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Comment by whynotmaybe | Hacker News Reader

I heard a rumor that some people use this to check their neighbour's revenue and sometimes make snark comments if one of them has a high revenue but lives in a "average revenue" part of town.

They'd say that if you earn a lot, you shouldn't take a cheap housing.

Any truth to that?

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There used to be a lot more of that, but a system was put in place where you have to identify yourself with electronic ID to access the information, and the information is logged so the other party can see it.

Nowadays I think mostly journalists use it to pull up information about politicians and other people that are in the public spotlight. There are of course the yearly "richest people in Norway" lists in various categories.

> There used to be a lot more of that, but a system was put in place where you have to identify yourself with electronic ID to access the information, and the information is logged so the other party can see it.

Yeah, kind of a fake solution, request it via Ratsit or whatever and all they get to see is that someone used Ratsit, but not who actually requested it.

Same goes for criminal cases, using Krimfup or whatever just leads to the service's name "leaking", while you can use fake details to sign up for both Ratsit and Krimfup.

I don't think there's anything like ratsit in Norway which would let you do this query anonymously.

> They'd say that if you earn a lot, you shouldn't take a cheap housing.

I think a lot of "humbleness" is also enforced this way, in the US seems normal (or even some European countries) to flaunt your wealth, and others seem more or less OK with it, while in Sweden it's much more socially unacceptable to in any sort of way brag about being rich, or showing that off. Humble-richness is OK and tolerated, but flagrantly displaying your wealth among the public is generally frowned upon.

So together with that, living in a average neighborhood but have a house that sticks out as clearly "rich person's house" will gain you evil looks from your neighbors, as you're "supposed to" live in a different neighborhood where neighbors look more equal, otherwise you again stick out, which is cause for friction culturally.

Lots of culture in Sweden is less about "lets correctly solve the problem" and more "lets ensure the gaping holes aren't so visible for everyone, so we can ignore it properly".

I have a friend who has moved to Sweden a while ago, and she told me a lot about the Swedish housing situation, and admittedly most if it went over my head, but in short, apparently very few places would even allow you to build even somewhat freely.

Apparently she was in a situation where she 'owned' her house, but still paid a monthly maintenance fee to some agency. and she wasn't allowed to repaint the rooms or do any sort of repairs, but had to go through some agency, who would do it for her.

Apparently that was a neighborhood thing, but she told me of epic (and apparently fruitless) struggles of her friends' who wanted to repaint their house in a different color and install some circular windows.

Probably just didn't really buy the house. Many houses are part of an association (BRF). When you buy one, you practically only buy the right to live in the house plus a share of the entire association. The fee that she paid was towards that association for things like maintainance, managment, trash-fees, internet, parking, likely heating and water, and possibly interest on the associations loan. It's just a different structure that many countries have for flats in a building, in this case applied to single family houses.

Here in Australia, I’ve seen what we call “strata title” applied to “single family homes” before (American terminology, we’d say “detached houses”) - it is uncommon, much more common with apartment buildings or townhouses/villas/semidetached (you share walls and maybe the roof with your neighbours, but there is no one above or below you)-but not completely unheard of

Making snark comments about that sounds very unlikely. More likely they'd have respect for someone living frugally and not showing off. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

We don't talk to our neighbours.

But about them?

Making snarky comments about it, no, not really. Will some people snoop around? Yes, nosy people can be found everywhere.

Yes and no. You get notified if someone else actually asks for your revenue info and so in practice nobody actually does it.

Is this not trivial to get a random person to check stuff for you in exchange for making requests for them (on people they are interested in)? Or is that illegal?

There's paid services that pull it for you, most charging around 100nok (10eur) per lookup.[1]

Media is also allowed to pull "top" lists like the 100 people with the most income in a city, 100 people with the most wealth in a city, etc.

[1] https://sjekkskatt.no/

You get a notification by post if someone requested your info.

What is the harm in this case? Shit people are shit even without information. They would be snark about something else then.

I think it was covered during a discussion about immigrants that are easily rejected - because they're immigrants.

The points was that it added another layer of issues for immigrants because they didn't understand the neighbourhood they "should be living in" with their revenue.

Why is this not the “shit people do shit things” category? This happens even without being immigrants. Large part of my family lives in a way poorer neighborhood than what we can afford, because we don’t care to move. People who have problem with this had other problems even before we got richer. There is exactly zero difference. The exact same people are snark as before, just for something else now. They were and would be snark even without this.

This seems to me a very bad attempt to hide xenophobia.

Yep, that tracks.

There's also the underlying current of Jantelagen (Law of Jante) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

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