Only slightly bent

It’s no secret that TeliaSonera isn’t doing too well in Finland, so they recently made some interesting changes in an attempt to improve the situation. These include raising the call prices significantly, especially for short calls. Now that’s a surefire way to get more customers, right? I think they were trying to hide the price hike by announcing a set of 3G services (like a mobile TV-pilot) at the same time, but as predicted, all the media is focusing on is the hike in call prices.

Finland recently announced that it will allow subsidizing of 3G-terminals, and Elisa, Saunalahti and Sonera were quick to announce their plans. While the plans have been introduced on the companies’ websites and many blogs, I thought it’d be interesting to do a comparison. So let’s take a hypothetical 3G user, who could be characterized as a power user. He/she is looking to get a new phone along with the subscription and doesn’t mind the 24-month contracts. The N70 seems to fit the bill quite well, so that’s the chosen phone. The monthly usage of our hypothetical person is the following:

• Normal voice calls: 450mins / month
• Video calls: 50mins / month
• SMS messages: 100 SMS / month
• MMS Messages: 30 MMS / month
• Data usage: 100 MB / month (optional)

So how do things pan out among the three operators? Check out the table below which lists the total cost for the 24 months, including the N70 terminal:

NOTES: the Sonera prices do not take into account the call start fees of 4.9 cents per call, nor do any numbers take into account the minimum call charges. Also, the data plans were the cheapest available for 100MB of monthly traffic – Sonera and Saunalahti offer a 100MB/month packages, while the Elisa package is the unlimited package.

I think the verdict here is quite clear: TeliaSonera’s offering not only feels bad, it is bad. And I tend to disagree with TS’s Rautalinko who claims that users don’t want packages – never underestimate the consumers’ desire to prevent surprises in the phone bill. And in addition to that, the Saunalahti plan in question here is essentially an unlimited-everything plan at 3,000 minutes of calls & 3,000 videocalls and SMS+MMS messages each.

As March is starting to reach the final days, the lengthening and increasingly sunny days herald the arrival of spring and the collective mood of the nation is beginning to rise from the depression of the wintertime. While we still have lots of snow on the ground, its amount is slowly starting to decrease. But regardless of the situation outside, April is called spring in my books – so it was time to put together a Winter photo album. Below a couple of samples:

More photos at the Photo gallery-section under Helsinki winter 2005-6.

“Nothing too touristy”, he says … in a place that doesn’t have any tourists

I was at the Helsinki tourist information picking up some maps and while there, I overheard a tourist asking for restaurant suggestions. He said that he doesn’t want anything too touristy, that he’d wish to avoid all the tourist crowds. Tourists crowds? In Helsinki? In March? Now that’d be something!

And it was then that I realized one thing I like about Helsinki – there are no places that can be immediately branded as “touristy”. There are no “menu turistico”s in restaurants. The locals are everywhere and eat everywhere. But of course, the poor tourist couldn’t have known that – thankfully wherever he went, he probably found what he was looking for.

Could it possibly move any slower?

The world’s slowest-revolving revolving door can be found in East Pasila, at the end of an indoor corridor that starts near the Pasila railway station. I rarely lose patience with things like doors, but this thing sure is annoying. Its head-spinning speed really makes you want to push it, which of course causes another amazing phenomenon: it slows down even more. (While the thing on the right is actually a photo of the revolving door, it might as well be a video. You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.)

Expending energy creates energy

It’s counter-intuitive, but it works. One of the weirdest things in life is that when you feel tired, when you feel like you lack energy, the best treatment for the condition is to expend energy – that is, exercise. There are few things more invigorating than exercising after a hard day at work.

Sure we’re open on Sundays.. oh wait, no we’re not. Hey come back, yeah we are!

As a rule, stores are closed during Sundays in Finland. Except, of course, in the summer. Oh, and before Christmas. And let’s not forget all the special occasions (like openings) when they’re allowed to be open on Sundays also. But it’s just damn confusing – I really fail to see why opening hours need to be regulated at all. Let’s just let the stores (or even malls) decide when they want to be open and when they’re going to be closed. In the summer you become accustomed to everything being open on Sundays, just to find out in the fall that they’re suddenly closed again. Same thing happens in December. It’s just annoying.

