OTOH seat belts "don't work" by the same token. There are plenty of edge cases where they could do (and have done) worse than being without.

That's not to say that seat belts are a failure and that we'd be better without. Quite the opposite. "Mostly works" is when you think about it the highest praise any technology can hope to achieve.

Indeed. If you look at his actual proof of the existence Nash equilibrium it's a brilliant piece of mathematics where he freely jumps between seemingly unrelated fields of mathematics (probability theory in one instance, geometry in the next etc.), like a butterfly between flowers on a meadow. Obvious only in hindsight.

However, as schizophrenia is a disease that is characterised by the brain making associations between things that can't even be associated (e.g. "clanging" thinking as if words that rhyme actually have a meaningful relation in speech) you can't help but wonder about the connection. A brain that is able to make fantastic connection between distant fields of mathematics to build new results always teetering on the edge of completely losing touch with factual reality by "over revving," making false connections between everything and anything, even though there are none.

I can't since you don't read Swedish and obviously don't believe me who do.

All the above is media echo chamber from one police report. Even if you failed to link it correctly its this one.

Now, I'm not going to translate the lot for you, as you wouldn't believe it anyway, but just the first sentence sums it up quite nicely "I Sverige finns i nulÃget 55 geografiska omrÃ¥den dÃr lokala kriminella nÃtverk anses ha negativ pÃ¥verkan pÃ¥ lokalsamhÃllet". -> In Sweden there are at present 55 geographic areas where local criminal network are considered to have a negative impact on the local community."

That's as far as the "no-go" zones go.

Now, I'm not going to fisk the rest, because it's too tedious, but just as a "for instance": "Here is just one of many news stories on how police have to install shatterproof glass on their vehicles because they get rocks hurled at them whenever entering these areas". No, if you read the article, it says that due to the possibility of stones being thrown, the police responce busses (piketbussarna) have had shatterproof glass fitted. These are the vehicles carrying the special response units, riot police for example, that gets called in when things have gotten bad enough that its warranted (much like armed police in Britain). Again hyperbole. The offered citation doesn't actually say or support what "swedenreport" is trying to sell.

But like I said before, you're fishing in the wrong pond. There are "better" sites if you wish to keep this up.

If you're so concerned for the truth, then there's plenty of that to go around. One would think that with all this crime, drug dealing, shootings and IS supporters running rampant that would show up in crime statistics? Now, general crime statistics is a tricky subject since there's always the problem of what gets reported and how, so the usual proxy is to look at "homicide" i.e. wrongful death. That's a pretty useful statistic as dead people tend to show up in the statistics and are easy to count, and general crime tends to correlate rather well with violent crime, which correlates with people dying from it.

Here's the current count of "lethal violence" in Sweden. Since we have population of 9 644 864 at last count that means a rate of 0.9 per 100k inhabitants in 2014. This is including the last three years of gang shootings (that as you can see didn't even impact the overall statistics). That's better than almost all countries in the world. Including, I might add, Ireland.

So, by that token, it doesn't even matter that we have "no-go zones" then, as the people in them don't get up to much anyway... Police presence or not...

What? If that's really the general case in the US, then drugs should be a very distant second concern, far behind the transmission of disease.

You need to get your HVAC-shit together.

Hyperbole. That was already included in my previous reply.

That one police officer with no official or other standing says one thing doesn't a summer make. (Why he says that I don't know, but there are a number of mundane reasons).

Now, yes, we're having problems in certain areas. And they seem to stick. No denying that. BUT, by that token, why take the word of one policeman when it comes to "no-go zones". We've had much worse in the very city I'm writing this from. That was a real loss of control of general order from the police. No question about it. And even those reports were overblown. The city was perfectly safe for anybody who wasn't either a protester or police even at the height of "the troubles" (:-)). I should know, I was there... I can only imagine what "swedenreport" would have reported had he been there... He would no doubt be on about how Sweden still wasn't safe for the public and how police were still out of control of the streets. (Hint. If they ever were, they regained it very quickly. That wasn't actually the problem, but rather the overreaction of the establishment to what was really a rather minor incident, all things considered.)

So, what we're having now is the analogue. Police can't act like the usually do, i.e. just a single patrol can't necessarily just take off after a suspect if that suspect flees to certain streets in certain parts of the city in the middle of the night or they might get a stone thrown at their car. They have to actually call for backup. And since Swedish police is dimensioned for the actual need, that backup isn't available. Hence they'll let is slide, and the fiction of "no-go zones" were invented.

