If you don’t mind me asking, how were you able to immigrate there? I have family that lives in Norway on my father’s side and I’ve sometimes fantasized about packing up my life and moving there after I visited them and saw what an amazing place it is. The few times I’ve been manic enough to actually consider its realistic plausibility I’ve always been stopped at the dead end of their immigration policy. Maybe things have changed but when I looked into it, it seemed like a very difficult bar to meet (I would’ve either tried to find a skilled trade immigration policy, or perhaps used my extended family as a reason, but neither of those routes seemed particularly possible).
That is a great question and I would be happy to share.
Varnish Software had a job posting in Norway and I asked them if they would consider a US candidate. At that time I was living in the US and was looking for opportunities to immigrate to Norway (or Finland).
After I accepted the position they helped with the “skilled workers visa” process.
Moving abroad has a lot of logistics. Depending on your situation in the US, I suggest to sell, rent, or store your belongings in the US and only bring what you can as luggage on the Airplane. In my case, we had an estate sale, asked family to hang on to sentimental items, and gave away everything else. When we left the US to fly to Norway, we had 5 suitcases of what we needed/wanted.
My partner (at that time) and I had a 6mo old child.
We started with an Airbnb in the Sagene area of Oslo. After landing we rented a car and drove to the Airbnb.
That turned into a 6mo rental (outside of Airbnb) as we explored the area for either an apartment to rent or buy. Again, it helped to have minimal possessions as we moved around to find the area that suited us and our family.
Eventually we settled in an area called Torshov.
June or July is a great time move, the city is calm and almost everyone is on summer holiday.
It can take several months before you are in the banking system to receive your salary, so in advance you will need to have a buffer of savings and to keep a bank account in the US.
Forward all your mail in the US to family, friend, lawyer, or service to keep you informed. Forwarding mail to Norway is possible, but it will be delayed by at least one month, which can be a problem for any bills that are due.
Norway is sitting on a gold mine, I mean, an oil field. It can afford many things other countries can't, while also prudently saving much of its oil income.
It looks like Norway's oil revenue per capita is somewhere between $20,000 and $90,000, while the USA's is between $200 and $800, depending on how you calculate it.
I'd like to point out that any country providing universal healthcare is going to be a big improvement in standard of living for many of my friends. The sometimes hellish nature of the USA's for-profit healthcare system is very real.
Then there's crippling student debt following you nearly to the grave, gun violence, etc.
We grew up being told we had more freedom than anybody else, only to learn as adults that not only does freedom carry a heavy price, but so does every flu and broken bone.
Freedom is ridiculous. It's not what Americans have nor want. It's free in a warzone. True freedom is total chaos. Americans do not have nor want real freedom.
Concerns over gun violence (or violence in general) are largely misplaced. Almost all of the violent crime happens in a handful of cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington DC that have been wrecked by decades of failed progressive policies. And even in those cities the violence is concentrated in few bad neighborhoods. We need to fix those places: the residents shouldn't have to live in gang war zones. But at the same time those aren't the same neighborhoods that HN users would live anyway. The rest of the USA is no more violent than most other developed countries.
The state statistics are meaningless. As I already explained above, almost all of the murders in every state are concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods. It's a very localized problem.
As for the specific cities you mentioned, policies enacted by local governments over decades generally fall into the progressive category. State and federal governments certainly share some blame for the problem but because the causes are mostly local any solutions will also have to be local.
If gun violence is concentrated in a few neighborhoods and all states contain such neighborhoods, then state statistics do matter, don't they?
We can all agree that taking away peoples' guns would lead to less gun violence. (This is the part where you say "but that's impossible anyway" or "but the 2nd amendment" which doesn't really refute my point)
It didn't work in Canada. The criminals still have guns. Mind you when you share a large border with a nation that has lots of guns how effective could it possibly be? I'm not blaming the USA, I'm blaming the Canadian politicians for failing to take this into account.
Not sure what is progressive about the fact that one can easily obtain a gun. Pool with many legal guns makes it easier to obtain it illegal one as well.
There would be even less violence in Mexico if they were not bordering USA.
That’s just not true. I’m from Europe but lived in Boulder for several years. For example this shooting (1) happened 5 min walking distance from my home. My kids’ school had several lockdowns due to gun-related stuff in the neighborhood. Something like that is unimaginable in Europe, and big part of why we moved back.
I can’t name any polices per se, but it is very well documented how corrupt the city governments of Baltimore and Chicago are, and have been for decades and decades.
Hard to serve in the best interest of the people what that was never the goal to begin with.
From my experience, living in the US was dystopian compared to what I have experienced in Oslo. I have only been here for 6 years, so given a long enough timeframe that could change.
I think it comes down to mindset. For example You have what you need to live, but the things you want are expensive.
Housing is a problem, but it seems that is a problem almost everywhere. That said, it is not always “easy” to obtain what you want, but I think that is good for society. For example the second hand market is strong.
a Finnish security engineer, a Swedish datacenter engineer, and myself built a self-hosted continuous deployment system that is built around a blue-green deployment strategy. (Inspired by AWS internal systems) we wanted a system that can integrate with any cloud service, VM provider, and/or bare metal.
