So what, if anything, is different in Australia, using my previous home countries Finland and United States as the comparison points? The usual disclaimers about these all being incomplete, generalizations, personal non-scientific observations, YMMV etc apply. (Note that I’ve made a couple of additions to the list later on, preceded with the addition date)

Business & infrastructure

• Australian businesses are a curiously risk-averse bunch. Curiously because there’s lots of grassroots innovation and invention going on, but you wouldn’t believe it if you looked at just the enterprises. It is partly because of this that has led to a situation where many areas of technologies are, as many expats and foreigners often note, “behind” in Australia compared to other parts of the world. This is not a universal feature, however – in the area of mobiles (devices, services, even networks to some extent) and usage of social networking tools I would argue Australia is ahead of Finland, the self-proclaimed leader of mobility until some years ago. Of course, Ground Zero for mobile and social stuff is still San Francisco.

• There are lots more small businesses here than in Finland; it is evident right down to the streets, with countless lively suburbs filled with small businesses. At least in Melbourne, there are not many strip malls to speak of, but there are many, many wonderful small suburb centers with all the services provided in an almost quaint fashion, starting from the butchers to fish shops, flower shops, fruit shops etc. Not that Australia is immune to people shopping online or at supermarkets; most book stores have gone under and many smaller shops are under pressure, but at least they’re still there unlike in Finnish suburbs, let alone American suburbs. I consider these relatively distributed and localized economies to be extremely positive and important. The distributed nature applies to sectors such as health care as well, with many GPs and even specialists practicing at their home offices or at small medical centers that are dotted everywhere.

• What’s more, there are many small businesses who are completely happy being small and profitable. While many do aim for continuous growth, there is also a clear feeling that there are many small businesses who are completely content as they are – small or smallish and profitable, with no need to drive for continuous growth. I think that’s admirable.

• Many people like to make fun of Metro, or whoever happens to be the operator of the local commuter train system in Melbourne. It does have its share of problems, but overall the trains work well and so do the trams. News from Finland how VR is failing left, right and center has tempered my critique of the system here, and I would say the public transport system in Melbourne is okay. Obviously it could work better, but it’s a geographically huge city so there’s only so much one can reasonably do.

• Traffic is, in a word, polite. There is next to no speeding (speed limits are enthusiastically enforced) and driving is a remarkably smooth, low-stress experience compared to Finland. Of course there are traffic jams, but bad behavior on the roads is minimal. To exaggerate only slightly, everyone is polite, people give way at the slightest hint, be it for another car or a pedestrian. If there’s heavy rain or fog, people promptly slow down significantly. Contrast this to the Finnish drivers who seem to think it’s fine to travel at 120km/h on icy roads with visibility of 10m and it’s just baffling. Over in Boston, of course, everyone sped and you got used to it. Most of the time that worked well, too, but I suppose sticking to the speed limits does have some safety benefits.

• Housing infrastructure is a different story, however. In short, most houses are built very poorly – there is no insulation to speak of and hence houses are freezing cold in the winter; +15C as winter daytime high may not be too bad, but +15C as an indoors temperature and freezing floors as a bonus is just not right. This is a real shame since there a) is know-how to build properly, it just isn’t utilized and b) it’d be supremely easy to design passive houses given the climate. At least solar hot water heating is common and distributed solar PV generation becoming common as well.

• What houses lack in insulation, they make up for in architecture. Melbourne has some awesome architecture and I also love many of the floor plans with open kitchens and living areas.

• Some businesses, like Australia post, could use a lesson or two in logistics. Packages are always delivered home, which is a good thing because the place you pick them up from when you’re not home to receive them is a logistical nightmare. Let’s just say it’s a minor miracle we have not lost packages in either direction (yet) and that mail usually travels at reasonable speeds.

• There are many more services with home delivery than in Finland; from the numerous regular & organic food delivery companies to niche services like mobile knife sharpening services, it seems you can get pretty much any service home-delivered.

• Child care is, at least where we live, a disaster. Not only is the average quality of child care lower than in Finland, the costs are exorbitant ($100/child/day is the norm) and to top it off, waiting lists for a year or more are also normal.

