From a Basement on a Hill
Well, I have arrived...after several harrowing months in Sodom and Gomorrah (both former municipalities sprawled out so much that they ended up combining, these days we refer to this Mega-Metro-Urban dystopia as London). As a preface I should say that I cannot find all the punctuation on this keyboard, in short this means no quotes or rhetorical questions today.
Anyway, my new apartment is fantastic! It is a bit out of the city, but the city is very accessible by train and I have a month train pass...about 80 dollars (this is about half of a month pass in London for 2 zones on the Underground...I can, with this pass, use all of Stockholms public transport both in the city and the outer lying communities). I also do not know where the apostrophe is...so no conjunctions and the possessives will be improper...in Swedish you do not use punctuation in the possessive form, just add an s...that is what I will do for now. My area seems great. Slow and boring no doubt, but after the cacophony of poorly arranged sensations I have just left, the quiet is a benefit (I am a curmudgeon, and a luddite to boot!). The biggest upside is that it is all forest and hills...very pretty, and more than ideal running terrain.
I picked up pretty much where I left off when I was last in Scandinavia. This morning I had a bowl of muesli and strawberry yogurt, coupled with a glass of mineral water because I misread the label on the bottle...ah, the joys of living in a foreign land. I have on schedule for lunch today a PB and J sandwich made of that thick heavy sponge they call bread up here, great great jelly, and terrible peanut-butter.
At the market, I was quick to notice nothing has changed. Still small, expensive and with more selection of chocolate than food. I bought my grocery bags because in Scandinavian communism the people have stopped regulating any aspect of their lives so in order to encourage conservation the government makes it expensive to be wasteful...when you buy a plastic or glass bottle you pay about a one dollar deposit on it that you get back when you recycle the bottle. I kind of like it to be honest with you...its a brilliant idea.
Conservation and recycling are good, but they are public goods so people do not register in their day to day lives the impact of being wasteful. Lazy and close-minded people...and lets face it we all are (do not make me get philosophical about the impossibility of the open-mind)...can be made to contribute to the public good by shifting a small part of the burden to them personally. Recycling deposits do this. If you pay for your grocery bags then you find yourself taking two of them out of the closet before you go back to the store next time as opposed to buying new ones each time. It is simply distributing the commons to avoid the oft-mentioned tragedy of the commons...its the model that the world is trying to take with corporate waste, simply shift some of the burden back to individual corporations, anaolgous to the recycling deposit, and the corporation will reduce waste and the costs will be off-set by the (often pecuniary) benefits of preserving public goods.
The USA, in our never-ending wisdom, disagree with this model because we are incapable of thinking in the distance, either temporally or spatially (is the war on terrorism not the perfect model of American ad-hoc-ism...we are capable, both collectively and individually, of planning about 7 minutes into the future and about the control of the things within about 3 feet of our physical bodies...see the deficit and credit industry in America if you must). You can never explain to the board of an American corporation that paying 2 extra dollars is actually saving countless money in the preservation of a public good.
It all fits our never-ending quest to destroy the idea of anything common. Private this, individual that...I hope we could all see by the model above that we do take up the costs of damage to public goods, that it is the case that we do not see everyday these costs so we take them for granted (and being selfish is not natural, I will hear nothing of how destructive laissez-faire capitalism is our -natural state-...large coordinated economies themselves are unnatural, whatever form they take...and how they tend to form you...conventional in the highest degree). So these everyday costs are taken for granted, but we have, in our highly unnatural conventional markets, mechanisms for localizing the burden. When the burden is localized then our atomized anti-social society can preserve the public good despite itself.
Mini-rant over, pending anything else coming into my mind. I said nothing had changed in Scandinavian grocery store, this is not the whole truth because the was one remarkable change. I was completely comfortable, at-home, in the grocery store. Grocery stores are my litmus test for how rootless and alienated I am in a new place. If I feel like I am depressed or about to have a panic attack everytime I go into a grocery store then I am not at-home. I could not hide my smile yesterday! I knew the lay-out of the store, I could read most of the labels when I took the time to look, which I often did not do because I was so at-ease that presence seemed unwarranted.
I mentioned before that Denmark was the closest thing to a home I have in Europe, I think this was manifest in yesterdays shopping experience here in Sweden. Sweden is different than Denmark and they are both different from Norway...this is also the case with regard to Swedes, Danes and Norwegians (less so than they think). I am completely comfortable here and with these people.
Jag skal läser Heidegger nu. Hej då!
