Satisfaction

[snousle]

- Canada beats the US in yet another quality of life index, not a surprise.
- Hungarians less satisfied than RUSSIANS? One has to wonder why.

Comments

Hungarians

[urso.livejournal.com]

Hungarians aren't satisfied about anything. Just ask Bill/bitterlawngnome.

Hungarians are moody and dark. Perhaps that's what makes them so hot.

I fly home from China tomorrow. I know I have a renewed appreciation for my own country, although visiting the Canada Pavilion here at Expo 2010, I had to constantly remind myself I wasn't Canadian. I certainly knew more about Canada than my media guide who'd never been there.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Because Hungary was conquered by Russia and looted of people, resources, wealth, and the entire social fabric systematically disrupted and destroyed by the Russian in order to keep the country under control, for the entire cold war period. It is very, very hard living there now, it will be generations before the damage is even mitigated.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Curious that the numbers don't really show it - Hungary is not exactly a rich nation but on paper it looks MUCH better than Russia on many points, and Russia has consistently ranked near the bottom on various happiness indexes. Not sure how much I trust this chart I posted...

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

It's actually a very rich country - agriculture, minerals, an educated and highly neurotic workforce ... but decades of systematic looting ...

I think the thing that americans can't understand though is that the russians bought off large numbers of the population to act as KGB agents, not as much with the intention of gathering info (although they did) but with the intent of destroying the national myth, which is "Us against Them", ie, Hungarians against the invaders. They made it so that you couldn't trust your own countrymen. Imagine if you knew that 2 of your 10 nearest neighbours - but you don't know which 2 - were spies for the secret police, and that you could be disappeared without a trace if one of them implicated you for any reason real or invented.

[bigjohnsf.livejournal.com]

I'm not really clear what this is measuring, but I feel even righter in thinking Holland would be a cool place to live.

Since these don't add up 100%, I find the rate of dissatisfaction in Holland even more telling.

OTOH, I suppose one could interpret that to say that the Dutch are very mobile people, so the ones who were dissatisfied had no reluctance to leave.

[barbarian-rat.livejournal.com]

When I read your post East Germany came to mind.
I guess my question is ... Did the Russians treat Hungary differently than the other countries it controlled, possibly because of the '56 uprising?

[jstregyr.livejournal.com]

bigjohnsf writes: "...I feel even righter in thinking Holland would be a cool place to live"

OTOOH, when the sea-level goes up by a modest seven meters, I wonder how happy the Dutch are really going to be: it's certainly going to be a more WET place to live.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Modest? Most models predict only about 1M by 2100. Beyond that, I figure it will either be an easy fix, or the least of our problems. ;-)

[westwind-mv.livejournal.com]

I'm quite surprised that South Korea ranked so low. I guess there really isn't a positive correlation between available network bandwidth and personal satisfaction. Who knew? ;-)

[bigjohnsf.livejournal.com]

Actually, if you play with the drop-down, the difference between 1m and 7m is amazing.

Still, 7m would be in a future so far away as not to even think of it. By then Dutch hydrologist will have developed a ray gun to re-freeze the polar ice caps.

Shorter term planning talks about 2100 (1m) or 2200. Even by the most modest estimates, I will not see either of those dates.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

My dad was Hungarian, I don't really know the specifics of other countries.

Among my father's generation some people felt the uprising was "permitted" in order to flush out the revolutionaries. There were failed uprisings elsewhere too ... Poland for instance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poznań_1956_protests

[broduke2000.livejournal.com]

I have never heard a bad comment about The Netherlands. When we had IML's Henrri Ten Havi up on the river for Club Mud, he amazed me at how free his country really is.

But yeah, when the water rises, and people look at all those USA gas guzzlers, we'll be the #1 hated country in the world.