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Haha most livable if you’re a white German speaking European
Let's all pretend that the experience is the same for everyone, if you're not white, you know this is not necessarily true for you
Secondly, it's funny to see how variable the scores are from one year to the next - with rare exceptions (e.g. Kiev right now) cities don't really change that much in the short term.
A few other small observations:
1. It's absolutely comical that Frankfurt ranks 7th. I know the city quite well, it shouldn't crack the top 50 in any vaguely sane ranking.
2. It's also plainly weird that Istanbul is Western Europe but Budapest is Eastern Europe, together with Tashkent, which is comfortably to the East of all of Iran.
3. Why no breakdown for Southern Europe/the Mediterranean?
Year after year when going over these rankings I'm left with the same impression - arbitrary tastes and cultural flexing + some basic common sense observations, all masquerading as science.
Some factors rapidly changing in UK cities are - Empty offices since the pandemic - Disappearance of the high-street due to Amazon - New "In-between" builds Most British cities still have empty or skeleton-crewed office buildings. That can't be sustainable. Surely these will be sold off as housing. Shops are vanishing at a terrifying rate. Some city centres are boarded up and only charity shops, Tesco minimarts and t…
And gambling shops. I noticed a large increase in those.
what is living well? Why are these lists always so skewed toward such a normative view of liveability? Zürich is a beautiful and well-organized city, for example, but every single time I've been there I've found out that its quiet translates into a boringness I've seldom experienced anywhere else. For me, a man in his late thirties who has no plans to have kids and form a normative family, it's a living nightmare.
You should be able to have fun anywhere. But seriously, should they be skewed more single 30s guys with no commitments? Should they be skewed towards the things that benefit the majority of people who are not single 30s guys. Saying this as a former 'single guy in his 30s' myself.
Some factors rapidly changing in UK cities are - Empty offices since the pandemic - Disappearance of the high-street due to Amazon - New "In-between" builds Most British cities still have empty or skeleton-crewed office buildings. That can't be sustainable. Surely these will be sold off as housing. Shops are vanishing at a terrifying rate. Some city centres are boarded up and only charity shops, Tesco minimarts and t…
But I wanted to add that with the exception of empty offices due to COVID all other problems didn't change that rapidly, IMO.
These have been slowly building up since Gideon's austerity and in almost all deprived areas in the UK, you could play the Charity/Fried Chicken/Bookies/Boarded shop drinking game for at least a decade.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wrong. German is a nationality, not an ethnicity, except if you take an opinion of a few far right borderline Nazi German parties.
You are confusing Europe with the US, Canada and Australia. Being German is akin to being Maori or Aboriginal.
what is living well? Why are these lists always so skewed toward such a normative view of liveability? Zürich is a beautiful and well-organized city, for example, but every single time I've been there I've found out that its quiet translates into a boringness I've seldom experienced anywhere else. For me, a man in his late thirties who has no plans to have kids and form a normative family, it's a living nightmare.
You should be able to have fun anywhere. But seriously, should they be skewed more single 30s guys with no commitments? Should they be skewed towards the things that benefit the majority of people who are not single 30s guys. Saying this as a former 'single guy in his 30s' myself.
Personally I also find very well organized, well functioning Western European cities quite boring. I would take Athens over Frankfurt any day - but of course the 'objective' index says I would be wrong to do so.
So Auckland dropped 33 places just because of few Covid cases ? It is true that we had a peak of Covid cases this year, but it was never really massive by international standards. At the same time, Auckland is pretty dead for a while now, especially the CBD. Traffic is not that bad, but we haven't recovered at all from Covid. We will see in the next few months if cruise ships and tourists are back or not.
Auckland is lovely - if you can afford to live there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be European perspective, but there are dozens of absolutely gorgeous historic cities within an hour or two of flight from where I live, so flying sixteen hours to see Seattle (where I could fly two hours to see Paris or Rome) is just a sorry proposition.
Paris and Rome are indeed lovely. But they're just like NYC and Seattle... Mini malls and intersections.
[1] In the Soviets, the cities were built on different premises, so they look very different - although the countries were so poor that, even though urban planning was excellent (ubiquitous parks, public spaces, houses built far away from busy roads etc.), the buildings themselves are drab due to resource constraints.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using the median surely goes too far the other way though, discounting the fact that the US is far larger than any of those countries except Russia. Of course the US is less likely to have shooting-free years, it's far bigger. Other ways to display this data would be: - group Europe into 1 - split the US into states - display error bars - take 95% lower bound assuming a normal distribution https://www.evanmiller.org/…
> Using the median surely goes too far the other way though, discounting the fact that the US is far larger than any of those countries except Russia. Of course the US is less likely to have shooting-free years, it's far bigger. The stats are deaths per million people .