this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Here in Sweden education is free, and the government provides a (small) monthly payout to students.
It’s one of the things I’m most grateful about living in Sweden. I wouldn’t be able to pursue higher education otherwise.
Social infrastructure FTW, a far more respectable way to run the ship. I'll keep with the boat analogy to use another idiom; "a rising tide lifts all boats" society shows wisdom in encouraging the kinds of conditions where their citizens can succeed without significant barriers, and improve the whole of it afterward (instead of the banking institutions which extend predatory high-interest loans) with their success. Hats off to Sweden.
Free at point of service. But it's 7% of Swedish GDP, with all of that coming from public coffers.
Compare it to the US, which spends only 5.5% of GDP on education, with the majority on the heavily privatized university level.
The math gets worse when you look at student/teacher ratios, administration overhead, building construction, and spending on extracurriculars like sports.
Americans spend less overall than their swedish counterparts, but far more on amenities that have nothing to do with the actual mechanics of education.
According to my American economics education, this proves the American system is actually more efficient. Swedes would do better to adopt our model, if they want to be A#1 Liberty Whiskey Sexy, like we are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
That link doesn't work because you can't add a %27 in a title.
Works for me on both Jerboa and the web interface. Maybe it's an issue with your client?
I'm using ~~Voyager~~ (edit: Thunder. I can't believe I missed that). For some reason, it adds a 25 between the % and the 27.
Also using Thunder - same issue here.
25 is hex for % so it somehow url encodes it again
My jerboa fails
yes you can
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding
%27 is an url encoded '
Whatever browser can't handle that has quite a serious compliance issue.
More efficient for whom? And how? Because this is kind of hard to agree with when the efficient solution is a small amount of people with huge amounts of debt and everyone else not getting an education even if they want it.
I mean, what's the point of public coffers if they aren't being spent on public good?
I'm pretty sure you're missing some sarcasm
That would be the people paying less tax....
You can't just compare GDP spendings and call it efficiency without accounting for the output.
Does the USA educate the same fraction of their population as Sweden? Otherwise it's comparing apples to pears.
Not that efficiency is the top priority in my book, but sure, it's not an unimportant metric by any means.
edit: ... am I being Poe's lawed here?
I guess that depends on how you value "Business School" as an education model.
I believe New Zealand does this as well?
I got beat for refusing to work in a mall hanging clothing while the "school" took my pay for my education at sped ed. Sweden should think about running things here instead..
You made negative claims about a vulnerable group of people.
People have been engaging you in good faith and you responded with sarcasm and trolling.
Let's let things cool off a little.
Learning isn't a guarantee of a higher income. It might help temporarily, but when all the poor are educated they will still be on the bottom of the economic pyramid, and possibly less complacent about their situation having been educated...
Yeah, it doesn't solve social mobility, but it certainly doesn't hurt!
Above I provided some research into this debate. It didn't have any information on people "obviously not educating themselves". Would you be able to cite some research?
You are ignoring the systemic effects: a society were everybody is highly educated is a society were everybody can worked in higher value added areas hence the entire society is actually richer.
Even those who are poor in a highly educated society relatively to others in the same society are still better off compared to people in societies which do not invest in Education - even when that society focuses more on quality of life than wealth production, they live much better because of that society's higher productive capabilities.
The biggest difference between the US and most of Europe when it comes to Education is that the former looks at it as a way for individuals to become more competitive in the job market versus other individuals (a perspective also displayed in your posts) whilst the latter sees Education as a strategic investment to raise the productivity of the entire country, often beyond the mere "money making" and into quality of life domains.
Sweden invests in Education because it allows the country to more and better host higher return Economic areas this pulling the country up, whilst in the US beyond a certain point it has to be individuals investing themselves in their own Education purely for their own personal good.
Education is a good thing, but in a society where everybody is well educated just having an education doesn't get you the most desirable real estate...
I think Sweden has actually become more like America in that regard. Young people are not thinking about the country, they want to get rich quick, just like in America.
The culture in Sweden is also highly americanized, if thats a word for it... American tv, American social media, American attitudes.
Everyone realizes that going to work for a corporation as a salary slave is not the way to get rich. Its the same thing in the US with the gen z generation as we have here.
Sweden is like mini America but with enough socialism that companies cant do what they want, and people have access to laws to protect their jobs to a degree, as well as free healthcare, parental leaves and vacations.
Also public transport. But America is better for those super high salaries. They hardly exist here.
I've lived in 3 countries in Europe for long periods in the last 3 decades and at least in the last two - Britain and Portugal - also saw the "Americanization" of society.
This was especially glaring in Portugal as there I was returning from 2 decades abroad, which made more visible the changes to an American model that happened in the meanwhile, including in terms of how people's behaviour has shifted more towards that way of thinking, very similarly to what you're describing for Sweden.
Even the politics has shifted to American style sleaze talk and even lying - back in the day politicians would resign when caught lying, nowadays that's just Monday morning.
Personally I find it even more shocking for Portugal since IMHO, Portugal was always culturally more backwards than Northern Europe (specifically in comparison with The Netherlands, were I also lived and hence can compare both countries from personal experience) and American ways are (also IMHO) even more regressive than Portugal in general (at least when it comes to interpersonal relations, where the American way glorifies sociopathic behaviours whilst traditionally the Portuguese way was a lot about taking in account the feelings of others, though also with a big chunk of "what will people think" that moderates acts of screwing up other people directly), though it's a different kind of regressiveness, and the Americanization of Portugal coincides with what by most metrics (such as PP income, inequality, social mobility, quality of life, violent crime) is the country stopping it's progress (that had been going one since Fascism was overthrown in 74) and now going back.
Again, comparing like to like with The Netherlands (which has gone down a route similar to what you describe for Sweden), I think how bad Americanization was for the various countries in Europe very much depends on how advanced they were in terms of both the wealth of their society and popularity of politicies to benefit the many as a group, hence countries like Portugal have so far suffered more than The Netherlands (and, it seems, Sweden) purelly because of having started this period already well behind those countries.
citation needed
I am a mod here and this comment was reported for Nazi rhetoric.
While I'm certainly sorry to see anti-immigration sentiment I would rather show a realistic perspective of immigration. It's easy to see that immigration is a positive for the host county and for the world, especially for refugees.
Thankfully Sweden seems to have a generally healthy perspective on welfare and immigration.
Here is an interesting meta study on research into the Swedish immigration debate.
In the most direct measurement, the immigrant populations that take the longest time make net positive tax contribution are refugees.
I hope Swedish people feel pride in the refugees they are able to host. It's impressive that despite refugees working a lot of jobs that are needed for society to function (letting other high tax payers have nice lives) but are low pay, they are still able to become net contributors to public finances in 20 years.
The paper points out how integrating immigrants into the workforce quickly is important but that can be challenging because refugees often come in influxes.
And education is a big part of finding work:
And in conclusion it says:
Yes, you could (should) have stopped there