Greetings from Finland. No deposit required for the carts, yet almost all carts are being returned (I can't remember when I last saw one not returned).
Wherever you are in Finland is more considerate than wherever I am in in Finland. Often when I arrive at my local Prisma there’s an employee outside wrangling abandoned carts.
As a Nordic person, that kind of income difference looks realistic (without having checked). But I could never had imagined the difference to be considered as dystopian. If we would dig deeper into this, I would expect our different views to have something to do with differences on what expectations we have, values in life and how we relate to inter-personal statuses.
At my company we make a niche software used by companies globally. Our plan was to arrange a conference in the US for our clients in North/Cental America. Considering the state of the US, we will probably cancel it, as we don't expect our Mexican and Canadian clients to feel comfortable at all. Neither do we at the head office in Europe.
We will instead host it in Europe most likely.
I remember when the ACM ICPC had to be moved from Egypt to the US during the Arab Spring. It's got to be a logistics nightmare to move a conference, but it's best to bite the bullet at the first sign of trouble.
This is deliberate. To my knowledge, absolutely no US airports allow you to transit without going through immigration, and stopovers in the US are very hard to avoid because the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country unless they stop at a US airport.
So it's very expensive to overfly the US without landing, and once you land you can't avoid immigration even if you are just transiting on your way to another country.
> the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country
The overland fee is $61.75 per 100 nautical miles (and it's a lower $26.51 per 100 nautical miles)[1]. Is this really that high? Let's say a flight from Canada to Mexico has to cross 1600 nautical miles overland the US. That would cost 16 x 61.75 = $988. Isn't that pretty low? On a flight with 200 passengers, that's an extra $5 per passenger.
They require issuance of paper visas and an in-person interview. It's _easier_ than B1/B2 visas; but in the overall scheme of things not _that_ much easier.
For a person deliberately avoiding the US (whether out of principle or otherwise), I can't imagine a trip through customs for a transfer would be acceptable either.
That's a great idea. I can't speak about Mexican alternatives but there are many great locations in Canada for a conference.
If the conference was originally going to be held on the west coast of the US then Vancouver would be an excellent alternative and if it was going to be held on the east coast then Montreal is another excellent alternative.
Can anyone suggest some viable alternatives in Mexico?
Depends on when the conference is scheduled, but Mexico has some world renewed venues at the seaside - say Cancun- that nobody minds visiting when it’s winter at home. :-)
I noted that a bunch of physicists met in Cancun on December 10th to discuss the new Galaxy survey that led to questioning the stability of the strength of deep energy.
Traveling to awesome places is a perk of (physics) academia that is not widely appreciated. A large fraction of physicist seems to do rock-climbing or other hobbies that align well with exploring the outdoors when traveling.
I got my first taste of this with this was a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps [0], and after graduating I did postdoc positions on three different continents -- all the time appreciating that unlike corporate expats, I got to choose the exact place to go next. Would highly recommend this way of traveling over backpacking.
Yes absolutely. It’s odd to see people here suggesting Mexico as an alternative based on safety of travelers. It’s a giveaway that they’re simply being opportunistic in attacking America due to their opposition to the administration, rather than anything actually safety related.
As an example, this article from 2025 about a family of foreigners being shot dead also lists numerous other recent examples of tourists being killed, and links to those stories:
Those aren’t even the only ones, and physical harm isn’t the only type of crime foreigners can experience in Mexico either. Moving a conference there for safety makes no sense whatsoever.
There are certainly plenty of areas in Mexico that are dangerous (typically along the US border and drug routes), but it's not as though everywhere in the country is more dangerous than everywhere in the US. E.g., I've been to academic conferences in plenty of US cities that rank among the most dangerous in the world (Baltimore, Oakland, Philly, etc.), [0] as well as Mexico City, which decidedly does not rank among the most dangerous -- let alone the resort destinations. The reality is, "family on vacation murdered in cartel territory" is going to draw a lot more media attention than "family on vacation robbed in New Orleans" or "overwhelming majority of families have perfectly safe vacations". You can't judge by sensationalist articles how safe a place actually is, let alone an entire nation the size of Mexico.
No, he is right. Mexico still has an awful problem with the drug cartels that control whole regions and can actively undermine the government in the whole country. They just recently discovered a death camp that might explain where some of the hundreds of thousands disappeared people ended up.
But there are regions where hosting a conference would be possible, mexico city or Querétaro for example.
What is absolutely astonishing, however, is how similar they sound, at least in terms of prosody. To my Hungarian ears Finnish, at least if heard from distance, sounds eerily familiar.
Compare this to e.g. Spanish and French, languages so close to each other but sounding so different. I wonder if there is some deep reason why prosody is well conserved in the Finnish-Hungarian pair and apparently entirely meaningless in Romance.
I'm part of the Swedish speaking minority in Finland, and spent 7 years in school trying to learn Finnish. I spent 3 years learning German, and got about as far with that. Or as a friend of mine said who moved to Germany: German just feels like a dialect compared to Finnish.
Swedish and German are very closely related languages, so you probably had tons of implicit intuition about how Germanic languages work that didn’t have to be studied.
Yep, Swedish and German is as closely related as English and German. It's possible that English and German are even closer as they share the same Germanic branch (west Germanic), which Swedish does not share.
I bring this up since it can be easier for the English speaking community of HN to relate to the closeness of German, and for a while consider being "easy as a dialect of English" to understand, in contrast to Finnish which is really difficult.
Random off-topic question: do people in your group (Swedish speakers from Finland) culturally identify more closely with Swedes from Sweden, or with (the rest of) Finnish people? I’ve always been curious about this.
> do people in your group (Swedish speakers from Finland) culturally identify more closely with Swedes from Sweden, or with (the rest of) Finnish people?
They're definitely Finlanders. Rooting for Finland in Finland - Sweden sportsball games, general disdain for Swedes as "sissies", etc, etc.
Source: I'm an immigrant from Sweden to Finland; my son is a Finland-Swede.
Alternative source: I think I've read somewhere on the internet (or seen in some YouTube video?) an offhand quip along those same "Sissy Sweden-Swedes" lines by the internationally most well-known -- at least among the kind of people frequenting HN, I'd assume -- Finland-Swede, Linus Torvalds.
It's reasonable to think I'm immersed with Finnish, but I live in a part of Finland that is Swedish speaking, even by law (https://satwcomic.com/difficult-love). I have a Finnish speaking manager since 6 years back. We've never spoken anything else than English.