People & culture

• While there is a sense of risk-aversion compared to Finland (and definitely the USA), failure does not have the stigma it still has in Finland. Much has been done in Finland in recent years to try to emphasize that failure is an inevitable part of innovation and a learning opportunity, but there is a deep-seated negative image of failure in Finland. Australia is not as failure-glorifying as the USA where failure is completely acceptable across the board, but it’s somewhere in between – and this is a recurring theme; in many, many instances Australia places somehow between Finland and the United States.

• People in Australia are very friendly and positive. This is true both superficially through positive small-talk (that I much prefer to the Finnish ways), but also on a deeper level. Having said that, however, it is probably slightly more difficult to establish deep friendships here than it is in Finland, where once you get through the veneer of brutal indifference and impoliteness, the transition into what could be called mateship here is perhaps easier. Establishing friendships with immigrants is probably easier than “native” (even non-aboriginal) Australians. This is of course a complex topic so such generalizations are somewhat dangerous.

• There is racism, but not even close to such an extent as the still sadly common xenophobia in Finland. In Finland, lots of the negative sentiment has to do with the socioeconomic and cultural background of many immigrants to Finland – substantially bigger proportion of the immigrants are refugees than here – but also because immigration is a new thing there. With 30% of Australians having been born abroad, it has been necessary to weed out outright racism or the society couldn’t function. For the most part I believe this has been successful.

• In many respects the Australian society is a more old-fashioned one than in Finland. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good, for example in the sense that people are polite and helpful; good manners are still appreciated and doors are opened for strangers. It’s also bad, for example in the sense that much of the society is structured along the same models and it’s mostly expected that women with children are at most working part time.

• Children are welcome everywhere, and they are treated with respect and friendliness – in Finland you often get the feeling that kids are somehow treated as annoyances and are often personae non gratae in places like better restaurants. Here they’re warmly welcomed and catered for.

• Grassroots environmental awareness is far more visible here than in Finland. This has been “helped” by Australia already suffering from impacts of climate change and being in general a country of climate extremes (in drought/floods etc), hence things like water conservation policies etc have had more time to be established. This environmental awareness is a bit of a paradox, considering Australia is one of the worst greenhouse gas emitters – but people still genuinely care about the environment and live close to the nature.

• The Economist report on Australian people has many good points; for example, I completely agree with these:
  

  Relative absence of conspicuous consumption (and, it has to be said, a certain lack of style in everyday dress); the evident democracy of the beach and the park; the practice of passenger and driver sitting side by side in taxis; the general amiability of discourse; the pervasiveness of a café society based, for the most part, on small enterprises producing their own excellent coffee (Australia, inventor of the “flat white”, has all but seen off Starbucks, which closed 61 out of its 85 Australian cafés three years ago, having found that anything it could do the Aussies were already doing better).

• The language, I must admit, I find occasionally annoying. Not so much the everyday spoken language – which is a mix of British and American English, spiced with heaps of local shorthand expressions and terminology – but written language, as it seems all media outlets spend 75% of their journalistic efforts to coming up with a supposedly funny wordplay-title for their articles. The more puns the better, it seems. Well I’ve got news for the MSM: 99% of it is not funny.

• [added later on Feb 7th, 2012]: jealousy and destructive envy are big issues in Finland; if someone appears to enjoy (particularly financial) success, the natural instinct of a typical Finn seems to be one of finding ways to damage this success – whereas the USA is the polar opposite of this; despite the recent 99%-vs-1% movement, success there is mostly seen as a positive & inspirational thing and something to strive for yourself, too. Australia is closer to the US in this; though there is a phenomenon called tall poppy syndrome in Australia, it’s much less prevalent than related trends in Finland.

• [added later on Feb 7th, 2012]: vandalism is less of a problem in Australia than in Finland. Helsinki is in perpetual fight against ugly graffiti tags on bus shelters, trains, buses etc. Pretty flower installations during the summer are also popular vandalism targets. I have seen very little of that here; there is clearly a better respect of the commons in Australia.

