Like nearly all other Swedes, you can google 'carl heath' and find a page with his phone number, home address, birthday, and a button 'send him flowers':
http://personer.eniro.se/resultat/Carl+Heath
As a Swede currently living in California who also has visited IKEA in several different countries I can report that the general experience of visiting IKEA is pretty much as stressful and disorienting here as in Sweden. There are some local variations in the product portfolio both due to different standards like in bed sizes and kitchen and cultural differences. You cannot find a cheese slicer in my nearest IKEA and they have icing on their cinnamon buns (almost blasphemy).
To be honest, IKEA is a Swedish company by brand only. The products are sourced from wherever it is cheapest to manufacture right now and the ownership structure is so complex, multinational and tax-avoidance schemy that probably only the head honcho Ingvar Kamprad (IK in IKEA) who until recently resided in Switzerland, knows where the profit ends up.
(edit: got Ingvar Kamprads name wrong first time around)
Just some anecdote on Kamprad: Switzerland was also the first country for IKEA to expand into and we now have some of the largest stores. I suspect it had to do with Kamprad's early interest in the country, and possibly because it was a good test market for them. Most Swiss have heard some of stories about him - e.g. him driving an old Volvo, using and washing up plastic dishes and also that he often visited the first Ikea in Switzerland (Spreitenbach) in order to see how things go and optimise the strategy.
For me it has always been impressive how streamlined an Ikea is towards maximising revenue. I'm one of these people who tends to analyse my surroundings constantly for possible optimizations - yet in Ikea I couldn't come up with even one improvement that would make it better for the company. This alone is actually rather refreshing for me, finally a place where I can switch off my brain and just indulge in a bit of consumption!
And here I was thinking this was a Brazillian invention (they are wildly popular in Brazil, everywhere you go in Brazil, even the middle of nowhere, like Amazon Rainforest, you will find someone that owns one).
the most popular cheese, far ahead of anything else, is mozarella... it is not high quality as actual italian ones though (it is way less "fibrous").
then we have Prato (it means "Plate" as in dinner plate... or dinner dish...), that has the exact same recipe as Danbo, but is made with brazillian milk, and seemly tastes very differently (I dunno, since I never ate Danbo).
then we have a purely local invention called Minas, named after the state of Minas Gerais, despite being a São Paulo invention... (go figure...), that one is hard to describe, since it refers to 4 different cheeses (or the same cheese with 4 slightly variations in the process to make them, but with end results drastically different).
Then other italian cheeses are popular here, maybe because the large italian community here, and how much Brazillians also love pizza, so here almost every supermarket offers Provolone, Parmesan and Gorgonzola.
In urban areas you can find frequently "Steppe" cheese, it is a russian cheese it seems, it is expensive (double the price of "Prato") but not much as local clones of french/swiss cheese (Steppe is half of the price of local clones of Emmental, Gruyere, etc...)
cheddar cheese is sold a bit, but most people consider it low quality crap, the biggest seller of cheddar cheese don't even bother in selling actual cheddar, and instead sell a clone that tastes mostly the same, for very little... people still prefer to buy more expensive mozarella instead.
There's cheese which is made in America which for most intents and purposes is cheese like everywhere else, and then there's "American cheese" which comes in slices or blocks and is "cheese product" and only vaguely resembles the real thing despite being delicious in certain guilty-pleasure situations.
That makes no sense. The geographic source of the cheese is trivila compared to the way it is made. You can get cheap American process ccheese food or you can get expensive classic varieties of cheese from anywhere.
In my experience, the more popular american cheeses are quite mild and have a low melting temperature to get a good melt and stretch on warm food. I don't find them particularly interesting to just slice and put on a piece of bread. It is often easy enough to find good but expensive imported cheeses.
That’s exactly what I meant! We (my family being German) found it on one of our shopping trips at Bilka Kolding (we sometimes drive up there), and just bought one.
In Switzerland we do cheese shavings like described in the following article (although only for a specific type of cheese, the 'tete de moine' (monk's head). http://itotd.com/articles/217/the-girolle/
Huh. I've had a cheese slicer at home forever (Scottish-American).
It mostly gets used at dinner parties, when we buy nicer cheeses; inexpensive cheese is almost all pre-sliced in the US. Same holds true for my parents.
Their main design office is in Sweden and most designers are Swedish. Sometimes they collaborate with 'star' designers and they have been accused of plagiarism quite a few times.
