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I lived in Iceland for several years recently. One thing you have to keep in mind, is this philosophy is pretty much born out of necessity. Until the US Milit
by bbarn 3y ago
I lived in Iceland for several years recently. One thing you have to keep in mind, is this philosophy is pretty much born out of necessity. Until the US Military built a base in Keflavík (which later became an international airport), the country was quite behind the times. As one friend put it to me "When you were landing on the moon we were getting running water installed"
Iceland was a very poor country for most people other than a few well off in the fishing industry. Today it's still relatively "medium" with few people very wealthy, but also almost no one in destitution. The attitude is that everyone should be able to live a good life, and while it's not truly socialist, it's pretty darn close.
Þetta reddast is used somewhat interchangeably with "I don't feel like dealing with this" and "Some how things will work out even though it doesn't look like it now" and "fuck it". To most people it's kind of an in joke you say when something really sucks.
- yakkomajuri 3y agoDefinitely, it's just about always used in a manner of like "Ah, don't worry about it", and while I tried to convey that as well in the post (like with the Snæfellsjökull story), I wanted to show that there might be more to the mentality behind the scenes.
- pavlov 3y ago> ‘As one friend put it to me "When you were landing on the moon we were getting running water installed"’ This also applied to large parts of the United States in 1969, and was part of the reason why many leftists and Black activists saw the Apollo program as a symbol of misplaced priorities at the time. Iceland wasn’t any poorer than Mississippi, for example. And at least Iceland had a program in place to build a Scandinavian-style welfare state so everyone really would get that running water pretty quickly, as well as healthcare and education and the rest. America is still struggling with that while again spending tens of billions on a microwaved-Apollo-cum-Artemis program that’s mostly pork distribution for senators.
- ch4s3 3y ago> a symbol of misplaced priorities at the time This always feels terribly myopic to me. There's a lot of state capacity and doing a sing;e time bound endeavor did not prevent civil rights legislation from passing or economic development in Mississippi. The moonshot caused NASA's funding to peak at ~4% of the federal budget for a single year in 1966, returning to less than 1% by '73.
- actionfromafar 3y agoBut in 1969 it was not settled that the country should fix civil rights. Probably Apollo would have been received differently by many people if other, more humane areas had seen as enthusiastic spending. Not saying it was wrong to do Apollo, though! It was important, another great outcome was that it made the Soviet system crack faster. It was also not clear from originally that Apollo would be single time limited project, in the beginning there was a lot of talk about moon bases and such.
- ch4s3 3y agoPeople use that kind of framing to say my highest priority isn't being addressed therefore anything else government does is wrong. I don't think this is logically sound, or a convincing argument.
- philwelch 3y agoThere were a lot of enthusiastic spending programs and civil rights reforms in the 1960’s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, Civil Rights Act of 1968 (which included the Fair Housing Act), the establishment of Medicare, Medicaid, federal funding for elementary and secondary schools, Job Corps, Head Start, expansion of Social Security benefits, the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, the Department of Transportation (along with federal funding for mass transit and high speed rail), the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, and food stamps, just to name the highlights.
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- merpnderp 3y agoIt's criminal that the US is spending money on SLS when it is so incredibly inefficient and will very likely be completely outclassed in cost and operational ability by Starship.
- criley2 3y agoConsidering the CEO of the company making Starship has openly messed with his other companies in support of Russia (thinking about Ukraine decisions), there is zero chance the US should get into a situation where Elon Musk is the decider of whether or not Americans can go to space. Honestly, SpaceX with Musk at the helm is becoming a massive national security problem, and as a taxpayer, I'm okay spending more money to insulate ourselves from some globo-billionaire who doesn't give even a single F about my country.
- ethbr1 3y agoStarlink over Crimea? I thought the end facts on that were that SpaceX had never turned it on there, to avoid stepping over a redline, and simply refused to change that policy when the Ukranians requested it for a USV attack.
- simoncion 3y agoIt's my understanding that Starlink said something to the effect of: > No, we're absolutely not supporting offensive military operations. However, Starshield _is_ in that business, so go file your request through that so as to run it by the appropriate people in the US government to get their approval. And -AFAIK- the request was run through Starshield, and it did get approved.
- colechristensen 3y agoYou’re criticizing the “foreign policy” of a company that decided not to directly participate in a foreign war, quite possibly at the request of the US government or under threat of having those satellites shot down which would be a catastrophe for space travel. If the US wanted to contract spacex for Ukrainian military comms, they would have. There are plenty of reasons to criticize musk, but not participating directly in a war isn’t one of them
- rufus_foreman 3y ago>> This also applied to large parts of the United States in 1969 By 1970, 93% of the homes in the US had "complete plumbing facilities", which means not just running water but hot and cold water, a shower or bath, and a flush toilet. See https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-plumbing.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-plumb.... 1940 54.7% 1950 64.5% 1960 83.2% 1970 93.1% 1980 97.3% 1990 98.9% In the 1950's and 1960's, the United States was able to do more than one thing at a time.
