I’m happy to pay just over 13e/month for that content. News and Areena are top quality. Yle also produces good series and documentaries.
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Absolutely, Yle should be behind a separate fee and removed from tax funding. As can be seen, they are constantly encroaching on the territory of commercial operators, disturbing the industry, because the budget is absolutely ridiculous, and then there are these completely useless news in 12 different languages. In Finland, Finnish, Swedish, and English are sufficient as news languages to be paid for from tax funds.
And now it was also reported that the new CEO gets an additional ten thousand added to their monthly salary, which was already outrageously large even before.
Yle lives a life of its own, and politicians approve all the waste.
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Well, his monthly salary apparently decreased by three thousand compared to his predecessor. It is a high salary, no denying that. But I don’t really understand how the reasonableness of the salary is assessed based on what the person in question earned in their previous job.
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That surely cannot be a salary in the public sector related to the demanding nature of the job. Let’s take the biggest ministerial portfolios for comparison; then we’re talking about somewhat bigger matters than ensuring the waste of Yle’s budget under the title of CEO. There would have been an opportunity to lower that salary, but no.
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The state certainly has salaries commensurate with the demanding nature of the job, but managers have their own salary system, and top management is even outside of this.
So, it’s pointless to confuse these matters. The salary of Yle’s director has completely gotten out of hand. It’s another matter how much savings would be achieved by reducing it, and what good would be gained in return. Probably nothing at all.
These 12-language programs should ideally be seen on a commercial channel; whoever needs them pays for them.
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@Insinoori Lowering Yle’s CEO’s salary wouldn’t result in significant savings, but it would set an example to lower it.
I meant top management, and similar overpayment is also the case with Alko. There’s no sense in a 30k€/month salary + bonuses when running a monopoly. And as we can see, Alko’s sales have started to falter as soon as competition was opened up. Has Alko’s CEO earned their outrageously large salary? Absolutely not.
Yle should start cutting everything that private service providers already offer. Areena has also been heavily modified into a streaming service, which again should not belong to Yle.
More local channels have left the radio sector, which would be more Yle’s thing than news in 12 different languages, especially when one problem is foreigners’ poor command of the Finnish language.
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Could Yle save, for example, from UMK?
”There are fewer and fewer things that bring Finns together around a common cause. I think it’s important for Yle to hold onto a few such things in the future as well. Another thing is that the prices of sports rights are pretty much through the roof, meaning few companies can buy them alone anymore. That’s why they have been shared with other operators.”
The new CEO is right on the topic there. One only needs to look at the current state of ice hockey or Formula 1 to see what paid channels are doing to these former forms of entertainment for the whole nation. A nation needs a common culture or it ceases to be a nation. In that work, Yle is absolutely necessary.
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This, as well as previous scandals related to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, are remarkably peculiar in how they are somehow handled in the media, as if the Foreign Minister herself were an outsider to these issues, especially when the minister is from the National Coalition Party. It’s as if Valtonen bears no responsibility whatsoever for how her ministry operates, and the Foreign Minister’s name hasn’t even been written in these scandals.
Imagine a situation where the minister in question was from the Finns Party.
Another matter, which is genuinely the Foreign Minister’s responsibility, even for the National Coalition Party, is how unhealthy the work culture of that ministry appears to be. If the entire staff files a harassment report, then the ministry’s decision to conceal the related resolution, while the ambassador continues as if nothing happened and the staff receives some “therapy discussions” with HR, is straight out of a “how to effectively screw over employees while pretending to do something” guide.
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https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/milei-effect-clear-signs-of-argentinas-economic-recovery
Argentina has found a path out of misery. When will Finland take action?
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This encapsulates the difference between the National Coalition Party and the Finns Party. The National Coalition Party generally strives to be civilized and polite towards other people, even if they disagree. The Finns Party, on the other hand, tries to challenge and be confrontational about everything. Such choices have consequences in this life.
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Then when it’s okay to cut the number of municipalities to one-fifth of the current, close a few garrisons and half of the prisons.
It’s easy to punish the unemployed, but who has the guts to geographically pull half of Finland under the keel?
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This is how the National Coalition Party used to be, at least, but now, unfortunately, the party’s Finns Party wing has grown, and their rhetoric and demeanor are very similar to those of the Finns Party. It remains to be seen how far this development will go.
