And there's also this tidbit from the article:
> Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned: “There’s a lot of evidence that it’s probably even worse here.”
Most of it probably isn't glamorous enough to warrant full page articles but you do note them popping up in news at a steady rate.
Today some active politicians simultaneously perform as senior advisers and the like for so called public affairs, i.e. lobbying, firms. That is, in the open. The leader of one of the largest parties in parliament and kind of part of the current government had a mob leader as guest at his wedding a while back.
There's an agreement among the largest parties to blame the fallout on immigrant minorities. They still disagree about whether to also put blame on sexual and gender minorities, as well as indigenous minorities. I expect them to start agreeing more during the next election.
When the government as a body is in control of everything, all the corrupt looters go there, but you can't have the private industry keep them in check unless you count on the pipeline of years in industry gaining financial freedom -> public service as a regulator.
Being a member of a society that you believe has low corruption disincentivizes you from being corrupt yourself because people generally want to follow the surrounding norms. So it's probably good for people to believe that corruption is better than it is.
But exposing corruption is also necessary to root it out and actually punish the people involved.
How does one make the trade-off for when disclosure is net helpful for reducing overall corruption? Does it depend on X and N?
The original purpose of IKEA was to foster self reliance, essentially making everyone a bit handier. IKEA brings decent quality furniture to people who otherwise wouldn't afford it. I think it's a noble goal, hence why I ask.
As I understand it, and I could be wrong, IKEA is owned by a non-profit organization called INGKA, set up in such a way to generate revenue not to a few rich people but:
"INGKA Foundation’s purpose is to further, without pursuing any profits, a better everyday life for the many people in need. We achieve this purpose by funding the IKEA Foundation, which is committed to helping children and families living in poverty afford a better everyday life while protecting the planet."
https://www.ingkafoundation.org/our-charitable-purpose/
https://www.inter.ikea.com/en/this-is-inter-ikea-group/about...
https://www.inter.ikea.com/en/-/media/InterIKEA/IGI/Financia...
Regarding them paying of Romanian secret police, I'm very interested to hear about it. I know they used east german prisoners for a time as cheap labor.
Or taking one class a year as a "student" to qualify for student housing with rent control, etc.
It's still a great country, just take the marketing with a hint of salt - a self certain smugness / hubris can easily make you blind to real problems.
Tax-evasion in small scale called "sort arbejde" is quite common.
Former primeminister and current foreign miniater Lars Løkke Rasmussen is a interessant figure. He's famous for not even being able to pay for his own underware.
First, this is an assertion about “All of Scandinavia”, and there is some contradiction about crime exists but is small, and Denmark has “no corruption”. But this is basic over-generalization, between low and none, and a exposé that provides anecdotes but doesn’t challenge statistics.
Still people will claim (rhetorically) “none” when the real answer is not zero. And is that really incorrect? To be correct is to quantify and provide your reasoning. That’s something that public discourse is yet to embrace.
If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other.
One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.
That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great environments, some create hells on earth.
Source: I lived in 3 different countries + an isolated island.
But you don't even need my biased opinion on the matter. We have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and cultures that celebrate them.
And you could take single individuals from either culture and drop them in the other culture, and most of them would happily act and think just like the new culture, and swear blind that they’d always thought that way.
It would be an interesting experiment to see how many individuals you could replace one-by-one before the culture changed. Or perhaps, like a Ship of Theseus, you could replace all the people, but have the culture endure.
> That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great environments, some create hells on earth.
Sure. People are not the same in their current behaviors. People are the same in how they acquire their behaviors or change their behaviors based on the conditions of their environments. And sometimes these changes are very quick.
To give a very simple example, many people in my native country who would throw burning cigarette butts on the ground, stop doing so immediately when they, say, immigrate to the US. They didn't really change all of a sudden; what remains the same is the people's opportunistic ability to adapt to the conditions of their environment, regardless of what is moral, just, etc.
The rise of the far right in Europe and USA might challenge your idea of fixed regional cultures quite soon.
When I said people are the same it means the same people who created great environments can in all likelihood create hell within a generation span.
