Tuukka R

It has something like 100 times as many users as PieFed+Lemmy+Mbin do together.

When starting here, I found it a nice way for finding interesting communities to go to different instances’ pages with my web browser and browsing their Local. A lot of communities I would never have thought of!

So, go to sopuli.xyz and see what their Local has to offer, then go to piefed.social for the same. And suppo.fi and Solarpunk (is it slrpnk.net or what?) and what is there still? Blåhaj at least. You can see what instances interesting commentators are coming from and check out the rest of that instance’s atmosphere by just writing that instance’s address in your browser’s URL bar.

The oldest one I regularly use is this one: https://web.archive.org/web/19961108115333/http://www.kela.fi/

It’s the Finnish state organ for giving people their welfare benefits and operating the national health insurance system. So, if you get a child, you get an amount of money per month from Kela for having a child. (Because they want the population to grow).
Or, if you end up unemployed for a longer time, it’s Kela that will pay your unemployment benefits.
Of if you break your leg, it’s Kela that pays for your hospital care. I don’t know how many forms I’ve already filled on their website :D

But yeah, the site’s been around for a while now.

There is an it. And then there’s another it. And some more its, perhaps.
I don’t know what the life of their own is, though. I am also not sure if I do want to know.

But rest assured: It was surely not a mistake.
The its are coming. I, four one, welcome our it overlords!

…and then came Valmet with its Dm6.

And nobody paid anything for the intellectual property. The history of these railbuses is fascinating in how it’s a chain of betrayals.

Well, yeah. Up to a point, we do.

But they tend to be based on people knowing that When I say “count the ticket, it’s hundreding” in the meaning “lower the flag, it’s raining” (based on the Finnish word “laskea” meaning both “count” and “to lower”, “lippu” meaning both “ticket” and “flag” and “sataa” being both the partitive form of “hundred” and “it rains”, the joke is about the Finnish language having funny homonyms.

And similarly here the arse of the joke is English being funny in having to meanings for the word “come”? It’s not usual to make such jokes with words that are actual cognates. They are more usually made with word pairs such as read and read, or read and red. I mean, jokes are goof things to have, but they shouldn’t be based on the laughee being ignorant.

What would be a fantastic name for a brothel, however, is this:

Those trains were blatantly copied by another Swedish company, and then that one was again blatantly copied by a Finnish company, leading to the models Dm6 and Dm7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR_Class_Dm7

Zero royalties paid!

The US instituted a mandatory draft to fight that war.

But that was an offensive war, and most countries don’t do those.

Finland was much much safer before.

Depends on how you define “to be safe”. The Russia had declared that its goal is to return the borders of the Russian empire. That sounded a bit scary, but we shrugged it off, because it would require a war and that would hurt the Russia so much that such a war would be idiocy and therefore will not happen.

In case you don’t know where the borders of the Russian Empire were, they included for example these:

• Finland
• Estonia
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• half of Poland
• Ukraine
• Moldova

The Russia has declared that it wants to make all of those countries part of the Russian Federation.

So, we were not in danger, because the Russia would not be stupid enough to begin a war in Ukraine or in Finland, as it was clear that it would hurt the Russia’s economy more than it could ever be of use to it. The Finnish defence doctrine was based on the concept of credible defence. We were told in school that “they can attack us and they could most likely even take over all of Finland, but our army is able to incur such big losses to them that they will not want to do that.”
But then, it turned out that the Russia does not care about losses.

So, we found out two things:

• the Russia is really interested in acting to its declarations. They are not just empty words as we had assumed
• the Russia does not care about losses – therefore the doctrine of credible defence does not protect from the Russia

You can say that we were not in danger because we didn’t know that we are in danger. And in some way that’s true. But, once we found out that we are in danger, then, well, we were.
Since the doctrine of credible defence went down the drain, meaning that Finland effectively did not have a defence that is able to protect it, what else than joining NATO do you suggest we should have done to gain a level of defence capability able to keep the Russia out of Finland? Name one other option that we had.

Your idea that the Russia has a right to defend itself by preemptively taking over Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, half of Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova is, well… It would be impolite saying what it makes you look like.

EDIT: And of course this is relevant: In January 2022 the support for joining NATO was around 35 %. No “let’s join NATO” propaganda had been made at all, but in May 2022 the support for joining NATO was around 80 %. The only thing that caused this was that people around Finland saw that what we had been taught about the Russia in our schools was crap. It was part of the school curriculum to make sure every Finn knows that the Russia is not going to attack us, with an explanation of why not. And it seemed to make sense. And everyone had that in their heads. And then… We saw what the Russia is doing in Ukraine, and it was clear from that alone that shit, we are fucked! That meant, 80 % of the people decided they wanted a new kind of safety against the Russia.
Maybe you can say that they told that in our schools for about 40 years just so that in 2025 Finland could join NATO. But… Well, you know.
In May 2022 you could go to any bar to talk with random people and it would be clear that the assumption was “we are joining NATO. There is no other option.” There was no real dialogue about it, because basically everybody was of the same opinion. For the abovementioned reasons.

