Well, Norway collaborated with the nazis and sympathised for some of their ideas at the time, for example Norway had been experimenting with eugenics programs since the 20s when they started to sterilise mentally hill patients and made it legal in 1934.
But the king of Norway and members of the army escaped to London and directed the resistance from there.
Ask the Jews that owned the houses and nursing homes that were confiscated for the Lebensborn project and the kids that survived it (not many), what they think about it.
Others had it worse doesn't mean they escaped the war and its consequences.
If the eastern block is where you draw the line, you could argue that many parts of Europe escaped the war.
They had a head start after WW 2 for sure. Earlier they were not affected by Ottoman wars like the Balkans and other Eastern Europe (the extent of destruction and de population that brought was beyond imagination), nor a Moorish occupation like in Iberia. Scandinavia was not razed to the ground and drastically depopulated in recent centuries.
Finland is somewhat exceptional among the Nordics as they were quite poor and had some shit to deal with from Russia (and Sweden) but managed to become rich and high trust.
They have been at war for 2 centuries like much of Europe.
Depending on who you ask, Ottomans were their allied or their enemies in Scandinavia, at times they have been both like Denmark allied of Ottomans against Russia that then switched side and sided with Russia that gave them land from Sweden.
There were big differences between Scandinavian countries and they have been at war for a long time.
Denmark for example owned Ghana, like Belgium owned Congo.
They were richer than say Finland.
France has been involved in less wars during the same time span.
Another example: Spain and Portugal weren't bombed during WW2, they were not occupied, they stayed mostly neutral, but didn't develop an high trust society.
> I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously.
They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises.
Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality.
I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia.
I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there.
If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.
On the other hand, people using cheap devices usually don't rely on them so much, so the higher consumption is compensated by the lower overall usage, or have made the real environmental savy choice.
I've never encountered an iPhone owner that didn't bring a charger in their backpacks.
Do you see old people like my father charging their sub 100 € smartphones at Starbucks or young people with shiny high end smartphones?
My father use his smartphone so rarely that the battery lasts exactly as advertised: 2+ days on standby (I believe it's ~60 hours).
He uses no app, except WhatsApp twice a year and Maps, has no background service running, takes a few pictures of his niece and that's it. How much power can he consume? How much is he contributing to the climate change compared to me, his son, that starts the day at 9 am and at 18 is on 20% battery?
An I don't even use the smartphone that much, but hey, WFH, slack and teams are constantly checking for new messages, that friend sent you a message in IG, of course I'm gonna check my timeline. Look, a new notification, Amazon is delivering the package, let me check on the news if the streets are still closed today because they are shooting that Tom Cruise movie (it really happened few days ago!)
Etc. etc. How much of this could be saved?
On the opposite side, the construction workers who renewed my house all used old phones like Nokia 3330 because they need something though and durable that won't die on them after a few hours, in environments where electrical power is not granted, so they go for the thing with the longest battery life on the market which is also the cheapest option and, in the end, the most power efficient.
If that was even possible, you would have to wait at least 10 years.
At that point who knows if tablets as a form factor survived.
To be clear, I think that a tablet (not specifically iPads which are expensive in their segment as any other Apple device, there is no cheap option) could replace most PC nowadays, but to reiterate what's already been said: Apple is not present in too many places, for a reason.
To make an example: I work for a company in Italy with 14 thousands employees.
The laptops they give us software developers today are gonna be the accountants PCs of the future. Unless they break before. In that case they are replaced by the supplier with something with similar specs but new. Probably it will be a different brand, depending on what's available at the moment.
It's not imaginable that a company like this, which is relatively small if we look at the real giants of the World (including many in Italy as well), will replace every PC with tablets, not only for monetary reasons, but because they had to re-train thousands of employees. Being in Italy I'm sure that only talking about it would end up in a strike. No kidding.
But even assuming that it would happen, they would buy cheap Asus tablets.
But even assuming it would be iPads, does this software the company has been using for 15 years runs on it?
The answer is most certainly "no, it doesn't".
Battery life and power efficiency is not a factor in such environments, they prefer to plant trees, be part of a renewable energy consortium or power the offices with solar panels, that they can also spin in PR, than buy Apple devices because they have an incredibly power efficient CPU.
It doesn't really matter to them.
And I tell you this knowing that I work there because I know that ethically speaking they are vastly better than the average. They really do care of many small things that many others don't, but Apple ARM CPUs aren't one of them.
Coming from a family where I am the first generation who could afford going to college, I disagree.
OP was talking about Vietnam, my experience is in rural Italy and matches the idea of people helping each other, not of the exploitation of the women.
