Sunday, January 19, 2014

Socialised healthcare in Norway

Last Friday, we had a talk session at work where human resources (HR) gave out information on health insurance that's provided by the company that I work at.  You might ask yourself, "wait a minute, isn't healthcare in Norway free?  Isn't it good?  Why would anyone want to buy their own health insurance?"  To the disbelievers who have drank from the kool aid fountain for too long, let me say, it's not too late to discover the truth, there is always light at the end of the tunnel.  And who better to tell you than me, hearing another first hand account from a Norwegian, actually two Norwegians, who were absolutely tearing up the so called "healthcare" system.


Don't get a hard on, she is not Norwegian.

Patient X from work had some back problems, and he went through private health insurance, he mentioned that if he had to go through the traditional system, it would have taken him weeks to get an appointment.  Going through the private health insurance system, only took him one day.  Pretty efficient.  So he saw the physio, had some treatment that was completely paid for by the private insurer.  He had a relapse a few months later and relied on the same private health insurance to get an operation performed on him.  There was no way he was going to go on the "free public healthcare system" that Norway provides (or rather, steals from you through high taxes), and he made it very obvious.  He was really, really, really glad that he had private health insurance.

Patient Y, a rather unfortunate fellow, probably provided the greatest horror story that I have heard in a while.  He had the luxury of first not knowing about the health insurance provided by the company and went through the "traditional" route of going through the absolutely "wonderful" Norwegian healthcare system.  First after many months, he went through a scan and found out he had a brain tumour that was 4 centimetres long.  Now I don't know about you, but if I found out that I had a brain tumour in my head I want it out of there faster than I want a pencil jammed up my ass, and you would think that the doctors would think that, but no, it was worse, worse than getting a pencil stuck up your ass, the geniuses here wanted to "wait and see if it gets bigger".  Yes you read that right, they wanted to wait and see if it gets BIGGER.  I don't know if there was ever a case where a brain tumour was beneficial to anyone, maybe if you're a member of Professor Xavier's X-men?  By the name of Tumouruine perhaps?  Close relative of Wolverine?  But you know, that's just beyond belief.  So this guy, he gave up on the system and sought an expert opinion from experts in the US and they agreed something had to be done.  About a year later he said some top doctor from the Norwegian hospital that he went to apologised for his colleagues' behaviour, but by then he had already had his operation performed outside of the Norwegian healthcare system.  He said the Norwegian doctors were useless, and this is coming from a Norwegian.

Would he still be alive if he had waited?  You know, I highly doubt so, he probably would have died.  But hey who knows right?  After all it's only a life, a statistic in the health care system, you know, just a number.  That's how the public system treats you here, a number, not a human, a number.  Don't forget it.


Don't worry man, it's only a brain tumour!!  Worst case you just become Wolverine Tumourine!

In conclusion, these two people were extremely glad for the private health insurance provided by the company.  In one case, it most likely saved the guy's life.  I would say highly likely it did.  But hey, what do I know?  I'm not Norwegian, these guys are.  All the smart ones know the system blows, only the dumb kool aid drinking morons are the ones praising the system and I bet they're also praising to get more pencils stuck up their ass as well.

To end this post, I'm going to quote what someone else has said, a certain Margaret Thatcher.

"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money"

The best advice that I can give anyone living here, is to get private health insurance.  You know, if you cared about your life and your family's.  But maybe.. just maybe, you might live through a brain tumour growing in your head and get to tell others how wonderful the experience was!

Friday, December 20, 2013

The last 2013 post from Norway

I'm flying off in 9 hours, so this is going to be super short.  Today's the last night that I'm posting from Norway, at least for the year 2013.  Been 3 years since I moved here, my my... how time flies.  This year I haven't posted much.  Maybe next year will be better.  Gotta put on the blogging hat on again.

Sometime next year I'll be leaving Norway, on to better things.  You might ask yourself "Why?  Isn't this the supposed best place to live?"  In one word, "No", in two words, "Hell No" (But if you're a welfare loving, socialist, nincompoop you might disagree with me).


It's a BIG world out there!!

But that's another story, that's to be continued… in the next post!

