University of Helsinki To Lay Off a Thousand People (yle.fi) 308
jones_supa writes: University of Helsinki, the place where Linus Torvalds got his degree as well, will reduce staff by 980 people, with 570 being laid off by the end of 2017. In addition, the university will reorganize and incorporate certain divisions including continuing education. Professors, teachers and researchers are criticizing the cuts, which coincide with the university's administrative and educational overhaul. The staff cuts reflect the government's drastic funding cuts to education, which plays one part in the effort of trying to help the difficult economic situation of today's Finland. The university estimates that of the 980 positions, terminations during this coming spring will account for 570 positions. Of the employees to be made redundant, 75 are teaching and research staff and 495 other staff. The rest of the cuts will be spread over the coming years.
Lay off my People (Score:3)
Re:The Cost Of FREEDOM! (Score:4, Informative)
Do you have any idea of how expensive beer is in Finland?
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how is this relevant to /. (Score:2, Insightful)
I get it that Torvalds went to school there etc, but this isn't any different than any other school that hundreds of other developers have gone to that have had staff cuts. Those don't make /.
Why is this here at all?
Re:how is this relevant to /. (Score:5, Interesting)
You clearly do not understand the context or the background to this, so allow me to explain why this is relevant. Firstly, the university of Helsinki is THE university here. Sure, we have a few other major ones and they're decent, but we're a nation of 5,4 million people, the university of Helsinki is the bedrock and pinnacle of our much praised educational system. Gutting it means they're making a huge dent in the higher education of the entire country. Secondly, the cuts are nationwide, they're cutting across the board from higher education, the university of Helsinki is just getting the hardest hit as it is the biggest.
But most importantly, this is about much more than the simple cuts themselves. This is about politicians fucking us over in every way imaginable and betraying their own principles on which they ran for the parliament in a record time. We had elections last year, and one of the biggest promises made by the winning centre-right coalition was that no matter how tough cuts they'd have to make, they'd stay off the education. Our current prime minister and minister of treasury even posed in twitter pictures with students with cards saying 'no cuts'.
35 days. It took 35 days from the elections to them start suggesting cuts. Then they introduced tuition fees for exchange students coming from outside the Union. Now, this raised concern since the worry was that once the concept of tuition fees has been introduced, the next step would be to start suggesting everyone should pay them. This is a major deal as universities have always been free to attend to for those who have the grades to get in. Without free universities, we likely wouldn't have risen from a fairly backwater nation that suffered a civil war and the 2nd world war to a first world post-industrialized welfare state in less than a century. Without free higher education it's likely we would never have produced people such as Torvalds, companies such as Nokia and Rovio etc. Free higher education is at the very core of what this nation is supposed to be built on, which is why it is in our constitution:
When they announced the cuts they promised they would never expand the tuition fees. Yet, unsurprisingly, one MP just proposed that today: the introduction of nationwide tuition fees and simultaneous cutting of student benefits. At the same time they cut the amount of corporate taxes MORE than they cut universities (the total combined cuts to education are about 600 million euros). They're literally trying to wipe their ass on the constitution that we have, pissing on a fundamental cornerstone of well being in our country, and lying through their teeth while doing so. They say they have to do these cuts to save the economy. But destroying the basis for all intellectual capital in this country is not going to do anything else than destroy the economy in the long term. But they do not seem to care. And to make matters worse, the universities appear to have given up any sort of resistance to this and are allowing this all top happen with very little protest.
In my life so far, never have I been so angry and sad at the same time, nor have I EVER felt this betrayed and fucked over by our elected representatives. They're a fucking national disgrac
Re: how is this relevant to /. (Score:2)
Perhaps the cuts are being made to improve education. I notice that a significant number of the positions being eliminated are non-teaching. Sometimes thick layers of administrative bloat have to be sloughed off to improve an entity. It would certainly improve education in the US to prune administrative staff at many schools.
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In other words, this is exactly what I expected it to be -- butthurt lefties trying to raise up negative sentiments abroad, even when the UH really doesn't mean anything to your average slashdot reader. The "ooh, look at how we are perceived abroad now!" tactic is typical. In reality, nobody cares, but just might end up with the notion that something awful is happening in Finland.
I am a UH CS dept alumnus just like Torvalds is, but if something's got to give in our current economic situation, something's go
Re:how is this relevant to /. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, americans straw manning universal education/health care arguments by the age old 'nothings free' -argument. How surprising.