The white stuff that refuses to melt

Okay, so I’ve been happy and mad about the winter lately, but now that we’re approaching April, I would hope that the white stuff that’s still all around would get the drift and melt away for the season. Face it, your time’s over. See you at the end of the year.

Now let’s have the above-freezing temperatures back, ok?

You know, you could clean more often than once a year…

As spring arrives to Finland (which, again, it hopefully will soon), we again have to deal with the sand, gravel and stuff thrown on the streets during the wintertime to keep us from slipping all over the place. Now, the way this is usually done is that sweeping machines will come and clean the streets. So far so good. But they only come once, and in order to get most of the sand, they only come once every last bit of snow has melted away! This means weeks and weeks of living with the sand and dust everywhere, creating a terrible air quality. In downtown Helsinki, they sometimes spray water around just to keep the dust from suffocating people. In some other places they have heard that you can actually clean the streets more than once a year, so why not try it here? Clean the street as the snow melts, not once when the snow has melted. And it wouldn’t hurt to sweep them a few times during summer, too.

Rogue Nation: American unilateralism and the failure of good intentions by Clyde Prestowitz has to be one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read and should be mandatory reading for everyone wishing to understand the global role of USA and how it executes its policies – and how both the policies and their execution are sometimes fatally flawed. Books and opinions critical of USA are not exactly in short supply these days, so it’s worth saying a few words about the author and why he should be listened to. Prestowitz describers himself as follows:

In fact, I am an unlikely person to write this book. The product of a middle class, conservative, rock-ribbed Republican, superpatriotic, born again Christian family, I attended Swarthmore college where, in reaction to the reigning liberal (some would say pinko) orthodoxy of the campus, I founded the college’s conservative club.

His subsequent experience as a diplomat in U.S. embassies, in multinational companies and in the Reagan administration and most recently in a non-profit “think tank” make for a rather convincing background – on top of that, the book is exhaustively researched with hundreds of references for the facts.

Rogue Nation basically reviews American international politics and relationships over the past decades, focusing on the latter part of the 20th century, attempting to explain the reasoning behind each decision and their eventual consequences. While there are many genuine successes of the US foreign policy and intervention, many failures are highlighted and analyzed. While it may be tempting to think that the current dislike of the USA is thanks to the current administration, it’s enlightening to realize that the roots of the mistrust go back much longer in history; it’s only the current administrations actions that are finally beginning to lower the water level of the global goodwill-reservoir towards Americans to a critical level. Still, one cannot escape the feeling that the Bush administrations have done much more harm to the country (and, indeed the world) than the Clinton period. That doesn’t mean that the Clinton administration was without faults; one clear failure from them was ignoring the Asian financial crisis and yet moving heaven and earth to save Mexico when their economy was threatened by an immediate crisis.

To mention just a few of the memorable events highlighted in the book, some excerpts below:

• In 1998, one of the up-until-then most successful hedge funds, Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) began to “hemorrhage money as if from a fire hose.” This was not peanuts, considering there was more than $1 trillion in the fund. What happened next was a good example of how financial liberalism is not a good thing – at least when the world doesn’t function according to your computer models:
  

  This was, of course, bad for the LTCM and its investors, but it had some other people worried too. One of them was Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve system and the most imporant central banker in the world. A disciple of the extreme libertarian novelist Ayn Rand and high priest of the virtues of unfettered markets, Greenspan had assured the U.S. Congress in extensive testimony that there was no need to regulate hedge funds like LTCM because as professionals they knew the risks and were prepared to accept them. But now the risk staring Greenspan in the face was the collapse of the whole global financial system. LTCM had borrowed so much money and placed such risky bets that if it collapsed it threatened to take major banks and perhaps the system itself with it. Faced with that risk, Greenspan blinked and organized a bail-out of the LTCm. In effect, he too imposed capital controls, and in doing so he probably saved the global financial system.

  The irony of the situation aside, it’s another example that shows how vulnerable the global financial system actually is.

• Peak oil is on everyones lips these days and the U.S., as by far the biggest consumer of oil, is a key to pushing back the peak so that we have time to develop alternative energy sources. Calls for Manhattan-project style alternative energy efforst can be heard more and more – and such a project is indeed long overdue, but a lot can be done immediately. Unfortunately, it seems that to some, conservation is a swear word. Cheap energy is considered as the birth right of every American and the illusion of cheap energy is maintained by all means necessary. Yet, it’s an illusion that is bound to crash with reality someday soon.

