Like nearly all other Swedes, you can google 'carl heath' and find a page with his phone number, home address, birthday, and a button 'send him flowers':
http://personer.eniro.se/resultat/Carl+Heath
As a Swede currently living in California who also has visited IKEA in several different countries I can report that the general experience of visiting IKEA is pretty much as stressful and disorienting here as in Sweden. There are some local variations in the product portfolio both due to different standards like in bed sizes and kitchen and cultural differences. You cannot find a cheese slicer in my nearest IKEA and they have icing on their cinnamon buns (almost blasphemy).
To be honest, IKEA is a Swedish company by brand only. The products are sourced from wherever it is cheapest to manufacture right now and the ownership structure is so complex, multinational and tax-avoidance schemy that probably only the head honcho Ingvar Kamprad (IK in IKEA) who until recently resided in Switzerland, knows where the profit ends up.
(edit: got Ingvar Kamprads name wrong first time around)
Just some anecdote on Kamprad: Switzerland was also the first country for IKEA to expand into and we now have some of the largest stores. I suspect it had to do with Kamprad's early interest in the country, and possibly because it was a good test market for them. Most Swiss have heard some of stories about him - e.g. him driving an old Volvo, using and washing up plastic dishes and also that he often visited the first Ikea in Switzerland (Spreitenbach) in order to see how things go and optimise the strategy.
For me it has always been impressive how streamlined an Ikea is towards maximising revenue. I'm one of these people who tends to analyse my surroundings constantly for possible optimizations - yet in Ikea I couldn't come up with even one improvement that would make it better for the company. This alone is actually rather refreshing for me, finally a place where I can switch off my brain and just indulge in a bit of consumption!
And here I was thinking this was a Brazillian invention (they are wildly popular in Brazil, everywhere you go in Brazil, even the middle of nowhere, like Amazon Rainforest, you will find someone that owns one).
In Switzerland we do cheese shavings like described in the following article (although only for a specific type of cheese, the 'tete de moine' (monk's head). http://itotd.com/articles/217/the-girolle/
Huh. I've had a cheese slicer at home forever (Scottish-American).
It mostly gets used at dinner parties, when we buy nicer cheeses; inexpensive cheese is almost all pre-sliced in the US. Same holds true for my parents.
Their main design office is in Sweden and most designers are Swedish. Sometimes they collaborate with 'star' designers and they have been accused of plagiarism quite a few times.
IKEA is owned by former Nazi and famous tax evader Ingvar Kamprad. IKEA is actually a Dutch non-profit(!) foundation. It's part of a very intricate scheme to minimize the tax burden of the owners. IMHO, Kamprad has been exploiting Sweden's good will abroad (and maybe reputation for quality?) but he doesn't give a whole lot back. They do sell good and cheap furniture though. :)
He wasn't exactly the only teenager that were swept away by the rather popular national socialistic party at the time before the war. Germany was an important cultural influence and they sort of bootstrapped the economy, etc. There are publicly available lists for anyone that is interested. The researcher Tobias Hübinette seems to be focusing on issues related to Sweden, "whiteness" and race. http://www.tobiashubinette.se/
Regarding the trusts... I think that at the time (1970) and heavily socialist influenced era, it was more or less the only option to secure a privately owned and growing company from the tax man. The taxes were absurd at the time and small privately owned companies were very vulnerably to death-by-tax, especially if the owner died unexpectedly.
When the trusts are set up and the ownership is moved, there is not that much you can do about that actually, and the trusts can control to some degree how much tax the corporations pay as the trusts can charge royalties and set rates to minimize the earnings in the corporations that are "IKEA". Kamprad is probably a board member of all the important trusts, but the trusts are limited by their charter though, so there are limits to the control. It's true that they can't just give money away, at least without a courts ruling.
But still. IKEA have done a lot for the Swedish economy, there is still plenty of production in Sweden (as in Poland, or any cheap place in the world), and a lot of designers and engineers are employed in Sweden.
From this Swede's point of view, IKEA is primarily a global distributor of fresh Lingonberry jam. (I hear they also sell furniture.)
(Seriously, I don't get why lingonberries don't get a wider, eh, distribution. It's brilliant in so many things. My favorite is just tossing lingonberry jam into cream-based sauces.)
Swedes, as citiens of a kinda small and inherently insignificant county kinda fetishise any foreign recognition. I think that's why we like IKEA and H&M.
There's an old but good show that discusses the subject of our self-image pretty accurately (dunno if there are any english subtitles available) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4-V8_r0y-o
And Max Martin, the Swedish songwriter behind most of the international superstars of the last decade or two. Liked a song by Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Pink or Britney Spears? Good chance it was actually a Max Martin song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin
After moving to Hawaii, I've discovered that IKEA products are largely not appropriate for tropical climates -- all the fiberboard stuff has gotten severe mold infestations.
In CA, I loved going to IKEA to stock up on some swedish foods they have. I was very sad when they stopped carrying the foam cars, now it's mostly IKEA-branded stuff...
Hej Hej! I spent 4 months (in the dead of winter) consulting in Stockholm Sweden and it has a special place in my heart. I meet some great people... Some from just posting in reddit /stockholm.