Friday, September 13, 2013

Javazone 2013

So I attend Javazone from Sept 11 till Sept 12.  Javazone is a tech conference highly catered towards the Norwegian and Scandinavian region, but there were plenty of English sessions as well.  I'm not a fan of Java, but I'm fan of technical stuff, so that's why I go.

Day 1


View Larger Map

The venue, Oslo Spektrum, that's that big irregular shape in the middle.  Where it has been since I moved here, and probably before that as well.

The morning kicked off at 8:30am with a Norwegian band playing music.  I was more concerned with keeping awake at this point.  Early mornings ain't my cup of tea.


Yes the guy in the middle really is half naked and wearing a mask.

The first session of the day was at 9am, and I started off with Douglas Crockford's session on "Managing Asynchronicity in JavaScript with RQ".  It was pretty cool, I like the syntax of RQ.  He is a really good speaker, probably the best session I attended over the two days.  I spoke with him in 2008 when I was still living in Australia in another conference.


Douglas Crockford.

Javazone works like this, every session is 60 minutes, with 20 minute breaks in-between.  So after the break I spent 20 minutes running around taking photos, and well, eating food.  I tried the cheese platter and bbq pork wrap, both were frankly awful by any kind of edible standard, thankfully the sushi was good which was a change.  Usually it's the sushi that's awful.  But anyway there's 6 different sessions going on at any one time, so you have to pick just one to attend.  If possible usually I avoid pretty much all the Norwegian speakers, the American speakers or non Norwegians are much better speakers from my experience having attended all the sessions previously.


Sponsors area.

10:20am was the next session.  "Livin on the edge: Netflix edge architecture".  Did you know Netflix uses software that I create? And now here I was attending a session by them.


Adrian Cole.

11:40am's session was about avoiding creating gigantic blobs of mud posing as systems in the real world which people use.  "Breaking the monolith: Towards a system-of-systems architecture".


His name is Stefan Tilkov.  Harden the f*** up Stefan!! (only Australians will get this joke. ;))

The session at 1pm wasn't very interesting for me.  Well I thought it was going to be but turned out, not really.  It was called "Visualize your architecture and information".  No pictures here.

2:20pm's session on programming was like a history of programming languages and how today's functional programming languages solve some programming problems like state and mutations. "Programming, Only Better".  At the end there was a Norwegian guy who asked questions in Norwegian while Bodil translated.  Was this guy just too ashamed to speak English?  I don't know. :)


Bodil Stokke.

3:40pm's session by Finn.no, the only site that Norwegians know of in addition to vg.no, provided interesting insight into how mobile is taking over the desktop.  Only a few years ago in 2010 1% of mobile users were using their site, today it's 41% and by years' end that's expected to be 50%.  Anyway they create native mobile apps that interface a backend, it's extra work but it works in this case. "Why and how we do mobile native apps at Finn.no".  Also talked about how the uptake of people updating their apps, well not everyone updates them, some people will never update them.  After the session ended I had some coconut ice cream.


Alf Thomas Nilsen.

5pm's session was on "Data, Visibility and Abstraction".  At this point my brain was about to shut down.  I had some chicken drumsticks after the session was over.


Stuart Sierra.

The last session of the day was at 6:20pm.  I attended "Borrowing from Github's Culture for Fun and Profit".  I actually liked this talk about Github's promoting working from anywhere, no leave day policy and other not mainstream accepted ideas.  Mainstream is usually poor and at most, average.


Matthew McCullough.

So after that I was pretty much done for the day.  I had to go to trafikanten to exchange my faulty ruter cards and get a refund for my old paper tickets, finally got around to it after several months.  Didn't get home till after 8pm, long day.  I think I may have more sushi than the average person, but at least the sushi was well appreciated.

Day 2

Well this is going to be short, as it was pretty much the same as the day before.

Sessions attended

  1. First, Kill All the Product Owners
  2. Information-Leading Architectures
  3. Design is a Process, not a Document
  4. Configuring large scale distributed systems
  5. Dart and Web components - Scalable, Structured Web Apps
  6. You probably don't know how the internet actually works
  7. 6 Years Later: One Line of Code That Changed the Web Forever
I'm not elaborating on the sessions as it's pretty much the same day as yesterday.  Will I be back next year?  Well that's another story!