261–270 of 300 posts
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Livable means different things to diff ppl (duh). For me which city is livable is very personal thing outside of basic necessities. Münster almost bored me to death plus the church bells were super loud where I stayed. Service people were special kind of polite plastic robots, but for some people its what they want
I find it difficult to adapt. When I am abroad it always feels creepy how "servant" the service industry is. And stop trying to sell me shit. People really underestimate how you are shaped by the society that you grow up in.
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These lists also often ignore the weather, which makes a huge difference to what most people consider to be "livable". Nordic European winters are horrible, and no amount of amenities can compensate.
Nordic winters are tame compared to those in places like northern north America. I live in a town that regularly dips below -40c. But a very cold winter is nothing compared to a very hot summer. Look at how many people die in heat waves. Rarely does a cold snap result in more than a handful of deaths, and most of those will be traffic-related. Heat waves can result in hundreds dead very easily. I'll take a Canadian o…
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/extreme-t...
> The study found that extreme heat and cold killed 5.08 million people on an average every year from 2000-2019. Of this, 4.6 million deaths on an average occurred annually due to extreme cold while 0.48 million deaths occurred due to extreme heat.
As I wrote last year, these liveability index ignores all the best cities in Europe and I suppose in most countries by focusing on the largest cities. I enjoyed living in the US, France, Denmark and Germany, I can't find Boulder, Besançon, Nantes, Helsingor, Münster, etc. These are all smaller cities outside of the big ones and they would all have a score higher than Vienna in this index. I am 100% confident that you…
And while it's always possible that the hedonic treadmill is skewing their sense of perspective, I also suspect that these measures are somehow lagging behind reality, and that a list of top 10 is in fact the list of the best places to live 5 years ago, and the best to have moved to 8+ years ago, rather than somewhere you should be making a 2 year plan to move there.
If you are young or adventurous, you might be better off looking at a list of 10 up and coming cities instead. Though you might be slightly worse off there in the case of a recession hitting before you are fully established.
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Nordic winters are tame compared to those in places like northern north America. I live in a town that regularly dips below -40c. But a very cold winter is nothing compared to a very hot summer. Look at how many people die in heat waves. Rarely does a cold snap result in more than a handful of deaths, and most of those will be traffic-related. Heat waves can result in hundreds dead very easily. I'll take a Canadian o…
Cold kills almost 10x more than heat https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/extreme-t... > The study found that extreme heat and cold killed 5.08 million people on an average every year from 2000-2019. Of this, 4.6 million deaths on an average occurred annually due to extreme cold while 0.48 million deaths occurred due to extreme heat.
"In Canada, more than 80 people die each year from over-exposure to the cold."
https://www.ottawapublichealth.ca/en/public-health-topics/co...
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Broadly speaking, this is opposed in Canada by some due to the perception that the existence of a private parallel system will be weaponized to undermine the public system, as many feel has happened to the NHS in the UK.
I'd say they have a point. Brazil, where I've lived most of my life, has had its single payer public Healthcare modeled after the UK, and the private healthcare sector which is supposed to be a "complement" to the "universal" public system, is instead parallel to and competing with it. This competition probably is an erosive force. Public Healthcare absorves the heaviest blows: expensive surgeries, cancer treatment e…
If there was no private system, the public system would pay for all of that. What you’ve described actually seems like it goes easier on the public system by allowing it to specialize on certain kinds of issues
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It does exist, it's just you completely have to pay out of pocket, and if you opt out of it as a doctor, you cannot take any public healthcare system patients either, which means your limited to a few rich people 'executive health' checkups and such. It's a complete either / or system. 'benefits' that cover the few items not covered by the public system also typically do not cover such non-public doctor visits either…
$200k!! (presumably Canadian Dollars, which works out at ~£126k). Here in the UK a typical GP salary is ~90k, and while we do have trouble retaining doctors that is almost entirely due to working conditions (hospitals and practices are understaffed so medical staff end up overworked). I've only very rarely heard doctors complain that they are underpaid. I can definitely see that rates ought to equalised across differ…
It's a combination of:
- A government that is outright hostile to health care workers, including fighting a battle against their unions during covid to reduce pay. The health minister famously went to a doctor's home and berated him from the driveway for tweeting something negative about him. Again, during the pandemic.
- Some specific changes to the pay schedule for doctors that makes it very difficult for them to spend more than 15 minutes with any given patient without losing out on income.
- The introduction a teledoctor system that pays better but most of the people on the other side of it don't live or work in the province.
And that's ignoring other kinds of medical workers, where they've done various things to force specialists to take on fewer patients, cut nursing headcounts to the bone, etc.
Every medical professional I've interacted with for the last few years (even before the pandemic) has seemed exhausted and on the verge of packing up and leaving.
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Cold kills almost 10x more than heat https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/extreme-t... > The study found that extreme heat and cold killed 5.08 million people on an average every year from 2000-2019. Of this, 4.6 million deaths on an average occurred annually due to extreme cold while 0.48 million deaths occurred due to extreme heat.
In India and sub-Saharan Africa. This article is about livable cities, all of which are in countries where heating is not much of an issue. Canada, a country that knows cold and hosts many of the cities on this list, looses maybe a hundred people a year to cold. But BC recently lost nearly 500 to heat in a single heat wave. In the developed world, heat is far more a problem than cold. "In Canada, more than 80 people…
In Canada and northern US, you expect the cold and plan accordingly.
In sub-Saharan Africa, you expect the heat and plan accordingly.
It's when the conditions flip-flop (hot Canada, cold Africa) that people run into trouble.
As I wrote last year, these liveability index ignores all the best cities in Europe and I suppose in most countries by focusing on the largest cities. I enjoyed living in the US, France, Denmark and Germany, I can't find Boulder, Besançon, Nantes, Helsingor, Münster, etc. These are all smaller cities outside of the big ones and they would all have a score higher than Vienna in this index. I am 100% confident that you…
There are lists for the US that have Seattle and San Francisco in the top 10, but if you talk to people who have moved out of those cities, they talk about how much less livable they've gotten. And while it's always possible that the hedonic treadmill is skewing their sense of perspective, I also suspect that these measures are somehow lagging behind reality, and that a list of top 10 is in fact the list of the best…