And not in an idealised way either, I could make countless examples that I experienced first hand, growing up with 18 cousins and spending together every easter, Christmas and summer holiday for large part of our lives. Especially summer holidays that last three months in Italy.
They are my sisters and brothers, even though I only have one "real" sister, my 8 aunts are my moms, my 8 uncles are my dads, when I was a kid I probably spent more time with them than with my parents that were working 12 hour shifts in hospital (they did the exact same job and shared 50/50 parenting) and sent me and my sister to our grandparents when schools were closed, so we didn't have to be alone at home or with a baby sitter.
I feel lucky to have a family where no one is left behind or alone.
I never felt we were dependent, on the contrary, they let me develop my independence and I have been a kid who spent long moments alone and still do as an adult.
What you call pastoral I call it sense of community.
Yes, women had it bad in the past, but what you're seeing is not reduced dependence, it's solitude.
Maybe the fact that I grew up in a socialist family makes my perspective different, but I can't imagine old people wanting to be alone, away from their family and loved ones, unless they are forced to.
And the worst thing is that even if you were right and old people are simply fulfilling their desire of independence, women have it worse all the same: stats say that in USA 75% of the elderly living alone are women and to make things even worse widowers have more chances of remarriage than widows.
Considering that old people living alone have more chances of falling into poverty, that poverty increases the chances of being alone even more, that eating it's a social activity for many people, so living alone increases the risk of malnutrition and that in the presence of health issues loneliness increases the chances of the symptoms getting worse, I wouldn't consider more time alone a blessing, not for men nor for women.
> Apple -- at 20% or so in most of the world's economies
Apple has 17% (and dropping) of the mobile market share in Europe and around 9% in computing.
There aren't many other richer economies in the World.
Ferrari is worth now more than General Motors and Ford, so market share and net worth are not comparable.
Their market share is small because they make a luxury limited edition product.
They limit their production capacity to around 10 thousands cars/year (all sold in pre order), Apple is trying to sell as many devices they can.
There are no Ferrari Store where you can buy a Ferrari and drive it home half an hour later.
It's not a small difference.
Last but not least, there is a lot more competition between car manufacturers, even in the most expensive segments, Apple devices are only made by Apple.
Hyundai, for example, had a net income of over 3 trillion in 2019, Apple net income is measured in tens of billions.
> English is not about moving to another place but doing business beyond local.
There are "only" 379 million people speaking English as a native language.
But there are 1.2 billion people speaking English as a second language, which means that there are more people speaking English that do not actually speak "proper" English, than people speaking it because they were born with it.
The outcome is that
> About 75% of the world's 1.2 billion English speakers are non-native speakers. However, while non-native speakers often understand each other well in English, many native speakers are bad at making themselves understood by non-native speakers.
> "Often you have a [room] full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other, and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them"
As a dutch subject I have to agree. When Americans talk about social security and healthcare they seem to attempt to do it (read "fail") from a purely selfish angle. What seems like a complete lack of empathy born out of a selfish culture where no one has your back is really just my linguistic shortcommerings. Jokes aside (not really) Its pretty funny if you think about it. Europe wants to build a cute union that nurtures the citizens into a bunch of weaklings while team America wants their country to be this big hungry monster that hunts you down and eats you. Clearly non of this is right but migrating from the US to the EU would seem the best experience.
The EU exists to matter on the global stage in the age of superpowers, to keep alight the flame of European economic imperialism that was being smothered bu US/USSR (and now US/China). It just so happens that most people here think the best way to go about that, without massive societal upheaval, is to guarantee prosperity for all. There is little “cute” about the project, any “cuteness” you might see is the result of strategic positioning.
Mostly it exists so we don’t kill each other -European imperialism is a direct outgrowth of being the most warlike continent for hundreds of years. When they talk about “civil war times” in the history of China ... that’s the whole history of Europe. I have 300 castles around my hometown ... I can find WW2 bombs and Munition from the 30 years war in the forest.
So true - and the comparison might not even be possible, but Europe had very small units fighting each other and at the same time there was a feeling of common religion and culture. That is pretty unique and uniquely stupid. So let’s state it a bit differently we are complete idiots and we were mostly governed by 5 families over 1000 years and these 5 families fought each other and burned everything into the ground and then married each other. So to be no longer governed by complete idiots that fight each other mostly for entertainment there is the EU.
The WWII in Scandinavia was particularly bad, including the occupation of Norway and Denmark.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Weserübung
They did escape the contemporary ones the same way any other country in Europe did anyway.