IKEA is owned by former Nazi and famous tax evader Ingvar Kamprad. IKEA is actually a Dutch non-profit(!) foundation. It's part of a very intricate scheme to minimize the tax burden of the owners. IMHO, Kamprad has been exploiting Sweden's good will abroad (and maybe reputation for quality?) but he doesn't give a whole lot back. They do sell good and cheap furniture though. :)
He wasn't exactly the only teenager that were swept away by the rather popular national socialistic party at the time before the war. Germany was an important cultural influence and they sort of bootstrapped the economy, etc. There are publicly available lists for anyone that is interested. The researcher Tobias Hübinette seems to be focusing on issues related to Sweden, "whiteness" and race. http://www.tobiashubinette.se/
Regarding the trusts... I think that at the time (1970) and heavily socialist influenced era, it was more or less the only option to secure a privately owned and growing company from the tax man. The taxes were absurd at the time and small privately owned companies were very vulnerably to death-by-tax, especially if the owner died unexpectedly.
When the trusts are set up and the ownership is moved, there is not that much you can do about that actually, and the trusts can control to some degree how much tax the corporations pay as the trusts can charge royalties and set rates to minimize the earnings in the corporations that are "IKEA". Kamprad is probably a board member of all the important trusts, but the trusts are limited by their charter though, so there are limits to the control. It's true that they can't just give money away, at least without a courts ruling.
But still. IKEA have done a lot for the Swedish economy, there is still plenty of production in Sweden (as in Poland, or any cheap place in the world), and a lot of designers and engineers are employed in Sweden.
From this Swede's point of view, IKEA is primarily a global distributor of fresh Lingonberry jam. (I hear they also sell furniture.)
(Seriously, I don't get why lingonberries don't get a wider, eh, distribution. It's brilliant in so many things. My favorite is just tossing lingonberry jam into cream-based sauces.)
Swedes, as citiens of a kinda small and inherently insignificant county kinda fetishise any foreign recognition. I think that's why we like IKEA and H&M.
There's an old but good show that discusses the subject of our self-image pretty accurately (dunno if there are any english subtitles available) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4-V8_r0y-o
And Max Martin, the Swedish songwriter behind most of the international superstars of the last decade or two. Liked a song by Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Pink or Britney Spears? Good chance it was actually a Max Martin song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin
After moving to Hawaii, I've discovered that IKEA products are largely not appropriate for tropical climates -- all the fiberboard stuff has gotten severe mold infestations.
In CA, I loved going to IKEA to stock up on some swedish foods they have. I was very sad when they stopped carrying the foam cars, now it's mostly IKEA-branded stuff...
Hej Hej! I spent 4 months (in the dead of winter) consulting in Stockholm Sweden and it has a special place in my heart. I meet some great people... Some from just posting in reddit /stockholm.
Highly recommend visiting, if you can, go during June (end) for midsummer. I was there Dec - March, it was damn cold.
This made me laugh so hard I thought an upvote was not enough. We're building a SaaS thing at work and I'll open with this at the daily stand-up tomorrow.
I am from Norway, and decided to call.
Ended up talking 30 mins with an extremely nice lady in the south of sweden.
10/10 would recommend - Swedes are awesome
There were actually postings on 4chan's /pol/ about this. Mostly anons asking Swedes what they thought of Muslim refugees raping women in their country (in the rudest way possible) and Swedes politely denying that claim.
Would have been interesting if the anons weren't so hostile; instead it was just aggravating as 4chan always is.
From what I've heard from actual Swedes, any non-leftist opinion (or one that isn't leftist enough) will quickly result in the media turning on you and labeling you as a racist, Islamophobe, etc. It'd make you a social pariah and probably end your career. It's apparently not even kosher to suggest decreasing the number of immigrants coming in each year.
I wonder what their responses to that question would be if they weren't afraid of being identified (by their voice, information they provided on the call, etc.).
Do you read Swedish media? I don't say there haven't been a blind spot regarding immigration, but lately the government ministers have acknowledged the current refugee crisis is a problem.
Anyway, portraying the whole immigration issue only in terms of a rightist / leftist divide isn't very truthful. Moderaterna are not exactly a leftist party.
I'm not Swedish but I'm living in Sweden. This past weekend, my girlfriend, who is Swedish, wanted to participate in this phone number thing. I told her it was a terrible idea and I had to show her /b/ to convince her.
Interesting but not surprising website. I visited Stockholm for the first time recently and I was impressed with the usage of tech to increase everyday efficiencies. Things like: app for the rail station tickets/yellow cabs/buses, electric/hybrid vehicles commonplace, free wifi in abundance...