Other things

• The weather, one of the contributing reasons why we ended up moving here to begin with, is great. It is also, however, extremely variable – not quite “four seasons in one day” as the locals like to say, but I grant them two seasons. Differences of 20C degrees in daytime highs within just a couple of days are not unheard of. There are also more extreme weather events – rains are usually shorter and heavier than in Finland, hot periods are really hot, high UV radiation is really high (UV index of up to 12 vs the high of 6 Finland reaches in summer) etc. Still, summer by Finnish standards lasts maybe 9 months of the year, and there’s beach weather to be found from at least 6 of the warmer months. The Economist aptly pointed out in the special report on Australia last year that the weather is “benign and beautiful much of the time, but often by turns scorching, soaking, dehydrating, burning, blowing, parching, cyclonic, cancer-causing and generally destructive.”

• Good availability of a wide range of organic food is one of the best things in Australia. You can find pretty much everything as an organic version and the price premiums are lower than they are in Finland. Food supply seasonality is also much more visible here – fruits are absolutely delicious when they are in season, and many are simply unavailable when they are out of season. Over 95% of the fruit and veggies sold here are domestic. In Finland, where much of the fresh fruit & veggies are imported for much of the year, everything tends to be available year round – but also tends to have a pretty bland taste for much of the year.

• The nature is simply awesome and there’s a lot of variety from deserts to beaches to rainforests to rivers, from flatlands to mountains (well, closer to real mountains than the hills in Finland anyway) and numerous exotic animals.

• Unfortunately there is also a ubiquitous lack of quality that is apparent in many things; from houses that are built in the cheapest possible way to clothes and workmanship (and to child care, as mentioned), the median level of quality in pretty much everything is lower than that in Europe. That’s not to say good quality cannot be found – it can – but unless you go look for it, the average experience is worse.

• There’s lots of variety between the cities; I haven’t visited all the big ones yet, but it seems fairly accurate to compare Melbourne to Boston and Sydney to New York (and Canberra to, oh I don’t know, maybe Columbus Ohio or perhaps Washington DC? ) – the atmosphere and vibe of the cities differs markedly, which is probably a good thing, giving everyone a choice of where they fit best.

• Australia has somehow – whether it is a reality or an illusion, I cannot tell yet – managed to brand its countryside as a “cool”, desirable place. Life in the Finnish countryside never really appealed to me that much, but for some reason moving to rural areas has become an appealing possibility here. Not to the in-the-middle-of-nowhere outback, mind you, but outside the major population centers. Maybe it’s the plethora of organic farms (some of which we’ve visited) or the good quality of the meat and produce, maybe partly thanks to the Royal Melbourne Show or the picturesque scenery when driving there or just a desire to raise kids somewhere peaceful and quiet, who knows.

Finally, I have become much more interested in the theory and practice of raising TCKs, the so-called Third Culture Kids. Plenty of those, and ATCKs (Adult Third-Culture Kids), here. I have somehow always thought of myself as one, but have not paid too much attention to it – now that it appears we are raising TCKs, the topic is back on my mind. It’s a tough and complex topic that I will return to in another post.

The truth, of course, is a bit more complicated and nuanced than just flat-out “yes” or “no”. In some respects Australia certainly is behind – fixed broadband connections, for example, are relatively expensive and slow. With the NBN (of which many abroad are still blissfully ignorant about), that should change quite dramatically in the next few years. Houses are by and large insulated poorly and it remains a cruel fact that I have never been colder in my life than in Australia during winters. Despite the temperature practically never going below +5C or +10C during the day, I have been warmer in Finland in -30C weather indoors than indoors here.

Then there’s the other side of the coin. Mobiles are one good example – having grown up in Finland, I grew up with the expectations that mobiles need to work everywhere, all the time. While the Vodafone network has been experiencing major pains, I have been quite impressed by the Telstra “NextG” network (which btw is a standard HSPA+ network despite the odd name – and for full disclosure, I work for Telstra), as I expected much worse performance and coverage.

