Sollie Citizen Rights Compared To USA Today ...

thinkstoomuch wrote:

Joat42 wrote:Mostly happens in the US only I'm afraid. And the prime cause for this is usually special interests groups lobbying (ie bribing) politicians.

I'll take your word for local conditions.

Quibble a bit about reasons. Local school board responding to affected parents. Compared to a Representative working up to 3,000 miles away for 700,000 plus people of which only a small percent is spent on any particular issue. Much worse for Senators one for every 3,000,00 on average. Which is why our Bureaucracy is so out of control.

Reading back through not sure if it is a quibble or an expansion of how special interests get their power.

Same applies in a lot of ways to Health Care. Most countries are smaller than most of our states.

Don't get me too wrong both on those things I mentioned from the 70's and 80's I supported, at that time.

Now when I look at the numbers and results I cringe. Then again I used to cringe thinking about Florida public education in the 60's when it had a lot of retirees and less parents.

Really wish there were easy answers to any of it.

Enjoy,
T2M

If we had the answers it wouldn't be a problem anymore.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Um you have this bachward.

No i do not, because as should have been obvious, i was talking about HERE. The big privatisation wave that came in the 90s and onwards. That was going to make eeeverything sooo much better. About the only thing that got better was the amount of private profits taken from taxmoney.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Same applies in a lot of ways to Health Care. Most countries are smaller than most of our states.

That is nothing but a poor excuse. Canada, heck even my own country has far greater problems with low density population and distances for school children to travel.
Canada is also similar size as USA. Meanwhile, China and Japan manages a high density crowding situation.
Russia meanwhile is the worlds largest nation and does not try to use that excuse, because it´s irrelevant unless you let incompetency rule.
And while Canada may only have about 1/9th of USAs population, Russia has almost half, and a drastically harsher climate as well(try to adjust the costs for all USAs schools to the climate of southern Alaska and you might get a hint of how much problems that causes).

So no, that´s just a copout without even the slightest justification.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Quibble a bit about reasons. Local school board responding to affected parents. Compared to a Reprsentative working up to 3,000 miles away for 700,000 plus people of which only a small percent is spent on any particular issue.

I might add that there´s some calling for going back to a national-level control of schools, because switching it to local control started the overall worsening of quality.
Privatisation later made it much worse.


And as a footnote, i might add that one part of the reason for that has later been explained by research findings regarding how schools take on students...

The findings were that if you mix good and bad students randomly, the bad students do much better while the good students results remain good.

However, if you split up good and bad students, the bad students generally do worse, sometimes severely so... But the real kicker was when the research also found that the "elite classes", consisting only of good students and teachers, overall actually got a worse result than expected, as in worse than good students got in mixed good/bad classes.

While average students got a mixed result of anything from not being affected from being split from the best and worst, all the way to dropping to "bad students" level.

The research behind this consisted of statistics from decades, taken from Europe, USA, South America, Africa and Japan.

Exact reasons for the above is still being studied.

But with the heavy social stratification of USA in general, that alone might actually explain much of your school troubles.

Tenshinai wrote:
That is nothing but a poor excuse. Canada, heck even my own country has far greater problems with low density population and distances for school children to travel.
Canada is also similar size as USA. Meanwhile, China and Japan manages a high density crowding situation.
Russia meanwhile is the worlds largest nation and does not try to use that excuse, because it´s irrelevant unless you let incompetency rul(accidental snip I dislike nested quotes next to impossible to get right, my apologies)
And while Canada may only have about 1/9th of USAs population, Russia has almost half, and a drastically harsher climate as well(try to adjust the costs for all USAs schools to the climate of southern Alaska and you might get a hint of how much problems that causes).

So no, that´s just a copout without even the (did it again)

I might add that there´s some calling for going back to a national-level control of schools, because switching it to local control started the overall worsening of quality.
Privatisation later made it much worse.
...snip...

Well once again we have proven all cultures are not equal.

Here virtually the opposite is true.

Of course ever look up urbanization index.

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-inf ... 15#-amount

Sweden 84.2%
US 81 %

So meally mouthing about rural seems like you are much more centralized.