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I don’t quite grasp the logic now, how the National Coalition Party’s (Kokoomus) possible imagined or real politeness relates to the media treating a National Coalition Party minister with such kid gloves that nothing similar was seen even with Marin. Doesn’t this really raise any questions about the media’s completely obvious and blatant bias?
I can’t say exactly how much the foreign minister should be grilled about this, but his/her protection in the scandals of his/her own ministry is, in its silence, deafening. If it were a Finns Party (Perussuomalainen) foreign minister, I am 110% sure that HS editorials and tabloid columns would have demanded their head on a block long ago.
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https://www.is.fi/politiikka/art-2000011324297.html
3% of Left Alliance supporters, 3% of Green League supporters, and 2% of SDP supporters favor cuts in public spending. 51% of Finns Party (PS) supporters and 46% of National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) supporters.
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My excellent economist friend shared a study (possibly already seen here) concerning Finland’s exceptionally skewed population structure.
I can’t resist quoting this part from the conclusions:
Using the Synthetic Control Method, we find that the rapid ageing of Finland’s population over the past decade has had significant economic effects. Real GDP per capita is 15.9 % to 27.5 % lower, productivity is 8.4 % to 13.9 % lower, and government debt is 26.0 to 28.4 percentage points higher, depending on the comparison sample.
In my polemical spirit, I state that without the pension bomb, our GDP per capita, our productivity, and thus certainly our wealth level would be comparable to Sweden’s. So, when someone starts arguing that we are poorer than Swedes due to our taxation, one can point to this study and say that we are poorer because the age cohorts between 1950-1970 did not procreate.
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Referring to entrepreneurs’ schematic home office deductions. Stupid decisions are apparently being reversed, for which I tip my hat. It would, of course, be better if decisions were prepared better from the outset.
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My friend introduced this to me last week and I’m still really dumbfounded by it. To put it bluntly, shouldn’t decision-makers in Finland be economically interested in nothing else but our demographic structure? It should have been 30 years ago already. Think about our wealth level if the GDP/capita of the last decade had been 15 percent higher. It would have accumulated there.
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How about a grocery store owned by the City of Helsinki, with the store name Hesuli, or Tunari in Turku, or VelkaMarket if state-owned, would this be possible in Finland?
In the NYC Mayoral primary, the “surprise winner” Zohran Mamdani proposes that New York should establish its own grocery stores and offer basic necessities without profit.
City-owned grocery stores.
Food prices are out of control. Nearly 9 in 10 New Yorkers say the cost of groceries is rising faster than their income. Only the very wealthiest aren’t feeling squeezed at the register.
As Mayor, Zohran will create a network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit. Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers. They will buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods on products and sourcing.
I assume that in the US grocery market, there is some other model than the Finnish oligopoly, but New York is not pursuing this reform alone; a similar model is being promoted elsewhere, as NYT reported.
The idea has gained momentum in other cities as a way to address so-called food deserts, where supermarkets are scarce. Chicago and Atlanta are moving forward with proposals, and there are already city-owned grocery stores in Kansas and Wisconsin.
What others lead, Finland always lags behind; of course, we’ll probably have to wait for the Swedes to get ahead in this too before anyone here in this backwater starts promoting a new radical vote-fishing scheme, but I could bet that someone from the green-left will add this to their election program in the next elections.
The operations of the S- and K-mafia are still a taboo in Finland, but when there are political easy points to be gained and the price of coffee is always easy to lament, then surely some politician will try to break the silence at the latest before the elections and propose something similar.
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This is an unfortunate and unnecessary spectacle, in which the President of the Republic and especially his son were unintentionally cast in a negative light. However, things must be said as they are, meaning it is difficult to believe that a first-year student would outperform more experienced applicants; it is easier to believe that, unfortunately, the applicant’s family background carried weight in the interview.
This is not a stance against Alexander Stubb; in my opinion, he is a good president, nor is this a stance against his son. The entire situation has also been difficult for the recruiters, as it is hard to imagine that, under pressure, the applicant’s background would not have influenced the selection in this case. Nevertheless, there should have been the courage to choose a more experienced applicant.
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It would have been better to apply to a private company so that this whole fuss wouldn’t have been necessary. For any operator, it’s positive if they get the president’s son on the team. In working life, contacts also matter, and regardless of one’s opinion on the matter, the choice made is always net-positive for the employer. (If anyone dares to claim that student summer employees have any real impact on a company’s operations, I guarantee they have no experience of what tasks summer interns are given in state and public sector organizations.)
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