When police reallocates (as they have due to the last spate of shootings), lo and behold that place is cleared out in short order. (And then police will allocate back, the bad places left to fester and the cycle repeats. We wouldn't even need more police to solve that, but for the police we have to work when crimes are actually committed, i.e. nights and weekends. But since our police force is ageing, they don't want to/need to work nights and weekends. This is actually a bigger problem than any "no-go" zone).

That's a useful analogy. First of course, even in Northern Ireland the streets were "completely safe" even at the heights of the troubles. If you weren't a British squaddie walking alone down Falls road in the middle of the night. If you do the numbers, US crime in New York beat the death rate of "the troubles" by a factor of ten if you look at the period as a whole.

Second. Even taking that as a comparison, the very worst current level of violence in Gothenburg, taking the recent spate of shootings into account, doesn't even begin to reach the level of IRA violence in Republic of Ireland during the troubles. The tourists you speak of objectively were in more danger from the IRA walking the streets of Dublin than the would walking our streets here. In both cases, while the difference in relative risk is quite substantial, the difference in absolute risk is similar, as the absolute risk is the same: as close to zero as to make no difference.

So, it's interesting that you should mention the troubles, as we have a similar situation here, much, much more ink is being spilled than actual blood. Making the general public think there is danger where there actually isn't.

This isn't due to a need to "defend" my home country BTW. To the extent that it needs defending it can do that very well itself, thank you very much, but rather that these horrid little one man web show like "swedenreport" really needs to go off in a corner and die. They're part of the noise, not the signal. I'm happy to say that even though we've seen the general decline of news reporting that the rest of the west has seen, we never had to suffer the likes of the British tabloids, and I'll be damned if we have to suffer it from the likes of swedenreport.

So if you seriously want to learn about the current Swedish situation get yourself a real source. If you're just another one of the "OMG MUSLIMS!!!" looking to verify your preconceived notions, then there are quite frankly better (i.e. even worse, even less connected to reality) sources out there for you to quote. The conclusion however, is the same: In either case, stay away from "swedenreport."

I see. I take it you don't read Swedish? His own sources doesn't actually say what he claims they say. (Even the vaunted police report he cites doesn't actually say what he says it does.) Yes, we have a growing problem with gang based crime in Sweden (we have a whopping 4000 gang members out of a nine million population, which is 4000 more than only 20-30 years ago). Yes, there are parts of cities in Sweden where police/fire/ambulance etc. have been met with stone throwing. Yes, we have a worrying increase in the number of gang related shootings.

However. All this has to be understood from a backdrop of approximately zero such problems in the past. Hence of course, relatively speaking, we take this very seriously, and we're appalled. As we should be. However, with that said, our crime indicators are still among the lowest in the world, even though gang shootings make the headlines almost every day (it feels like) it's still only a handful per year and our murder rate hasn't even ticked up as a result. Still steady at just over one per 100k/year, which is as close to zero as you're going to get. (Notably it's not any different from mono-ethnical Finland and Norway).

Most notably however, active police work in these areas inevitably reduces the level of overt crime in these areas once they've been in the papers long enough to affect resource allocation. We routinely clean up these areas (by locking up the handful of people who are the real problem) and things are normalised. Until the next time. While we of course are deeply concerned by this pattern, to say that "police have given up" and that there are "no go" zones anywhere in Sweden is taking the current situation much, much too far.

So a "pinch" of salt isn't the appropriate measure here. You need a metric ton. As I say to american friends and family when the inevitable "is it safe?"-question comes; "You being american, your level of street smarts serves you everywhere and anywhere in Sweden. If you behaved like you would in the safest areas of the US, you'd be pretty much OK in the very worst areas here." It's a bit like if Cal Ripken was dropped into a little league game asking the coach who he would have to look out for on the opposing team. The only sensible answer of course being. "No one... But please go easy on them, yeah?"

So, calling any area in Sweden a "police no-go zone" is hyperbole to the level of untruth.

No, of course not. As those "no-go areas" don't actually exist in Sweden.

Seriously, where do you people get this crap?

And they're quite good at sealing up cracks in concrete to! No bacteria needed, and no need for complicated feeding schemes. Just send the sealers to the next supermarket. (They even pay for the food themselves!)

Nope. Not even close. The Eurozone excludes important economies, such as the UK. So their poor state doesn't have anything to do with the Euro per se.

