Microblog Memes

Are the media companies run by propaganda groups like they are in most other countries?

Kind of. We have state media in the form of SVT (Sveriges Television) and SR (Sveriges Radio), and through lobbying they've been kind of hamstrung in the sense that they're not allowed to compete with private media. In reality this means that articles from SVT tend to be rather terse. They're good, but they never offer much in the way of details. On the other hand I feel like they're typically very objective. There are never really opinions included in things.

Pretty much all publications have a political affiliation though, and that tends to colour headlines and such. It's something to be aware of.

Then there are obviously smaller propaganda outlets. Samtiden for example is owned by the party Sverigedemokraterna and is highly influenced by their neo-nazi politics.

I’d be curious how education works as well, most free economies can be broken by attacking education… it seems like there must be a ton of pressure to not have working examples of this kind of regulated capitalism in the world.

Education is pretty regulated. Homeschooling like in the U.S. just isn't a thing here. All children have a thing called "skolplikt" (duty to attend school), and while there are private schools, recently they've all fallen under really heavy scrutiny for not living up to the standards they're expected to hold.

Private schools are publicly funded. I'm not 100% sure how all this works, but I believe each child has a certain sum tied to them, so if a child decides to attend private school, that sum goes to the private school. There's likely also grants and such for schools, but school isn't really something that's on my mind a lot.

Private schools are more about different forms of education, like Waldorf or Montessori. There are also religious private schools. As far as I know, schools don't charge individuals for attendance, so going to a private school isn't really something prestigious here.

Schools are also expected to feed kids. Boggled my mind first time I heard of a kid having "school lunch debt", the notion strikes me as ridiculous. Schools are meant to be safe spaces for learning and growth.

Is everyone taught to hate foreign workers that are lazy and also steal all the jobs?

Nah. This strikes me as the kind of thing your racist old grandpa might say.

That's not to say that people don't shit on foreign workers. I know Eastern Europeans aren't very highly regarded among truckers, but I've also heard that they tend to be really incompetent and outright dangerous, not obeying traffic laws and whatnot, so I expect that at least some of the animosity is deserved.

It's not all perfect though. I belive a union recently negotiated that ready personnel (so like, firefighters, ambulance, life rescue personnel etc.) got a rule through for forced downtime. Which sounds great in theory, but it effectively screws over smaller departments (like in my town) where they have a very small staff pool, and rely on people being on-call. Most of the time nothing comes from being on-call, but with forced rest they'd need to actually schedule people. I'm not 100% sure how it works, but the workers were not happy and several threatened to quit. In my town they requested an exemption from these rules, and they got it through.

It seems like it's a rule that's really good for larger towns and cities, but in a small town like mine it just makes things harder.

Sweden is also by no means a perfect country. There are so many areas we could improve on. The housing market (like everywhere) is pretty rubbish. We have a lot of immigrants, but the integration efforts are incredibly half-arsed. We're very digital, and you basically need a BankID to operate anything digitally here. For that you need to be registered at the tax office, and getting registered there can require you to hop through a bunch of hoops. It took my roomie almost 4 years to get properly registered an receive a social security ID.

There's also barely anything that's private information. If you knew my name, you could find out so much about me. How many vehicles I own, where I live, the size of my apartment, who my employer is, what I make, if I've been involved in any legal cases, if I'm politically engaged, if I own property, if so what, where, and how much it's worth, if I have a car, then the make, colour, last time it was checked. My phone number (if that's public, mine thankfully isn't), my social security ID, etc. etc.

I heard of a case where a guy found out that he was legally declared dead when a letter arrived telling him so. Someone had basically signed a death certificate with his details, then they'd signed it as a doctor or whatever that didn't exist, and submitted it to the right place. You'd think there'd be more checks and balances in place, but nope. It took the guy ages to get stuff at least partially sorted out, because shockingly there aren't any procedures in places for when people magically stop being dead.

We also paid out social security to the defense minister of Iraq, so our systems definitely do get abused. The sad part being that when they restrict things and make these systems more conservative, people that really do need them end up getting hurt.