We are already paying for it, dumb ass. We've just decided that it should be collectively and publicly funded because one needs not to look very far to understand that limiting education chances based on the income of the person/their family is not a solution.
I want my fellow citizens to be able to get higher education and health care and other base necessities of modern day life regardless of whether or not they were born to a rich family. And I want people to continue to graduate without student debt weighing them down so they can actually spend the money they make and thus help the economy. This system works, and has worked in here and across Europe for decades. it's never been free, but it's still cheaper, per person, than any of the privatized university models.
I'm paying for my past education and the education of the coming generations by paying across the board higher taxes than most people in say, the US- And I'm completely alright with that, as are most of the people here, so shut the fuck up.
Re: how is this relevant to /. (Score:4, Informative)
From what I'm reading here, Finland's economy is tanking, necessitating these cuts...
Not really, Finland's economy is tanking because we're in the Eurozone, because our exporters decided to compete by cutting costs instead of raising quality, but mainly because of five years of continuous shrinking of national economy due to these cuts.
Just yesterday our minister of finance said that it was not a choice by necessity but by political ideology. The Finnish government is basically doing to Finland what EU did to Greece. I don't know what we did to earn such hatred from them, though.
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2) Finland's economic woes, which has led to UH's belt-tightening, are directly tied to the falling exports of mobile phones by Nokia.
Nokia taking a dirt nap is because Nokia *isn't*/*wasn't* a technology company.
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Even if they had not sold themselves to Microsoft in order to save themselves from bankruptcy, Nokia was not "just about to pull a unicorn out of its butt".
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Before Stephen "I'm-totally-not-a-Microsoft-stooge" Elop (or is that Flop?) took over, Nokia still had around 60% share of the cell phone market and was still over half a billion handsets a year even though they were starting to lose ground to the premium smartphone. After Elop came in and fired Nokia's engineers and killed off all platforms except Microsofts shitty windows phone, Nokia was the walking dead. Now, there's a lot of analysis out there about whether Elop was a trojan that Microsoft used to deva
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As you note: Nokia was on a downward spiral, and the fact of a declining-but-then-60% market share would allow them some time to save themselves, but they apparently were not interested in doing do, content with their "But we have 60% of the market!".
Microsoft taking their carcass, and, for wont of better words, turning them into a Men-In-Black style "Edgar Suit" and wearing the corpse didn't help, but it certainly didn't give Nokia the "But we have 60% of the market!" cancer in the first place.
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I thought that was a separate division that wasn't part of the sale?
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Cuz Microsoft killed it.
Not really. I would say that Microsoft failed to save Nokia. Nokia was in deep trouble already when the Microsoft deal was made.
What actually killed Nokia was sticking with the Symbian operating system for too long. It was extremely buggy, laggy, ugly and a pain for developers.
Just dig up an old Series 40 or Series 60 phone, or watch some videos of them in YouTube. You will be reminded how crusty the user experience was. It was easy for Google and Apple to realize that all this could be done better. Nokia h
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Cuz consumer technology changed rapidly and they got their timing and direction wrong.
Refugees (Score:4, Insightful)
Well they need money to pay for all those refugees. Population replacement is not cheap!
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but they sent them all over Europe to spread that ISIS crap.
Because ISIS communicates only by physically being next the person they wish to communicate with...
Re:Refugees (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Syria has a lot of Russian and Soviet weaponry. So does Iraq.
Strictly speaking, we didn't cause ISIS, we entered the country in a war, and then left it before we should have, but ISIS was created and abetted by those who have funded it and given it support.
Certainly the occupation of Iraq and the Syrian Civil War have given ISIS an opportunity to prosper, but you needed people willing to be ISIS for that to happen. It doesn't just happen automatically when you invade a country or when you leave it. We could have left in complete disorder and there didn't have to be an ISIS at the end of it. Let's put blame where blame belongs. The US and Soviet/Russian governments provided opportunities for ISIS, but ISIS is nothing without sympathizers in those countries and in the greater Muslim world who support them.
Re:Refugees (Score:4, Insightful)
If you provide fertile soil, plant the seeds and nurture them then technically you didn't "create" the fruit, but most people would hold you largely responsible for it.
We broke those countries and left them in a state where an organization like ISIS could come into existence. We must accept responsibility.