Well, I have arrived...after several harrowing months in Sodom and Gomorrah (both former municipalities sprawled out so much that they ended up combining, these days we refer to this Mega-Metro-Urban dystopia as London). As a preface I should say that I cannot find all the punctuation on this keyboard, in short this means no quotes or rhetorical questions today.
Anyway, my new apartment is fantastic! It is a bit out of the city, but the city is very accessible by train and I have a month train pass...about 80 dollars (this is about half of a month pass in London for 2 zones on the Underground...I can, with this pass, use all of Stockholms public transport both in the city and the outer lying communities). I also do not know where the apostrophe is...so no conjunctions and the possessives will be improper...in Swedish you do not use punctuation in the possessive form, just add an s...that is what I will do for now. My area seems great. Slow and boring no doubt, but after the cacophony of poorly arranged sensations I have just left, the quiet is a benefit (I am a curmudgeon, and a luddite to boot!). The biggest upside is that it is all forest and hills...very pretty, and more than ideal running terrain.
I picked up pretty much where I left off when I was last in Scandinavia. This morning I had a bowl of muesli and strawberry yogurt, coupled with a glass of mineral water because I misread the label on the bottle...ah, the joys of living in a foreign land. I have on schedule for lunch today a PB and J sandwich made of that thick heavy sponge they call bread up here, great great jelly, and terrible peanut-butter.
At the market, I was quick to notice nothing has changed. Still small, expensive and with more selection of chocolate than food. I bought my grocery bags because in Scandinavian communism the people have stopped regulating any aspect of their lives so in order to encourage conservation the government makes it expensive to be wasteful...when you buy a plastic or glass bottle you pay about a one dollar deposit on it that you get back when you recycle the bottle. I kind of like it to be honest with you...its a brilliant idea.
Conservation and recycling are good, but they are public goods so people do not register in their day to day lives the impact of being wasteful. Lazy and close-minded people...and lets face it we all are (do not make me get philosophical about the impossibility of the open-mind)...can be made to contribute to the public good by shifting a small part of the burden to them personally. Recycling deposits do this. If you pay for your grocery bags then you find yourself taking two of them out of the closet before you go back to the store next time as opposed to buying new ones each time. It is simply distributing the commons to avoid the oft-mentioned tragedy of the commons...its the model that the world is trying to take with corporate waste, simply shift some of the burden back to individual corporations, anaolgous to the recycling deposit, and the corporation will reduce waste and the costs will be off-set by the (often pecuniary) benefits of preserving public goods.
The USA, in our never-ending wisdom, disagree with this model because we are incapable of thinking in the distance, either temporally or spatially (is the war on terrorism not the perfect model of American ad-hoc-ism...we are capable, both collectively and individually, of planning about 7 minutes into the future and about the control of the things within about 3 feet of our physical bodies...see the deficit and credit industry in America if you must). You can never explain to the board of an American corporation that paying 2 extra dollars is actually saving countless money in the preservation of a public good.
It all fits our never-ending quest to destroy the idea of anything common. Private this, individual that...I hope we could all see by the model above that we do take up the costs of damage to public goods, that it is the case that we do not see everyday these costs so we take them for granted (and being selfish is not natural, I will hear nothing of how destructive laissez-faire capitalism is our -natural state-...large coordinated economies themselves are unnatural, whatever form they take...and how they tend to form you...conventional in the highest degree). So these everyday costs are taken for granted, but we have, in our highly unnatural conventional markets, mechanisms for localizing the burden. When the burden is localized then our atomized anti-social society can preserve the public good despite itself.
Mini-rant over, pending anything else coming into my mind. I said nothing had changed in Scandinavian grocery store, this is not the whole truth because the was one remarkable change. I was completely comfortable, at-home, in the grocery store. Grocery stores are my litmus test for how rootless and alienated I am in a new place. If I feel like I am depressed or about to have a panic attack everytime I go into a grocery store then I am not at-home. I could not hide my smile yesterday! I knew the lay-out of the store, I could read most of the labels when I took the time to look, which I often did not do because I was so at-ease that presence seemed unwarranted.
I mentioned before that Denmark was the closest thing to a home I have in Europe, I think this was manifest in yesterdays shopping experience here in Sweden. Sweden is different than Denmark and they are both different from Norway...this is also the case with regard to Swedes, Danes and Norwegians (less so than they think). I am completely comfortable here and with these people.
Jag skal läser Heidegger nu. Hej då!
posted by Lenin | 10:05 fm
1 Comments:
Ah, to be comfortable in your surroundings. Me and Sylvio are sitting here by the pool, signs of spring all around and I believe the ducks are coming back to the pool!
Tony S.
Skicka en kommentar
<< Home