They don't just give the account to random people. It's always people with already some kind of social media presence, and stealing an account as well known as @Sweden is not something someone like that would just do.
tweetdeck (now owned by twitter) officially supports team access to twitter accounts. So you can add someone to the team account and let them tweet using the handle, and revoke the access a week later easily.
However, because tweetdeck isn't available on mobile devices, most of these rotated accounts end up using password sharing.
The abuse of the @Sweden Twitter account is obvious -- just look at the lebanese immigrant Elias Kreidy who wrote “I’m the immigrant fking your daughter while you’re trying to sleep ignoring her moans calling me ‘daddy'”.
Now imagine this guy answering a phone line as an ambassador for the country!
Use Google Translate. Obviously English sources for Swedish news is hard to find. It is, afaik, not the first the time @sweden account has been used for trolling by douches.
Got a link to an article by anyone who doesn't think the moon landings are fake or that the US government was behind 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing?
I've no idea if that article is factual or not but let's not uncritically link to infowars.net, eh?
There is an American living in Sweden that is answering calls. He's got some interesting perspectives on life in Sweden. Not sure if he is still taking calls or not.
Unfortunately what I've seen implies they talk in English. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But my son has been taking French language class in school and this provides the obvious extension to their idea of "talk to a random French-speaking person" or whatever other language someone wants to learn. Something like that probably already exists anyway. I suppose there would be the predictable issues with most foreign language learners being minors.
I've visited Sweden quite a few times and have travelled around quite a bit. I didn't meet a single person who couldn't speak English to some extent. I didn't meet a single person under about 50 who wasn't completely fluent.
Reminder: A trumped-up Swedish arrest warrant is the reason that Julian Assange has been trapped for years inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London and denied his right to asylum... all for journalism that made the US government look bad.
Don't travel to Sweden. Don't support the Swedish government in any way. They are cooperating in a large-scale effort to censor the types of things you can read about in the newspaper.
I'm working on an application, submitted to fellowship, that will allow people to confess about something and others will be able to comment on this confession.
This topic makes clear that I need really good, and fast, moderation tools
We're in 64th place for crime, just behind UK and Australia and way behind the US (obviously). But Japan is absolutely great if you're looking for low crime rates, and the food is fantastic too.
Yes, sorry that was a terrible reference; I should have been more careful. But take instead the murder rate from Wikipedia (which gets stats from the UN): Sweden is in place 205 out of 218 countries and no other nordic country is lower except Iceland (and the rate in Iceland is not accurately measurable since they had only a single murder).
In decline? Sweden had the highest growth rate in Europe in the last quarter of last higher. Highest population growth rate in the EU. How do you define decline? Or crime for that matter :) Sweden does not have high crime. I'm Irish, living in Sweden. I know high crime.
Lived there in 2012 for 6 months. What an amazing country, probably the best place in Europe to have a family. Stockholm is one of the most beautiful and safest capitals in the world.
Another case of malware blocking gone wrong. Well, it’s not malware, but if you don’t trust it, you can probably use the archive.org version of the site.
Let's clear this up once and for all; That Sweden has a high suicide rate is a rumour and not true. Sweden's suicide rate is below the average of the OECD countries. Feel free to read up on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Sweden
Also quite likely, it is due to the fact that Swedish rape law is quite different from many other countries in 2 aspects that have significant effect on statistics:
a) Every form of sex without consent is classified as rape, including "too drunk/asleep to say no" and sex within a marriage
b) Every incident is recorded separately
So if a person is raped 5 times by his/her spouse, this would lead to 5 rapes in the Swedish statistics, as opposed to zero times (b/c within marriage) or 1 time (b/c same offender and victim) in many other places.
False equivalence. Blackface was not civil disobedience. Not even sure why you're bringing that up unless it is to tie white guilt in America to white guilt in Sweden.
Who said anything about anyone 'caricaturing' people of Arabic origin? They spoke the language. That is not by itself a 'caricature'.
Moreover, blackface was done to be funny (you know, like an actual caricature). This is done to make a political point.
If it was Americans answering a phone line like this with an exaggerated Texas accent, you wouldn't bat an eye. That's how we know you're driven by white guilt.
If you would prefer, you could replace 'blackface' with 'speaking ebonics.' I'm sure that would be a real hoot. Eveybody, laugh at the white man pretending to be a black man who can barely speak understandable English!
I wonder what kind of political statement that would make...
