It doesn't matter if people in the US feel less safe now. I, as a non-USian, feel a lot more empowered and at peace with the world now. I definately believe that his actions did help world peace overall even if they did hurt US interests. Hypocrisy was running too rampant and it is a good thing that it was slapped down a bit.
So? The Nexus 5 has nothing to do with what made n900 great. Jolla has a pretty similar OS, community and development environment. Neither phone has a hardware keyboard. Either you are willing to pay for the better OS or you are not... I agree that Android hardware is the most cost effective hardware on the planet.
(Part of the Jolla price is 24% sales tax to Finland - it would be nice if they had a separate export price for people outside EU without the tax. Hopefully soon.)
I got one from preordering and I really like it a lot. If the thing you like in n900 is the community and the hackability, you will like Jolla too. Most importantly, I'm able to use it as my work phone already, so it's not just a plaything. So far there has been a steady stream of updates and apps. If you are in US, getting one is probably not very easy, but maybe you can get one from ebay or something? (Check the frequencies etc. first.)
I got one from preordering and I really like it a lot. Most importantly, I'm able to use it as my work phone already now and so far there has been a steady stream of updates and apps. If you are in US, getting one is probably not very easy, but maybe you can get one from ebay?
No. It was a shame on all European countries that when he was still at the airport we were declining planes from flying over our countries. All because of a remote chance that Snowden was sneaking to South America. We would not have given him acylum. Sad indeed.
It's my business to pay attention to myself, and not my business to pry into other people's matters. Life should not be a competition.
I absolutely agree that life should not be a competition. But - I assume you are from the U.S. - I'm pretty sure that overall life here is less a competition then it is over there, so clearly public tax information is not driving the competition the way you assume it would.
The way I see it is that it gives you more information to make important desicions about your life. Like how big a mortgage can you actually pay back? Or is your employer really valueing you highly like they say they are doing? And that is a very good thing. Most other information sources, like banks or surveys only give you very averaged and aggregated data that is difficult to use this way.
In a similar way, we built a house 7 years ago and I've been trying to tell all interested how much the project cost. People around here often do not share that kind of information. Prospective house builders have to work with very inaccurate information about the real cost of building a house. People bragging about how clever they were and how much they saved etc. I think this kind of thing is a really big problem in our society and we need more public economical information - not less.
Well, certainly the people earning a lot of money think we have a culture of envy. But I'm not at all convinced that we actually have one outside of the top 10% earners envying each other. Now, of course the people making less money envy the rich in the sense that they would like to make more money - but isn't that what market capitalism is all about? What I mean is that most people are not consumed by this envy and they do not suffer from it in any significant way. Nor do people regularly harass each other about their money.
I dunno, maybe it is different in Norway, but your original comment really sounded like the comments I hear around here and I don't see any hard evidence to back them up.
And finally: if the tax information was not available, it would not stop this. People would probably think the rich are earning even more then they really are and envy them even more. Out of sight - out of mind, does not really work when you can see people using their big income in luxury boats, big houses and expensive cars.
The idea is to get the information for the negotiations, and offers from other companies suffer from the same problem. I.e. if you don't know what you are worth, how do you get good offers from other companies? Also
I don't know what you do for a living, but I sure as hell know how good the other members of my dev team are at their work. I would like to add that I know it much better then our managers.
And yes, we do also share this kind of information between coworkers. Sometimes with numbers, sometimes without them.
After all above: public salary info would IMHO make everything easier and
Fighting wealth equality should happen in policies, not publicly shaming those who work hard and actually contributes to the society.
It is hard to explain to foreigners often, but there is a deep rooted culture of envy that historically have been strong where someone standing out in a positive way is pulled down as hard as possible.
I live in Finland and we also have publis tax information. I think the rationale for having that information public is to make hiding income harder... if you have no taxable income and your neighbour sees you buying new cars every year, that may cause him to go and talk to someone at the tax office. I'm not sure if there actually is someone you can report a suspected tax evader, but that's the general idea. The shaming is bad, but that is mostly done by the press here and AFAICT there is no shame if you have some reason for the large income. E.g. people owning companies are treated more like heroes.
But, anyway, what I really wanted to say was that the "culture of envy" is a myth. We have the same myth here too. The envy is mostly inside the head of people earning a lot of money. The people earning less generally do not care.
Personally I am very much in favor of public tax information. I usually check the income of some of my coworkers every couple of years. Usually their wages are very much what I expect, but once I noticed that my previous employer valued writing design documents over creating working software - and after learning that I decided to change to another job. I did not start raving and frothing at mouth.
Usually, what you imagine without the information is much worse then the reality.
Compared to what Google and NSA are doing, I find the public tax information to not be a problem.
I don't think the schools here in Finland have degrading for decades. The buildings are getting old because many of them where built after WW2 and they have certainly degraded, but the other stuff is just about a just as it has ever been. You still get a free meal, good books and professional teachers.
The reason we are running out of money is that we now have a lot of old people not working anymore and their healthcare may well be the end of the nordic welllfare state. But the public school system is still doing just fine.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't. -- Ernest Rutherford