People confuse population-scale average behaviors with guarantees about individuals.
In any country you can find outliers that don't match the country's norms.
The hard part is that the devious ones can leverage their country's (or culture, or state, or relgious affiliation, etc.) norms to disguise their bad behavior. It's easier to scam someone if you pretend to blend in with groups known for being trustworthy.
This is not true in general. Environment does not only influence behavior, it selects for it.
As evidenced by our ability to breed behavior traits in domesticated animals - I.e. ragdoll cats, retrievers, rat terriers, etc. have distinct behavioral traits that have been intentionally selected for.
But yeah, depending on how strong the selective force is... Ashkenazy Jews have an average IQ of what, around 130 points? But on the other side also suffer a lot more genetic disorders.
Interesting are also the altitude tolerance of Sherpa, body morphology of the Kenian runners and the dive endurance of a particular South east asian tribe (if I remember correctly), some organ is able to store a lot more blood than usually
I think you are saying that people's behavior changes based on stimulus. That doesn't mean they're unpredictable, just that the prediction shouldn't be unchanged behavior regardless of stimulus.
For some population, you can safely state that some portion of them will contract appendicitis. You cannot make that same assertion about an individual person. This likewise carries to specific behaviors (theft, charity, becoming a pet owner, etc).
but i digress, and its hard to communicate that its better to end good times with ability to move, then to be caught in paradise, when the resource window falls shut. you want to be able to wiggle and act in the dark times, keep it together , have tech thats maintainable but not existence ending , while wild hordes fight for the last glimmering bits of the golden era.
The examples you give come from environments which are likely to attract sociopaths. You yourself are with a higher probability a narcissist than the average human [1].
[1] https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/96cff233-cefd-45...
In the West, it is hard to see low-level corruption (bribes for services) in offices. However, corruption takes form in the shape of collusion; and this collusion is pretty much legal. Revolving door, consultants, lobbyists, conflicts of interests, setting up NGOs to grab money from the govt, offering sinecure jobs like advisors, directors, etc for friends and family--these are some strategies to do unethical yet legal stuff in the West.
If you pick the right reason/name for X - anyone who crticises you can also automatically be labelled racist, dumb, fascist or whatever as well.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Tech...
Source: https://youtu.be/ZD8BhZEJcjI at around 1:00:00.
Corruption is multidimensional. There's the size. There's the nature of the parties involved. There's the question of whether it's legal or illegal - which itself as a continuum as my lawyer girlfriend always reminds me
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024
I always thought the lower the more realistic
The portuguese say: "this shitty country is so corrupt". I never encountered any corruption in Portugal.
The danes say: "See we are the best and justest country in the World without corruption". Facts say otherwise. Just google Lars Løkke Rasmussen and take a look at his actions
It doesn’t help either that the corruption perceptions index is often shortened in German to Korruptionsindex = corruption index which makes it sound objective instead instead of subjective
Does the filmmaker have access to some sort of exclusive information that the rest of the world doesn't? Or, like most of these sorts of filmmakers, is he drawing conclusions beyond what can be conclusively reached with the availabile evidence?
https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/03/19/denmark-bound-plane-cr...
Call it a conspiracy but I won’t at all be surprised when someone discovered they have transferred a large amount of funds to some “family friends” that look suspiciously like them but live in the Cayman Islands.
It's a sensitive topic in the Occident, many powerful people would prefer their friends never face scrutiny or justice due to involvement with those crimes.
Unlike what this article suggests, tax fraud is also relatively common (one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in places like the US), and while heavily frowned upon certainly not seen as the highest form of crime as this article suggests. Well, maybe if you ask the tax agency and the political parties pushing for ever more welfare, both of which push heavily for a cashless society where all financial transactions are fully trackable by them, but I think most would place tax evasion quite far down on the list of significant crimes.
I would instead say that the average Dane is carefree about these issues, not because they are trusting or believe their system is worth religious following, but because the issues experienced there feels quite minor compared to what seems to happen elsewhere in the world. When your concept of a significant natural disaster is a flooded basement, you tend to not worry that much about what happens locally.
