Swedish postal services suck
Just a quick note, Swedish postal services suck. They are completely retarded to deal with. Since christmas, I’ve ordered 5 packages sent via “Posten”, 4 of those are lost/stolen.
I’ve spent over 8 hours on hold and in phonelines to posten trying to report these different losses etc. If you read this, and use Posten for package delivery, or you are a company sending packages to Sweden, please use another service. A list of the packages that has been lost so far:
1. An Acer Aspire One + extra ram, stolen over 1,5 months ago, still haven’t received payment for the laptop. According to my research, it could be up to 4-5 months before they get their thumbs out of their asses and pay money to me.
2. Electronics, it was delivered to package delivery, but i never got notified, and after 7 days it was returned — packages are supposed to be left for 14-30 days, and you’re supposed to get notified. Elfa was kind enough to repay me in full.
3. Cell phone, it was delivered in Alvesta since posten claims it’s my closest pickup point. For those not knowing, Alvesta is 300-400km away from me. Again, no notification. No payment done in advance.
4. Replacement cell phone, sent over a week ago. Still no notification, possibly gone?
As you can understand, I’m not happy with the services. The only package that I did receive? It was sent with inWarehouse to their own pickup point, 1,5km extra travel to pick it up, but sooo worth it.
The dead horse rebeaten to life – How governments keeps banks alive
So, once again it happens, local governments jumps the bandwagons to save big time banks who have done a crap job at making sound and good business. Once again we have people completely misbehaving, and in general doing bad business, getting their wallets lined with more money from the governments to save them.
Personally, I don’t have a belief in either [political] direction really, but I think that if we are going to make a sustainable planetarian (as opposed to the wordinternational, which always tend to exclude countries) economic system, we need to stop promoting the current scenario with promoted competition and then giving our friends (the loosers) prizes for doing bad choices. This is contra-productive in my humble opinion, and stagnates the market and the players in a bad circle.
We have two diametrically opposite choices planetarian economical systems — in reality, no we don’t have these choices, but to make what I believe is a sustainable planetarian system. I refuse to talk about global economy as we’ve already seen where that leads.
The problem
The world willingly entered (yes yes, I’m beating a dead horse as well) a global economic system during the 1990’s, the leaderships and right wing politicos of countries jumped the possibilities, while citizens and left wing politicos where slightly defiant and backwards, something normally attributed to right wing people. Either way, we entered the system, but only partially. Banks (swedbank, hypo real estate, fannie mae, et al) and global mega corporations (ibm, dell, coca cola company, disney, ford, nestle, et al) are using the possibilities to its fullest, they are no longer national entities, they are everywhere and anywhere and noone except themself has a decent window into the ins and outs of their economical structures. And no, no, no — Nasdaq, SEC, NYSEC, and none of the so called third parties have a decent looking glass into these kind of megacorps. In actuality — the ones who where in some part supposed to be our warrants against misbehaviour, where the ones misbehaving the worst in this round.
National governments and local governments are still living in the local economic system, they know part of what is happening, not even close to everything. They are still regarding banks and other megacorps as local entities, which does good for the locals, and which needs local support in bad times. For examples, look at Lehman brothers, Hypo Real Estate or SE-banken back in the days.
Are they really worthy of our [local] support? As it currently stands, the economical machinery doesn’t work. It’s out of sync with reality, fantasy sums of money are passing around every day in the forms of loans and 1’s and 0’s.
I will pull a weird example from a game I’ve played for quite some time, eve-online (It has it’s own problems, admittedly), to show how numbers can be misguiding. Recently, there’s been a gigantic war between two different factions — GBC and NC. Normally all “kills” are gathered on specific webpages for each alliance, GBC has several alliances, and NC has several alliances as well. Now looking at any one of those alliances killboards for a big battle, you always have the “local“, ie the alliance who owns the killboard, looking as if they came out as the winner of the battle. Now, go over to an alliance on the other side, it looks the same way, the “locals” where winning. In this case, you only get a partial overview of the fight — you get the losses of that specific alliance but none of the others, but since everyone from all alliances on one side are sharing the kills, all the kills are showing up on any one of the respective alliances killboard.
This [eve fights] alone is hard to get accurate numbers on unless you do some serious data aggregation and acquisition, now let’s try to get accurate numbers for a real life company operating in 50+ countries, especially if anyone at any level in that company has something to hide? And if the one who has something to hide, is the one who is supposed to be supervising the market?
