A whole lot of other governments have the same stuff, I would hazard to guess that they all do (Eschelon for example) and Sweden has actually been open about the fact that it has it, and has shown how the oversight is being done, whereas with other governments this is all a secret. Not justifying it, but just saying that because Sweden has said it does this, doesn't mean it is the worst or the only government spying on Internet traffic.
Sweden is outstanding if you ignore all the equally great countries in Europe and elsewhere. Sweden also used to be the standard-bearer for the Nordic model, this is not true anymore. There's plenty of reasons to avoid Sweden, but here are the top ones:
* Everything is expensive.
* Taxes are high.
* Housing (more or less) can't be rented, buying is expensive.
* Weather is cold and/or dark most of the year.
* Culture life is relatively mediocre.
* Foreigners generally perceive Swedes as guarded.
Cultural life in Stockholm is rather quite good for a town of its size, and you have plenty of nature around you to compensate for not having quite as many bars as London.
Racism is sadly on the rise, but not as bad as in many other societies. Anecdotally I have immigrant friends and visitor friends, from backgrounds that would invite racism, who say that they feel less discriminated in Sweden than in other Euopean countries. No place is perfect though, you just have to select the drawbacks you want to put up with.
More importantly for Hacker News readers I consider that the startup and investment community to be fairly insular and limited in scope in Stockholm compared to other places I have worked, particular London, West/East coast US. But no surprises there, it is a lot smaller after all.
That's quite an old ranking and it's hard to compare against any other ranking, but I can't imagine Ireland still being at the top of the list.
I do think the "IT-community" (and most people) are awesome. While somewhat underappreciated it's lot more enthusiast/hacker than academic/corporate, compared to other countries. People also generally don't care about hierarchies and titles in the workplaces. I mean getting to work is often more "troublesome" than getting things done at work. YMMV of course.
Maybe it might make a good base from which to launch a startup focused on reclaiming some standard expectations privacy for internet users, by using original internet peer-to-peer design instead of the prevalent "calf-cow" (client-server) model. Many, like the 60-something Harvard blogger who recently wrote about Facebook's flaws, are calling for an end to this design.
Consider the Skype example mentioned as one of Sweden's startup success stories. (And I believe he did eventually go to London for better access to capital.)
I, as an American, decided to move to Sweden for all of the reasons GP posted, and despite your list of supposed downsides. A few observations after six months here:
* The Swedish summer more than makes up for the dark winter. Not that much colder than Chicago either.
* Taxes are high, but the benefits you get from the taxes are astounding, especially from an American perspective. Great roads, clean cities, amazing public transit, free healthcare, etc.
* Six weeks of vacation, over a year of maternity leave, etc. Enough said.
* Yes, the rental market in Stockholm sucks.
Honestly, Sweden is truly a democratic model that other countries should try following. I'm very happy with my decision to move here and wish I had discovered it sooner.
I'm a joint Australian/UK citizen, I work in Stockholm from time to time (usually 3-6 months bursts). Because of my pattern the tax issue is a non issue for me.
I would agree with all the positives posted here. The only notable negatives I've noticed (in order of annoyance) are:
* The intrusive personnummer.
* The rental market (and the bloody laundry madness...) in Stockholm.
* Something similar to but not quite as overt as Racism.
The personnumer is used as a primary key by many businesses. Some visitors may not have a personnumer and this makes it difficult to do a range of things like visit some Gyms and so forth.
The rental market situation is a nightmare. Even worse than Sydney.
If you look like a non native Scandinavian this can lead to significant non-confrontational discrimination in some "exclusive" sub-cultures.
Lots of people want to move to Stockholm, Malmö and Göteborg (Gothenburg), so demand is rising faster than supply.
But also, the laws that ensure that lower class people are to afford to live in nice places also makes it a bad investment to build new houses. It's great because the classes are more integrated, leading to more sense of community, less crime and less 'ghettos' riddled with crime and drugs. But on the other hand, since the government keeps prices reasonable, low prices makes it a less good investment. Sadly we can't have the best of two worlds, but I think a golden middle path ("lagom") is the way to go. Not regulated enough that no one will invest in houses, not free enough that the lower classes will (even more than it's now) have to move to ghettos.
Yes, non-availability. Basically high demand because of rapid urbanization, poor infrastructure, small and single city center. Low supply because of rent control on the first and second hand market, conversion of rentals and not enough new buildings. At least for the three large cities in Sweden.
A large factor is probably the oligopolies in the building industry, which earns lots of money with the present situation, despite little building going on.
Regulatory capture in Sweden is still not counted as corruption, for some strange reason...
and considering that everything is expensive, the wages are not that high either. Moreover buying in apartment in a appropriated size (>=55m^2) close to the city in Stockholm is always >3 million SEK (~330k €).
If you add in the non-visible salary taxes ("sociala avgifter") and other hidden costs, the salaries are quite high... you just don't get any of that money.
Healthcare is generally very cheap (theoretical maximum 1000$ per year, plus hospital stay 10$ a day). Dental care for adults is not. If you're a non-EU citizen Sweden has some of the most expensive education in Europe. As a citizen of the EU, tuition fees are cheap, but so are they almost everywhere in Europe[1].