Canada almost the same as the US 81.9%
Australia 94.8 this one shocked the hell out me. "Shows what know that just isn't so." Which is why I had to include it.

So exactly how many people in your legislayive branch.

In the US you get something like 14 Reprsentatives in a country with minimal background diversity.

Heck the most conservative estimate I have seen we have more illegal aliens than you do people. Hell or Federal government has more employees than you do citizens.

I am not knocking any of that. It seems like a good way to go if you can manage it. But that ain't what the US is or what it attracts. It is not even what we started with for that matter.

For that matter I am virtually certain we have more corporations than citizens.

And if big corporations are evil and not looking out for their shareholders just the board, how do big governments avoid the same problem. Simple answer seems like they don't. At least after a certain time and size.

T2M

thinkstoomuch wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:
That is nothing but a poor excuse. Canada, heck even my own country has far greater problems with low density population and distances for school children to travel.
Canada is also similar size as USA. Meanwhile, China and Japan manages a high density crowding situation.
Russia meanwhile is the worlds largest nation and does not try to use that excuse, because it´s irrelevant unless you let incompetency rul(accidental snip I dislike nested quotes next to impossible to get right, my apologies)
And while Canada may only have about 1/9th of USAs population, Russia has almost half, and a drastically harsher climate as well(try to adjust the costs for all USAs schools to the climate of southern Alaska and you might get a hint of how much problems that causes).

So no, that´s just a copout without even the (did it again)

I might add that there´s some calling for going back to a national-level control of schools, because switching it to local control started the overall worsening of quality.
Privatisation later made it much worse.
...snip...

Well once again we have proven all cultures are not equal.

Here virtually the opposite is true.

Of course ever look up urbanization index.

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-inf ... 15#-amount

Sweden 84.2%
US 81 %

So really mouthing about rural seems like you are much more centralized.

Canada almost the same as the US 81.9%
Australia 94.8 this one shocked the hell out me. "Shows what know that just isn't so." Which is why I had to include it.

So exactly how many people in your legislative branch.

In the US you get something like 14 Representatives in a country with minimal background diversity.

Heck the most conservative estimate I have seen we have more illegal aliens than you do people. Hell or Federal government has more employees than you do citizens.

I am not knocking any of that. It seems like a good way to go if you can manage it. But that ain't what the US is or what it attracts. It is not even what we started with for that matter.

For that matter I am virtually certain we have more corporations than citizens.

And if big corporations are evil and not looking out for their shareholders just the board, how do big governments avoid the same problem. Simple answer seems like they don't. At least after a certain time and size.

T2M

You have to look at the urbanization together with the population density to get a fair picture on what's going on. Australia is a prime example of this, high urbanization but very low population density which makes the numbers look wonky.

Population density:
US 32.69 pop/km² (84.68 pop/mi²)
Sweden 21.7 pop/km² (56 pop/mi²)
Canada 3.61 pop/km² (9.34 pop/mi²)
Australia 3.11 pop/km² (8.04 pop/mi²)

Joat42 wrote:You have to look at the urbanization together with the population density to get a fair picture on what's going on. Australia is a prime example of this, high urbanization but very low population density which makes the numbers look wonky.

Population density:
US 32.69 pop/km² (84.68 pop/mi²)
Sweden 21.7 pop/km² (56 pop/mi²)
Canada 3.61 pop/km² (9.34 pop/mi²)
Australia 3.11 pop/km² (8.04 pop/mi²)

From the UN where that stat cane from.

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/
Bold is my emphasis.

Quote
The Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations has been issuing, since 1988, every two years revised estimates and projections of the urban and rural populations of all countries in the world and of their major urban agglomerations. This web site presents the main findings of the 2014 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects which are consistent with the size of the total population of each country as estimated or projected in the 2012 Revision of World Population Prospects (United Nations, 2013). The World Urbanization Prospects are used widely throughout the United Nations and by many international organizations, research centers, academic researchers and the media.


End quote

So the misleading stat is population density by country. This is actually a measurement of cities or where the people actually are.

