> Note that the "homeless" people in Finland are mainly people who refuse to accept support from the social welfare, this is because they prefer to get drunk instead of spending it on food and rent.
When you posted this hateful nonsense, did you think nobody would bring you up on it? Can you provide anything to back up this assertion?
I can see people taking issue with the word "prefer" in relation to getting drunk. It makes the tone of the OP seem dismissive of the fact that by the point you're putting alcohol/drugs before shelter and food you're no longer expressing a preference but rather a symptom of mental illness: addiction, depression, or otherwise.
Without evidence, he stated that all homeless people in Finland are homeless because they would "prefer to get drunk". I don't think it's incorrect to describe this as hateful, because it's very clearly informed by a bias against homeless people rather than any real evidence.
This is the equivalent of jumping into a discussion to say that Black people are poor because they "keep buying cellphones". It's not a serious intellectual comment, it's cloaked hatred.
You do understand that everyone gets social security as money if they need. The problems happen if they are unable to use that money to pay the rent. And yes indeed the main reason is some sort of intoxicant use, as they rather get more stuff than use the money for rent.
Legal debts are also not a reason not to pay rent, as one is protected from repaying them when it's about essentials. So that doesn't count either. As long as you're able to push the pay button in your online bank you use the default system. Only when that's not possible do you fall into the provided housing system. And not surprisingly drug use is a major reason for not pushing that pay button but rather taking the money and using it elsewhere. Does that honestly surprise you? What else could it even be?
That's why we have the second option with food stamps and provided housing. It's not perfect as people elsewhere have stated the obvious "Hey want to buy 20e foodstamp for 10e?". But still they get it.
I'll be happy to retract the "hateful" comment if anyone can provide evidence that "people are mainly homeless in Finland because they would prefer to get drunk".
We use two terms for homeless here. Strictly speaking if we just use the term homeless you're correct. 79% of them are not like that [ARA Asunnottomat 2019]. They're people like students bunking in a friends bed without a valid address or other short term issues, like the social security making a mistake, but they're eventually rectified. This means the homelessness has lasted for less than a year.
21% are long term homeless. And that's what people generally mean when they collegially use the term homeless. That's defined as homeless that has lasted for more than a year and has significant social or health component, such as substance abuse or mental illness. The thing about mental illness is that there is also treatment for them. The solution is different for them as for the substance abusers.
If you ever see a Finn begging it's pretty much always an alcoholic who wants more beer. That's because the mentally ill cannot really beg as they're either receiving treatment or if they have unfortunately slipped trough the cracks of the system they're also unable to beg for any extended period.
As for the scale of this problem. 2019 there were 961 persons listed in the long term homeless category. That's out of a population of 5.518 million in 2019. That's 0.017% of the whole population. Also, even out of them 584 live with someone, just not with an official address. They wouldn't be counted as homeless in US.
The actual amount of people in street on that category was 177. That's 0.003% of the population.
Check out page 845 showing death by alcohol poisoning is 5x higher in the homeless population of Finland than the whole of the country.
FWIW, and anecdotally, my ancestry is Finnish and we are known for having issues with alcohol. The majority of my extended family has drinking issues. Within our Finnish-American community, it’s believed that Finns have some sort of gene that pre-disposes us to drink to excess.
Thanks, but I didn't ask for evidence that "alcohol poisoning is 5x higher in the homeless population", I asked for evidence that "people are mainly homeless in Finland because they would prefer to get drunk."
https://ysaatio.fi/en/housing-first-finland there's no extensive graphs, but this page mentions it briefly. There's also been some freelancer yle documents covering up some homeless people that mainly refuse the social benefits to get more money for their daily drinking. [1]
Cloudef's comment might make it seem like it's predominantly a voluntary decision by the homeless, and I disagree with that. AFAIK most homeless people in Finland do have a substance abuse problem, though.
Edit: What actually might make this more interesting is that this could be how things are regarding homelessness in Western Europe in general, more or less, not just in a single country. I mentioned this in another comment, but AFAIK living in the streets in Finland, and quite possibly in Northern and Western Europe in general, is rather strongly connected to mental health issues and substance abuse problems. That doesn't mean that the homeless should be vilified, as both of those are illnesses and largely not a voluntary choice, but it could be something that's different about homelessness in the U.S. and in Western/Northern Europe.
Uh, no. I'm finnish. You go to social security and they fix you with an apartment. It is mostly due to the decisions of the homeless that they remain homeless.
Homelessness causes suffering which is usually self-treated with substance abuse. This is not a hateful commentary.
I'm not sure how a blanket characterization equates to "hate", when it's a lazy attribution due to indifference. Maybe disdain is the appropriate term.
It ascribes a characterisation to homeless people (that they would prefer to get drunk than have a home) that there is simply no evidence for. The comment blames homeless people for their own destitution purely based on the commenter's preconceived bias against homeless people.