I think there is a distinction between avoidance (typically considered legal) and evasion (fraud and illegal). Everyone should practice avoidance, using the system as designed. IME, evasion is much higher in countries with say a VAT than the US. Paying cash for transactions, even rather large ones, is common in order to avoid 10-20%+ VAT.
Tax minimisation is fine. Tax avoidance is, in sensible countries, not illegal but ineffective: tax avoidance arrangements are void for tax purposes. Tax evasion is a serious crime.
Avoidance is not using the system as it was designed. It is using the system as it was not intended, creating totally artificial structures just for tax reasons. In a sensible society the taxman can just say "clearly artificial so I will ignore this" and if you disagree, well, see you in court.
The Black Swan documentary is primarily about sleazy private sector actors in Denmark. The only remotely state affiliated individuals in the documentary is a business man who was a former small city council member and a bankruptcy lawyer who has previously contracted for Danish government organizations. The system worked fine and the Danish equivalent of the FBI, the NSK, already had ongoing cases of investigations into a lot of the uncovered material.
The only "common" tax fraud in Denmark is when a house needs some minor fixing before being put on sale. Many Danish people will pay their friend's friend to do it for them "under the table" and not as formally contracted and taxed work. This is becoming increasingly harder.
However this is far from the massive systemic corruption in many other countries.
The reason regular salaried employees do this less, limited to the kind of sort arbejde ("under the table" labor) you describe is because it has become obscenely difficult to do anything meaningful with sorte penge (untaxed money) - not because people don't want to do more or didn't previously do it.
But at least the tax agency seems quite keen on investigating abuses. I remember Klarna has to pay a huge fine for trying because of trying to abuse tax loopholes a few years ago.
[1] I define tax dodging as using legal tax loopholes in order to pay less tax. A lot of those tax rules are not even complicated, they were just set up with a specific type of person in mind to let them pay less tax.
[2] The most popular ones that middle class Swedes use are delaying paying property capital gains, 30% tax deduction on loan interest payments, special rules for private pension and using ISK investment accounts (which allow you to avoid capital gains). None of them are illegal, just heavily favor some demographics. It is not that hard for a upper middle class Swede to avoid the maximum 56% income tax rate and the 30% capital gains tax.
The US has lower taxes so by your logic we would have less evasion. Unless you’re making a judgement on Americans.
Denmark does its very best to make it either a pain in the arse or impossible to use company property in any way that could be seen as having private value. Did you drive home in your company car? Then get ready to be privately taxed of its full market value and for the company to get a bill for the VAT. Did you take a private phone call on a company phone? Then you have to pay the "free phone" tax and the company VAT of the phone. Did you buy furniture for your home office, but without having the home office locked to physically separate it from your regular home, or did you put a comfortable chair in there so it its private value becomes ambiguous? Not a valid company purchase.
Weird US tricks like getting paid in stock and taking loans with that stock as collateral, with the resulting liability cancelling out remaining tax also don't work there. The common stuff would be, say, restaurant owners inexplicably having really low private food expenditure, or really low revenue on paper for how popular the place is.
I suspect the reason is that the US government has pressure from lobbyists to maintain the status quo, while the DK government has pressure to claw in taxes to cover their sky high spending ambitions.
> All documentaries are artificial: their footage has been carefully threshed and sieved with an eye to telling a story or pushing an argument. The Black Swan, though, relies on the unblinking, real-time gaze of hidden CCTV cameras, so we lull ourselves into thinking that we’re seeing the full picture, the full truth. No such thing. Instead, we get evasion upon evasion: Smajic’s charade for her clients, Malm cheating the taxman, TV2 withholding their work from the police, Brügger keeping details from his audience. Smajic’s final bluff merely confirms what Brügger seems to have believed throughout his career: everywhere, there are conspiracies and lies that he must expose, even if he has to participate in the dissembling himself.
