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I never worried particularly much about climate change, but just to hedge my bets for my kids I moved to northern Europe. For the most part it's just equated to
by hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
I never worried particularly much about climate change, but just to hedge my bets for my kids I moved to northern Europe. For the most part it's just equated to milder (= bearable) Winters and nicer summers up here.
I guess we also spend a fair bit on moving to renewables up here - Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro. If I were an ideologue in either direction I'd probably say "that's the real reason I moved" or "can't believe they're waiting my tax money on this", but I'm not, I'm just a guy who likes hedging his bets. The nuclear is especially nice because cheap electricity is the true backbone of society, and we've seen the market prices go straight up _negative_ a few times due to overproduction.
Self recommending! Come to Finland and help us build a stronger democracy, whatever that means to you.
- johnchristopher 3y agoIs Finland self sufficient for food ?
- LightBug1 3y ago"Self recommending! Come to Finland and help us build a stronger democracy, whatever that means to you. " How are you finding life as an enviromental migrant?
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoGreat! Much nicer than Boston.
- ejb999 3y agohow were you able to permanently move from the states to Finland - were you already a citizen there? (I assume you mean Boston Mass, unless you are talking about another Boston already in the EU)
- chasd00 3y agoThis. Immigrating to Finland isn’t as easy as just showing up and wading across a shallow river like in the US.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- harambae 3y agoYou were already in Boston and worried about global warming? How much do you think it’s going to warm?
- BodyCulture 3y agoThis is an illusion. There is no safe place, you can’t escape the reality of global warming by moving to another place.
- trenchgun 3y agoThere is no safe place in general, with or without climate change. But you can for sure mitigate most of the climate change risks by moving to anothe place.
- PeterisP 3y agoWhile you may be technically true, it is obviously clear that some places are far safer than others, and moving to another place will have a very high impact on how global warming affects you, as some regions will be affected much more harshly than others. At the extreme, some places may be underwater or otherwise uninhabitable, but if you can afford to, moving away from them in a timely manner, you can escape being forced to do so at a time when doing so may be much harder.
- madaxe_again 3y agoSecond order effects will be the killer. It won’t be the coastal flooding, it will be the dispossessed hordes. It won’t be the uninhabitable areas, it will be the rapid rise in price of food staples. No matter where you are, the chaos will come to your door, when it comes. Takes surprisingly little to collapse a civilisation when you kick its knees out from under it.
- PeterisP 3y agoI agree, but there is a meaningful difference between having dispossessed hordes on your doorstep and being among those dispossessed hordes having to find a place for yourself; and if the price of grain doubles, for a poor community that means starvation while a wealthy community would barely notice.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
- dieortin 3y agoElectricity prices did not go negative because of nuclear.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoIn a way, yes they did. If your energy infrastructure has a significant amount of nuclear, and your solar power is over-producing during the day, it is cheaper to have negative energy prices than to shut down the nuclear plant.
- weatherlite 3y agoIf shit hits the fan everywhere else but North Europe remains safe - will it be business as usual there? Won't hundreds of millions of people (or more) from India, China and Africa flee to to wherever is safe?
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoWe will close the border, and kill them. :)
- weatherlite 3y agoWhat will you fire on them, polar bears ? If the Indians come to realize India is no longer habitable you better make room.
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago[flagged]
- CalRobert 3y agoThe plan appears to be massive gun turrets at every southern border at this rate.
- xienze 3y agoYou sure about that? The plan seems to be letting in anyone and everyone who says the magic words “asylum” or “refugee.”
- freen 3y agoLook up the rates of successful asylum and refugee applications. In the US, which takes in far more refugees and asylum seekers, it’s around half a percentage point of all legal immigration attempts succeed. https://www.cato.org/blog/why-legal-immigration-nearly-impossible https://www.cato.org/blog/why-legal-immigration-nearly-impos...