For example Rhode Island with a density of over a thousand and several states under a hundred. (Thank you for the metric conversion by the way)

To be very fair when I first saw this stat more than a month ago I had the same reaction. Until I talked to my sister and her discussion month long walkabout paid for by a year's tips at a resturant.

She said duh lot a land there that won't support people or even a station.

Which sort of matches up with much of Utah outside the cities. In a fashion anyway.

Have fun,
T2M

thinkstoomuch wrote:Of course ever look up urbanization index.

As Joat42 already noted, looking at that by itself is not a good comparison.

Almost a third of Sweden, even calling it rural is an exaggeration, because sometimes there´s several miles between houses, even before you get up into the real wilderness areas.

thinkstoomuch wrote:So meally mouthing about rural seems like you are much more centralized.

Far from it unless you only look at the southern half, or better yet southern third of the country.
And the overall very low population density makes over half the country difficult to effectively administrate. For example, up north at worst, there´s one region where 3 counties, each larger in area than that of Stockholm, share a single ambulance, in total.
With distances between the edges of the counties being more than 100km. And most roads within the area NOT being able to bring you straight from point A to point B, meaning that a normal ambulance call might require going 200km from station to pickup, then if it´s a bad situation going to nearest larger hospital, another 300-400km.
Fortunately, there are more assets available, like so called "acute vehicles" which is basically a car with the treatment ability but not transport ability of an ambulance, as well as helicopters.

Just the fact that use of helicopters for ambulance deliveries is a COMMON thing in the upper 1/3 of Sweden should tell you a lot.

thinkstoomuch wrote:So exactly how many people in your legislayive branch.

Parliament has 349 seats since 1976. Proportionally elected. 310 seats on a constituency basis, the rest 39 to assure proportionality to the total vote result.

thinkstoomuch wrote:In the US you get something like 14 Reprsentatives in a country with minimal background diversity.

Did you mean country or county? Background diversity here varies wildly, and if you look at local governments, more still. And national politics often do not matter much locally, where it was for example not long ago that one of the better handle counties were administrated by the Left Party and Moderaterna together, and those two are basically as if the Teaparty would cooperate with the US communist party.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Heck the most conservative estimate I have seen we have more illegal aliens than you do people. Hell or Federal government has more employees than you do citizens.

That´s because nearly all of what would be illegal aliens for you, here are LEGAL immigrants. And i can very much assure you that we have more of those compared to total population than USA has.

In 2007, immigration to Sweden would equate to USA having about 4 times more immigrants per year. And the EU effect, well that is something like as if USA would have a completely open border with Mexico, all of the Caribbean and much of South and Central America.
And i mean literally OPEN border, no checks of ANY kind. Try handling that! Damn bloody stupid i tell you. Over the last few years we suddenly have a mass "invasion" of Romanian beggars, it´s just absurd.

And of course, this is a primary reason why the not entirely nice history "sweden democrats" have become third largest party lately.

Also, the size of government doesn´t really matter, how effective it is does.

As a comparative note, it´s sometimes joked about how as late as the 1920s, you could effectively just walk into many government buildings and go say hi to whoever was in charge there, noone bothered locking doors, and no excess personnel was there to stop you.

thinkstoomuch wrote:And if big corporations are evil and not looking out for their shareholders just the board, how do big governments avoid the same problem. Simple answer seems like they don't. At least after a certain time and size.

That´s because you´re trying to run governments like you run a corporation. Sadly that has become fashionable here as well, and is part of the reason why government here has become far less effective in the last 20 years.

Instead of exploiting the advantages of a government structure, rules forcing private contractors and interdepartmental contracting have caused a severe change to the worse.

So again, no it has nothing to do with size, or time for that matter, just with what rules you set and if you can find at least SOME few people that are reliable. Thing is that you don´t need to have everyone involved being reliable as long as you have a few, and overall, if you give people reason to be honest and work hard, they strive to live up to that.

It´s when you assume people are crap and treat them based on that, that´s when you make sure there´s LOTS of scumbags crawling around.

