(Justin)

Tech nerd from Sweden

  • 5 Posts
  • 934 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It would be great to have closer ties to Asia. The concern is the imperialist claims to Taiwan and the whole Xi dictatorship thing. We have already learned what trading with an imperialist dictator does to Europe after Putin. Just blindly jumping into a closer relationship with Xi without a carrot and stick and without building closer cultural ties to the Chinese, Tibetan, and Uighur people, will only backfire for Europe.

    It’s not a cold war, a trade war, or any sort of economic competition thing, it’s just concern over the volatility and human rights issues of dictatorships.

    As an aside, Sanchez is missing the fact that the EV tarriffs were implemented in response to excessive state aid by the PRC. It’s not good for him to promise to drop the tarriffs without committing to more negotiation regarding the EU’s concerns about state aid.






  • Aren’t coops basically democratic condos? In Sweden we have “bostadsrätt” which are condos governed by a democratic resident association. They’re good for democratic control over housing, but they still require a mortgage and they’re still subject to market speculation. Some of the apartments can be rentals, but that still means you have a landlord, just that your landlord is your neighbors.

    Having the city or the state as your landlord seems like it would be more ideal, or at least a balance of coops and public housing.


  • You’re mixing two different kinds of inequality here, The top graph is wealth (aka savings), while the bottom one is income. Wealth is the much harder one to crack, and Sweden actually has much higher wealth inequality than all of the other countries being compared.

    It’s worth noting that one of the main reasons that Sweden has relatively equal income before tax is because of the way the tax system works. Because social security contributions cap out at ~$70k/year, similar to the US, but there is no similar cut off for social security payroll taxes, employers generally pay their employees in dividends and private pensions instead of income, above that $70k level. Taxes are generally flat in Sweden, though.

    - a swede