Homelessness causes suffering, which is usually self-treated with substance abuse/use, depending on how you want to play with numbers. Fair enough? That's normal human behavior.
> Next it talks about how businesses profit from this. While true it's also totally misses the point. The economist wrote an article on how the world is vastly underspending on solving this problem.
Is it supposed to make me feel better that not only are we not spending enough on the problem, but what little we are spending is going to line the pockets of Big Pharma instead?
They're the ones actually making the vaccines to solve the problem?? What better use of our money is it than funding and buying the vaccine? How is that "lining their pockets"? If anything they're selling doses for much much more cheaply than people would be willing to pay for them.
It’s necessary to incentivize people to invent and manufacture the vaccine.
It’s amazing to me that we now have a generation coming up that doesn’t know that we—-that is the human race—-tried socialism, really gave it the old college try, and it. did. not. work. For a significant period of time most of the educated people in the world thought it would work. This was not some fringe idea that was never given a fair shot.
(I’m talking here about actual socialism, not welfare capitalism that many on the contemporary left and right call socialism for their own propagandist reasons.)
The current approach used by the NIH is a response to the failures of socialism. The Bayh–Dole Act was passed in 1980 and signed by noted right winger Jimmy Carter.
Advocating for central planning in 2021 is like advocating for NoSQL—-lots of pretty arguments vs the overwhelming weight of real world evidence.
We've never remotely had anything akin to socialism in the US. The USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, yes, absolutely. But neither socialism nor communism were ever used here in the US.
Oxford, the inventors, were originally willing to give the invention away for free. It's the central contention of the article we're discussing. How can you omit that from your argument?
They are only making the vaccine because IP law and a culture that separates research and development allowed them to hoard the utility of publicly funded research.
We are paying off the ransomers we outfitted.
Maybe it's unavoidable this time, but I would sure like to see the system reformed to not get in the bind again.
Finally, taking a step back, US/EU complete reliance on a vaccine is also preventable. See East Asia, where the non-abysmal quarantine would allow a less desperate negotiation with the drug lords.
> Then it switched to being a Chromium based browser in 2013 so they could utilize the Chromium plug-in ecosystem.
Opera switched to Chromium because they didn't consider it profitable enough to keep developing their own engine, and laid off a large portion of their browser developers. It was entirely about money and nothing to do with using Chrome extensions.
To be honest all I think I was really driving at is that he sets the tone in the first sentence that he’s uninformed about what he’s talking about. I kind of get the impression also that he’s trying to be divisive rather than understand the issues at hand. I kind of feel he goes against the hacker ethic on both points ...
> Early roots of neoliberalism were laid in the 1970s during the Carter administration, with deregulation of the trucking, banking and airline industries,[144][145][146] as well as the appointment of Paul Volcker to chairman of the Federal Reserve.[21]:5
> During the 1990s, the Clinton administration also embraced neoliberalism[130] by supporting the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), continuing the deregulation of the financial sector through passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act and implementing cuts to the welfare state through passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.[147][149][150]
You seem to presuppose your claims are de-facto correct; I don't think that is true.
Nope, sorry, not convinced. There’s something askew in your outlook and I think it’s affecting your ability to make your point. I’d suggest reevaluating your fundamentals and going from there. Take care brother
The answer is the left has a long history of opposing globalization, union breaking and neoliberalism in general. In particular the left attacks on centrist democrats embrace of neoliberalism has be vicious. They were the reason why Obama won the primary over Clinton in 2008. And why Sanders showed well in 2016 even though Clinton won. And Clinton despises the left for it.
See the 1999 Seattle WTO protests as an example of the left opposing neoliberalism.
You say "the left" like it is a well-defined thing or a single entity.
Just because those that were further-left than centrist democrats existed and opposed their centrist democrats policies doesn't mean centrist democrats weren't considered "on the left" by a great many people, who would also be considered left of the Republicans at the time.
I've seen no reliable sources make the claim that Parler was built on WordPress. To the best of my knowledge this stems from a misunderstanding, and Parler had a WordPress blog which was compromised, but that is a completely separate system to the main social media site, which is not WordPress.
Self closing tags are perfectly valid in HTML 5 and there's nothing wrong with using them. Even if the parser ignores them, they're still useful for the reader. HTML 5 does not require you to close your paragraph tags either but most people still do it because tag soups are hard to understand.
The citations do not support what you say. Citation [0] says only that excess mortality in specifically the third quarter of 2020 was not higher than previous years. It says nothing about the excess deaths for all of 2020.
Citation [1] is data for 2019, before COVID-19.
Why did you cite these articles and pretend they say something they don't?
