:s those types of comment are helpful. Mousing over a function call to see what it returns and what the arguments are without having to find the code for that function speeds up coding for me personally at least.