Serola

National newspaper Helsingin Sanomat arranged a poll for overseas Finns on their main concerns over Finland's international reputation. Many worried about Finland becoming more intolerant and even racist.

Same topics can be seen on social media. Some people say we are actually just as racist as we have always been but because of social media it is becoming more public. People now dare to speak aloud and express their thoughts on Internet, on blogs, Twitter and on Facebook. For some reason people seem to think it is alright to use what ever language they like.

What earlier stayed within discussions on corner pub table, has now become part of public domain. Either people don't come to think their comments on Internet may boecome accessible world wide, or they just don't care. The only good thing is that now we see what people actually think.

Another topical problem in Finnish society are so called quick loans. They have been advertised all over the place and even very young people can get them very easily. Then people learn to spend more than they earn, living on loan, and they no longer seem to understand the value of money. Young adults can spend 100 euros in a split of a moment, without even thinking.

And rapidly increased inflation has made this all worse. When Finnish Markka was replaced with Euro, all prices soon increased six times higher. What once costs one ten Markka, now costs ten Euros aka 60 old Markka. Moreover, when we joined to EU, we were promised the food price would decrease. Instead, food now costs more than never.

All this is maybe caused by global issues like companies escaping from Europe to China, where are big markets waiting, and work force is much cheaper, taxes are lover for business.

For European countries like Finland this means increasing unemployment. Big Finnish companies like Nokia are no longer Finnish. All their jobs, manufacturing, design and planning is going or has gone abroad. And yet we are encouraged to consume to keep markets alive.

Then there are all environmental worries stressing us. Global warming not only means the increase of average global temperature, but it also means more extreme weather. Bad weather is becoming more common also in Finland, summers maybe warmer, but also rainier. And winters, when it finally started, it turned out extreme cold.

Last week was very cold all around the Europe. People literally freeze to death in Ukraine and also in other countries. In Finland we are prepared to this, and even used to, but still the last week was surprisingly cold. The good side was that the weather was finally sunny for few days.

Maybe we should just do as many ecologist suggest. Stop spending so much money and try live with less. Instead of drinking expensive beverages and processed food, we should just drink water and eat home made food. And instead of buying new things almost every month, we should start to repair old stuff and seek what we could reuse.

The problem however is that then economist again blame us for not consuming to keep the markets alive.

But like said, weather was finally beautiful after very very many cloudy days. High air pressure has kept the clouds away.

That caused some problems to our beloved Swedish neighbors because high air pressure caused technical problems to their air fighters. Luckily our airplanes worked, and we could at least pretend our military defense is up and working. Well, that's a very comforting for a small country in a big bad world, to at least have an expensive self defense.

So, what else could we do but pray? And if we don't believe in any gods, then what to pray? Or even if we do believe, it still looks like we can't expect much help from gods if we can't even help ourselves.

Maybe we should just pray forgiveness from each other. Ask other people to forgive our sins against them. Instead of waisting our time on judging each other, we could forgive and look forward to find something that help us going on.

Today several Web sites like English Wikipedia are on strike against Stop Online Piracy Act. However, Opera users may not even notice this because Wikipedia uses Javascript that does not affect on Opera browsers.

I'm personally strongly against copyright infringements but this act sounds really crazy. It would allow U.S. Department of Justice to close down U.S. servers where any copyright infringement found. So, the service providers would be punished if any of their users do the crime. Moreover, U.S. based global search engines like Google could be then ordered to stop indexing even non U.S. servers where copyright infringements found.

This means the consequences of such law in U.S. would have global affect. The only positive side on this could be that then the rest of the world would start using some other services.