We built this together at a previous organisation and moved all the internal and external services at that organisation to this system (It allowed the org to satisfy the ISO27001 requirements).
After being in operation for a couple of years, we have collected a lot of insights and feedback on what to change/improve for the open source version.
This summer I’m setting aside some time to work on making those changes for an open source version of what we call “Vanir”.
(Seems like good timing with the initiatives in EU to take back some ownership of the cloud stack).
No LLM or AI magic. Just simple state machines, extendable configuration, and a lovely GUI (web-based, no JavaScript).
The tech stack is python3, postgresql, ansible, and django.
Thank you for the kind words my friend. I enjoyed contributing to TinyKVM during my time at Varnish Software. It is nice to see that you are able to present and share it with the community.
My partner and I love the "single-stair multifamily" building "Leilighet" that we live in Oslo, Norway. It was built in the 1920s and has 3 levels with each level having 3 units. We enjoy the people that we live near and we really appreciate that our son is able to be around so many people in our immediate community. For the most part, we are always seeing someone that we know when coming and going.
We have an access road behind the building that is between the building and the green space. This access road is gated and is used by all of us residents (especially the kids).
The green space has plenty of things to share (garden areas, berries, fruit trees, barbecues, tables, chairs, etc...) My 5 year old son has a lot of friends who live in our area and he's able to just be himself running around, climbing trees, digging in dirt, and exploring his world within a safe community.
The density and use of space is much more efficient than what I was previously used to in the Pacific Northwest. During the last five years of living in Oslo, we have only needed a car when visiting friends at their cabins. I feel privileged to live a car free lifestyle.
As a student of Bokmål (for immigration and integration), Nynorsk is an ongoing mystery to me.
I think that I'm still at the A level (A1/A2). My auditory processing disorder adds an extra variable that I'm still learning how to work with as an adult. If anyone (in Norway) knows of someone who has or is interested in APD (https://www.statped.no/horsel/andre-utfordringer/auditive-pr...), please reach out to me.
Anyways, always happy to see Norwegian related news in HN.
Had a remote meeting with someone from Finland today. She speaks a bit Swedish, so I speak Norwegian and we can understand each other. Then today some other Norwegian joined in on the meeting, but she's from western Norway with a heavy dialect, and we had to switch to English for everyone to understand each other, heh.
Nynorsk isn't so bad once you get used to Bokmål. When I come across it in writing, it just seems like everything is spelled wrong. (am an immigrant as well)
It won't be such a mystery forever - at least not for reading. I struggle with many of the dialects down there (but then again... I'm listening to folks around Trondheim and I know others think that dialect is weird, too)
I'm in my 50s now and emigrated, but as a Norwegian child growing up in Oslo/Fredrikstad (both bokmål districts) I absolutely loathed the forced Nynorsk classes in the 80s/early 90s.
It absolutely felt as a political box ticking exercise, and a complete waste of time - I readily observed that people were struggling enough with bokmål as it was.
Never had a single use for it after leaving school.
As for the dialects, 100% agree
- they are very very different indeed.
A fun and relevant challenge would be to read some works by Jon Fosse, who was the recent Nobel Prize winner. He writes in Nynorsk. It's just different at a reading level (writing it is different, since there are some different grammar rules with it.)
For an easier challenge, there's the comic artist Jens K. Styve, who makes a newspaper comic ("Dunce") good enough that even the national newspapers didn't mind that it was in Nynorsk.
Nothing, but if you want to write a terminal user interface with eyecandy insofar as that's possible in a terminal, Charm's libraries and tooling is an option.
In Oslo, Norway we are currently paying about $300/mo for full time child care (it is more like kindergarten). That’s the maximum out-of-pocket that parents have to pay for a single child.
Our taxes contribute to the kindergarten system and the government requires that all children from the age of 1 have a right to attend. We have hundreds of both private (owned by the government) and public (for profit) kindergartens in the Oslo area. So it scales well and benefits the entire community and local economy.
I wish the US could experience what we have here in Norway.
> private (owned by the government) and public (for profit)
I think these may be inverted - public is what is owned by the government, private is for profit.
Nonetheless, children being raised by the state is not a positive. As a parent you get to see your child for a couple of hours a day during the week and for two full days during the weekend. Not ideal to be honest.
My parent’s waited 12+ months for a replacement bumper for their Tesla. They eventually decided to just trade it in for a new SUV. My dad is the kind of man who takes excellent care of things, and keeps vehicles in perfect condition.
If Tesla was able to provide the replacement parts I imagine they would have kept the car, but the waiting and poor communication from Tesla was the deciding factor to go back to a SUV.
You can’t really compare dollar to krone the difference of a US salary to a Norwegian salary.
I’m not sure how to explain it for those who haven’t lived in the nordics, but you don't need a high paying income to live a good life.
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