As an Icelander who follows things at home quite closely, I'm telling you you're in for a disappointment. Things are not going well.

Unemployment is still high, about 7.5%. Our currency has fallen (and we live with currency controls), so wages here are now among the lowest in the OECD (software engineers now earn about 400000 ISK/month, ~2000 GBP, before income tax (38.5%)) and the prices of imported goods has skyrocketed (and we import almost everything). The price of our exports go up, so the large fishing companies and their owners benefit, and Iceland's government gets foreign currency to pay off its huge and debilitating foreign debt (interest payments alone amount to about 1/4 of government income).

Almost all household debt in the country is price-indexed (!!! -- an almost unique situation). E.g. the war in Libya increased oil prices == more expensive gasoline, which raises the Icelandic CPI and so everyone's loans go up. It's a crazy system. Many Icelanders struggle under overbearing debt, which can only become worse.

To put it bluntly, Iceland's financial woes have been very firmly placed on the working people of the country. Just because we refused to pay the Icesave debt, it doesn't mean that everything is well. A

You, sir, make some excellent points.

Who cares? Thomas L Friedman is an obnoxious windbag mostly famous for being wrong about pretty much everything.

"As for Iceland, yo do realize the country went bankrupt because they insisted on having state controlled banks and made laws against larger international banks being owners/part owners"

This is complete and utter nonsense. The Icelandic banks Kaupthing and Landsbanki were privatised in 2003. They consequently became huge, borrowed vast sums of money and then crashed, tanking the Icelandic economy. Now they've been taken over by the state, and ordinary taxpayers are made to fork out to cover their private debts, much like in the UK and USA. No, Nordic welfare socialism is certainly not to blame for the state of the Icelandic economy. On the contrary, the reason the Icelanders are fucked now is because of their experiment with neoliberalism and mass privatisation -- an experiment that the next couple of generations will have to pay out the nose for.

Mod this UP!

Windows refused to install in those cases?

I very much doubt that online games can ever provide any decent economic modelling. The things that make most people risk-averse in the real world are largely mitigated online.

It may be terrible to lose your character or his equipment in the MMORPG universe, but you'd have to be pretty far gone in order to feel the same way about that as you would about losing your job / house / car.

"... Doubled the number of customers for its product. This was only a century or two ago"

I very much doubt that it was "only a century or two ago." I don't think many women removed their body hair in 1800, or 1850, or even 1900. More likely, it was a marketing gimmick in the post-war years, when Edward Bernais got up to his clever tricks.

The popularity of the stick-figure female model built like a boy in early pubescence is due to the prevalence of gay male designers in the fashion industry. They like skinny young boys, and so they want women to be as close to that ideal as possible. That, at least, is my theory.

In theory, the government could assert direct control by passing special laws to that effect.

However, it is usually considered a bad idea to have politicians directly running and controlling state-owned companies. Tends to foster corruption, although in this context all talk of worries about corruption is pretty ironic. The whole bloody system was corrupt, and pretty much everybody was in everybody's pocket.

When one talks of the "Government", one usually has in minds the upper echelons of the executive, not the petty beaurocrats and officials that make the whole battery work. These are usually collectively referred to as "the State." For example, we change our government regularly, every time somebody new gets elected into power, but the State (i.e. the aggregation of individuals that keep things running) stay mostly the same.

In this context, it is important to distinguish between the "State" and the "Government." If you were arrested for drunk driving by an ordinary policeman, you would hardly say that the Government was arresting you.

The government *as such* is not censoring anything here. Kaupthing Bank is. While Kaupthing is now owned by the state, it is not controlled directly by politicians.

Kaupthing wasn't state-controlled at the time these transfers were made. And the figures are genuine. In 2004, I remember reading Kaupthing owned assets worth 4300 billion ISK (about 60 billion USD at the exchange rate then).

Icelandic courts don't use the jury system.