But what’s been even more impressive in the mobiles space are the devices – ever since arriving here, the nation seemed to be dominated by iPhones. The iPhone still grabs by far the #1 spot in smartphone sales (which, in turn, make up a bigger percentage of total mobile sales than pretty much in any other country), though Android has made a strong entry over the past 18 months. People in the mobile industry sometimes lament the fact that all attention is now on smartphones, whereas the vast majority of the devices in use are not smartphones. Over in Australia, however, that’s no longer true – the majority of the devices out there are smartphones, and featurephones are practically irrelevant from a future-looking service perspective. And while it may not be a sign of progress per se, I suspect Australia has the largest install base (percentage-wise) of iPhones in the world. That has some interesting implications in terms of service take-up and the kind of services that are developed. It’s safe to say Australia today is ahead in the smartphone adoption curve compared to, say, Finland, the cradle of the mobile phone.

Another aspect is the energy-efficiency and environmental awareness. It’s a very ironic thing that a country where the existing housing stock’s appalling inefficiency (only very recently has respectable energy-efficiency begun to be required from new buildings) leads to enormous waste of energy, a country where most electricity is generated by the dirtiest means possible (coal) and a country that has one of the highest carbon-footprints in the world, still manages to have a much more environmentally conscious vibe to it than, say, Finland. This is of course a generalization, but more people here are more environmentally aware than in most other parts of the world. Maybe it’s because Australia is no stranger to the effects of climate change or adverse climate in general, but the fact that 38% of the global organic food production is in Australia is very telling. Water conservation is taken seriously, Australia led the world in phasing out incandescent bulbs, residential solar hot water as well as PV solar systems are common and Permaculture, what can possibly end up being the most important contribution to humankind’s survival ever, has its origins in Australia.

It’s a paradoxical situation – while there is no doubt that Europe as a whole is more energy-efficient than Australia, the topic of energy-efficiency and environmental awareness is at the societal level taken more seriously here and with greater respect. While, for example, many Finns say they want to support local food production and organic foods, they too rarely put their money where their mouth is – whereas organic farms thrive here, with a great deal of grassroots activity. It’s more of a bottom-up approach here where in Finland people seem to assume the government will take care of these things, a more top-down mode of thinking which at least occasionally is somewhat naive.

But to get back to the point – for foreigners to think of Australia being always a few years behind in everything is a bit dangerous and a bit self-conceited. Certainly the culture is different from that, say, of famously risk-taking America, and definitely one can easily find many things that could use an improvement. Some things drive you downright crazy. But that goes with the territory of living in another culture and it’s equally easy to find counter-examples of aspects that are taken care of better here than in many other places.

The path of information and idea exchange between Australia & the rest of the world should be a two-way road, benefiting all parties involved – and there is plenty of scope for such movement both ways.

I think stores should be allowed to stay open anytime they wish to; hence, I welcome the May-August period when stores in Finland can be open on Sundays. Last Sunday I went to our local grocery store to pick up some fresh bread – or so I thought. Here’s what they had on offer on Sunday evening:



Perhaps I didn’t want bread after all.. Kind of reminds me of the Soviet Union, doesn’t it?

Hmm, wonder what that is… Let’s call it scrambled eggs!

We were in Kuopio last week for a friend’s wedding which was a lot of fun. During our visit, we stayed at the Cumulus Hotel. Without going into unnecessary details – I do NOT recommend the hotel. One thing that we, prior to witnessing the actual fact, thought was positive was that the breakfast was included in the price. Now, hotel breakfasts can often be judged by their eggs – in better places they will make you a perfect omelette just the way you want it. In good places they will at least have decent scrambled eggs and crisp bacon.

In other places they have this:



On the left are the scrambled eggs from Day 1. On the right is the same scrambled eggs dish on Day 2. I didn’t dare look into it on Day 3.. I don’t know about you, but I doubt one can classify pieces of rubbery eggs floating in water or a huge block of cooked eggs as scrambled eggs. Eww!

Luckily it was possible to find good food in Kuopio – more about that in a later post.

So why don’t we put one like, I dunno, everywhere?

Another snippet of Kuopio. It is a common complaint that there are not enough trash cans in the downtown area of any given city. The Kuopio market square, however, hardly suffers from this problem:



That just might be a bit of an overkill, don’t you think?

