
The World's Best Places to Live 2008 - pavel
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0611_mercer/index_01.htm?chan=rss_topSlideShows_ssi_5
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david927
Living in Zurich is like going out with a beautiful woman who has nothing to
say. The best day is the day you get together. The second best day is the day
you split up.

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davidw
In this day and age, these kinds of things should come with a flash app with
sliders to control weights for things like climate, so that you can do your
own rankings. Frankfurt? No way.

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Retric
I agree, but I think there is a positive correlation between specific climates
and getting stuff done. Where you can blow off working to go surfing and live
cheaply it's a lot harder to keep going but when it’s cold outside it seems to
motivate people to keep going. (Or get depressed.)

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davidw
Which is why places like the California bay area, Los Angeles, and large
portions of Australia are so depressed economically?

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froo
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but Australia is far from depressed
economically.

I'm guessing by large portions, you mean the underpopulated areas of
Australia? Around 80% of our Australia's population is spread amongst less
than 20% of the Land Mass, and most of this is centered around coastal areas.

The underpopulated areas have economies that are far from depressed too as a
direct result from our resources boom.

For example, The following redirects to an Australian real estate site
<http://tinyurl.com/5e2vhl>

Karratha is pretty much a country town - but rent there is around $2000 per
week ($1920 USD) for an average 4 bedroom home. A couple of years ago this
simply would not have been the case.

So if you were joking, fair enough - if you were serious... then you're pretty
much wrong.

Thanks :)

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davidw
I was definitely joking. Like California, much of Australia seems to have a
pretty nice climate, and does well economically.

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nir
... In which BusinessWeek fills some pages and a consulting firm gets some PR
by pretending it's possible to quantify things like "quality of life".

(People who take such articles seriously _deserve_ to live in Zurich ;))

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rw
I recommend the Big Island of Hawai'i for an "extended working period." You
get an internet connection (albeit a laggy one), a laptop, privacy, fucking
excellent coffee, and beautiful views of jungle and ocean. Result: you finish
your novel or software project.

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corecirculator
I agree, although life in general seems to move at a leisurely pace there, so
the "urgency" factor in work is not there. OTOH, the fruit juices there do
taste much better than the supermarket ones in mainland US...

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krschultz
Honolulu? I lived in Honolulu for 2 years and it sucked. About the only thing
going for it is the beach, but you can get that in a lot of places. Meanwhile
the place is overrun with poverty, drug use, and high cost of living for
basically no culture. I feel like the editor of this list said "give me 23
cities no one else has listed before" instead of the actual best places. New
York City? San Fran? Boulder? Singapore? Come on

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steveplace
I think it deliberately left out most US cities (Honolulu is the only one I
remember).

Businessweek's "Best of" lists are normally crap anyways... it still got me on
their site, though.

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mandarin
Generally agree with this list as a whole especially considering I live in one
of them ;) However, I do not agree with some German entries on this list.
Düsseldorf ranked 6th?!?

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greyman
How could Berlin get there?! Passionless, uninteresting city...(IMHO of
course, sorry Berliners!)

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msluyter
The results do seem a bit strange. I'm curious to know the exact method they
used for their evaluation. The accompanying text mentions criteria such as
"level of traffic congestion, air quality, and personal safety," but given
that Honolulu came in at 28, they couldn't have given much weight to cost of
living, could they?

Also, I'm guessing crime as a metric probably skews the results away from
American cities, generally. America's per capita murder rate is much higher
than european countries', for example. I think those of us who are
upper/middle class are often insulated from the crime and social problems that
exist -- usually in areas we never venture -- in certain portions of our
cities and thus forget that, taken as a whole, our cities may not be as nice
as we imagine them to be.

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froo
As an Australian, I find it odd that Perth didn't rate as high as either
Sydney or Melbourne which came in as 10th and 17th respectively. Perth ranked
21st overall but wasn't shown on the list associated with this link.

Sure, Perth does not have the nightlife or the population density that either
of those 2 cities have (1.1 million vs ~4 and ~3.5 respectively) but then
again, Perth has one of the lowest crime rates in the country, the lowest
unemployment rate, pollution is nonexistant, fantastic weather (its warm and
sunny about 300-320 days a year) and they're currently undergoing a resources
boom that is the envy of the rest of the country.

The guidelines for defining quality of life can be found on the Mercer
Consulting site which conducted the survey. Link below for convenience.
<http://www.mercer.com/referencecontent.htm?idContent=1306640>

I'd be curious to see what the weightings were for each of the factors, as
this list seems a little strange.

Full Disclosure: I'm a resident of Perth, but I've lived in Melbourne, Sydney
and Brisbane within Australia.

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gibsonf1
I think their metrics need some help as I've been to most of these cities and
I can't imagine many of them outranking a city like San Francisco.

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david927
I've lived in SF (and Berkeley and Oakland) and I've lived in Zurich. There's
no competition. Zurich would win in a heartbeat by anyone who is impartial. My
point above is that it's like heaven -- everything is white and boring. But in
a competition, let's be honest, heaven is going to win.

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pfedor
As long as you don't mind that it's raining and the people don't speak English
even at the city hall.

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haasted
The picture of Copenhagen is actually from the Freetown Christiania
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania>), which is located inside
Copenhagen.

While Christiania is a huge tourist attraction for Copenhagen, I don't think
it's fair to use its picture as a representation of Copenhagen.

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yummyfajitas
From the article: "Cities are compared to New York as the base city, with an
index score of 100."

I think this reveals as much as the rankings do.

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ConradHex
Maybe, or maybe they're just using it as a numeric reference. Something has to
be 100, right?

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yummyfajitas
Yes, NYC is the standard to which all other cities are compared.

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river_styx
Summary: Switzerland good, U.S. not so much.

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locacorten
After three years of living in Toronto, I'm still shocked as why people rank
Toronto so high. Go live in Toronto for awhile and then tell me what you think
about:

1\. Pollution 2\. Traffic 3\. Taxes

I'll stop here since I don't want to get all worked up.

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run4yourlives
People like Hogtown because it's like a mini New York. You get all the
benefits of living in a "big time" city, but you can still have a house and a
yard and live the suburban dream. (For now at least).

After being raised in Toronto and now living in Vancouver, via Calgary, I
definitely prefer where I am now, with the exception of the rain.

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Chocobean
Did we drop a place to 4th this year because of the 88-day garbage strike last
year? Or is it the Unsolved Mystery Of The 5 Severed Feet Found Beached? Or is
it the recent gang wars? Or...Surrey?

sorry Surrey. =)

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run4yourlives
Surrey should be apologizing to the rest of us, to be honest!

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shawndrost
Hey, Honolulu's at #28, top of the US! If anyone wants a leg up in moving over
here, let me know, I know a few startups that are hiring, and I'll tell you
about the (small) tech community.

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jm4
Interesting. I saw an article- I think on HN- about the most expensive cities
in the world and many of these were on that list as well.

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Chocobean
well you're also making more money in those top cities, right?

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rokhayakebe
Honolulu? Obviously, the people who did this survey did not spend much time
there. Maybe Maui.

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run4yourlives
Good God Maui's even worse... Kona is your best bet for Hawaii.

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truebosko
Here's to Waterloo (Ontario) in ... 2012 or so being on that list :)