Yes and that will all change as you continue to embrace multiculturalism. These properties are only possible in a society with high cohesion. People are more than happy to support their own communities.
People are more trusting of those who are racially or ethnically similar to them.
The sorts of things you list are not easily attainable in America because of our multiculturalism. When I pay taxes, I don't know how that money will be used by people who probably do not share the same value or aspirations as I do. Different racial and ethnic groups in aggregate put different values on different things.
Because of that, it's more dog-eat-dog here. People are less trusting of the government to promote the values they wish to see in their society. That's why Americans are wary of socialist programs.
But it's not all bad. It's that culture of independence and competition which breeds innovation. It's the melting pot, the mixing and meshing and synthesizing of view points which breeds progress. It's the reason America is a technological and economic superpower.
My point is: you have your thing, we have our thing. It's a trade off.
Please excuse me as I womit in my mouth. All right, done. Sorry for the stench everyone, but racism has a bad effect on my stomach.
Multi-culti has been part of Sweden for a Long Time. Immigrants one of the big reasons why Sweden prospered in the 1900's. Turks, Italians and Finns are some of the places where large amounts of immigrants have come, and they've been employed by Swedish companies exporting everything from building material, textile, mining, cars. The list is long.
Do you know how many people who aren't immigrants (or 2nd or 3rd generation)? ~7 million. That is less than NYC, in a whole country. We need all extra labour we can get.
But theese things arent the least important. They really doesnt matter at all.
There are two big reasons why people immigrate (here, at least): shelter from violence or opression and the hope of affording a decent life.
To reject anyone coming from war who wants to live in peace would be the most inhumane thing to do. Ever. In war-ridden countries, you always live with the risk of you and your family being killed.
And to reject someone who wants to earn enough to live a decent life? And who has the balls to move to a new country to make that dream come true?
Immigration and multi-culturalism has brought so many great things to Sweden, and I am proud that my country let's many into it's borders.
IKEA is a very successful international company. It was founded in Sweden in 1943, when the system which you find so wonderful was not yet in place (taxes were low, for starters), and like all Swedish companies of that era it subsequently profited from being based in one of two European countries whose industrial base was not bombed to rubble during WWII, the other one being Switzerland. With Marshall aid flowing to Europe from the US, much of what needed to be bought was bought from those two countries. When taxes started rising, IKEA moved to greener pastures, and so did its founder. Ingvar Kamprad has been living in Switzerland since 1976. Guess why. I could go on and pick your list apart piece by piece, but will content myself with your most egregious piece of disinformation: Skype. As any hacker should know, the software was created by Estonians and acquired by the two "founders", Friis (a Dane) and Zennstrom (a Swede). They were nowhere near Sweden when any of that happened. They met in Denmark, where Zennstrom had moved to work (he wisely left Sweden even before graduating, did his last year in the US) and were both living in the Netherlands at the time. Last time I checked, Zennstrom, the closest thing to a Swedish Skype connection, lived in London and managed his holdings through holding companies in various low tax jurisdictions, which, needless to say, means not Sweden.
He's not saying it's not a successful company (it certainly is). What he said is that IKEA, being a traditional-business-disruptive company (with its too much competitive pricing), is probably not much in favor of flourishing market economy.
We then proceed to accept new laws regulating net neutrality, but all major ISPs by next tuesday have to block the Pirate Bay. Something seems wrong...
I, as an Indian am tired of the 'World's Biggest Democracy' label. I feel it is a clever way for India's politicians to mask huge problems we face as a democracy - rampant social inequality, throwing money at problems that need creative solutions cotinuous effort and commitment etc.
Except for very few states, turn up for elections seldom crosses 50%. If the number of people participating is the measure for biggest, I would think there are other places with bigger participation in the electoral process.
FYI, Tor was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Lab, and the US has always been a pretty bad player in this regard (though more so now than in the past).
whenever I discuss Tor with people who have just enough knowledge to be dangerous, I hear "yea, but it was funded by the US so it probably has a backdoor/wouldn't be funded if they couldn't read the data".
I don't agree with that, but what can you say other than "it's open source so many eyeballs are auditing it"?
Besides that, I use to say that I would not put a backdoor in the system used by my spies to communicate. It would be really dangerous for me if it fallen in the wrong hands.
Any backdoor in TOR that could remain hidden for so long would have to be a protocol flaw. Implementation changes too much to rely on an obfuscated 'bug' and anything as straightforward as your suggestion would simply be found and removed immediately.
Protocol flaws can of course be found and used by anyone.
I am no expert, but I thought the weakness of tor was that a goverment could control many of the exit nodes (combied with timing attacks to find the user?), since most users don't want to run them for fear of being arrested for whatever the users were doing on the network?
* A flourishing market economy that has created everything from IKEA and H&M to Spotify and Skype.
* Free health-care
* Free college education
* Low corruption
* A well functioning justice system (practically no patent trolls!)
It certainly has it's problems but compared to other countries it is truly amazing how it has managed to balance social well-fare and capitalism.
Disclosure: I am Swedish.