> ...Smajic believes she’s a victim of journalistic deceit. The Black Swan was meant to be about her life, she said, with the hidden camera footage being used only sparingly to corroborate her stories. She’d been offered no security during the filming, she said. When TV2 screened the first three episodes for her approval, they were really just raw, unedited clips, she maintained, and in any case, she’d been strongly medicated after a surgery and couldn’t assess them with a clear mind. (“Amira watched the edited episodes, they just needed finalising,” TV2’s Nørgaard told me. “During the four hours she spent with the editorial team that day, she appeared unaffected and seemed coherent, as we also documented in the series.”) Smajic hadn’t been running any other office at the time, she said to me, and in any case, “they hadn’t bought the rights to every single moment in my life”.
The middle class citizen in most of Europe is now paying more than 50% of their earnings to the state. I don’t believe a single one actually believes this is anything fair and many surely think it’s oppressive and a form of slavery.
There are only 3 kinds of people that defend these outrageously high taxes:
- the ones that are a net negative to the system
- populist politicians
- people that are indoctrinated to virtue signal about the theme, but that don’t actually believe in it (the ones in the video)
We are really living in the Dictatorship of the Majority.
> Nothing I learned from Smajic solved the central mystery of The Black Swan: why did she choose to capsize her life by participating at all?
I recall that Herve Falciani only leaked his trove of tax data when a police investigation was closing in on him. Maybe something similar here: a looming indictment?
Also this type of corruption isn't seen by Danes in our day to day life, so they don't really register on our corruption perception. I still struggle to view it as corruption and not just straight up criminal activity or deliberate environmental damage.
There is a famous saying, that in one version goes like this:
I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how. [1]
Mutatis mutandis, something very similar can be said about filmmaking: it is of less importance exactly what someone says and of great importance who cuts and edit it.
Light or lack of light, missing context - this can be the exact questions asked that triggered the answer[2] or what the person said to qualify their statements [3]. There is music, sound effects, camera perspectives and so on and so on.
One can also lead the viewer towards a conclusion without spelling it out [4].
There is a reason militaries advice soldier that in case of capture we should say as little as absolutely possible outside of what one is legally required to say: name, rank, service number, and date of birth. Anything and everything can and probably will be abused.
This is true not only for opponents in a war but as probably everyone knows also with police in most of the world, and HN is keenly aware of this.
I'd argue that we should be equally aware when it comes to journalism: as much as I respect many journalists, they are not a homogeneous group of perfectly ethical people striving for perfect objectivity. They have personal agendas: fame, income, people and cases they sympathize with and people and cases theywant to hurt.
We should be aware of this when reading, watching or listening - but of course even more when answering questions.
Any competent defense attorney can tell
[1]: Supposedly said by Stalin in reference to a vote in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but exactly who said is is less important than the general idea.
[2]: can be as simple as this classic: asking the person "hypothetically, if you wanted to ... how would you have done it?"
[3]: Simple example: "Q: Have you cheated on your taxes? A: yes, <here the director cuts>, back in 1956 when I was 18 ..."
[4]: This is an actual example: Our public broadcaster in Norway mentioning that they had tried to investigate the economic transactions of some people, saying they couldn't do it and it was very confusing and ending that segment with a merry go round.
What they didn't mention was that Norwegian police had already investigated the same people over three years, several months secretly and had not only been unable to prove the crimes suggested, but gone as far as stating they found it proven that the accused were innocent.
edit: if you downvote me and haven't lived in a scandinavian country for over a decade… perhaps trust me instead of trusting your preconceptions?
Why not simpler English -- "half of the country has watched it"
Also pendatic aside -- i think "every two danes" is a stretch -- i am sure we can find many instances of "two danes" where both has watched it. Or neither. Some are being born as we speak (write).
The second part was just playful aside -- not serious. Ofcourse that didn't come through. I know there is a common sensical read that all readers will apply to it and it will not be misinterpreted. I thought this being HN people will find it amusing to treat it as a logical statement and parse.
I guess as it was aimed at a British audience, and that is not an uncommon way for us to form such sentences.
If you hadn't mentioned it, I'd not even have noticed it, simply parsing it as "half".
For all other fractions, I don't feel it is that odd to use X out of Y construct.
Expressing things as percentages was a late arrival; when until the mid 70s folks had to be able to cope with, and mentally manipulate vulgar fractions.