Now it's not surprising that an american would see the EU as a US style federation, but it's anything but. Far from it. All the member states retain their full freedom, the limits of which are only voluntarily agreed to by convention. Hence the Euro was as doomed as all previous European currency collaborations, when push came to shove, there wasn't sufficient power to actually punish the countries not holding up their end of the bargain.

Now traditionally, that was "fixed" by leaving the cooperation, hence it was thought that by actually agreeing on one currency, that would take that option away and make everybody keep in line. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the opposite. Instead we got all the old problems without the old solution available. Hence they're in worse shape than they were before...

That couldn't happen in a federation such as the US as the central bank has actual teeth. In the Eurozone, it doesn't. Hence the two economies are not comparable.

Nice way of putting words in my mouth... But at least we now know that you consider yourself Greek, and hence the big mouth, and bad manners have been explained... ;-)

No, I didn't ascribe the Greek/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese economic situation to laziness. As a matter of fact, I pointedly, didn't ascribe it to any one, multitude of, or particular cause. I just observed that these economies have never done well in modern times, for more than a short period of time at a stretch. And that's even when pumping in billions to try and get them on the right track. (Hell, this is even true within Italy, and hence the Lega Nord party's rhetoric to get rid of the "south," meaning southern Italy).

Of course, it goes without saying that however hard the Greeks work (or not), has no bearing whatsoever on the Spanish economy... You might as well blame their lack of economic success on too much sun. At least they have that in common.

Well, it's not just Germany. There's Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria etc. doing great, for example.

Now of course, economy is a complex beast, but compare the deficits in this table with the US 2014 deficit of 2.8% of GDP (which was a record low). You'll see that most EU countries are doing better or much better than the US even though the EU as a whole is doing slightly worse as some of the large southern economies are pulling the rest of us down.

So, as is always the case these days, news reporting skews the general picture to be (much) worse than it already is. That the southernes aren't doing to good is furthermore not exactly news... They've always done poorly, one way or another... (So why someone thought it would be a good idea to include them in the Euro I don't know.)

Note also today's news that even if Greece didn't pay back their loans, it wouldn't be a disaster, and could be handled quite nicely. Not that we don't care, it's a precedent we don't want set, but still. The worst is over. And if you're looking for economic stability, go to Northern Europe. South of the Alps is and has always been a crap shot. And stay out of the east if you don't know what you're doing... :-)

We'd be happy to pay those people. But the current system doesn't allow us.

But this isn't news to you...

I don't know about american unions, but as I said in other posts, that's most definitely not true about northern European unions (let's call them "Germanic" for short). Not by a long shot. We have the highest standard of living indices known to man, lowest inequality, and well running economies (much better than the US), and some of the strongest unions on the planet. In fact, many big business leaders admit in private that it's the unions that make it easy to do business here. It levels the playing field when it comes to employees, everybody knows the rules, and you don't have to suffer strikes all the time, but can negotiate instead.

Even such well known leftist bastions as the IMF and OECD have finally come to the conclusion that income inequality hurts economic growth. Yes the almighty economic growth of the whole nation.

In Sweden we increased our financial inequality in the nineties due to our banking crisis. And even though we've had very good growth since then, the IMF believes we have lost a substantial amount due to the increase in income inequality. If we had kept our old system we would be much richer now as a country, and as a people.

How do you fix this? Easy, redistribution tax the rich, and let the money flow to the relatively poorer. Says the IMF and the OECD. Bloody communist bastards the lot of them... Yeah, right.

Probably not too long ago. Check out Volvo cars (built in Sweden) or Volvo trucks (built in Sweden, and Swedish owned). To just name two. There are many others.

Now of course, we've been non white for the last 30 years or so. Still going strong. If you lot would just stop starting wars all over, or at least take care of the refugees we wouldn't have to. The town of Sodertalje (home to Scania) took in more Iraq refugees than all of the US of A. Combined.

Then again, if you weren't so hot on wars, the Norwegians couldn't export their "Raufoss" rounds to you, so there's that...

Fact of the matter is that we have a very positive trade balance with you, even considering how small Sweden is. So a lot more shit gets done here, than over there... A lot more...

Nope. The unions in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and, to a lesser extent, Norway, for example, are much stronger than the unions in the countries you mentioned. As far as Europe is concerned the countries you mention are on the lower half when it comes to union strength. (Which is clear if you notice the antics they get up to. A strong union wouldn't have to behave like that.)

So, no cigarr. Try again.