[stonescar]

Keyser, just to avoid any confusion - the beer tax is not $4, but the total price for the cheapest 0.5l in a grocery store. In a club you'd have to pay $10+ for a beer. Alcohol and tobacco are however the most heavily taxed items, afaik, and have the highest price compared to other merchandise.

About the prison, there are only a few prisoners that are allowed to go there, after behaving really well for many years in other prisons. Still, i think the prison standard is pretty high overall, albeit not as "free". Don't really think the norwegian people are any different genetically [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img] but I do think the community we live in is more healthy.

Norway isn't quite the utopia Michael Moore presents, in that he of course only shows the most flattering cases, but compared to the US, it's a pretty sweet deal IMO. Also, people do complain about taxes, but that's mostly the less educated/intelligent or filthy rich and self centered.

People also complain about expensive gas, alcohol and tobacco, and there are some politicians milking that cow dry, promising lower taxes, cheaper alcohol etc, without really having any realistic propositions - "FRP" is one such party. Unfortunately a lot of people fall for it, it's kind of like the norwegian version of bush supporters, but fortunately they're not in the Government - no other political parties want to cooperate to make a coalition. Also I think our media is somewhat less corrupt and biased then my impression of the US media.

The social democrats are still in control, and I hope it stays that way, among other reasons because they value and subside culture - which I hope will be my trade.

However, on the negative side, the schools in Norway aren't that great. There are tons of money in the national oil fund, and I truly believe that spending money on educating the people will pay off in the long run. We are very lucky to have free education - anyone can get a university degree, as long as they can pay for the books and pass the classes, but we have the opportunity to have the best school in the world imo, and we're just too greedy. Teachers are underpaid, school budgets are cut etc. etc.
I guess I can't complain when my university degree is free of charge, but still, we could have so much more.

/end rambling