In [0] it states that 2020 is an average year in deaths, but only writes exact numbers for different quarters. In [1] it shows averages for the previous years in numbers summing while years up.
I’m getting HTTP error 500 (iOS safari from a Swedish domestic IP) when going to the statistics database - idk if it’s just me or if they deployed something buggy recently. Can therefore only find articles atm, but they are still from the government statistics bureau source.
The first paragraph of [0] says “Den ökande spridningen av coronaviruset i samhället syns ännu inte i antalet dödsfall i Sverige, visar preliminär statistik från SCB” which is English is “The growing spread of Coronavirus in the community is not yet showing any change in the number of deaths in Sweden, shows preliminary statistics from the (government) central bureau of statistics” and I think that states it rather clear.
I do believe you argue in good faith though and welcome corrections - although I still believe in principle it is not right to hinder free people from living free.
> In [0] it states that 2020 is an average year in deaths
It does not.
> In [1] it shows averages for the previous years in numbers summing while years up.
This still has no relation to deaths in the year 2020. You cannot tell anything about deaths caused by coronavirus from data that only goes up to 2019.
> "The growing spread of Coronavirus in the community is not year showed any change in the number of deaths in Sweden"
My translation is "The increasing spread of the coronavirus in society is not yet visible in the number of deaths in Sweden", meaning, "there may be more coronavirus cases than we can tell from just looking at deaths". A significantly different meaning to "coronavirus did not cause any change in number of deaths", which is in any case flatly contradicted by the same article which describes increases in excess deaths in the second quarter.
For what it's worth, I am willing to believe that despite the massive increase in excess deaths in the second quarter, it could be offset by reductions in excess deaths in other quarters. So if you do have data that specifically compares excess deaths for the last few years feel free to share it. Currently you haven't got anything to support your statement.
Is the part we are disagreeing about what “not _yet_ showing any change” means? I doubt hospitals have ten thousand deaths which they procrastinated reporting.
More likely the author meant that November and December is not yet counted, and therefore must add the “yet” to the sentence.
As you say, [0] states that a slightly larger than average number of deaths occurred during Q2, and a smaller number during Q3. It may be a tragedy to die in spring and not in fall, and miss one last summer. Please keep in mind though that the claim you’re responding to was that 2020 the year didn’t see a significant increase in deaths - it was a very average year to die as a Swede.
> Is the part we are disagreeing about what “not _yet_ showing any change” means?
No, it's the meaning of the entire statement. Your translation means "coronavirus did not result in an increase in deaths in 2020", whereas my translation means "the spread of coronavirus may be wider than the number of excess deaths in 2020 indicates". The meaning is wholly different, it is saying something orthogonal to the point you want to make. It says nothing about whether the number of excess deaths is higher or lower than usual, just that you cannot take the number of excess deaths and determine the spread of coronavirus from it.
> Please keep in mind though that the claim you’re responding to was that 2020 the year didn’t see a significant increase in deaths - it was a very average year to die as a Swede.
I am keeping this in mind because I'm trying to point out to you that you have no data for excess deaths in 2020 so you cannot make this claim.
> Your translation means "coronavirus did not result in an increase in deaths in 2020"
That’s simply a lie - you are deliberately taking the “yet” out and replacing “showing” with “result”, which indicates total certainty, from my translation. I am not editing comments earlier in this thread FYI, you know I translated it correctly. “Ännu” means “yet” and “visar” means “showing/shows”. I encourage non-Scandinavians to Deepl translate it; language barriers don’t exist in our age due to machine translation.
Difficult to see much excess death in the UK in the past few months beyond levels seen in the 2018 and 2017 flu seasons.
New lockdowns also seem to be coordinated across the global right now, independent of local conditions. This absolutely seems like a coordinated global action to achieve some kind of strategic aim.
> Difficult to see much excess death in the UK in the past few months beyond levels seen in the 2018 and 2017 flu seasons.
Excess mortality is only just starting to creep back up. It's easy to see that UK excess deaths peaked in early April at a weekly rate nearly 4 times that of the highest pre-2020 peak (2018-01). Ideally, we'd avoid a repeat of that.
> This absolutely seems like a coordinated global action to achieve some kind of strategic aim.
Could said aim by any chance be to avoid running out of hospital beds?
To put it simply, the UK government is continuing a decade of placing their and their friends' financial interests ahead of the interests of the country. Many own properties that are at risk when nobody's going to work, or are indebted to party donors who do. The idea is to put up with people dying (after all, austerity caused the deaths of over 100,000 people in the UK, and that was apparently acceptable) as long as the economy keeps going. Of course this will fail in the long term, and the result will be a collapsed economy and a lot of dead people, but long term thinking has never been a requirement to be a Conservative government.
When you posted this hateful nonsense, did you think nobody would bring you up on it? Can you provide anything to back up this assertion?