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Re:Refugees (Score:4, Informative)
ISIS provided what the government and the private sector couldn't provide, a paying job. That's what the Iraqi insurgents did when Bremer disbanded the military and fired anyone with ties to the Baath party. He didn't even make allowances for those who had to join to get their jobs. He then prohibited Iraqis from starting businesses that might compete with American businesses. They went so far as to importing foreign workers and materials for reconstruction. 70% unemployment was the result
Another big mistake was not disarming the military before disbanding them. They also forgot to secure the ammo dumps. Many of the IED's were made up of what was culled from these storage compounds.
The decision to withdraw was made in 2008 under a SOFA agreement with Iraq. Obama tried to amend the SOFA to keep a security force there, but Maliki would not agree to legal protections for US soldiers. So we withdrew under the conditions of the 2008 SOFA.
Re:Refugees (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes you did, with your meddling in their politics, funding and arming "freedom fighters" which is a small disgruntled minority you can find in ANY country to further your own political and financial agenda's. Drone strikes have created more radical extremists then anything else you have done. If I was at a wedding and you dropped a bomb on it because my nephew Yusuf once dialled a wrong number and is now linked to a terrorist group I would be pretty fucking radical after that.
So why the fuck did you even do THAT? Their biggest issue has always been America meddling in their affairs, the problem is your economy is driven by war, you keep bloody starting them (although you suck at ending them [independentagenda.com] - and I don't agree with that list either, you lost the Korean war). America has been around about 236 years, and for 214 years of that you have been at war. Around 90% of the time. [ivn.us]
Yes, yes it is.
I also love how any critical posts of the USA get modded into oblivion. See you on -1 side.
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In fact, the vey first conflict that the US got involved in after the Revolution itself was against the Barbary pirates. We tried buying them off, and when that didn't work we wiped them out, giving rise eventually to that "Shores of Tripoli" reference in the Marine Hymn.
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I, as a Dane - well, ex-Dane now - feel deeply saddened by the continuing trend in Scandinavia towards this narrow-minded duck-pondism (read The Ugly Duckling if you don't know what that means). We used to be the bleeding edge in liberal-mindedness and tolerance, and now we become ever more xenophobic and try to blame 'the others', 'the foreigners' for what is basically down to poor management and lack of foresight by consecutive governments.
Firstly, the myth that immigration costs us too much: in the short
Re:Refugees (Score:5, Insightful)
yes, it can be a burden to integrate newcomers into society, no one's denying it. In the long term, though, these people become strong contributors to society, at least if we allow them.
I think that's the rub, though, and in particular with Muslim immigrants. They hang onto a religiously-driven cultural conservatism and reject the more liberal cultural values of their host country, self-sorting into ghettos. There's an expectation the country to which they have immigrated needs to change its norms and laws to accommodate their religious and cultural preferences. They see the host country's lack of willingness to change for their sake as discrimination. This leads to unemployment, poverty and lately, a tendency to be attracted to radicalization.
Your process would work more like you expect with immigrants who were either willing to abandon their cultural and religious practices that were incompatible with their host country or already had a culture and values similar to the host country. Even then I recognize that it's not easy, but at least you obtain a relatively rapid integration that results in the economic gains.
But even then what you're arguing for is that Scandinavia needs and wants is economic expansion via labor pool expansion, not that there's something missing from it socially and culturally that the contributions of conservative Islam. By and large those qualities tend to result in conflict and social schisms which are counter-productive to economic growth and social stability.
Re:Refugees (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, they are just not like us, with their murky skin and garlic-breath, is that what you are saying? Why would they have to abandon their identity? That is an absurd and shameful thing to demand, and it is designed solely to ensure that muslims understand that you think they are somehow lower than you. We in the West would hardly feel it was reasonable to have to abandon our culture and identity in a similar situation. You are simply being mean and rather despicable.
No, it's their wholesale repression of women, genital mutilation, honor killings, repression of homosexuals, lack of belief in separation of church and state, the use of amputation and execution for the punishment of religious crimes.
On those subjects, you're absolutely right -- anyone who believes women are second class citizens, essentially property, I do believe is lower than me. Those are medieval beliefs.
I also value the separation of religion and state and believe that religion has NO role in the operation of the state, and I hold anyone who would believe that fantasy beliefs in a mystical being should play a role in governance to be lower than me, especially when said beliefs are to be backed with the killing authority of the state. Again, this is a medieval mindset, a primitive outlook on par with gladiatorial contests, crucifixion and human sacrifice which has NO PLACE in the modern world.
