I was on a flight three years ago where a guy was violently ill. I was in the last row beside the door to the tail head. He went past me with a very full air sickness bag. As we were descending the flight attendant was making more and more frantic announcements that everyone needed to return to their seats so we could land I finally leaned out of my seat, made hard eye contact, and made the sign language sign for vomiting.
Her shoulders fell, she hung up the microphone, inbuilt her seatbelt, stormed to the back of the plane and pounced on the door shouting, "Get back in your seat so we can land. Now! "
I didn’t actually read this… because I’m actually supposed to be working right now. After a bit of digging i found their methodology. someone want to look it over and see how legitimate it is? www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/…/methodology
an online survey […] total of 17,195 individuals from 36 countries. Of the respondents, 8,267 were informed elites, 4,622 were business decision-makers and 7,402 were considered general public (43%). Survey participants were given a random subset of countries and country attributes to consider: about half of the attributes for roughly a third of the countries.
Participants assessed whether they associated an attribute with a nation. The more a country was perceived to exemplify a certain characteristic in relation to the average, the higher that country’s attribute score.
Attributes were grouped into 10 thematic subrankings. Subranking scores for each country were determined by averaging the scores that country received in each of the attributes comprising that subranking.
To determine the weight each subranking score had in the overall Best Countries score, using correlation with GDP(PPP) […] a stronger relationship weighted more heavily: Entrepreneurship (14.13%), Quality of Life (14.12%), Agility (14.02%), Social Purpose (12.83%), Movers (11.54%), Cultural Influence (10.44%), Open for Business (9.43%), Adventure (5.37%), Power (5.00%), Heritage (3.13%).
The math sounds alright. My main gripe would be that it’s survey-based (so highly affected by biased perceptions) and that an attribute impact in the overall ranking is dictated by its correlation with wealth, which is kinda arbitrary - and bleak. Great things like “friendly, fun, good for tourism, pleasant climate, scenic” (Adventure) and “culturally accessible, has a rich history, has great food, many cultural attractions, many geographical attractions” (Heritage) are heavily discounted.
To be honest, the only category of attributes I care about in this methodology are in the realm of Quality of Life (Canada #3), but I still find it wildly arbitrary that “good job market” is QoL but things like “pleasant climate” and “good food” are not. Anyway, the top 20 in QoL are the usual suspects, so I don’t really care about minor changes in relative position between these - lol at US #23.
"Quality of Life" was a category on the survey, although it was only one of ten. Additionally, they were mostly asking the people who were benefitting the most from their society:
a survey of over 17,000 people from 36 countries – including business leaders, middle-class or higher college-educated individuals and “nationally representative” citizens of each country
So I imagine there were a lot of folks who disagreed with the final rankings, but their opinions were mostly considered irrelevant.
I wonder of you took some of the people complaining about Canada and dropped them somewhere like Sudan, Myanmar, Eritrea, or DR Congo for a couple of years they wouldn’t come back with a new appreciation for Canada? Well, the survivors if there were any, anyway.
Is ready to pass and Joan when you love in one of the best countries in the world. I just think some people need some perspective.
You are ignoring the voices of those with legitimate concerns in this country because you live a comfortable life. Get a grip.
Yes Canada is wonderful. I love this country and wouldn't want to live anywhere else - that being said, you cannot ignore that there is are plenty of glaring issues with this country that are affected a shit ton of people.
Yes, there are problems. Yes, people have legitimate concerns. I just can’t tolerate the, “Canada is a dictatorship” nonsense, or, “Canada is turning into a third world country,” or our white bread, milquetoast right of center Prime Minister and his father are Marxists. People need some perspective.
I was thinking Canada was going down the tube for years and then I left vancouver to go to a smaller city. I just don’t see the point of struggling every single day just to have some temperate weather and nice mountains in the background. Even if I liked skiing or hiking I didn’t have the time or money to reap the benefits of that city. In 2 years since I left I have bought a house, with a yard for my dog. sure the Prarie winters are hard but at least I’m saving for my future. my advice to anyone who is barely making it by those large city centre, go somewhere that will value your effort and provide the opportunity for you to be happy. It’s not as scary as you would think.
Back when the Glorious Orange Leader was taking about building a northern border fence my American coworkers asked me how Canadians felt about it. I said that we were all for it since the US was Canada’s Mexico.
I’m from south Texas and it took me forever to realize that people don’t like Mexico. It really confused me to hear Mexicans supporting building the wall…
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