- CalRobert 3y agoSimilar, though leaving the US had a lot to do with hedging our bets against a crumbling democracy as well. How is Finland? It was on our list but we wanted to have good train connections to the continent so ended up in the Netherlands (but above sea level). Oulu has impressive winter cycling though.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoI lived in Oulu for a time, and yes it does indeed live up to its winter cycling reputation. Actually most of my wife's family lives around that region, so we'll probably return up there in a few years. Finland is terrific! Learning the language is tough, and recommended, but ultimately optional for white collar migrants. The lower salaries here are unfortunate - I make a third of what I could make as a software lead in the US (~50k vs ~150k). Doubly so as there really is a lot of top notch engineering talent here, probably because it's so hard to hire people that FTEs end up having to learn a lot about everything lol. I haven't yet carved a path to make US level money while living in Finland - but you'd better believe it's on my list of things to beeline towards once I hit my thirties.
- askonomm 3y agoSalary comparisons without accounting for cost of living is entirely useless and means nothing.
- hrududuu 3y agoMeh, you can come up with twenty different methodologies and they all point to coming out way way behind in Finland. SF -> Finland immigrant, took approximately 70% pay cut, and enjoying the 80% marginal tax rate. The health of democracy is way better than the US at least.
- askonomm 3y agoConsumer prices are 35% lower in Finland, rent prices are 70% lower in Finland, when comparing to SF.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoFinland has a nasty neighbor.
- throw_pm23 3y agoPlease don't talk like that about Sweden. They are bad, but don't quite deserve this.
- matt-attack 3y agoWhat’s wrong with Sweden? I thought they were generally regarded as a sane well run country. Has that changed?
- anonuser123456 3y agoAre you kidding? The Swedes are down right savages. Ever hear of Swedish meatballs? They originated in Finland. Cultural appropriation in the extreme!
- t0bia_s 3y agoDid they really mix horses in those meatballs?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cassepipe 3y agoIt's a joke. The nasty neighbour is obviously Russia and the comment below pretended that Sweden was meant instead
- matt-attack 3y agoThank you. I must stop scoffing at others on HN when they don't get what I consider to be obvious jokes, as it seems I too am capable of missing obvious humor.
- epgui 3y agoI am puzzled by the usage of the word “ideologue” in a context of self preservation.
- Jedd 3y ago> Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear Is this a fission plant that uses fuel mined in Canada, Kazakhstan, and Australia?
- cassepipe 3y agoI think you are implying that this self sufficiency is illusory To which I would respond that France could hold two years with its uranium reserves if the world stopped selling it Uranium. Gasoline reserves in comparison would last three months.
- Jedd 3y agoIllusory? Perhaps. Certainly 'self-sufficient' is inaccurate, given the reliance on external inputs. If other nation states are also not self-sufficient for fissionable materials, and/or other fuel types, then I would also not call them self-sufficient on power generation. Sure, there are degrees of reliance on providers of fuel types, but no need to muddy the waters about self-sufficiency. (f.e. Australia could be self-sufficient on solar, wind, coal, fission, I suspect - at least in terms of raw materials.)
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoUh... Finland could be one of the bigger victims of global warming. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4118630-atlantic-ocean-currents-system-collapse-climate-change/ https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4118630-atlant...
- syslog 3y agoJust here[0] they say that that’s a myth. I don‘t know what to believe anymore. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39156692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39156692
- t0bia_s 3y agoNowadays most valuable comodity is your attention. No matter what topic and if that is true or not.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoYeah, the AMOC collapse predictions are interesting. I'd love to see a much colder Finland, personally, since I want to know what a developed country that has 6 months of winter feels and looks like from the inside. But I do agree that for most people here it would be unfortunate.
- admissionsguy 3y ago> developed country that has 6 months of winter Nothing out of the ordinary here in Norrbotten, Sweden. Seems like things stop working properly under -35 degrees or so (trains, heat pumps), so some adjustments would be needed if such temperatures became more frequent.
- perlgeek 3y agoYou never worried particularly, but enough to move to a different country? That sounds contradictory to me.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoThat's because it's more just a nice secondary factor. ;) Mostly I moved because it amused me. I have a long history of going to places I can't actually locate on a map, eg I thought Northwestern University would be in Portland, not Chicago - imagine my shock when I stepped off the plane. Similarly with Finland. I knew so little about the place that when the opportunity to move arose I couldn't not take it, it would be like turning down getting teleported into the inside of a black hole.
