• Samsy@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Most favourite: all of them

    Least favourite: Denmark

    I think all of them has some individual progressive Systems which other countries can learn from, for example: education.

    Denmark at the end because I heard their strong community has some trouble with people outside of their community. But I wouldn’t call it fascism, it’s more like a nationalism.

    • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io
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      5 months ago

      I’ve only been to Denmark but certainly concur with voting Denmark last.

      • society is designed to render people without a CPR № dysfuctional
        • could not check out a library book without CPR №
        • could not make a photo copy without CPR №
        • could not open a bank acct without CPR № (bank falsely advertised to expats the possibility to process paperwork before even arriving)
        • could not get student rate on trains until the CPR № was granted. Took a month to get the number, the clock of which only started ticking after finding a seemingly legitimate place to live. Not counting time sleeping in a classroom. No way to get the train fare difference back retroactively.
      • society is designed to render people without a bank account dysfuctional
        • many restaraunts refuse service to cash payers, including university campus snack shops
        • university events required electronic payments (someone has to use their personal bank acct to let cash payers participate)
        • someone could not simply do laundry
      • university e-mail outsourced to Microsoft, forcing everyone on campus to share their school-related email with a US surveillance capitalist
      • university itself used Facebook to announce events, thus excluding those who do not use FB
      • university forced 2FA on some academic resources, which then required SMS (thus denying students without a mobile phone or the will to share their number access to school resources)
      • university outsourced e-book service to a Cloudflare service (Proquest), who then blocks access to some demographics of people
      • banks themselves are cashless. If your ATM card fails because of some persnickety paperwork issue, you have no money access unless you visit a branch during opening hours, at which point a banker actually has to walk down the street to an ATM with you, carrying a special internal ATM card. So getting your own money out of your bank account is comparable to asking dad for money.
      • banks app can receive inbound international money, but cannot send outbound international transfers (only domestic)
      • housing crisis: the waiting list for an apartment is years; had to sleep illegally in a classroom and dodge night guards, or deal with lots of dodgy landlords exploiting the crisis. Had a landlord who was illegally subletting, who demanded cash payment (fine) but then refused to give a receipt.
      • severe shortage of on-campus dorms. Just enough to house foreign exchange students. All “dorms” for locals are scattered in private apartments. Getting one close to campus is a competition.
      • was denied a CPR № because the dwelling had more people than officially allowed on paper, despite some of the officially known people not actually living there.
      • expected this country with the world’s highest degree of income equality to be quite liberal, but the people & culture were ironically conservative. No concept of privacy.
      • cycling actually sucks. You might expect it to be the best place in the world for cycling, but the cycle paths are so popular they are like driving on a highway. Overcrowded. If you cruise along slowly a bicycle traffic jam becomes possible. Car driving stresses are there on the high traffic cycling lanes.

      That’s just off the top of my head. The nannying is endless.

      Can anyone confirm or deny whether many of these issues are replicated among Denmark’s neighbors?

      • EvilCartyen@feddit.dk
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        5 months ago

        While that sounds frustrating, I also could not get a bank account in the UK when I studied there, and my wife had to go to maybe 10 different banks in France to find one which would open an account for a foreigner when she lived there for a while.

        We spent close to a year preparing to live in the UK as students for 8 months, emailing universities and city councils and so on. Moving to a new country is full of that sort of thing in general.

      • jwt@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        Damn, for a second there I thought Danes were required to know cardiopulmonary resuscitation to get access to basic amenities.