A caricature is 'a picture, description, or imitation of a person or thing in which certain striking characteristics are exaggerated in order to create a comic or grotesque effect.' Blackface absolutely qualifies. Pretending to speak another language/dialect for grotesque effect absolutely qualifies.
And yes, if America had a large group of people who would put on black hoods, and stand on metaphorical soapboxes, shouting about how Texans are destroying the country, how they are rapists and thieves, and they should be sent back to <Wherever>, I'd have a problem with that, too. For some reason, though, this form of racism doesn't seem to be particularly popular...
The intent behind the two instances is different. With blackface, it was part of entertainment, not political protest. With this Sweden thing (which I'm assuming is legitimate, as I've yet to see a source by the person claiming it, although I've asked), the intent seems clear, to me, to be political protest of the perceived dilution of their culture.
Now if black people in America were wearing white face to politically protest gentrification, I would say that's more equivalent to this Sweden thing than historical blackface.
The Swedish left has gone completely off the rails, to the point where merely addressing a demographic shift gets you accused of spreading "racist propaganda". When the Swedish authorities cover up mass sexual assaults because they were committed by a particular group, that's not propaganda, that's just good work - we wouldn't want those imaginary SS divisions to take advantage of such inconvenient realities.
This whole issue appears to be virtually unknown outside Scandinavian circles - and to some degree inside Sweden, whose print and broadcast media are to all intents and purposes heavily censored.
I had a Swedish girlfriend for a while. She moved to Denmark, where I live. And within a month changed her entire outlook on the demographics of her native land.
It is actually getting serious. Artists are jailed for their work in Sweden these days. Malmø is going out of control. The country is in a downward spiral of violence and chaos, and in deep, deep denial.
The merest mention of these issues automatically trigger the full brunt of rightist extremism accusations. And a predictable loss of karma points.
Numbers aside, there's a lot more to cultural changes than merely existing in a country. During my time in Sweden I found people from all over the world in droves. Africa/ME didn't stand out in any way and it seems like anyone who ever talks about this stuff any other way hasn't even stepped foot in Sweden.
Come visit southern france some time to see what an "arabized" region looks like.
Oh come on. 16% of the population is foreign-born, of which half are Europeans. Of the top ten immigrant countries, only one is arab (Iraq), and they constitute 1.3% of the population. The many Syrians who came last fall are not in the statistics yet, but will likely also amount to less than 2%.
In Malmö, less than 30% are foreign-born, and the largest group is (unsurprisingly) Danish, along with Iraqi and former Yugoslavia.
Oh yeah. And the hand grenades, and the constant shootings, and the rapes, and the burning schools, and the burned out cars, my god, it's all so quaint and Swedish.
I think people are mostly concerned with muslims, in effect, whether they're arab or not. Take the Netherlands for example, it features a guy called Wilders who frequently talks about Eurabia (instead of Europe) and calls the labour party (partij van de arbeid) the partij van de arabieren (arabs). When in reality, 90% of muslims in the Netherlands are Berbers and Turks, not arabs. There's an anti-arab sentiment because people are ignorant, but it really doesn't matter if you're arab or not. You can be berber, pakistani, turkish, persian or kurdish and you'll be seen as an arab, which is wrong, and a muslim, which is usually correct. So it probably doesn't make all that much sense to talk about arabs.
So Islam instead, in Sweden:
> Islam has, as of 2009, 106,327 officially registered adherents among citizens and residents of Sweden. Other sources set the figure at roughly 450,000 to 500,000, which accounts for around 5% of the total Swedish population, including people who would not really regard themselves as Muslims.[1]
Of course, the distribution is quite lopsided and very much geared towards the big cities. Further, immigrant families (at least those from lower socioeconomic status, e.g. usually not say Iranian immigrants) tend to have a higher birthrate. Further, at old age immigrants tend to move back to their home country, relative to wanting to work in Europe at a younger age. The combination of these three effects: concentration in cities, relatively high birthrate and relatively high incoming young migrants vs outgoing older migrants, makes for large young populations in the big cities. And young people themselves have certain characteristics compared to older age groups (across ethnicities): relatively higher propensity to be present on the street, rather than at home, relatively higher unemployment (i.e. again, overrepresented in the street, underrepresented in workplaces), relatively higher levels of crime etc.
Such that a population of just 5% can be 15-20% in certain cities, a population which is disproportionately confronted on the street in a criminal or unemployed fashion, compared to other age groups (and due to the demographic age characteristic of particular ethnicities, also compared to other ethnicities). This can skew the personal experience of citizens of these cities in a way that average statistics wouldn't explain.