  One enlightening example is that if the U.S. had the same energy efficiency as the EU, it could do completely without oil imports;

  This would cut $100 billion a year off the U.S. trade deficit, stop the flow of U.S. money that gets recycled through oil-producing countries in the Middle East to fund terrorism and the spread of radical Islam, and greatly reduce the need for U.S. military deployments in the Persian Gulf. These deployments, which cost $60 billion annually, raise the real cost of Gulf oil to about $200 per barrel. Many observers around the world wonder why America isn’t more serious about conserving energy purely in its own interest. As I will explain, the reason has to do with our love of personal freedom. But the price of that independence is a dependence that has made us vulnerable. In turn the vulnerability has led to war, destruction, and death, and finally to a hint of soul searching.

• The Kyoto deal is given a whole chapter of coverage and is another contrast that doesn’t quite add up – U.S. as the inventor of environmentalism is now viewed as the enemy by much of the world. It turns out Bush can be considered the villain here (too):
  

  As one State Department official told me, “The Bushies think environmentalism is where all the commies went after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They hate ‘em”. Second, Bush didn’t believe the science on global warming and really thought the Kyoto measures would hurt the U.S. economy. His economic advisors were from the supply side and the aluminum industry. Third, Bush had made campaign promises to the coal, power, oil and steel companies in order to win critical states like West Virginia. Now it was payback time.

• As it turns out, Kyoto isn’t the only important treaty U.S. has not ratified. It seems that the treaties involving the International Criminal Court, ban on landmines, non-proliferation, cotton, small arms, antigenocide, status of women, ABM and chemical weapons and relationships with the UN, North Korea, Israel and even the EU are some of things that are very problematic for the U.S. Not exactly role-model behaviour there.

In all fairness, the book is not about bashing the U.S., but about understanding how the country got to where it is now and how it could take a better course in the future. Not everything U.S. has done has failed, but too many things have. If you’re at all interested in globalization, the global economy, America or its foreign policy in particular, I can highly recommend the book. While very enlightening for the rest of the world to read, this should really be mandatory reading for Americans – maybe they would understand why the actions of their country are not appreciated as much as they might want to. As was mentioned throughout the book, the people of many (or even most) nations actually like Americans, the people, but they strongly dislike the actions of the country and the government (a sentiment split that I share). If this helps change the system so that wealthy special interest groups wouldn’t have so much power in American politics, a lot of good could come out of this.

Meanwhile, U.S. has again raised its debt limit to almost 9 trillion dollars.

If this isn’t an endorsement for file-sharing, I don’t know what is

Iltalehti, one of the tabloid newspapers in Finland, was caught downloading the “Finland special”-Conan O’Brien show from P2P networks. What’s notable here is that they unquestionably did it for profit, something that’s a clear no-no in the new copyright laws. So when one of the biggest newspapers of the country can get away with “illegal” for-profit activity, what exactly is the message this gives to consumers?

The message is, by accident, the correct one: that the new copyright law is a joke. This whole debacle in Finland has done nothing but create a lot of badwill towards certain industries, depreciate the law by creating laws that are unpunishable and unenforceable and confuse the heck out of ordinary citizens. I wish the government would have have the guts to put some sense back into the law so that this mess could be straightened out. I’m not holding my breath though. Some informative sites about the topic (in Finnish): [Olenrikollinen.org], [tekijanoikeus.net] and [EFF Finland]

What, you’re not supposed to cook in the kitchen?

I seriously think the standard kitchen range hood ventilators in apartment buildings are severly underdimensioned. Try flambéing a simple steak. The fire alarm, which is some 15 feet away, seems to notice the quickly passing half a meter-flames almost immediately and lets you know, loud and clear, that it thinks you’re doing something you’re not supposed to.

I so need a real kitchen.

How right they are…

Helsingin Sanomat had an article about sweet potato some days ago. In the article they mentioned (translation mine):

Bataatti on tärkeä viljelyskasvi kehitysmaissa, joissa tuotetaan pääosa maailman bataattisadosta. Suomeen tuodaan bataattia muun muassa Israelista.

Sweet potato is an important crop in developing countries, where the majority of the worlds sweet potato is produced. Finland imports sweet potato from, among other countries, Israel.


Whether they meant it or not, the implication is quite clear