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoSweden here, welcome! We need more of your kind of immigrant for sure! Working is number 1, willing to take part, and learning the culture.
- anonym29 3y agoAren't all immigrants like this?
- chasd00 3y agoNo, some make “identity erasure” a culture crime.
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoOn Thursday, the Expert Group for Studies in Public Economics (ESO) will present a report on the employment level of refugees between 1983 and 2015. Among other things, the study shows that the integration of refugees gradually deteriorated during the period, and that an average refugee represents a cost of SEK 74 000 per year for public finances. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/ny-eso-rapport-flyktinginvandring-en-kostnad-for-sverige https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/ny-eso-rapport-flyktingin...
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoGlad to be here! I'll likely be visiting Sweden for work next month, you guys are doing great over there.
- Aachen 3y ago> Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro. Energy means, well, energy. Finland still drives combustion vehicles (a lot of them, last I was there they drove some of the oldest cars in the EU on average due to high taxes for buying new ones) and probably mostly heat with energy not originating from the trio you mentioned. I think you meant electricity, which is a great milestone on the way but not yet the destination. Electricity used to be about 10% of a rich country's energy consumption, of late I think it's closer to 20% as some early adopters and new buildings have made the switch, but that still leaves 80% of your energy generated from oil and natural gas
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoLet’s also not forget another human activity, also a kind of energy consumption, but in a more direct way, aka eating. Livestock produces around 15% of global greenhouse emissions according to my quick Google search. And I am sure some Finns like to eat meat.
- Aachen 3y agoAnd "making things" while we're at it, as Gates calls it. Right. I forgot about those :/
- ImHereToVote 3y agoHow much greenhouse emissions does wildlife produce?
- krastanov 3y agoGood question! Surprisingly, very little: Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass And add to that the fact that cow flatulence is very rich in methane (much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) because of poor diet in industrial agriculture.
- hrududuu 3y agoAnd yet I never saw people tracking the daily electricity spot price until I moved to Finland :). Miten menee sun suomi, on kiva oppia sitä.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoMinulla lemppari urheilulaji :D se kehittyy hitaasti mutta varmasti. I actually maintain several online Finnish learning resources now, including a flashcard deck of the most common 10,000 words from the YLE study way back [1], a command line lemmatizer [2], and a website whose permissions I need to refresh ASAP which archives Selkouutiset with YYYY/MM/DD URLs [3]. Indeed building these tools were what got me back into software development as a profession, after a long absence. [1]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1149950470 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1149950470 [2]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem [3]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/ https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/
- hrududuu 3y agoOh cool, I'll check these out! I've been doing some coding myself to learn Finnish. I'll post a video of my tool in a little bit. I generate a daily set of exercises, and then track my progress over time. The tasks: scrape all the selko articles and then generate fi-> en translation tasks in the form of phrases (using an LLM). Same thing except en->fi. Free form task generation where I tend to use HS for articles (so like, adult Finnish). And then one I'm working on now, Finnish transcription from auto-generated speech, from selko again. A lot of my evaluation is based on embedding + cosine distance. LLM's are truly bringing a golden age for language learning.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoHell yeah, I'd love to see it in action! I was planning on doing a similar thing but my wife didn't seem terribly enthused by the current SOTA with Finnish text generation. Sometimes I do ask GPT-4 to "kerro minulle jotain kiinostavaa [aiheesta]" and throw the generated longform text into a single Anki card to read later on. The style definitely feels different, and it hallucinates a lot, but hey, it's still net beneficial on the margin. Let's keep in touch, it's always good to meet fellow Finnward folk. My email is in my bio if you ever need anything.
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago>Come to Finland and help us build a stronger democracy, whatever that means to you. What? You recommended it. What does it mean to you? What are you recommending?
- noobermin 3y agoViable as long as you're white I suppose.