That logic may work elsewhere, but not in Finland.

Curiously enough, food prices in Finland continue to rise at much higher rates than pretty much anywhere else. In 2008 food prices rose by 10,7% in Finland – a higher rate than any other European country with the exception of Iceland. What’s more, while food prices have recently started decreasing in some countries, food prices in Finland still rose by (what I hope is annualized, the story doesn’t say) an incredible 7% in January of 2009. As an example comparison elsewhere, in the U.S. the food price inflation is currently running at an annualized pace of 1.4%.

Therefore it’s not very surprising that Martti Luukko from The Finnish Consumers’ Association comments ever-so-carefully (translation mine) that:

- Onko nyt jotenkin niin, että kilpailu ei toimisi ihan täydellä teholla, Luukko kysyy.

- Could it somehow be so that competition is not working at full power, Luukko questions.

“Could it somehow” my @$$! Ahh, the beauty of an oligopoly – the story of Finland in so many other areas as well. I have no doubt that there are people even in Finland who go hungry because of this.

Since I’m on a food-related rant here, there are two other issues that tick me off:

Here’s some cheaper food – only you can’t buy any!

There actually are places in Finland where you can find semi-reasonably priced groceries. These are the cash-and-carry wholesalers which there are a few of, but the catch is that for some inexplicable reason, they are off-limits to normal consumers.

I really, really cannot come up with a good reason why this is so so could someone tell me why such idiotic rules are in place?

When the economy packs save money only for the merchant

One of my pet peeves when grocery shopping in normal stores are so-called economy packs. Of many products, there are economy packs available – i.e. larger amounts of the same stuff. Supposedly these are cheaper per unit (liter, roll, kg, whatever) – but the annoying fact is that the so-called economy packs are cheaper per unit in maybe only 50% of the cases. Half the time the stuff in the bigger package, though cheaper per unit to produce and to sell, is more expensive to the consumer.

That’s just deceitful.

Resources:

• YLE: Ruuan hinta kallistuu edelleen (in Finnish)
• Eurostat: Harmonised indices of consumer prices
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index Summary

First, as much as the energy company Fortum is disparaged for their executive pay and price hikes, there’s one nice thing they do: bring some light.

As most people know, light is in extreme short supply in Finland during the winter months. Hence, I was glad to see Fortum once again installing their bright light lamps on selected bus stops. On the right is what the sign says, roughly translated as “Bright Light 3500 lux – recharge some energy from here in the midst of the darkness”. The bright light lamps have actually been proven to help in the seasonal affective disorder which most people suffer from to some extent.

The relative brightness of the light is better represented in the photo below:

Snowfall of 30cm or more during a 24-hour period is, perhaps surprisingly, quite rare in Finland. This situation on the streets and the cars hiding under piles of snow – see below – reminded me more of Boston than it did of Finland. From where I’m now looking at this, it’s so unfair that both summers AND winters were better (i.e. more sunlight and warmth during the summer, more snow in the winter) in Boston.

But that shouldn’t detract us from the beauty of the current situation. Last night Helsinki looked like a winter wonderland, which it rarely does anymore. Even though the melt has already started, it was nice to see this anyway:

Isn’t that pretty? Yes it is. And it’s also enough to fulfill my winter quota for a year, so bring on the summer!

Huh? What do you mean “maybe in six months”?

*sigh*..

Each of the 108 topics gets two pages, written by numerous semi-well-known Finns. The topics are incredibly wide-ranging. Some of them actually deal with genuine innovations from Finland – like Linux, SMS and Xylitol. Xylitol for one is very good stuff in terms of dental health so one would hope it gained wider global acceptance as a sweetener. Some, on the other hand, more describe the society than any innovation therein – topics like Sámi people, NGO proliferation, ice fishing, ice swimming and bilingualism would go into this category.

Some topics are just weird, like “Eroticism in everyday life”. Qué? In Finland? Luckily there are some everyday topics that are rather honestly seen as having a significant cultural impact, like Salmiakki Koskenkorva (from all foreigners’ point of view, interestingly flavored vodka), mämmi and HK Blue Sausage (both food products that, by many accounts, should not be classified as such) as well as Liquorice.