Highly recommend visiting, if you can, go during June (end) for midsummer. I was there Dec - March, it was damn cold.
This made me laugh so hard I thought an upvote was not enough. We're building a SaaS thing at work and I'll open with this at the daily stand-up tomorrow.
I am from Norway, and decided to call.
Ended up talking 30 mins with an extremely nice lady in the south of sweden.
10/10 would recommend - Swedes are awesome
There were actually postings on 4chan's /pol/ about this. Mostly anons asking Swedes what they thought of Muslim refugees raping women in their country (in the rudest way possible) and Swedes politely denying that claim.
Would have been interesting if the anons weren't so hostile; instead it was just aggravating as 4chan always is.
From what I've heard from actual Swedes, any non-leftist opinion (or one that isn't leftist enough) will quickly result in the media turning on you and labeling you as a racist, Islamophobe, etc. It'd make you a social pariah and probably end your career. It's apparently not even kosher to suggest decreasing the number of immigrants coming in each year.
I wonder what their responses to that question would be if they weren't afraid of being identified (by their voice, information they provided on the call, etc.).
Do you read Swedish media? I don't say there haven't been a blind spot regarding immigration, but lately the government ministers have acknowledged the current refugee crisis is a problem.
Anyway, portraying the whole immigration issue only in terms of a rightist / leftist divide isn't very truthful. Moderaterna are not exactly a leftist party.
I'm not Swedish but I'm living in Sweden. This past weekend, my girlfriend, who is Swedish, wanted to participate in this phone number thing. I told her it was a terrible idea and I had to show her /b/ to convince her.
Interesting but not surprising website. I visited Stockholm for the first time recently and I was impressed with the usage of tech to increase everyday efficiencies. Things like: app for the rail station tickets/yellow cabs/buses, electric/hybrid vehicles commonplace, free wifi in abundance...
They don't just give the account to random people. It's always people with already some kind of social media presence, and stealing an account as well known as @Sweden is not something someone like that would just do.
tweetdeck (now owned by twitter) officially supports team access to twitter accounts. So you can add someone to the team account and let them tweet using the handle, and revoke the access a week later easily.
However, because tweetdeck isn't available on mobile devices, most of these rotated accounts end up using password sharing.
The abuse of the @Sweden Twitter account is obvious -- just look at the lebanese immigrant Elias Kreidy who wrote “I’m the immigrant fking your daughter while you’re trying to sleep ignoring her moans calling me ‘daddy'”.
Now imagine this guy answering a phone line as an ambassador for the country!
Use Google Translate. Obviously English sources for Swedish news is hard to find. It is, afaik, not the first the time @sweden account has been used for trolling by douches.
Got a link to an article by anyone who doesn't think the moon landings are fake or that the US government was behind 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing?
I've no idea if that article is factual or not but let's not uncritically link to infowars.net, eh?
There is an American living in Sweden that is answering calls. He's got some interesting perspectives on life in Sweden. Not sure if he is still taking calls or not.
Unfortunately what I've seen implies they talk in English. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But my son has been taking French language class in school and this provides the obvious extension to their idea of "talk to a random French-speaking person" or whatever other language someone wants to learn. Something like that probably already exists anyway. I suppose there would be the predictable issues with most foreign language learners being minors.
I've visited Sweden quite a few times and have travelled around quite a bit. I didn't meet a single person who couldn't speak English to some extent. I didn't meet a single person under about 50 who wasn't completely fluent.
Reminder: A trumped-up Swedish arrest warrant is the reason that Julian Assange has been trapped for years inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London and denied his right to asylum... all for journalism that made the US government look bad.
Don't travel to Sweden. Don't support the Swedish government in any way. They are cooperating in a large-scale effort to censor the types of things you can read about in the newspaper.
I'm working on an application, submitted to fellowship, that will allow people to confess about something and others will be able to comment on this confession.
This topic makes clear that I need really good, and fast, moderation tools
We're in 64th place for crime, just behind UK and Australia and way behind the US (obviously). But Japan is absolutely great if you're looking for low crime rates, and the food is fantastic too.
Yes, sorry that was a terrible reference; I should have been more careful. But take instead the murder rate from Wikipedia (which gets stats from the UN): Sweden is in place 205 out of 218 countries and no other nordic country is lower except Iceland (and the rate in Iceland is not accurately measurable since they had only a single murder).
In decline? Sweden had the highest growth rate in Europe in the last quarter of last higher. Highest population growth rate in the EU. How do you define decline? Or crime for that matter :) Sweden does not have high crime. I'm Irish, living in Sweden. I know high crime.
Lived there in 2012 for 6 months. What an amazing country, probably the best place in Europe to have a family. Stockholm is one of the most beautiful and safest capitals in the world.
Another case of malware blocking gone wrong. Well, it’s not malware, but if you don’t trust it, you can probably use the archive.org version of the site.
Let's clear this up once and for all; That Sweden has a high suicide rate is a rumour and not true. Sweden's suicide rate is below the average of the OECD countries. Feel free to read up on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Sweden
