Galena Chocolate Lovers Stroll........................Ummm.

:1rotfl: the most brain dead

I have spent some time in Denmark, Norway and Sweden and talked with locals, distant relatives and friends from the US who live there (Oslo). The North Sea oil pays for a lot of what Norway has. Folks from Denmark and Sweden find Norway hugely expensive and it is. I saw the King driving himself in a BMW 740 but few other large luxury vehicles in Norway. People take trains, buses and ride bikes in these countries. They even have special train cars with bike parking inside. The people I know in Oslo are highly educated and enjoy very high end professional employment, drive an expensive Tesla (tax incentives on EVs there). They only have one car though. They live in a 3,000 sq ft close-in suburban home near the Holmenkollen Ski Museum and Tower, big yard, feels like a nice old fashioned upper middle class US suburb. Restaurant food is ridiculously expensive in Norway so we ate all meals at their house. I spent $200 on snacks and soft drinks for their two children at a park. The taxicab drive to the Oslo airport was $$$$$. I also visited my paternal grandfather's hometown Jonkoping in Sweden. It felt like the US in the 1950s. People were nice. I felt safe, like I do in TV. Denmark is also a nice country and the people quite friendly. In Scandinavia there is incredible social pressure to fit in and not stand out - achieve and/or display above the norm. "The Almost Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia" by Michael Booth is a good read.

I do not find Scandinavians happy and cheerful but a little on the morose side. They consume a LOT of alcohol - I saw large potato fields in Sweden to fuel their distilleries - and have a history of high suicide rates although those are abating.

It’s just somebody’s opinion.

Or Hollywood.

I think the first two posted, which are 6 min apart, shows it’s bogus. (Not to mention a few cities I wouldn’t live in on a bet)

Thanks for the stories.

What so many don't realize about the Scandinavian systems - which I happened to recognize within three days of being in Denmark (then Sweden and Finland) back in the early 90s - is that their heavy taxation and basic trust in the Govt spending all those funds well and fairly is because they are very homogenous cultures. In just a couple of days of being there, you recognize that. The populations are 95%+ from Scandinavian countries and Germany - so, they share similar values and upbringings. That's why their system would never work in America - we do not have anything close to a homogenous culture of values and trust.

The Scandi countries, like pretty much all others with high citizen tax burdens, tend to control immigration very tightly because their whole system doesn't work if there are more "takers than producers". In the last decade or so, they have learned some hard lessons when they permitted far more than normal immigration numbers and from extremely dissimilar countries where the values are very different plus the new people don't speak the language so have limited work opportunities. Therefore, they live on Govt welfare. It is an experiment that has not gone well and now they have significant problems.

Disagree with list. Escaped the rat-race in California to Florida like all others. My old city is on the list and no one here would want to visit it again.

A few years back a group of business people from New Mexico, The New Mexico Amigos, among whom I have some friends and acquaintances, visited several coastal cities in California. In San Francisco they were briefed not to touch the soles of their footwear when they returned to their hotel rooms from walking the streets as they could get Hepatitis from stepping in human remnants of excrement, other body fluids and waste from the large homeless population among whom many are infected from needles passed around and otherwise. I think they were told to be careful where they stepped in San Diego as well.

Homelessness and Hepatitis A-San Diego County, 2016-2018 - PubMed

Homeless people defecating on LA streets fuels horror hepatitis outbreak, as city faulted | Fox News

Ugh!! My question is if cities could clear away the homeless, like San Francisco did for the Chinese President, (I heard they were shipped down to LA) why can’t they do it all the time?

The homeless tend to congregate where the best public benefits are (and decent weather) and those are mostly decided by local municipalities.

Newsom is the Cali Governor so, he could engineer that one time thing of paying to move them for awhile but, he has no impact on local municipal governance, how they allocate their money and where the homeless will travel to. Back to San Fran if the public bennies are worth it.

When I lived in NC, it was known amongst many city mayors in the state that Asheville provided some of the most generous homeless benefits so, they often gave bus tickets to Asheville for the homeless in their towns. Guess how much the homeless population in Asheville grew because of that?

Aaah, the Law of Unintended Consequences...it can be an arse-kicker.