Those are the beliefs and attitudes I expect to be abandoned when adopting citizenship in the modern, liberal west.
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The cost of the refugee crisis is orders of magnitude lower than what is needed to keep funding universities as they were previously. It's also an acute problem, where as university funding is every year.
The cause of this is the desire to run a budget surplus. That generally excludes short term costs like dealing with refugees. It's pointless saying "we will lay off 1000 people this year because some refugees arrived, and then once they are settled in a few years we can just hire them again". Governments bo
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You're probably confusing Finland and Norway...
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A basic income would fix that problem.
So true! When there isn't enough economic activity to generate the jobs that would make things like expensive university programs easy to afford, the best plan is definitely to spend more money you don't have (massive debt!) in order to just hand it out without any connection to productivity (inflation!). Excellent idea.
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Easy to afford? You mean free? (Score:2)
make things like expensive university programs
Ok... 95.9% free. AND you have to provide your own food, water, living quarters, underwear... [studyinfinland.fi]
What, no AI? (Score:2)
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This is Finland - even the 3D printed robots think it's too dang cold!
Clearing off administrator-barnicles? (Score:5, Informative)
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It's the professors that cut up their portion of the budget and they have been starving anything they could before even thinking of touching their own, their research or their assistants.
As a result we have more tenured professors now than we had 7 years ago but a lot less support personnel.
At the same time government (who provides the majority of our funds) is pushing us to provide more "flexible education" an
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The cuts do affect core staff. If they need equipment setting up, they will have to waste their own valuable time doing it instead of doing actual teaching. They will have to take over administration of their classes, instead of doing actual teaching. Support staff and administrators serve an important function sometimes.
But what about the Basic Income?!?? (Score:3, Insightful)
A few months ago we were told that Finland is doing so well that everybody is going to get a basic income...
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/10/31/2125226/finland-begins-to-shape-basic-income-proposal [slashdot.org]
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Let me correct you:
A few months ago we were told that Finland's pre-existing welfare system could be overhauled into a guaranteed basic income, and save money in the process.
The welfare costs are already there. Guaranteed basic income reduces the administrative costs by removing the need for the government to investigate and decide whether or not you deserve the money; thus either allowing the government to save money or increase the overall welfare payout to citizens without increasing any taxes.
Citizens come last (Score:5, Insightful)
In 2015 Finland accepted 15,000 more asylum seekers at a cost of EU 15,000 per head. That works out to EU 225 million *more* in 2015 due to some legitimate asylum seekers mixed in with a lot of opportunistic economic migrants:
http://sputniknews.com/europe/... [sputniknews.com]
Imagine if a portion of that money had gone to existing citizens instead - and the asylum seekers kept closer to their point of origin while receiving the other portion for their care - it's cheaper to help them closer to their point of origin, like in a neighboring country.
Too bad the politicians and bureaucrats in the West always consider their own citizens and tax payers last when deciding where to spend money taken from those very same tax payers.
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Imagine if a portion of that money had gone to existing citizens instead - and the asylum seekers kept closer to their point of origin while receiving the other portion for their care - it's cheaper to help them closer to their point of origin, like in a neighboring country.
Watch out, or the "progressives" will start calling you a Nazi, or Hitler, or xenophobic, or whatever other hackneyed, overused, erroneous label they use these days in an attempt to terrorize good people into complying with the agenda of the globalists.
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Yes they get to keep their own language, medical care, education, traditions, faiths going and are ready for the very short trip back home when hostilities cease.
A common climate and then the NGO"s can help with rebuilding that nation in need in a very direct way.
No funds are then just wasted on very
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So basically create a new Palestine and it will all work out better at least until we lose interest or their makeshift government become corrupt and waste the funds?
There are problems with all the scenarios.Even putting boots on the ground and removing the threat causing the refugees will have long term issues whether we are successful or not.
Re:Citizens come last (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if a portion of that money had gone to existing citizens instead - and the asylum seekers kept closer to their point of origin while receiving the other portion for their care - it's cheaper to help them closer to their point of origin, like in a neighboring country.
It's a little more complicated than that. The point of foreign aid is not just to feel good about helping others, it's a National Security prevention measure. You can let other humans rot, and all they will do is find a way to kill you and take your stuff. Or you can try and help them out of a hole and hopefully they'll leave you alone, or even better become prosperous enough to buy your products and boost your economy.
