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Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

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Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#501
post #449
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't necessarily want to use that angle on Finland... the gas tank is pretty large and gas is highly taxed, both figuratively and literally. In addition to the relatively small salaries, the cost of living is pretty high in the capital area. If you do move to some of the smaller cities your price-to-value ratio for living will go up way faster than trying to reach the same ratio by instead hunting for a larger s…

> You don't necessarily want to use that angle on Finland... the gas tank is pretty large and gas is highly taxed, both figuratively and literally. While the cost of car ownership and general cost of living is high, I'd like to point out that you don't necessarily need a car if you live and work in Helsinki. Or at least you don't need two cars in the household. A bicycle is a perfectly viable option for transport for…

Well, good luck hauling small kids, furniture, gardening or construction materials by bike or public transportation. Most of the adults are not singles in their twenties or early thirties, living in a rented flat.

Once you get a family or buy a house, owning a car is basically a must. And the price tag for it in Finland is very high. 1000e a year just for mandatory car tax, mandatory yearly checkup and liability insurance. ~70% of the price of gas is taxes. Cars themselves are so expensive that Finland has one of the oldest car fleet in the developed world (12.2 years).

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#502
post #2

This is honestly a great way for tech entrepreneurs to experience Nordic living. The fact is Finland has one of the most startup friendly environments around: — top schools (Aalto U. produces incredibly talented engineers) — startup friendly ecosystem (cheap rents, cheap internet) — Finnish work culture (direct, no nonsense, hard working but balanced) — fantastic food and beverage scene in downtown Helsinki My wife i…

Also: 24% VAT (sales tax) 18% employer payroll taxes 10% employee payroll taxes 20-30% typical income tax Take your American disposable income and cut it in half. Still worth it for 'free' education and 'free' healthcare? Also a lot of cold and darkness.

That's funny, because when viewing those numbers from a Swedish perspective they're not that controversive or high. I would go so far and say that they're below medium, some of them reaching low. I would get to keep so much more of my salary in Finland, since my income tax is at around 40% here in Sweden. Add to that all the other kreeping taxes added over time.

I love Sweden tho, no tax can change that ;)

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to pay to use most roads in the USA, on a usage basis at least. The use of the word free but not really isn’t foreign to Americans.

You absolutely pay for roads on a usage basis [1] unless you drive an electric car. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...

That's not paying for roads, that's paying for fuel. You would be paying those fuel taxes even if you were only driving on your own private roads.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#504

Finland and Helsinki seems great. But if you're willing to lower the #1's a bit, and go more to like #3's for most of these things, you can go to Zurich, Switzerland and easily get an USD 8K / month net salary for a marketing project manager job and USD 10-14K for a senior developer role. Not wanting to pitch countries against each other. All places have their advantages and disadvantages.

Could you please elaborate on where to find 10-14K senior developer role opportunities in zurich? The ones I stumble upon are sensibly on a lower ballpark.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#505
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the foundation you got with Finnish should be useful if ever you need to learn Turkish, Hungarian or Japanese. Natural languages are like programming languages in a sense -- Haskell doesn't get as much use as C++ but learning Haskell will make you better at C++.

It helps less than you would think. Finnish doesn't share any intelligible vocabulary with Hungarian beyond the loanwords that are also the same in English (let alone Turkish or Japanese which are entirely different language families). Yes, there are grammatical similarities, no that won't help you much at all in understanding or talking to people...

Finish shares root of around 200 words with Hungarian, it's just the languages diverged and got influenced by their respective regions. For starters, both languages use different letters for the same sounds. Hell, Hungarian uses written form of sz for the regular s sound, and written form of s for sh sound. The long ő, in the end of a Hungarian word, has previously been a diphtong öü or eü and even more previously ev. Finnish e/ä is written as Hungarian under one letter of e.

And here are some examples:

Hung. kéz (hand) = Finn. käsi, Hung. vér (blood) = Finn. veri, Hung. méz (honey) = Finn. mesi, Hung. szarv (horn) = Finn. sarvi, Hung. vaj (butter) = Finn. voi, Hung. eleven (alive) = Finn. elävä, Hung. menni (to go) = Finn. mennä, Hung. reped (to be torn) = Finn. repeää.

Then you have switches from h to k, as in Hung. hal (fish) = Finn. kala

Then you have switches from f to p, as in fej (head) = Finn. pää, Hung. fészek (nest) = Finn. pesä

Or, the letter n in Finnish is often replaced by ny in Hungarian, as in Finn. niellä (swallow) = Hung. nyelni, Finn. miniä (daughter-in-law) = Hung. meny

Hungarian and Finnish diverged 4500 years ago, and they represent the opposite spectrum of the Ugro-Finn language group. There are 9 languages in the same language group, and the middle parts of it have more in common with both languages than Hungarian with Finnish.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#506
post #461
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the foundation you got with Finnish should be useful if ever you need to learn Turkish, Hungarian or Japanese. Natural languages are like programming languages in a sense -- Haskell doesn't get as much use as C++ but learning Haskell will make you better at C++.

A genetic relationship between Finno-Ugric and either the Japonic or Turkic language families, if it exists, is so weak that most scholars believe there is no evidence for it.