I don’t think we could implement your suggestion. Our wartime maximum strength is about 700 000 soldiers and our population is around 5 600 000. That means, in wartime, one out of 8 inhabitants will be in different forms of military service. There’s no way we could pay an adequate salary for that many soldiers. And, that number is still a third less than how many soldiers Ukraine has, and Ukraine is just barely able to keep the Russia from advancing.

I’m not sure why you’re taking Vietnam war as an example, as it’s an offensive war and for example Finland has no plans to do anything like that.

Our military – numbers are public.

Yes, but the speed at which one can recruit soldiers in an emergency is not public.

maintaining offensive and diminishment operations

This is irrelevant, because most countries do not have any offensive operations to maintain in the first place.

You may not know what the phrase “proxy war” means, because in this context it’s rather insulting. And I do not think you meant to insult me or others. But do tell, why and how would Finland wage an offensive war?

Yeah, this is getting a bit off topic, but you’re making wild claims that would really need some clarification.

You could directly vote against being sent to die. You might not care about a ski hill funding request.

Uh, people choose when they are 18 whether they want to go to civil service or army. If they choose army, they will obviously be drafted if the Russia ever attacks, unless they have later had themselves removed from the drafting lists. To make a decision on how many soldiers we’ll need for the defence is actually an extremely good example of what kind of decisions absolutely cannot be made by a broad public vote. You need a military person relaying secret strategical information to the Ministers of Parliament. It cannot be relayed to all 5.6 million people without compromising the information. If such an amount of people knows about our military strategy, so does the Russia.

So, at least for that kind of decisions something else must be at place. Maybe there could be a restricted set of representatives that are allowed to vote in case we are attacked and you could then choose which one of those will handle your vote in this precise case – before they have talked with the military specialists.

To paraphrase a section of what was already said above:

Once you can make AND, OR and NOT gates, you can do everything. Everything any computer does is done with those three.

In Minecraft you can build AND, NOT, and OR gates.

A hit in the neck is definitely a miss from an intended target anyway. Can’t say how much or to what direction. It could have been that there’s been a target where the bullet would fly 30 cm behind the person to be guarded, but the bullet is taking a trajectory 10 cm off the intended and the person happens to their head 20 cm backwards just at the crucial moment.

But, I do believe that someone wanted that guy dead. I can imagine someone figuring that “he’s actively advocating killing politicians you don’t like, and I don’t like him. Therefore I am following his own instructions and this is acceptable.”

I personally think it’s a bad idea to kill a person like that, because it probably causes other people to get shot as well. It’s not a culture I want to see spread. But at least I do not see it morally as a very big problem that a person explicitly says that something is acceptable and then that thing is done to him. He wanted a certain kind of society and he got the kind of society he wanted. If there is life after death, he can spend that time being content of having changed the society.

What I’m saying is that there was a very much raised likelihood that someone kills him intentionally.

There is no concept of a parliament majority leader being able to block a proposal from being voted on.

I didn’t get what this is referring to. Is it some Canadian or US-American concept? I’d be happy if you could elaborate a bit!

You can change your delegation after disappointment with vote on an issue, and can choose to not delegate your vote on a mandatory military draft proposal.

I am already able to change my delegation after disappointment. Luckily I’ve never had to exercise that right. Also, another thing that flew far over my head: why is an exception specifically regarding mandatory military drafting important?

There was a very interesting tool/game someone made in Finland. You got shown the same problems the actualy Ministers of Parliament have to vote on, and all attachments that are available for public.

The idea was that it shows that direct democracy can work just fine.

I spent an evening trying to make my mind on whether I want to support expanding a ski centre in Lapland or not. Both sides had very good arguments! In the end I ended up thinking “Damn, this is a huge amount of work! If there was a system like this in place in Finland, I’d definitely want to outsource my part. I’d find someone that thinks more or less the same way as I do and I’d pay them to do the research and use my vote. It would make sense that people would sell that service to several citizens at once, bringing down the cost per person. I would not want to spend several hours each day researching something like ski centres 800 km away from my home – yet if only few do and vote, then the result is really random. So, I would definitely want someone to represent me.”

And then I figured that “damn, this is actually the system we have right now!”

What is the opposite of human? A mountain? A shrimp? Hmm… No… A human is a conscious being… Therefore, the complete opposite can not be conscious. I physically exist, therefore the complete and total opposite does not.

Not terrible fucked or blessed… Just very very inactive? And inexistent?

How would you have expressed the same message? If English is your mother tongue, you can probably word things much better in English than I can.

I’m happy to edit the comment to make its English flow better!

Nobody has ever helped China as much as Trump has. In fact, he is the biggest friend China has ever had. The best. The awesomest. And the most modestest! Absolutely fabulous. (Really, nobody in the west has ever helped China gain as much influence as mr. Carrotface has.)

A funny video, but why did you link it?

I call those low quality crap made in China so that China has a better chance to bring us down by seizing to export this stuff.

Anything but China, please. Even Vietnam is a lot better!

Removed by mod