There is no cheap option, you either lots of money, or a lot more.
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I agree. But my point was that Governments care less about their own citizens then about 'virtue signalling' to foreigners. Here we have an article about native Finns being put out of work at a university, due to hard economic times, meanwhile the Finns are spending large amounts of money on importing foreigners, rather than helping them closer to home. This is madness.
I'm not sure what you should expect to happen here. The administration of a university shouldn't be micromanaged by the Prime Minister, so the two events shouldn't be connected. It's quite possible (who knows) that the school was massively bloated with staff and needed culling. I noticed most cuts are non-teaching roles, and a good chunk are organic redundancies (ie through staff retirements). It sounds a lot worse than it is.
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This is the situation in Syria and northern Iraq: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl... [bbc.co.uk]
Remind me where the economic migrants are coming from again.
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That's my question to you.
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So, Vladimir Putin, who's used ultra-nationalist sentiment to stir up shit in other former Soviet satellite nations in order to give cover to an invasion, has his personal news agency telling us how much trouble Finland is in because of "refugees".
You do realise there is this thing called "world news" or "international news" that pretty much every non-tabloid will cover at some point?
What are you saying, that his story is biased because it's not from a Finnish site? That the numbers are a made up lie? That asylum seekers don't actually exist because it was reported by Putin?
But you are right. The number are wrong.
From the Finnish government themselves: http://www.migri.fi/about_us/s... [migri.fi]
2014: 3651
2015: 32476
That's 28825 new asylum seekers, not that 150
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"Asylum seekers" is not the same as refugees. A little over 7,000 decisions have been made regarding them being granted asylum.
From your own citation.
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You're right, by your count refugee movements into Europe haven't increased at all by the last few years. So it's all good then due to the pedantic use of english right?
No one cares what refugees are, people care what attempted refugees are, i.e. the people flooding a country to attain asylum. Keep reading my link to find out how much it's costing and the effort (money) involved in determining if one of the 32000 become one of the 7000, which is what the point of the damn article was: people moving between
No way this is even possible (Score:2, Funny)
The staff cuts reflect the government's drastic funding cuts to education, which plays one part in the effort of trying to help the difficult economic situation of today's Finland.
I have it on good authority - years of reading Slashdot posts - that European countries are enlightened, problem-free utopias. Someone must've made a mistake and replaced "America" with "Finland" when writing this. Stupid editors missed it again!
Re:No way this is even possible (Score:5, Insightful)
I have it on good authority - years of reading Slashdot posts - that European countries are enlightened, problem-free utopias.
You mustn't read so good. That's not your fault though, it's the relatively poor education system you have.
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If this is the middle class (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is the EU allowing itself to be flooded with people with few or no skills that will need long term generational support if it cant even look after its own best and brightest?
If a nation is so 'poor' why accept more poor people in who will need funds from a government who cant their own fund higher education?
Time for some national interest and ensuring educational funding is placed above EU policy.
Finland was able to keep the Soviet Union out, time to look after its own funding again and stop wasting limited funds on the EU's rapid population growth projects.
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Because the people running the EU (I'm looking at you, Angela Merkel) have decided the solution to low birth rates is the mass importation of people from other countries. It's cultural suicide. I think they've pretty much realized the whole thing was a bad idea, but where to go from here? The immigrants aren't leaving.
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Because the people running the EU (I'm looking at you, Angela Merkel) have decided the solution to low birth rates is the mass importation of people from other countries.
So what's your solution?
It's cultural suicide.
Interesting. In my experience the most multicultural cities in the word tend to be the most interesting and best to live in.
http://theculturetrip.com/nort... [theculturetrip.com]
I've be to all of these places except Sao Paolo, and all of them were excellent places (except maybe LA, which is more to do with the car oriented sprawl that is very tourist unfriendly)
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Because the people running the EU (I'm looking at you, Angela Merkel) have decided the solution to low birth rates is the mass importation of people from other countries. It's cultural suicide. I think they've pretty much realized the whole thing was a bad idea, but where to go from here? The immigrants aren't leaving.
Sweden is sending some 80,000 back:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme... [bbc.co.uk]
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but where to go from here? The immigrants aren't leaving.
I for one am interested in what will happen this year now that the Netherlands have the EU presidency. They don't appear to be quite as welcoming as other nations which pretty much the first thing said was the biggest topic of 2016 will be to get asylum seeker population under control.
