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Calling Canada, and Vancouver of all places, backwater, is very insulting. Vancouver is near the top in the Mercer quality of life ratings for cities on Earth; the highest US city is not even in the top 20 (and it's Hawaii, not even continental US). http://www.mercerhr.com/referencecontent.jhtml?idC ontent=1128060#top50all And if you're going to critique Mercer, you better be able to back it up because their research is considered the standard given how widely used their services are.

I live in Toronto. We may be the second best city in North America to live in, but our transit system sucks compared to others I've seen. I'm not surprised we're not on Google transit.

Europe is great if you are young or unemployed. Europe sucks if you actually want to make something of yourself through hard work.

Then pray tell why in independant quality of life surveys European cities take almost all of the first 30 places, while the best US place to live (rank 27) is Honolulu?

You base your experience on one European country and probably the worst governed European country at that, ignoring the diversity of European countries and cities. Else the that, and for the record, you don't have a friggin' clue.

There is no need to thank me.

I'm not sure about Denmark, but Sweden and Canada definitely levy a much larger income tax than America does.

There are other options. He could try Switzerland. Fairly low taxes (not quite as low as in the US, but the overall infrastructure provided for your tax-Franc is a lot better then in the US) and (arguably) the highest quality of life.

We welcome skilled people, too.

We are the 3rd best city in a world to live in according to this

and

only 89th most expensive one according to this

As a point of interest, my company tranferred me to London, England for 2 years. Overnight my salary more than doubled, but my costs more than tripled. I've since moved back and despite the large paycut from returning to a Canadian salary, it works out better for me in the end due to cost of living differences.

Mercer human resources has a chartoutlining cost-of-living differences in the world. Ottawa - my current home - is almost exactly 40% cheaper than New York. Canada's most expensive city (Toronto) is only slightly higher than the US's lowest city (Pittsburgh).

In my (most definitely biased) opinion, it's the best place in the world to live.

Actually, it's the third best place in the world to live. :)
.

• The average Swiss, despite being in a small country, travels 1200km/year by train, compared to about 600km in Germany and about 20km in the US. (from memory)
• Zurich, the city with the world's highest quality of life according to mercer, got there in part by reducing roads and parking spots and giving priority (e.g. at each traffic light) to public transports. The average citizen here uses public transports more than once per day.
• The biggest car-sharing company here (sort of an automated distributed car rental for people who don't want to own cars) already has close to 1% of the population for members, growing 10% per year.

World's seven most expensive cities -

1. Tokyo
2. Moscow
3. Osaka
4. Hong Kong
5. Beijing
6. Geneva
7. London

You live in a country with an incredibly good road system. You can get *anywhere* in the continental US by road. You can't get more than 15 miles away from a road in the continetal US.

And Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Sweden all have poor transportation?

You have running water. Reliably. You have indoor plumbing. You have readily available food. You have electricity.

Again, CA, FR, GB, IT, DE, SE don't have these?

You live in a place that has as many cars as families, because cars and gas are just that damned cheap here.

Is this a good thing? Do you know how much O2 a 5-liter Uh-mer-kin muscle car chews up just from driving to and from work on a semi-daily basis? Do you have any idea how many CO2-consuming organisms it takes to support your average Camero or Mustang owner? Why do we have so many cars here? Why aren't they needed in Manhattan or in most of Europe? Because our automotive industry killed our light rail industry in the first half of this century. We produce 3% of the world's oil. We consume nearly 60%. Hence our current predicament with our dependency on foreign oil. No, having that many cars is not something to boast about.

You don't have to fear for your life walking down the street (well, in some places, you do, but it's safer here than much of the rest of the world).

In most Iranian metropolitan areas, women can walk around at 03:00 alone without fear of abduction or harassment. People there don't give it any thought. I can't name one major city where this is true in the United States.

This is a nation in which *anyone* can get a job. Not necessarily a good job, or the job they want, but you can land a job that'll pay well enough for you to eat every day.

Unemployment in Switzerland has not reached more than 6% in over ten years. It averages around 3%-4%. You should read this if you want a better handle on what it means to be employed in this country.

I can drink the water anywhere in this nation without fear. Some places it looks a little brown, or have hard water, etc., but you can drink it without *dying*.

Once more, CA, FR, GB, IT, DE, SE don't have these?

You have incredible medical care. I know many places have better systems for covering payment, and it's free in many places, but there's very few places in US where you can't get immediate medical care.

The US has the best doctors in the world. We also have the highest liability. Does this seem odd to you? We are encouraging our doctors to become mediocre because it's not worth it to practice. I've talked with a fair amount of doctors (my family has more than its fair share of people working in medicine). They almost unilaterally have two pieces of advice for people in this country:

1. If you're thinking of becoming a doctor: don't.
2. Don't get sick, because unless you're rich, you'll get shit for care.

It's simply that, the particular set of advantages you get by being an American and living here on American soil is almost impossible to get anywhere else. Many places have worthwhile tradeoffs, but you can't get all the above just about anywhere else.

I realize that many of the above comments don't apply to everywhere in the world, and I apologize to the denizens of any nation that may be that much better, but I think that most of them apply somewhere.

The truth is that many cities outside the US are more livable than those within its borders. Hell, there are 9 countries which rank higher than we do in an audit of world democracies.

Please don't misunderstand. The US is a great place to live...one of the best in the world. I'm just real tired of its citizens thinking that this country's shit