Bjørn Stabell 白熊

Sipping a US$ 13 beer I cannot help but feel Norwegian again, even if the beer is a Kilkenny.

There are of course many contrasts between Norway, my home country, and Beijing, where I spent the last 8 years of my life.

Norway is very rich in natural resources—espically in oil, which has seen some growth recently—has a small population, and a “Robin Hood” social democracy.

The entire population is one big affluent middle class; nobody’s rich, nobody’s poor. With overtime pay the cleaning staff of my school made more money than the head of education in my county, even if they were both working about the same number of hours. This is perhaps as close to the communist ideal as you can find in a materialistic world, making Norway the 2^nd highest GDP per capita in the world, and the 1^st in terms of human development accoring to the UN.

And when the oil prices crash? Well, Norway’s saving its money in a petroleum fund, currently at US$ 245 billion.

This lack of income disparity has one very apparent effect: services become very expensive. Combined with a weak dollar and yen it’s perhaps no wonder Oslo surpassed Tokyo as the most expensive city in the world.  Swedes are taking over a lot of the service jobs as they know the language, the pay is better, and the working hours less than back home; as much as 2 hours less per day for, e.g., nurses.

Here’s a quick a dirty chart of the costs of some items in Norway and Beijing, all converted to US$ for easy comparison:

Huge taxes on gas and cars combined with high wages explains the big difference in cab fares. Kilkenny is an import in both countries, and only the service is really different, meaning less difference overall; electronics are even closer in price. Installing a stone wall involves a lot of service: some digging, transportation, installation, and cleanup, thus the big price difference; there’s certainly no lack of raw material (stone) in Norway.

So if you want to see what it’s like when the world is completely flat—when globalization has had its way and equalized all wage disparities—head to Norway. Be sure to bring enough plastic money, though.

Two weeks ago, when I was setting up this blog, I tried using Yahoo Small Business Hosting, and it worked fine. I later decided to host it myself since I needed the increased control.

Just now I was trying to set up a WordPress site for the Norwegian Business Forum in Beijing, but all of the IPs for the site are blocked from China! Blocking is bad enough, but this heavy-handed blocking is really annoying. Here’s a shell transcript:

% host nbfchina.com
nbfchina.com has address 216.39.58.39
nbfchina.com has address 216.39.58.44
nbfchina.com has address 216.39.58.45
nbfchina.com has address 216.39.58.46
nbfchina.com has address 216.39.58.47
nbfchina.com has address 216.39.58.48
% telnet 216.39.58.39 80
Trying 216.39.58.39...
^C  after hanging forever

Or as programmers like to say: Hello World! After spending so much time investigating the blog engines out there I thought a “vrooom” might be a better title for this, the start-up post.

Although my favorite technical environment would be Django and Python, and Socialist Software has made a decent implementation of the WordPress K2 theme using Django, I still opted for a real WordPress installation so I can get used the the full power of a mature blog software. At least this way, when the itch of not running on Django gets too noticable, I know how to scratch it

I plan to write on subjects that matter to me at any given time, syndicating the whole or parts of the site (using tags) to other places. This include:

• General business, management, agile software development, and human resources issues relating to Exoweb, the outsourced software research & development firm I founded and am still working in. This will be syndicated to the Exoweb planet site when it is ready.
• Technology issues, generally open source, and mostly relating to web application development using Ajax, Django, Python, or Ruby on Rails. A post or two on Mac or Linux might sneak in as well, as I’m quite fond of the Unix family of operating systems. These posts may be syndicated to other technology sites once I figure out which ones and how to do it.
• Impressions on the incredible place I live in–Beijing, China–or memories of the even stranger place I come from–Havøysund, Norway. It’d be nice if there were some RSS aggregators for these communities.
• Ideas on personal development and lifehacking. I’m blessed with good sense of logic, but cursed with bad long-term memory. Without systems I just can’t deal with all the stuff thrown at me.
• Personal experiences that I want to share with friends and family. Pictures will be posted to my beorn flickr account.

Don’t hesitate to get back to me with comments. I expect the more feedback I get, the more I’ll write. We humans are funny that way.

Thanks for reading! This blog is on the roll…!