Awesome. The poor shall rule the parking lots! I shall reap so many benefits from this scheme. When can it be implemented?
s/b "Suomiptuous" or maybe "Suomiptuary"
The TeX-style quotes seem inconsistent with the voice of the post.
It can be a field on your national ID card, citizen.
You mean on the mandatory RFID chip on your car. No swiping necessary. Also good for other potential scrumptious income-proportional fees such as congestion tolls.
The ultra rich will hire extremely poor people to follow them around and pay for parking. The vehicle will be nominally in the name of some Venezuelan immigrant who picks cabbage for a living. A whole new sector of the economy will arise as companies specializing in matching the rich with carefully screened cabbage pickers are set up. Bounty hunters will have a new line of business tracking down cabbage pickers who have absconded with their master's property. A new specialty in law will develop writing the contracts between the cabbage picker and his master in a way that maintains the nominal vehicle ownership in the name of the cabbage picker while making it a crime to sell the car.
This is the economic stimulus America needs.
The ultra rich will hire extremely poor people to follow them around and pay for parking.
At some point it will become trendy to just tie them to the front bumper a la Road Warrior. Reduces those annoying minor dents and scrapes as well.
20 years later, the effective unit of currency is 1/10000 of income, and I pay $50 for a Walmart T-shirt. Thanks a heap, ben.
I believe I recall that Finland is also the most alcoholic country in the world.
8: I'm pretty sure that's more to do with the weather, than the traffic fines.
Also, not to be trifled with
Nope, not even #1 in the OECD.
10: are the normalizing for alcohol content on that chart?
Yes: "Annual consumption of pure alcohol in liters, per person, aged 15 years and over. Methodology to convert alcoholic drinks to pure alcohol may differ across countries. Typically beer is weighted as 4-5%, wine as 11-16% and spirits as 40% of pure alcohol equivalent."
I have always heard that there is a significant spike in alcoholism rates above the arctic circle all around the globe. The above data doesn't speak to that long-held belief, so nanny-nanny-poo-poo on it.
re: 9
Reading that article, some of the Finnish tactics and Russian losses are pretty impressive. [I'd read a bit before but years ago]
re: 10
These charts never reflect how drunken a population is. Quietly sipping 2 glasses of wine at lunch and dinner gets you pretty high up the table of alcohol consumption but won't have quite the same public profile as drinking all 28 of those units on a Friday night.
I clearly need to go get some eXercise. LATER!
The Finns do love their alcohol. Many take the ferry to Tallinn on Saturdays to buy five-liter boxes of vodka for Saturday night. Boxed vodka! (In mylar pouches.)
15 is right, distribution makes a big difference.
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Illuminating piece on the roots of the financial crisis.
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Actually, just making parking proportional to the vehicle's value would do the trick, as well as being closer in spirit to a sumptuary law, which restricted nice clothing to the first two estates. At some level, the bum shakedown of "I'll watch your car for you" works this way already, as jalopy drivers basically get left alone.
This would happen naturally if parking lot sentinels were given authority to set prices and themselves bid for the right to extract rent from a lot rather than being wage slaves; automating such a system would be a scammy headache. But doing this would transfer power from corpulent office toads to (around here at least) Eritreans and Somalis, so it will never happen, even if these erstwhile pirates of the parking lot would then need to hire locals for security.
14:Always heard that as well. But amount of alcohol consumed need not correspond to alcholism rates. [pwned on preview by ttaM]
It does look like a difficult area to get good data. Here is a 24 page paper on the methodology of doing this:
This article describes some of the methodological problems involved in measuring drinking rates across countries, such as differences in drinking cultures, drink sizes, and measurement instruments. It then reviews the results of various types of studies that have examined drinking rates across countries.
Someone go read it and report back.
Ummm..... there are plane tickets and work visas available for Finland.
This data, however, is rock solid.
Suicide rates, then, thought I? But no: while Finland is 2nd in the OECD countries, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway are all below the average.
And what is Hungary's deal? I propose Finno-Ugric languages as a contributing factor.
For a while last year my wife and I were looking into moving to Finland. Specifically, here. We ended up deciding that being four hours from Helsinki was perhaps a little too isolated, even for our misanthropic tastes.
Let's get this straight: Finland is a Nordic country, as is Iceland.
The Scandinavian countries include Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
But: Next year, Sweden and Finland will be marking the bicentennial of 1809 which saw Finland pass from Swedish to Russian rule.
I really liked Helsinki and thought it might be a place I could live, but I was there in August. I'm going to Iceland in early January (cheap hotel rooms!), which should be interesting.
And why would you be moving to Kuopio, Spike?
Kuopio's pro football team seems to have a Sierran Leonian, a Nigerian, and a New Zealandois. Rovaniemi's, near the Arctic Circle, has five Zambians.
just making parking proportional to the vehicle's value would do the trick, as well as being closer in spirit to a sumptuary law, which restricted nice clothing to the first two estates
I like this one, as it would let people like me, who drive beaters despite having the income not to, off the hook.
20 years later, the effective unit of currency is 1/10000 of income
And you use your fingerprint to pay!
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2008/mar/21/business/chi-fri-pay-by-touch-mar21
30 - I've made the prediction before, but I'm not sure if it was here or on another blog, so I'll repeat it: Within the next ten years someone will have a body part forcibly removed in order to use it to fool a biometric scanner.
IOW, there's no way in hell I'm going to support pay-by-fingerprint. Pay by cock print is also out.
31 is correct. I saw it in "Minority Report". Also it may have been in Nancy Something's futuristic sci-fi kids' novel about Zimbabwe, "The Ear, the Eye and the Arm".
Not to mention Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, in which , IIRC, someone's eyeball was removed for access at CERT.
28: There was a job opening in Kuopio I was eminently qualified for. More generally, my wife has a strong desire to move out of the USA, and that seemed like as good a place as any. I have a similar desire, though less pressing, particularly since the election.
The pay by fingerprint guy was on drugs, and ran a huge Ponzi. Project death by association?
http://www.startribune.com/business/18182694.html
Also, not to be trifled with
Amusingly, the first time I saw a reference to that was in a Car Wars supplement
Finland, 1940 -- The Finnish forces, attacked by vastly superior numbers of Russians, and with a terrible shortage of anti-tank weapons, relied heavily on the Molotov cocktail. This simple, gasoline-filled bottle had been used in earlier wars, but seldom as successfully as by the Finns. In four months of fighting, the Finns used more than 70,000 Molotov cocktails. These accounted for a large proportion of the 2,300 Russian tanks destroyed. Pedestrians today still emulate the heroism of the Finns.
someone's eyeball was removed for access at CERT.
Heck, that's a plot point in Thunderball, for goodness' sake.
http://www.moviefone.com/movie/thunderball/2147/main?flv=1&icid=rbox_movie_titles.M
I don't know about Finland, but Sweden's got very low rates of alcoholism, and they've got the same restrictive alcohol policies (though in both cases, less restrictive than they used to be.
David, you're ruining my anecdotes and invidious stereotyping.
someone's eyeball was removed for access at CERT
By CERT, you mean CERN, right? In my experience their security can be bypassed by the easier route of looking like a confused scientist and mumbling incoherent Franglais while someone else is shouting at them in Italian.
40: looking confused and/or harried is a surprisingly robust technique for bypassing security.
In fact, sometimes carrying disembodied eyeballs is downright counterproductive for getting through security!
It's not easy for all of us, Tweet.