Combine this with further concentrations, like within neighbourhoods, and you get groups of people who feel overwhelmed by the demographic changes. For example, say 5% are 'foreign' in a particular country, but they're 4x more likely to live in a large city, and have 2x as many kids than the national average. Well then you've got 40% of the kids who are foreign in that city. And in a particular neighbourhood in that city, perhaps these foreigners are 2x more likely to live, such that if you send your kid to school, perhaps say 75% of the kids don't look like your kid, nor do the parents look like you or speak your language, perhaps even half of the teachers don't look like you. And for these people, I get it. I get the fear. I'm not saying it's right, but that it's very understandable. Of course these numbers are just made up, but you get my point.
I'm from a muslim family myself and I get frustrated with all the racist bs, I mean it's overwhelming what I faced as a teenager looking to shape his identity. Every day there were articles about people like me in the newspapers, describing me or my peers or family as barbaric, as having 'genes geared towards crime', as being backwards, less intelligent etc etc. Don't get me wrong, I reject all of that. But I do appreciate that some of the native white population in Europe feels threatened, and that it's not just blatant xenophobia. Indeed there are pockets where they're no longer the majority, and where the momentum is becoming disproportionate, and that can be scary. And simply saying 'but it's just 5%', which is something I say all the time, is true in most cases, but the personal experience due to many factors (some of which mentioned above) can make that 5% seem like a lot more. Hell my gf is a teacher and she was grading an essay about a particular muslim ethnic group in my country, who number 2.3% or so. The girl had gotten that figure wrong by an order of magnitude, she cited more than 20%. My gf was frustrated that she could get it so wrong (i.e. that such a large mistake didn't ring any bells for her to recheck her sources), until I showed her that in our city, for people of that kids' age, the number is actually quite close to 20%, and even higher in certain neighbourhoods, and that it was perfectly normal for that wrongful 20%+ figure not to be a red flag for her.
Anyway as to your question, I'm sorry I don't know what the exact figures are in Malmo. Just that 'arabs' is probably not the right statistic to look up, Muslims is an improvement, that they're 5%, but that I can imagine it's much higher in cities, and that the negative 'experience/feeling' of this percentage can be even greater than that due to various demographic factors.
Lastly, beware that, as you obviously know, statistics can be misleading. Social issues particularly are sensitive to definitions. Is a 3rd-generation migrant, whose parents both were both in Sweden, lived there for 50 years and have a 20 year old child, still seen as a foreigner? Is a brit who lives in Sweden included in the figures, making the natives a minority? etc. This stuff matters a lot. In the Netherlands for example, the king and queen are both foreigners on the basis of definitions used in the Netherlands, as are their children. In fact the royal family's children are specified further, as being 'non-western foreigners' (i.e. not say from Europe or the US, but rather from say Africa, Asia or South America). In any city they live, they're reducing the percentage of the native white population and increasing the number of non-western foreigners, which may be a scary conclusion to many, even though nobody has a problem with these kids [0]. Yet this is the official definition used in government, academia, media, education etc. So if someone says 'x is becoming a minority', well consider carefully on the basis of which definitions that's true.
Regarding the racist tendencies in the Netherlands: take heart, not everybody shares them. Wilders may be a very loud mouthed politician but he still represents just a minority.
Not at all. Malmö is one of my favorite cities in the world... I've visited there every year for the last 3 years, and it's still very Swedish. Granted, I haven't been since the Syrian refugee situation began, so it may have changed somewhat this year.
Worth pointing out there is something of a rivalry between Copenhagen (Denmark) & Malmö (Sweden), which are just 14km apart via bridge. The difference between the cultures is explored in an excellent crime drama called Brön/Brøn (The Bridge)... imagine a Swedish female Sheldon Cooper solving murders with her Danish counterpart. Worth watching if you can ever find it.
Sorry for nitpicking, but the Swedish/Danish name of the crime drama is spelled Bron/Broen. Brön could mean breads in some Swedish dialects (and is also slang for boobs). Glad to hear you like our city! :)
Nitpicking is entirely welcome, it's the only way I'll learn! And a very worthy nitpick, since I misspelled both the Swedish & Danish... ouch!
Next time I'm in Malmö I owe you a coffee at Espresso House! I wonder if they still have the Australian flag at their cafe in Emporia. Malmö made my friends and I feel so welcome in May 2013 and we've never forgotten it!
