I went to my brother’s restaurant yesterday. I already had dinner, but ordered 9 sushi to be a good guest. And got 18! A brother bonus. Sorry for eating most of it before taking the
I went to my brother’s restaurant yesterday. I already had dinner, but ordered 9 sushi to be a good guest. And got 18! A brother bonus. Sorry for eating most of it before taking the picture. They were so delicious that they hit my stomach like guided missiles. Many nearby restaurants have gone bankrupt but Roppongi at Kungsholmen keeps serving the best Japanese food ever. Most people take the food home, and some even send Uber guys, but if you want to sit down and have a beer with it, feel welcome!
This is currently the most liberal country in the world. And it’s economically a lot more sustainable than all the lockdowned countries. According to SEB Bank, private consumption has decreased 28%, while the numbers from Denmark, Finland and Norway have decreased between 55% to 70%. Then again, SEB Bank is a Swedish bank with few customers in other countries. Nordea, with more customers than SEB, especially in Finland, doesn’t see any differences at all, but haven’t published any data yet.
In any way, Swedish restaurants are open and people get jobs. While many countries around the world are helping the people with helicopter money, Sweden is still working with the unemployment insurance, meaning that you can’t have a company and you can’t even work! A restaurant is a business, and face all kinds of situations. Sometimes you don’t know today what will happen next week. You need to be flexible, and to be flexible you need flexible workers. There are only two ways of getting the latter: basic income or poverty. We chose poverty, for the poorest. But at least my brother is making sushi right now in Roppongi! Please get some food from there if you want to treat yourself. Of course you can have all them filled with avocado, beans and tofu to save the planet.
In any case, the Spanish Flu went on for three years, in some cases even five. It could be the same here. All lockdowned countries need to open up. And when they do, their deaths will rise again. Corona will become one of all ways to die, like dying from drinking too much coke and not exercising, by age or cancer, until we do get a cheap and trusted vaccine.
Now, I know that the healthcare situation in Stockholm is terrible. And this is mostly about Stockholm, that has almost half of Swedish deaths, with the rest of the country looking like the other Nordic countries.
And the healthcare system was terrible in Stockholm even before the crisis. We have the most expensive hospital on this planet, Nya Karolinska. We spent 4.7 billion euros on it (Swedish link). Let that sink in. (Or 6.1 billion in another article.) We did it by politicians simply giving the tax money away to their friends. Consultants are running the hospital, sending money away in various ways. Like it’s a game. But it’s tax money from Stockholm. There are so many examples here, but for example “Swedish Hospital Partner” (owned by building company Skanska and the British hedge-fund Innisfree) turns out to be registered in Luxembourg, paying a fraction of the Swedish income tax on their mighty profits. Here are some more corruption info in Swedish.
And these people simply don’t care about the staff or patients. The hospital lacks toilets, it has fewer beds than the old Karolinska (which saved my life after my brain hemorrhage), there are no rooms for people to sit down and do the administrative work, write journals etc.
It’s a mess by our Blue-Green coalition. (In which the Greens, like most of the Blues, simply didn’t understand what happened.) The two red parties, which I otherwise dislike, opposed this, and I will definitely vote red – dark-red – in our next election. In Stockholm county that is, not for the city or the country!
So, even before the Corona epidemic, we had a crisis, as we needed to fire 600 doctors and nurses to make up for all the missing money. And the people still working just want to quit as they still have to care for the same amount of patients.
And then came Corona. It’s a war.
But we’ll have this disease for years. The economy must function. I must eat 18 sushi pieces with a beer or three. And I will vote for the Left Party in 2022. And if you live in Stockholm county, then so should you.