Tenshinai

Thank you for the information. Our Local, county and state governments here vary widely. For the most part I don't want Federal Government involved in anything we can avoid. Public education is something I want. I don't want some ... person ... plane trips away not helo, plane deciding what regulations are needed on every little thing. Since our federal government got involved in a big way rather than just keeping stats administrative personnel have come close, if not exceeded, the number of teachers. Yet everytime something gets cut it is the teachers who are threatened not the secretaries and such.

Every year, it seems like, the spend more for less result. Before, for a lot of reasons, we were near the top. Now, not so much.

Stepkids went to private school because the school knew no results no money. Just privatizing won't fix anything. No tax credit that I remember.

Once again I want public schools. I just don't want them run from Washington, DC.

I grew up literally with a corn field across the street nearest hospital was over 15 miles away. That is in one of our densest states. Which is skewed enourmously by one major city NY,NY.

To equate at personal representation level 14 people in one house of representatives and 2 senators for your national government.

What you describe applies to more than two thirds of the US. North Dakota you are in tall cotton. Actually you pretty much are dead on for Minnisota(sp). It gets wrse from there to just about the Pacific.

Read my response to Joat42. It is their metric denoting what percentage of the population lives where. Be it a urban area or a rural area. Exactly what we are talking about. A higher percentage of Swedens population lives in cities than the US. Of course we have to trust the most corrupt sort of goverent fot the stat. You know the one that puts Suadia Arabia on the women's council(whatever the name is).

I need a cite on that immigration number. (Edit) never mind. I'l trust you to back up wiki on this. We are actually close for foreign born and I was finding old data or conflating stuff. Though you are understating what opening the border with Mexico would do. Though based on the results of NAFTA with just the truckers.

Hopefully this post makes somekind of sense. If not I am going to sleep anyway!

T2M

Actually to describe how rural some areas here are.

When I choose my motorcycle gas tank size was a big factor. Reason when I go by a sign that says next gas 180 miles, I'd like to get there. Keep in mind one day I will get to Alaska but that sign is in Idaho the next gas is in Nevada. Pretty country though.


80 miles is not even unusual where I travel. Scary sign I drive by way to often blank town 75 miles and it is on a nasty dirt road. At the intersection.

T2M

thinkstoomuch wrote:Every year, it seems like, the spend more for less result. Before, for a lot of reasons, we were near the top. Now, not so much.

Large part of that however has been due to the petrodollar system which keeps the dollar artificially skyhigh in value despite government printing money enough to cause hyperinflation five times over.

It´s also a primary reason why the deindustrialisation of USA started so early and was so severe.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Once again I want public schools. I just don't want them run from Washington, DC.

That´s what was once thought here as well, now however, a few decades after local government took over running the schools, there is much talk about shifting the system back to a national one, because that DID work better, much better even. Because then, the focus wasn´t so much on LOOKING good, it was on BEING good.

thinkstoomuch wrote:To equate at personal representation level 14 people in one house of representatives and 2 senators for your national government.

Why is there a need for both senate and congress?
Sweden for example dropped that, IIRC, in the 70s as it was found to be ~"detrimental to democracy".

thinkstoomuch wrote:Read my response to Joat42. It is their metric denoting what percentage of the population lives where. Be it a urban area or a rural area. Exactly what we are talking about. A higher percentage of Swedens population lives in cities than the US.

Looking ONLY at that does not show the truth however.

Otherwise, well lets give an example...
Japan has 81.5% urbanisation, Sweden 84.2% and USA 81%...

But the population density of Japan is 337/sqkm.
Do you consider Japan on an equal basis to USA when comparing how "rural" it is? As it has almost the same % of urbanisation...

And Australia meanwhile has an urbanisation of 94.8%, yet a population density of just 2.8/sqkm.

Hence, comparing ONLY the urbanisation value is completely useless. If 9 people live in a city and a tenth lives 300km away from the city, that is still an urbanisation value of 90%.

And in fact, consider this... USA has a LOWER urbanisation, but almost 50% HIGHER population density, compared to Sweden.
What this means is that on average your rural/nonurban areas ave around 50% higher population density.