- germinalphrase 3y agoAs a touch point: Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
- photochemsyn 3y agoI've never thought much of that narrative argument against the Apollo space program, since the Vietnam War cost at least 4X as much as the Apollo program, with much less to show for it and far more negative social effects (e.g. all the homeless Vietnam vets with unrecognized PTSD, etc.).
- actionfromafar 3y agoThe true, multi-faceted cost of Vietnam sort of crept up slowly though, especially in the 70s. Weren't many armed gangs started by 'nam vets for instance? (Not even counting what it meant for south east asia.)
- avgcorrection 3y agoHow could killing people on the other side of the world over ideology achieve anything (show for it)?
- reducesuffering 3y agoAsk the South Koreans
- avgcorrection 3y ago“Some of you Vietnamese will die... but that’s a sacrifice that I’m willing to make.” Something like that?
- philwelch 3y agoSouth Korea is a modern, developed country with a high tech manufacturing economy and a high standard of living. And it only exists today because many countries including the United States defended it from a communist invasion, just as the United States attempted to defend South Vietnam.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
- ytdytvhxgydvhh 3y agoI always appreciate Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger‘s response to such criticism: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/why-explore-space https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/why-explore-space
- somenameforme 3y agoIt's extremely and utterly odd, to me, that so many people single out things like the Apollo Program as an 'extravagance' when this was also the era of the Vietnam War. The entire Apollo program cost $178 billion in 2022 dollars. The Vietnam War cost more than $1 trillion, and that's if you put a $0 price tag on the millions of people killed, to say nothing of decades more of people being maimed and killed by our cluster bomblets left all over the country. The Vietnam War had absolutely 0 value. We hyped it up as some do-or-die necessity, we invaded, participated in the killing of millions of people, blew a trillion dollars, lost the war, went home, and there was no grand catastrophic change. We could have just skipped to the end by not getting involved in the first place. By contrast one can argue about the exact value of the Apollo Program but it's absolutely undeniable that there was value. We learned a bunch, showed what's possible with human ingenuity, and just plain old did something that would make one proud to be a human, let alone an American at the time. If we did more things like this, it's very likely that the relationship between the people and the government would be far better than it is today.
- gota 3y ago> say nothing of decades more of people being maimed and killed by our cluster bomblets left all over the country. Not to mention the millions of people devastated by Agent Orange. The fact that the specialists warned the US military of these effects and it didn't stop them from poisoning the population for generations is mind boggling. How did these people rationalize their actions? Anyway - there's no possible price tag for that. Your point of comparison is correct; the space race as a whole was about the best- and cheapest-case scenario for a "war"
- ebiester 3y agoLeftists and black activists were also against the Vietnam War. The arguments were far less about the monetary value in that case, though.
- somenameforme 3y agoThis is true but, in general, I don't think it should be. One can moralize endlessly about war. Even in this thread you can see somebody arguing that the Vietnam war couldn't have been that bad because it was against communism, which he thinks should always be opposed. And one cannot say he's wrong - it's an opinion. By contrast a trillion dollars is a trillion dollars. And I think almost nobody could argue, in good faith, that near to any war is worth a trillion dollars. That's more than $7,500 per household in the US. That sort of money, for some sort of vague geopolitical ambition, is just beyond absurd. And the thing is, even when we initially claim that this war or that will "only" cost some billions of dollars, they all go this way. Iraq "according to every analyst" was supposed to cost about $80 billion and last 2 years. 4 years later, the Congressional Budget Office estimated its cost to be about $2.4 trillion. That value is also not adjusted for inflation. These wars all around the world are just such an unbelievably tremendous waste of money. They have this magic trick that even Houdini couldn't hold a candle to - they can take trillions of dollars and just make it all disappear, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Nobody could ever rationalize this into being a good thing. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
- micromacrofoot 3y agoI don't know if it's technically stoicism or something, but you see this in places all over the world... the "it'll be alright until it isn't" kind of mantra. Living through these moments the best you can until you can no longer do so due to something beyond your control.
- gyomu 3y agoI highly recommend the novel “Independent People” by Halldór Laxness, which your comment reminded me of.
- rurban 3y agoI'd rather recommend the light hearted movie "Virgin Mountain", which is not that drastic. And in the german ARD Mediathek.
- mattbee 3y agoI really liked this novel! A lot of what people say about Icelanders I assume comes from this caricature of an independent-minded (or uncompromisingly stupid) homesteader. There is sheep and starvation, bathetic death, ambitions ruined over and over while the 20th century grinds on around our hero. 600 pages. Did I say sheep? There's a lot of sheep. Pages of chasing them, eating them, buying them, driving them around. If that doesn't sell it to you I don't know what will.
- bane 3y agoWe just spent some time in Iceland this past year. I hadn't really realized it but Iceland pretty much didn't even have a formal tourist industry until sometime in the early 2000s mostly due to volcanic eruptions disrupting transatlantic air traffic causing the country to end up on the news. I came away with some interesting things: - In one small town we visited they had turned the local town hall into a tourist greeting center. It had a theater that showed films from the 60s and 70s filmed near that town. One of them explained that there were no roads to the town until the modern period. However the town's main industry was sheep farming. How did they get the sheep to market in the larger towns? Simple, they flow in an aircraft, drove the sheep onboard, and flew them there! Before the airplane people either didn't live there or had to drive their sheep by foot or boat to market -- trips of many many days. - Icelanders are incredibly comfortable being constantly very near volcanism. Most village centers have a local bathhouse fed by hot water from hot springs and they're very popular social centers, people live on the slopes of active volcanoes, the air often smells of volcanic gases in many places in the country, and so on. - Much of the landscape is virtually impassable. It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape that was so inaccessible simply due to the terrain. In some areas, relatively "flat" landscapes were so rocky that I can't even imagine how one might traverse those. Beautiful country, hearty people, expensive, surprisingly consistently good food.
