The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. – Isaac Asimov Just finished reading Life 3.0 and I can say it does deserve being put on a mandatory reading list for anyone working in AI field. This is not a popular science book, but a great …
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“Russia Rising” by Seth Chanowitz is probably one of the strangest books I read in the past few years. I don’t even remember how I came across it – must’ve been the magic of Amazon’s recommendation algorithms. It caught my eye as the description said that “It takes places in Finland, Estonia, Russia, Belarus, and …
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Anu Partanen is a Finnish journalist now living and working in the United States.
In her new book “The Nordic Theory of Everything. In Search of a Better Life” she compares how Nordic/Finnish and American societies address key issues such as healthcare, education, parental leaves, unemployment.
This books hits close to home. I’m a naturalized Finnish citizen, and spent most of my adult life in Finland and Norway before relocating with family to California.
tl;dr; The book is a nuanced, well-argumented critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of American and Nordic societies. It debunks the myths that affordable universal healthcare, free quality education, improvement of women’s participation in economic life by providing affordable daycare and paid parental leaves can only be achieved in “nanny states” that discourage individuality.
As Anu writes:
The Nordic countries demonstrate that building strong public services can create economic growth, and that pooling the risks everyone faces in life – sickness, unemployment, old age, the need to be educated to secure a decent living – into one system funded by everyone is more efficient, and more effective, than each person saving individually to ensure security and survive misfortune, especially in today’s age of global economic uncertainty and competition.
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Should you buy a book on a new technology or just read technology provider’s guidelines, instructions and recommendations? This book was released over a year ago, so naturally it doesn’t cover all the latest developments that happened on Amazon AWS platform. For example Simple Email Service (SES) and Dynamo DB are not mentioned at all. After …
Entrepreneurs, such as Illya Segalovich (co-founder of Yandex), Loic LeMeur (founder of Seesmic and LeWeb), Peter Arvai (co-founder of Prezi) and many others (see full list on the book’s website: www.europeanfoundersatwork.com) tell about how they started, built, pivoted and drove their businesses to success.
The book gives a unique first-hand perspective on how to grow a successful business from Europe, what is the importance of US market, what are the challenges European start-ups are facing and what are the competitive advantages of being in Europe.
It is an inspiring book, and it is very relevant to European entrepreneurs. While stories of US start-ups quite often start with “we got $N mln in funding and started growing from there”, in Europe it’s more about bootstrapping and building a profit-generating machine. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is thinking of starting a technology company in Europe or is already running one.
I read “Information Diet” by Clay Johnson last Christmas. Central ideas of the book: – information is like food – bad consumption habits are bad for your health – it’s too easy to get yourself into information bubble: “When we tell ourselves, and listen to, only what we want to hear, we can end up …
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Last time I was flying, I picked up a very good book in the airport book shop – "From Finland with Love" by Roman Schatz. The book is an absolutely brilliant, witty and fun to read collection of satirical columns about Finland. Mr.Schatz is a German-born writer who has been living in Finland for 20 …
Read a very interesting article in Wednesday’s FT – "Not to celebrate Nabokov is a tragedy" by Nina Khrushcheva. Even if you’re not into russian literature – it is definitely a good read. Nina is a great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. She also has a number of other interesting articles on Project Syndicate (translated …
A few weeks ago we have finally move to our new house in Espoo. Now I commute to work by bus. 20 minutes of free time every morning and every evening – this is what I have missed living 5 minutes away from the office in Helsinki. Commuting gives a perfect opportunity to read. Laast …