Choices
The situation as it looks is untenable, we are currently fighting a fire with fire, and most likely moving problems from one place to another.
There are of course, several different choices imho, but to be perfectly logical, there are a few different changes that must be made.
Choice number one, go liberal. Do not engage in saving the different banks in financial crisis, let them be devoured by bad choices and the strong ones survive. The problem is, how do you make this work on a planetary level? Ie, if the banks in your region are not saved, they get a disadvantage in comparison to banks from regions which have regional support in bad times, hence putting darwinian rules out of the calculation. In other words, a planetary agreement must be reached for this to happen.
Choice number two, go all out socialistic, save the banks, but in return all the banks should either be run in such a way that their own proceeds will pay for either their own demise (Ie., make them pay for some kind of government run insurance, which must reach a zero result over a defined timeline), and also make the figureheads and CEO’s of financial institutions and banks personally responsible for what happens inside their organisation. Make it personally hurt whoever is responsible. This also requires quite a lot of unison between countries as to not provide too much leeway for any one of the banks around.
In summary, something needs to be done about this. Every 15-20 years or so we have another financial crisis due to more and more greed, and mostly it’s about the same type of people doing the same type of mistake over and over again.
Re: “Miljövän rasar mot flygshow”
http://www.gp.se/gp/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=113&a=442174
I need to comment on this news story as it really annoyed me.
I’ve personally grown up with airplanes and airshows very close to me as my father was a pilot, I have quite a few old friends that are pilots, and I’ve always been interested in airplanes and I admit that this might have coloured my perspective very heavily. However, the hypocrisy and bullshit, if you excuse my language, that Lotta Holmberg spews forth is just plain wrong.
Before she even considers throwing stones in her own glass house, she should contemplate how she herself is living. She’s even so mentally deficit as to admit that she hasn’t even stopped her “yearly trip to the sun”. Now, let’s do some really simple math on this.
Let’s consider how many people get anything from a trip with a charter airplane “to the sun”, approximately 200-500, let’s say 400 to err on her side. Average trip time from this country to “a place in the sun” would be approximately 5-6 hours airtime, so a grand total of 12 hours both ways. Split the airtime per passenger, 12/400 which turns into 1.8 minutes per person on the airplane.
Now, let’s consider the airshow. There was a grand total of maximum 6 hours or so of airshows per day, average of 3-4 airplanes in the air at all times (rounding to 4 to be nice to you), so a grand total of 6*2*4 = 48 hours in the air during the whole airshow. 45000 persons visited the airshow and had a great time, making for a total of 48/45000 hours per person and which turns into… tada, a massive 3,84 seconds airtime per visitor.
To make it simple, let’s make the assumption “all airplanes turns out as much green gases as any other” (your charter aircraft is gigantic in comparison and shiny new with perfect green engines (yeah as if, you freakin mooch going with the cheapest 30 year old crap airplanes on the market and still flying commercially), while “mine” at the airshow are very small, but at the same time very old so probably having a bad efficiency with a big exhaust of gases in comparison to their engine size). So, 1.8 minutes = 108 seconds, divided by 3.84 seconds, 28.125x less gas output per person in comparison to your “yearly trip to the sun”.
I got about 50 other reasons why airshows are a good thing and needs to be there, and why you should keep your mouth shut. Please stop throwing stones in a glass house and stop putting your feets in your own mouth.
Now, if you excuse me, I need to visit 420 airshows to use up as much green gases as you have done with your “yearly trips to the sun” — calculated based on you being old enough to have been on 15 “yearly trips to the sun” vs Göteborg Aero show.
British boffins perfect process to make any item ‘100% waterproof’
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/08/27/new_waterproofing_technology_pioneered_by_uk_firm/
This looks cool, damn that has applications from hell. I wish I came up with stuff like that. Well, more than the general idea of “oh, lets make everything hydrophobic”, to the “hm, if we do like this, then maybe we can make anything hydrophobic”. Ideas are easy to get, to actually implement and get an idea on how to do it is harder. Maybe if you’ve spent as much time doing physics and chemistry, as I’ve spent doing computers, it gets easier… “Turn on the flux capacitor Mr Scott!”