haha yes! I used interflora

> experience of visiting IKEA is pretty much as stressful and disorienting here as in Sweden

Weird- I visited an IKEA with four friends and it felt much like a theme park. There was a cafeteria and everything.

Granted, our 5th friend--whiskey--was there too.

Ingvar Kamprad now moved home to Sweden, probably to spend his last year. All other still apply.

http://www.svd.se/ingvar-kamprad-flyttar-hem

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!

The Swedes are using cheese slicers too? I always thought the Dutch were the only people in the world to use cheese slicers.

> You cannot find a cheese slicer in my nearest IKEA

Hmm, they sell them at the one closest to me (in Japan) [Yes I'm a Swede)

Is the aesthetic and design Swedish, or is that mostly a myth as well?

The food seems the most Swedish.

I did this when I first moved abroad. First weekend out of Sweden I went to the local IKEA and got stuff.

In her Volvo?

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.

The main takeaway here being that you can take advantage of the political climate for a century to win the game of life.

I upvoted you on both your comments because of the unfairness of downvotes without explanation. I can find nothing wrong with your comment.

Welcome to Hacker News! You'll receive stray downvotes sometimes, but usually it gets undone pretty quickly.

And yet you're the home of Roxette, Abba, Ace of Base, and more than a few others in my collection...

Those wonderful things are called Bilar:

http://www.cloetta.se/ahlgrensbilar

"... sold since 1953 and marketed as "the world's most sold car" (which is possibly technically correct, by number of cars)."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GWDqdnE2yk

"Det finns bara ett sätt att stoppa den - i munnen!"

the horse-meat balls arent what they used to be?

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.).

Shame. other people seem to have had lovely connections with the service, like Karl mentioned in another comment: https://medium.com/@carlheath/stories-from-the-swedish-numbe...

/b/ is actually educational when it comes to showing people the really bad face of the internet.

Not just citizens! I was fortunate to be asked to tweet as @sweden last year and I've only been living here for a few years.

Ireland also does that: https://twitter.com/ireland

How does that twitter profile switching work technically. Is there actual shadow account support available to Pro Twitter accounts?

This site seems to be run by a conspiracy theorist [1]. Next time a more reasonable source would probably be in order.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones_%28radio_host%29

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones_(radio_host)#Religi...

I've troubled imagining how you can abuse this though.

probably a good thing, you wouldn't want most of the calls to be answered by people very unhappy to be cold-called by some random foreigner...

The fact that they are volunteers doesn't change the fact that it's random, it just changes the set from which the random values are selected.

That index claims that there is less crime in Colombia and Russia than in the US. Also that there is less crime in Azerbaijan than in New Zealand.

Compare Sweden and Denmark. All countries around Sweden have lower crime rate.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11474253.

No, I tried to find some screenshots, but its 11 years ago. Current skype does not have this feature.

What exactly do you mean?

... says he who lives in Denmark?

Numbers aside, there's a lot more to cultural changes than merely existing in a country. During my time in Sweden I found people from all over the world in droves. Africa/ME didn't stand out in any way and it seems like anyone who ever talks about this stuff any other way hasn't even stepped foot in Sweden.

Come visit southern france some time to see what an "arabized" region looks like.

Do you have some numbers on that?

I thought you can't post the same link twice?