Then there are some topics that must have required some quite creative thinking in order to put a positive spin on them. For example, it is presented in unquestionably positive light that the amount of psychiatric hospital beds was reduced by 51% in just ten years along with increases in outpatient care. I don’t know about you, but I think there are far, far too many patients in outpatient “care” than is good for the country.

Given the messy nature and wide variety of the topics, what is the book good for? Well it’s an interesting collection of stuff about Finland – I myself found it informative, amusing, appalling and interesting. For foreigners the book provides a nice window into the Finnish society, or at least the official truth of it, as a lot of the basic features making up the fabric of the society are discussed. I’m sure it also includes some new tidbits of information for most Finns as well. On the other hand, it does contain some pretty self-righteous material, some of which is funny and some much less so. While you need to take it with a grain or two of salt, it’s worth flipping through.

This has got to be one of the coolest things I’ve learned recently. According to a recent Nature article (see e.g. the ABC story here or last week’s Economist):

One of the more unusual things you can do with a roll of adhesive tape is to take an X-ray photograph of your finger.
[..]
Peeling take from a reel results in a phenomenon called triboluminescence. The breaking of intermolecular bonds that hold the layers of tape together releases energy in the form of light. As the tape peels, the sticky acrylic adhesive, on the back of the tape, becomes positively charged, while the polyethylene roll becomes negatively charged, according to this hypothesis.

How extraordinarily weird.

Speak UP!

What is it with Finns and their sparing of words? I know I’ve brought this up before, but it just never seizes to amaze me how people here consider the following completely normal:
• Elbowing your way through crowds in a bus, a grocery story, department store etc without saying a word. Not a single word.
• Whizzing 1cm past you from behind on a bike without ringing the bell or yelling “on your right!”
• If a bus goes past your stop despite having pressed the stop-button, what do most people do? Nothing, that’s what. Rarely does anyone speak up and ask the driver to, like, stop when he’s supposed to. No, people just continue to ride to the next stop or wherever, resigned to their fate.

Seriously. One would be forgiven to think that most Finns are mute altogether. But unfortunately what it really is is bad manners and disrespect.

The most-broken law in the country

For some years now, it’s been illegal in Finland to speak to a cellphone when driving if you’re not using a hands-free kit. However, there is nothing anywhere to make you think this would be forbidden. If you take a look at the traffic, you’ll soon notice that 10-20% of the drivers are breaking this particular law at any given point in time.

This includes everybody from the hockey-moms to the busy businessmen and road “professionals” like taxi drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers etc. There is conclusive evidence that speaking on the phone while driving is dangerous, though I’m not sure there is evidence that hands-free systems help significantly. In any case, it’s blatant disregard for the law. Kind of like red lights, which don’t seem to mean a thing – or at most, means “hit the accelerator” – for some drivers in Helsinki.

Interpretation 1: we’re living the best of the fall season in Finland right now.

Interpretation 2: the market crash.

I’m feeling ambivalent about both. Here’s – briefly – why:

As for the fall the season, I love the awesome colors but I don’t like what fall as a season heralds. I like the clean, fresh and moist air but I don’t like the inevitable rain or the cold temperatures. I welcome the dark nights and the evenings, but I loathe the darkness’ intrusion into the daytime hours.

And as for the fall the crash, I like the fact that with this, some more people might understand that infinite growth is not possible. I don’t like it that it started from the financial sector or that it’s spilling over that now. I would’ve preferred the crisis to having been caused by the realization of Peak Oil or something similar because had that been the case, maybe the trillions of dollars now being spent in an attempt to stem the crisis could’ve produced some good, tangible results instead of trying to desperately clear up a mess created by financial wizardry-gone-awry.

I like the fact that some of the most absurd salaries in the financial sector will now come down. I don’t like the fact that we can’t get any of those hundreds of millions of dollars back that have already been paid to the executives responsible for this mess. I don’t like the privatize profit, socialize risk-schemes and the enormous consequences they have.