- dboreham 3y agoUntil railways were built everywhere animals were all driven to market often over long distances. Hence "drove road".
- seabass-labrax 3y agoThat might have been an unintentionally funny point to make, as Iceland doesn't have any railways!
- danans 3y ago> It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape that was so inaccessible simply due to the terrain. I haven't been to Iceland, but I got similar vibes the first time I hiked through the Kilauea East Rift zone (vegetatively sparse, nearly impassable), where it's perhaps even more stark since lush tropical forest is just a few miles away.
- ranting-moth 3y agoI'm pretty sure I heard something like "nennessekki" a few times when things where getting tense.
- meheleventyone 3y agoProbs something like ‘nei, nei, ekki’ which means ‘no, no, don’t’.
- jtha 3y agoThat would be the infamous Icelandic verb of "nenna". It's used as such "Ég nenni þessu ekki", which translates roughly to "I don't feel like it" or "I don't want to". But we have a word for both want and feel like, but they're different from "nenna". In some ways a better translation would be "I can't be bothered to". The word is somewhat socially acceptable as an excuse not to do something. "Þetta reddast" and "Ég nenni þessu ekki" are words many of us Icelanders live by.
- bbarn 3y agoYeah, that was a standby of one of my coworkers there. She'd often abbreviate it in slack as just "nenni ekki"
- distcs 3y ago> Iceland was a very poor country for most people other than a few well off in the fishing industry. Very insightful. I had no clue this was the case. Is there any published list somewhere that measures the relative richness between the countries? I am just curious to see which countries come out at the top and which ones at the bottom. Anyone knows any such list?
- bookofjoe 3y agoTop 10 Richest Countries in the World (1980-2023) — video https://fb.watch/pnScw21Tka/ https://fb.watch/pnScw21Tka/
- anonporridge 3y agoIceland has the highest median wealth per adult in the world today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... It's not wealthy in an absolute sense, but it's incredibly wealthy per capita.
- runarberg 3y agoThe pipes in question were hot water pipes, used for district heating. I think most (probably every) house had had running cold water for decades at this point. In contrast in the USA 7% of households were missing any plumbing in 1970. Iceland was late industrializing and getting basic infrastructure. But so were other colonies. In 1918 Iceland stopped being a colony and by the 1950s it had pretty much caught on (with the major exceptions of road and rail networks).
- bbarn 3y agoNot in Vestmannaeyjar...
- runarberg 3y agoOh yeah, keep forgetting about Vestmannaeyjar. So they got a freshwater connection to the mainland in 1968, and they do have some aquifers on the island (just really unreliable). I do know that they had problems with water prior to the main land connection, but I don’t know if most houses had plumbing connected to the unreliable aquifers prior to 1986.
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- avgcorrection 3y ago[flagged]
- anonporridge 3y ago> Today it's still relatively "medium" with few people very wealthy... This doesn't appear to be true. Iceland is one of the wealthiest nations on the planet per capita. Iceland also has the highest median wealth of any country at $413,193 compared to the US median of $107,739. Even in average wealth, Iceland ranks #5 globally only behind Switzerland, Luxembourg, United States, and Hong Kong. Keeping the average and median much closer than those other four does agree with your claim that they're good about making sure everyone has a good life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... Interesting thing I learned recently, is that Iceland has the highest rate of millionaires (in USD) of any country at 20% of the adult population. This more than double the 9% of US adult population millionaires. https://www.statista.com/statistics/262687/countries-with-the-highest-rate-of-millionaires/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/262687/countries-with-th...
- joisig 3y agoSome part of the reason for this is that pretty much anybody who is owns a single-family home in Iceland outright and is otherwise mostly debt-free would count as a millionaire (in USD) these days, because housing has appreciated by ridiculous amounts in the last 20 years or so. One of the reasons there are a lot of house-millionaires is because some of the oldest generations, who bought their homes before 1980 or so, took normal loans with fixed interest rates, just before massive inflation in the 80s. The decrease in value per krona in ten years starting 1980 was something like 99.7%, so the loans went pretty quickly to something indistinguishable from zero. Inflation-indexed loans have been the only type of housing loan you could get for most of the time since about 1981, and are still the norm. The effect around that time of transition was that the younger generations (next waves of house buyers after them) were saddled with a lot of the burden. Source: I'm Icelandic.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> "When you were landing on the moon we were getting running water installed" Same for a number of folks in Fairfax Co VA (US ~wealthiest). My best friend's house was typical for the area. Cold running water arrived ~1970. Hot 1982. Outhouses stayed until about 2000.