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Why is the EU allowing itself to be flooded with people with few or no skills that will need long term generational support if it cant even look after its own best and brightest?
This has nothing to do with the economic situation in Finland. You're just using it as an excuse to bring up a pet issue.
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Currency speculators, just like most high financiers, are complete sociopaths. They don't have sympathy for anyone.
Oh but they have sympathy for themselves. My observation is that as they get older and realise that nobody will mourn for them when they die, they quickly go into ultra-humanitarian legacy mode.
Closing the fire station (Score:3)
Muslim Syiran Migrants Are More Important (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Muslim Syiran Migrants Are More Important (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, Stupid Finland for not just letting people rot outside of its borders, but trying to do the humane thing, even while in an economic downturn where they (concurrently) have to lay off part of the workforce at a university.
Re:Muslim Syiran Migrants Are More Important (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually that second number is much closer to 32476 for 2015. How many of those are identified as "genuine" asylum seekers and how many will be sent back will be interesting.
A Very Sad Evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
University of Helsinki, my heart cries.
In the US we have witnessed the rise of the "Administrative University".
The Administrative University exists without classes, without research, without service to anyone or anything.
The Administrative University has a state appointed Board of Regents, a President (The Champion of the Board of Regents), Vice Presidents, Vice Vice Presidents, Superior Lawyers, Middle Layers, Submissive Layers, Patent Office Administrative Staff, Provosts, Vice Provosts, Deans.
The Administrative University exists to feed itself.
Teachers? NO.
Classes? NO.
Research? NO.
The Administrative University exists for itself and nothing else because it syphons money from the State and Federal Governments.
The Administrative University exists to uphold the lifestyles of the Board of Regents and Their Champion, The University President.
The Administrative Staff are the human shields to endure the slings and arrows of sexual lawsuits and felony complaints against The
Champion of the Board of Regents, The University President.
Example: The University of Alaska
Ha ha
It's just the Windows admins and helpdesk (Score:4, Funny)
With Linux replacing the infrastructure servers, they're finding they need only one admin per 100 systems, not one admin per 10.
I've actually seen this sort of thing happen....
Euro (Score:4, Insightful)
As in Greece, Spain, Italy, etc etc., the inability of the economy to recover is the consequence of adopting a currency that is run to benefit Germany instead of your own country.
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Re:This would n'er happen to a government-run coll (Score:5, Insightful)
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I like the use of "park rangers" as an example. If you want real examples of non-productive tax-payer funded jobs... you're looking at the millions of useless admin jobs/managerial posts in the civil services. Most of them women. Most of them flexible working/job sharing/endless maternity leave. All of this, in turn, propping up an HR industry that again multiplies up the costs and useless jobs.
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Well, not the ones in the green suits. But I've heard the one in the pink suit has done well for herself.
Re:This would n'er happen to a government-run coll (Score:4, Interesting)
The Scandinavian countries are quite pragmatic when it comes to solving problems. Sweden did a turn towards the right in 2006 which served them very well. Finland will do something similar.
See, Finland is not that pragmatic. That's the main problem actually. The country has failed to perform the necessary agile moves, the ones that neighboring countries like Sweden and Estonia have done. We Finns just stand with mouth open and mittens in our hands, stare into the horizon and say "Gee, I guess we could do something about the problems. But not right now. And there are many regulations preventing change anyway, and we cannot quickly change those regulations either." There is a lot of the classic 1970s conservative old world stiffness still present. However, right now a lot of confidence has been placed on PM Sipilä [wikipedia.org] and his government, so we'll see.
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And, by the way, we here in the labour force call those "acquired benefits" actually "compensation for working".
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See, Finland is not that pragmatic. That's the main problem actually. The country has failed to perform the necessary agile moves, the ones that neighboring countries like Sweden and Estonia have done. We Finns just stand with mouth open and mittens in our hands, stare into the horizon and say "Gee, I guess we could do something about the problems. But not right now. And there are many regulations preventing change anyway, and we cannot quickly change those regulations either." There is a lot of the classic 1970s conservative old world stiffness still present. However, right now a lot of confidence has been placed on PM Sipilä [wikipedia.org] and his government, so we'll see.