Yes, sunny – this is the time of the year when us Finns are starting to say goodbye to the sun for the next months to come – the length of the day is now shortening by more than 5 minutes every single day here in Helsinki. While there’s still more than two months to go to the worst of it, it’s depressing to realize just quickly the daylight minutes are dwindling.

Luckily I managed to take a few shots outside over the weekend before the storm hit us and stripped the trees of some of the best color. [Click on the photos to get a bigger version]

But we have none of that in Finland. Right? Something that, for a long time, was claimed to be a particularly wonderful and cherished feature of Finland was that the whole society was very much on the same level. Income differences were small and there were no “good” or “bad” areas to live. It was all one big happy family – if somewhat poor, uniform and a bit of an alcoholic one, but one family with a single set of values anyway.

Or so we wanted everyone to believe – not least Finns themselves. Since that illusion was at its strongest, income differences have risen in the past couple of decades and there are the occasional calls that the society is getting too split between the rich and the poor. And no matter what people say of East Helsinki not being a worse area to live in than other areas in the metropolitan area, by many standards it is. There are big differences in the housing prices among different neighborhoods, and there are actual, real-life reasons for that.

Let’s just say that the reasons are not all about distance from downtown or related to building quality and leave it at that.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I don’t want a society where the rich are isolated from the poor. I don’t want to live in a gated community with armed guards, able to only drive out in a huge SUV and feel safe to roam only at my exclusive club, which is what actually happens in some places around the world. No.

But I do want to get rid of – or be separated from – the people whose behavior is a menace to society. Not only the murderers et al but I also want to get rid of those literally blowing smoke in my face, leaving dirty needles around to stumble upon, the parasites who refuse to work but would rather live on social support off of my taxes, spending their lives in a drunken haze shouting at passers-by. First help them. If that fails, force some help on them. If they insist on continuing behavior that is promoting breaking down a society instead of building upon it, I’d rather they do it amongst themselves. Why would any society need to continue to support elements that are, in one way or another, actively acting against it?

All this may make me sound like an elitist *uck who’s totally detached from the realities of life. Let me assure you that’s not the case. I’m not advocating a prison-world, an Orwellian Big Brother-nation where civil liberties and freedom are stifled or a paradise where everyone lives happily ever after. No. And I’m also painfully aware that most people in the world are struggling with much bigger problems than is the topic of this post.

All I want is a world – or, lacking that, just a limited area of the world – where I can walk around peacefully without being harassed, enjoy the evening on my balcony without being surrounded by cancerous smoke, go to the local store without pinching my nose shut because the alcoholics came to get their daily fix of booze, play and walk at the beach and the parks without the fear of infected needles, have my daughter enjoy life without the fear of being assaulted verbally or physically…

Is that too much to ask for in todays world? Or is it just too much to ask for in Finland?

If – and it seems when – there are people who are happy to live their lives in a manner that disturbs and hurts other people, should we allow them to do that? Yes, in fact, we should. But only if we make sure the only people they hurt are the ones that share their values, or the lack thereof.

Now then, what would be the best realistic way of accomplishing this goal of (a more) peaceful, healthy & safe living nowadays? Since higher education goes, on average, hand in hand with taking better care of yourself and leading a healthier life, the best way to do that is to live in an area with lots of other highly educated people. If education also happens to go hand in hand with higher incomes and thus leads to socioeconomically divided neighborhoods, so be it. See if I care. If we can’t get people to behave in Finland, I for one would welcome a class society – but one based on behavior, not family ties, income or social status – with open arms.

Mind you, Finland is still one of the most equal countries in the world by design. I don’t know if it’s the reason for that or a corollary from that, but the people here cannot handle the inequality as well as many other nations, seeing someone better off (whether the target really is better of in reality or only in the beholders imagination) more as a target of hatred, jealousy and sabotage than an inspiring example to strive for.

If an American sees his neighbor has bought a cool new car he’d also want to have, his first thoughts are likely to be along the lines of “Cool car, I want one too – so I’m going to work even harder to get that.” If a Finn sees his neighbor with a cool new car, the likely first instinct is to “accidentally” scratch it with his key.

Which is a healthier approach?

What we need is to extend the No Asshole Rule from corporations to the society.