Turkish and Finnish do have the same word structure and very similar sentence characteristics. Both are agglutinative languages with vowel harmony and "floating" word order. Japanese is also agglutinative but lacks vowel harmony. I'd consider scholars who believe these languages are not similar to be quite wrong.

It's true that there is practically no common vocabulary between the tree though. (Hungarian and Turkish share some small amount of words due to relatively recent Ottoman rule, but that's about it)

An Italian friend learning Turkish complained mainly about having to wait until the end of sentence (The Turkish (and Japanese) sentences are canonically Subject-Object-Verb) to understand what's going on. And imagine a native English speaker's frustration when they realize groups of words can come in any order in Latin (and Turkish, and Finnish) and it's the suffixes that make up a word's function in the sentence!

So, my point was that being exposed to a language with a different grammar is simply good mental exercise and will come in handy when learning other, seemingly separate foreign languages, regardless of the amount of people who speak it.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#507
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as a non-acute dental issue. A filling can wait for a couple weeks max before possibly becoming a real acute issue. You are only aware of the cavity until it starts to hurt, which means already late. A good rule of thumb is to have a CT scan every year for early detection. I have been doing it for the last 5 years and boy it did save me from lots of pain. Lots of cavities are hiding unseen and…

"CT scan for cavities" speaking of over-diagnosis... (Not forgetting the risk of CT scan radiation) Brush your teeth, visit your dentist. Yes some might do an x-ray for hard to see areas. But this is not rocket science

CTs indeed sound a little overkill. Aren't cavities entirely avoidable? As long as you can afford a healthy diet and have water/toothpaste you won't develop any?

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#508
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't necessarily want to use that angle on Finland... the gas tank is pretty large and gas is highly taxed, both figuratively and literally. While the cost of car ownership and general cost of living is high, I'd like to point out that you don't necessarily need a car if you live and work in Helsinki. Or at least you don't need two cars in the household. A bicycle is a perfectly viable option for transport for…

Well, good luck hauling small kids, furniture, gardening or construction materials by bike or public transportation. Most of the adults are not singles in their twenties or early thirties, living in a rented flat. Once you get a family or buy a house, owning a car is basically a must. And the price tag for it in Finland is very high. 1000e a year just for mandatory car tax, mandatory yearly checkup and liability insu…

Unfortunately, this is the reality on the ground. Finland is the least densely populated country in Europe, and one of the most arctic countries in the world. A lot of the people simply need a car to commute to work.

Cars in Finland have not only a value-added tax (VAT) of 24% but also a separate car tax slapped on them. At the extreme cases this can result in over 100% additional tax to be paid on top of the retail price of a car.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#509
post #376
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USSR acted as a serious meat grinder, but a little less than half of German losses where on the eastern front which also included polish forces and the USSR had minimal impact on the Pacific front. The US footed a lot of the material costs needed for Europe and the USSR to stay in the fight via lend lease. To the tune of about $575 billion inflation adjusted, and 22% of that going directly to the USSR. https://en…

>a little less than half of German losses where on the eastern front Where did you get this from? According to Wikipedia, and most other sources, 70-80% of German military casualties were on the Eastern Front. >The US footed a lot of the material costs needed for Europe and the USSR to stay in the fight... More than 80% of the aid to USSR was delivered after the Battle of Stalingrad was won by the USSR, and the outco…

If you’re thinking of losses as lives in the German army and you include non German forces added to the German army and you assume all deaths on the eastern front where with the USSR then you can get very high numbers for German deaths due to the USSR.

On the other hand if you look at losses as the capacity to make war then things are different. As a land war the German navy for instance was largely uninvolved so you need to consider how many tanks was a battleship worth. How critical was a lost factory or oil field etc. And in that context while Germany gained some men from their invasion of the USSR* a major goal was the acquisition of oil in the caucuses, because having been cut off from other sources they would have likely lost with or without the invasion.

In the end it was the loss of aircraft factories more than aircraft that really cost them the air war. While we think of WWII as a modern war, Germany used 2.75 million horses in WWII. Fuel, raw materials, and industrial capacity for engines where tight.

*~230,000 of the deaths on the eastern front where originally from the USSR but fighting for the Germans.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[fyi: native Finn] > b) this is controversial but I think the standard language model used by linguists is too strongly inspired by Latin and a very poor fit for Finnish. I find trying to learn grammar formally is counterproductive and will set you back. Instead, think of the noun suffixes as a preposition equivalent. Trying to think of them as cases will mess with your progress Interesting point. This is what a lot…

About b) it's controversial because it's the standard model that is used by linguistics and is considered useful, and I think it's net-negative-value for education. That's why I want to make it abundantly clear that this is my opinion and it runs counter to the consensus in the linguistics world.

Yes but linguistics is about studying a language, not speaking it. As someone who has learnt a few languages non-natively, I never once spoke a sentence by thinking about the formal rule I'm supposed to use to produce it.

As in machine learning, just throwing a bunch of training data at my brain (in the form of complete, native sentences) way outperforms building a rule-based system to the point where I just don't bother learning any rules at all.

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