And that is despite of how states like Alaska and to a much lesser degree some of the desert states drag your population density down. Alaska for example is BIG, but has a population density of a tiny 0.49/sqkm. That is a drastic downer for the overall population density.

Meanwhile, for another comparison, Sweden has the population density of Arizona, pretty much exactly. While Minnesota is higher in density.

thinkstoomuch wrote:I need a cite on that immigration number. (Edit) never mind. I'l trust you to back up wiki on this. We are actually close for foreign born and I was finding old data or conflating stuff.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... ge-Big.png

That´s from the Swedish wikipedia. 100k immigrants in 1 year, compared to a population of around 9M at the time, that´s over 1%.

https://www.google.se/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... AQ&cad=rja

Ok it seems i may have mixed years before, but still, with US population a bit over 33 times greater than Sweden, while your immigration is roughly around 1M, ie 10 times larger in actual numbers, Sweden accepted around 3.3 times more immigrants in 2007 than USA per population.
With USA having 22 times greater land area, Sweden accepted well over twice as many immigrants per sqkm as USA.

Immigration in 2014 has gone up to around 120k for Sweden:
http://www.migrationsinfo.se/migration/sverige/
That number does include "returnees", but in that category, foreign born that have attained citizenship and then gone abroad are also a noticeable part.

And the percentage of total population not born in Sweden is up to 16%.

USA has 13% foreign born.
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ ... ted-states

thinkstoomuch wrote:Though you are understating what opening the border with Mexico would do. Though based on the results of NAFTA with just the truckers.

I don´t think you realise just how bad the situation is in some regions of south or eastern Europe. Mexico is doing well in comparison. But even if the trouble isn´t the same for whole nations in Europe, a lot of problematic people still go FAR away within EU to look for job, and without the language skills needed, very few are successful and are then stuck there as beggars.

There´s also at least some exploitation of this by organised crime, making it worse still.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Hopefully this post makes somekind of sense. If not I am going to sleep anyway!

And hopefully you slept well.

thinkstoomuch wrote:When I choose my motorcycle gas tank size was a big factor. Reason when I go by a sign that says next gas 180 miles, I'd like to get there. Keep in mind one day I will get to Alaska but that sign is in Idaho the next gas is in Nevada. Pretty country though.

Yeah, but you see, if Sweden was the size of USA with the same population distribution, that sign would probably say 200 or more instead of 180.

The inland part of northern Sweden is more wilderness than rural. With overall population heavily focused in the southern third(and a bit), and then north of that, along the coast.

thinkstoomuch wrote:80 miles is not even unusual where I travel.

Not here either. And you have 22 times greater area to play uneven population density games with.

There are two USA's. Just as there are two Sweden's.

There is the Eastern USA which is either a large city, or farmland with small town America. There is literally a small town every 5 to 10 miles. Pretty much the exact same as in Europe, other than the towns are smaller.

Then there is the Western United States(minus Pacific Ocean states of California and Washington and Western Oregon), where the entire land is mostly, or completely devoid of anyone or anything other than maybe a few head of cattle per thousand hectares and row after row of mountains. If you stay on one of the few interstate highways you can find gas every 30 miles and 70 miles at worst. Anywhere else? Good Luck! Most likely not. Why I always carry a spare 2 gallons of fuel and tip top each tank of fuel when traveling. I also always carry a sleeping pad and bag. I do not even bother with a hotel. No need. No one around.

Think of it this way. Montana and Sweden are effectively the same area. Sweden has 9X greater population than Montana and Montana is surrounded by states equally as large and equally devoid of people.

The state of Wyoming is not called "radio free" without cause. Its largest "city" is Cheyenne with a population of under 65,000. There are no "suburbs". It is half the size of Sweden.

It should be noted that by and large the western states spend less $$$/student on education and achieve higher standardized test scores. There is one large caveat in this: Fewer take multiple standardized tests on average than other states, so those that do, score high. All states use different "standarized tests". Then again, students in western states universities are not obtaining useless "hotel management" degrees. Most of their degrees are in mining, animal care, oil, and tech and drop all the fluff liberal arts degrees that don't make any money.