Malcolm Pemberton
English language and communication skills trainer.
malcolm.pemberton@vaasapages.com
For the past eleven years I have been teaching English to engineers, businessmen, bankers and many others. I teach skills such as negotiating, giving presentations, and email writing, and I have also done work checking the English pages of websites, and proofreading a great variety of documents, from contracts to menus. I really like this kind of work, because I have a sharp eye for mistakes (or for just plain bad style;-).
As regards my free-time activities, now that I have lived in Finland for twenty years, and in Vaasa for sixteen, I naturally love sailing, walking and biking and just being out in the countryside. Vaasa is such a great place to live. The sea and forest are on one's doorstep, yet all modern conveniences are right at hand.
As regards my family, I am married to a Finnish woman and we have two children. My wife owns her own translation agency here in Vaasa - it's name is tpt (Taina Pemberton Translations).
The great trick is trying to balance the needs and wishes of as many people as possible. It is no good if the majority rules without caring about the minorities. Some people prefer to live in rented accommodation, some long for their own house; both types of dwelling need to be built and planned for. Some people prefer the security of a good job, others prefer the risk and potential of a small business; both types of employment should be encouraged. Some people prefer a standard state-run school for their kids, others prefer one which is more specialised in music, dance or the arts, or which uses a different pedagogy.
If we are to call ourselves a free society, then all kinds of people must be able to live side by side in some sort of harmony. We need to do this in a sustainable way, and this surely is a sentiment shared by pretty much all groups of people. We all wish for good health, which includes a clean environment, food which is safe to eat, plenty of opportunity for a wide variety of sports and leisure-time activities. We all would like top-quality health care. We would all like good schools and other facilities for our children. We would all like security, which means effective policing and an atmosphere that does not encourage crime.
And we would all like to have these things close at hand, without having to travel far. All this costs money, but what is money for, if not to build the infrastructure to support a fine life?
Malcolm Pemberton
Most of our offices, shops and factories have enormous flat roofs; hectares of wasted space on which could be mounted, unseen from the street below, sufficient solar-electric panels to keep the building well-lit, ventilated and probably heated too. This would be localization at its best.
With rising energy costs, the initial investment in equipment would surely be quickly recovered, and after that - pretty well free.
Simple ideas like this are often the best.
As we all know, 'foreign' goods are often cheaper than their Finnish counterparts. Tomatoes from Spain, despite the fact that they have been delivered from over 3,000km away, are cheaper than those from Närpes. Clothes which have been made in the Far East are cheaper than Finnish equivalents, and shoes from Italy have more attractive price tags than Finnish ones. However, the question is: How long can we sustain this situation?
If too many of us choose Spanish tomatoes, eventually the Närpes growers will go bankrupt and join the unemployment line. There are now very few Finnish clothes makers, shoe-makers etc. Virtually every toy we buy for our kids comes from China. Our Nokia phone probably was not made in Finland, and I think it safe to say that every electronic device in your house was not made in Finland. What happens when we choose cheap? A lot of the time we are happily giving our money away to developing countries; which is very nice of us and I'm sure that some of the citizens of those countries are very happy about it :-)
There are two important points wrapped up in this little problem. Firstly, all other things being equal, the closer to home that the goods we buy are actually produced, the less smelly diesel fuel will be needed to transport them. This will make for cleaner air, and as my family and I are obliged to breath on a pretty regular basis, I am very much in favour of this! Secondly, if we buy locally produced goods, it is most likely that the money we pay will also get spent locally, and our own economy will be all the healthier for it.
My final point in this short article is this - it is better to give your money to an Oy (Ltd) type company than an Oyj (Plc) type one. The principle is simple, especially if the company is a locally-based one. A local company with its roots in the area is again more likely to re-circulate your hard-earned cash in your home town. The shareholders of a larger public company may be from all over the world, and that is where part of your cash is going to go.
So, it makes a lot of sense to buy locally produced goods whenever possible. Let's keep the air clean and our money local!
We are in a similar situation now. Tree-hugging 'lefties' are trying to save the planet (but as George Carlin said: "The planet will shake us off like a bad case of flees", and he was right - we do not threaten the planet, but we do threaten our position on it.) However, I, and others of my kind, do not hug trees, we are not way over to the left, and we are really rather normal people who would like to live on a clean planet, in harmony with the other furry and feathered creatures we share it with. My point? If you think that to be Green is to say 'Yes' to squirrels, but 'No' to any human development, you are wrong.
To be Green is simply an attempt to make sure that, whatever political system is currently in power, we actually have a nice clean planet to live on whilst we suffer the privations of the current tax and legal systems. No, sorry, I am being flippant. Being Green is more, much more, it means making sure that the disadvantaged are cared for, it means making sure that we have a proper, dignified, social security system, it means making sure that Globalization does not get too big for its boots. After all, when companies have a greater GDP than governments, what happens to democracy? It is possible, in the future, that huge companies become more important than sovereign states - and then what? So, our mission is two-fold: one, to make sure that our planet is fit to live on, and two - to make sure that democracy survives.
I'm not kidding! To be Left or Right is totally irrelevant if the planet is dead, or if indeed democracy is dead!
Have a nice day! Malcolm.
What makes no sense, is the outsourcing of component manufacture, either locally or from 'low-cost countries'. What is the point of this? Is it price? Well, the answer to this question is 'not often', especially when other factors are added to the equation. I have heard so many stories of poor delivery times, substandard work and other problems which result in unhappy customers. The big downside of this fashion is the tens of thousands of trucks driving unnecessary journeys all over Europe and beyond.
Remember the postal service we used to have? Well, each morning three separate vans arrive in front of our building, delivering only small packages to three different companies. A little later comes the old 'Posti' van with a fourth delivery. This is crazy! Four vans to deliver what would fit in a small car.
Outsourcing has much more to do with minimizing risk and reducing 'head counts' (charming phrase - dead or alive?). All this looks good in the reports to the shareholders, but I fear that this is the only 'added value' when it comes to quality products leaving the factory.
Every time a truck, or a car, has to slow down and stop at a set of traffic lights, it has to use very much more fuel to get moving again. Every time they have to slow down for a tractor or other slow-moving vehicle, the same happens. Bigger and better roads do not necessarily breed more traffic, they just let it move more freely.
The same applies to the Yhdystie, give it the other carriageway it was designed for and free up the system. Through-traffic should not go through Vaasa, it should go around it.
However, looking to the future, imagine this. All trucks, where practical, must offload at purpose-built transport stations on the edge of town, and transfer their loads to smaller, electrically-powered vans for final delivery. Only electrically-powered vehicles would be allowed in the town centre. Vaasa could be Europe's first really clean and quiet city centre.
Am I crazy? No, I think we all would like it to happen - it just seems so impossible, but it's not.