I cannae creids there would be something rotten in the state of Denmark
A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
51–60 of 188 posts
Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
#52In the third world, corruption is very open from the clerk in a local revenue office to the top ministers/secretaries. There is a price for every service. In the West, it is hard to see low-level corruption (bribes for services) in offices. However, corruption takes form in the shape of collusion; and this collusion is pretty much legal. Revolving door, consultants, lobbyists, conflicts of interests, setting up NGOs…
I was just listening to a talk by Stephen Kotkin were he mentioned corruption. He said corruption is not binary. Instead, it's a continuum. The question is how much of the money a public servant spends will actually end up in the desired outcome. In China, he said, maybe 20% will end up in the pockets of the public servant while the other 80% is spent on the road. In Nigeria, he said, everything will go to the servant and there will be no road.
Source: https://youtu.be/ZD8BhZEJcjI at around 1:00:00.
Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
#53Black Swan was a big deal, but this article massively overstates the average Dane's faith in the system. The welfare state is certainly not reverred as a religion, and the current state of it is always a hot discussion topic with pulls in either direction. Unlike what this article suggests, tax fraud is also relatively common (one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation…
> one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in places like the US The US has lower taxes so by your logic we would have less evasion. Unless you’re making a judgement on Americans.
I am making a judgement on the US corporate culture and population within it, yes. It has far more loopholes that remain open and actively used than Denmark does.
Denmark does its very best to make it either a pain in the arse or impossible to use company property in any way that could be seen as having private value. Did you drive home in your company car? Then get ready to be privately taxed of its full market value and for the company to get a bill for the VAT. Did you take a private phone call on a company phone? Then you have to pay the "free phone" tax and the company VAT of the phone. Did you buy furniture for your home office, but without having the home office locked to physically separate it from your regular home, or did you put a comfortable chair in there so it its private value becomes ambiguous? Not a valid company purchase.
Weird US tricks like getting paid in stock and taking loans with that stock as collateral, with the resulting liability cancelling out remaining tax also don't work there. The common stuff would be, say, restaurant owners inexplicably having really low private food expenditure, or really low revenue on paper for how popular the place is.
I suspect the reason is that the US government has pressure from lobbyists to maintain the status quo, while the DK government has pressure to claw in taxes to cover their sky high spending ambitions.
Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
#54Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters. If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be rea…
> People are the same everywhere
This is not true in general. Environment does not only influence behavior, it selects for it.
As evidenced by our ability to breed behavior traits in domesticated animals - I.e. ragdoll cats, retrievers, rat terriers, etc. have distinct behavioral traits that have been intentionally selected for.
Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
#55Black Swan was a big deal, but this article massively overstates the average Dane's faith in the system. The welfare state is certainly not reverred as a religion, and the current state of it is always a hot discussion topic with pulls in either direction. Unlike what this article suggests, tax fraud is also relatively common (one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation…
This isn't true and sounds like something written by terminally online reddit libertarians. The Black Swan documentary is primarily about sleazy private sector actors in Denmark. The only remotely state affiliated individuals in the documentary is a business man who was a former small city council member and a bankruptcy lawyer who has previously contracted for Danish government organizations. The system worked fine…
Or when a restaurant owner inexplexably has really low private food expenditure, or has really low revenue on paper despite being relatively popular, or small companies having a lot of company dinners, or labor workers having a lot of company places to go in their company porsche SUV, or...
The reason regular salaried employees do this less, limited to the kind of sort arbejde ("under the table" labor) you describe is because it has become obscenely difficult to do anything meaningful with sorte penge (untaxed money) - not because people don't want to do more or didn't previously do it.
Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
#56> One out of every two Danes has seen the documentary. Why not simpler English -- "half of the country has watched it" Also pendatic aside -- i think "every two danes" is a stretch -- i am sure we can find many instances of "two danes" where both has watched it. Or neither. Some are being born as we speak (write).
Why say "four out of five dentists" instead of "80% of dentists"?
Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
#57I'm fully aware that Sweden and Denmark are different countries (I lived in Denmark for 3 years), but this reminded me of the reel of Swedes playing every time I visit IKEA, where they talk about how corruption is absolutely unthinkable in Swedish society. And there's also this tidbit from the article: > Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a crimi…
Since the late eighties Sweden has privatised, as the euphemism goes, heavily. In particular schools and medical and elder care have become cesspools of corruption and mob activity. It's gotten worse in construction as well. Today some active politicians simultaneously perform as senior advisers and the like for so called public affairs, i.e. lobbying, firms. That is, in the open. The leader of one of the largest par…
Interesting. It really seems like wherever the power goes, the corruption follows. The good news with privatization is that it doesn't attract the corrupt looters to government and you can trust them as a culture to be a watchdog for corruption.
When the government as a body is in control of everything, all the corrupt looters go there, but you can't have the private industry keep them in check unless you count on the pipeline of years in industry gaining financial freedom -> public service as a regulator.
Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are saying humans are unpredictable, but then you make predictions. I think you are saying that people's behavior changes based on stimulus. That doesn't mean they're unpredictable, just that the prediction shouldn't be unchanged behavior regardless of stimulus.
I read it as the GP saying there's often confusion about assuming behavior about individuals as opposed to making predictions based on trends of large groups of individuals. For some population, you can safely state that some portion of them will contract appendicitis. You cannot make that same assertion about an individual person. This likewise carries to specific behaviors (theft, charity, becoming a pet owner, etc…
The same is true of say washing machine motors. You can predict that ~ 10% of them will fail in a certain amount of time (and even go into how they fail), but that doesn't tell you much about a specific motor. Or sports events, if you say there's a 25% chance of team A winning a single match; the results of the match don't support or refute your prediction... you'd have to run many matches to see if your prediction was empirically correct.
Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
#59Will that change Denmark‘s position in the Corruption Perception Index?
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024
I always thought the lower the more realistic
Re: A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image
#60Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters. If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be rea…
> People are the same everywhere This is not true in general. Environment does not only influence behavior, it selects for it. As evidenced by our ability to breed behavior traits in domesticated animals - I.e. ragdoll cats, retrievers, rat terriers, etc. have distinct behavioral traits that have been intentionally selected for.
Those dog breeds differ by like a factor of 10 in size, way more than humans basically in any aspect.
But yeah, depending on how strong the selective force is... Ashkenazy Jews have an average IQ of what, around 130 points? But on the other side also suffer a lot more genetic disorders.
Interesting are also the altitude tolerance of Sherpa, body morphology of the Kenian runners and the dive endurance of a particular South east asian tribe (if I remember correctly), some organ is able to store a lot more blood than usually