I see from your comment that you apparently approve of the government's actions. Fair enough, I just disagree. However, your statement about the confidence placed on the PM could be just a tiny bit more accurate... PM Sipila's approval ratings have plummeted from 60% (June 2015) to 36% (Dec 2015). You simply cannot call that "a lot of confidence".
Re:This would n'er happen to a government-run coll (Score:5, Informative)
Organizational downsizing and layoffs are inevitable. The difference is that these people get to keep their national pensions, will receive at least 700EUR/mo in basic allowance even if they're not qualified for unemployment insurance, and if they are, as they are likely to be, up to 85% of their normal pay for up to a year while they try to find a replacement job. Then there is the normal array of services, should any of them run into real difficulty. It's much more manageable than what you'd get in a third world hellhole like Arkansas.
Troll smarter, not harder next time.
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Re: This would n'er happen to a government-run col (Score:2)
Their debt is still lower than many of the developed nations including the US.
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But they can't print their way out of debt like the US - they are in the Euro.
Re:This would n'er happen to a government-run coll (Score:5, Informative)
This would never happen to an institution owned by the benevolent government of a nice, progressive country with constitutional protections for earning a living wage. Oh, wait...
The problem is that our government is far from benevolent. This is the most hard-line capitalistic government during the entire history of the Republic of Finland. This government has made it its mission to completely dismantle every remnant of the welfare state and turn Finland into a tax haven for the rich. The "difficult economic situation" is merely a pretext.
I'm veering off on an off-topic tangent, but the fact is that almost all economists, when asked by the press, have stated that the measures taken by the current government only worsen ad prolong the situation.
fine let's just replace it with loans at 7%-15% (Score:2)
fine let's just replace it with loans at 7%-15% and no chapter 11 or 7.
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TFS says:
75 are teaching and research staff and 495 other staff.
So a few are teachers and researchers, but MOST are useless administration and "overhead".
Could be a lot worse. Could be a little better, but it's almost the opposite of your claim that most of those being cut are the people actually serving the direct function of the university.
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Sounds like the other 495 are the groundskeepers, librarians, technicians, and support staff, not administrative staff.
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As a member of a different university's "other staff" let me tell you what these jobs usually are:
Secretaries, Logistics, IT, Equipment operators, Cleaning, Security. You know the jobs with the lower wages.
They are cutting wh
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>The country has lost what were its only significant export products for several years: the mobile phones of Nokia.
Thanks Microsoft.
It's totally not Microsoft's faults that no one wanted to buy the phones that Nokia wanted to be able to keep selling, but for which there was pretty much zero market.
If you disagree, you are welcome to go into the dumb-phone market with your own investors, and I happen to know a country where you could locate your company, with a reasonable expectations of being able to hire a bunch of unemployed dumb-phone engineers on the cheap...
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You realize Nokia was selling smartphones since 2002, long before Apple released its first iPhone in 2007, right?
I realize they were marketing feature phones as if they were actually smart-phones in order to try and rehabilitate their primary product into a product that the market was willing to buy.
You realize a feature phone isn't a smart phone, and Nokia didn't start selling the Nseries until April of 2006, right? And that they were still predominantly a dum phone selling company, even after that point, right?
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You realize they were selling the 7650 in 2002, with a 32 bit ARM9 CPU, able to run fullfledged applications like email programs and java based arbitrary applications, right?
Nokia was doing smartphones back before Apple even entered the business.
The 7650 was retconned into being called a smart phone. It was not in fact a smart phone, even though it had a 600 Euro price tag, because the JNI's were not there for the Java "apps". You could write/play games, and not much else. 3.6M of memory is not a lot, especially if you are running a JVM, since they tend to be "forgetful" about giving memory back.
But nice try.
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That what helped Apple to stand out the crowd was much stronger marketing muscle (started to grow in the 8 bit computers era) and making no trade offs for crappy hardware like caring about running on systems with 4 MB of RAM. In long term it helped making them look like a quality and luxury brand. (Same applies to Apple vs Windows).
No, what made Apple stand out is that the platform itself was very, very, very compelling.
People wanted to program for it badly enough that they were willing to jailbreak the devices using systemic exploits to do it, and then work on developing an SDK for it, to the point of reverse engineering the APIs for all the frameworks on the thing, and then making modifications to the scratch register usage in the compiler, because Apple did not use the standard (at the time) ARM ABI or calling conventions.
Jailbreak
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"Totally News for nerds...."
It would be if we were to 3-D print the free money.