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Happiness is on the Wane in the US, UN Global Report Finds (theguardian.com)
From a report on The Guardian, shared by five anonymous readers: Happiness in the US is declining and is expected to continue on a downward path, with Donald Trump's policies forecast to deepen the country's social crisis. The US has slipped to 15th place in the World Happiness Report 2017, produced by the United Nations. The world's economic superpower is well behind top-ranked Norway, although it remains above Germany in 17th place, the UK in 19th, and France in 32nd. Norway knocked Denmark off the top spot as the world's happiest country, with Iceland and Switzerland rounding out the top four. The report's authors stress, however, that the top four are so close that changes are not statistically significant. The next tier of countries are regular leaders in international happiness surveys: Finland is in fifth place, followed by the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden. The world's "unhappiest" countries are all in the Middle East and Africa: war-stricken Yemen and Syria feature in the bottom 10, with Tanzania, Burundi and Central African Republic making up the final three.
I'd expect this trend to continue for at least the next 4 to 8 years, depending on how the 2020 elections go. Perhaps even longer than 8 years, depending on how much damage is done to the average citizens' lives due to selfish and thoughtless policy decisions and legislation.
Happiness in the US is declining and is expected to continue on a downward path, with Donald Trump's policies forecast to deepen the country's social crisis
This line should tell you everything you need to know about the related article.
Look, I get it. Your candidate didn't win and it's upsetting to you. However, throwing little hissy fits every chance you get only serves to reinforce WHY folks had the temerity to vote for trump; the behavior of Hillary supporters ( and, let's face it, Hillary herself ) soured her support outside of her base.
Obviously a lot of people are pretty happy that Trump was elected, and are encouraged by his positions and actions. So the nonsense that happiness is expected to trend downwards is...exaggeration at least.
Note: I'm not a Trump or Hillary supporter. Can't stand any politician, although I will say Trump has been more amusing than I could ever envision Hillary being. The literal crying from Hillary's camp on election night was particularly hilarious.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
As a moderate conservative, I was happy with Obama and would've been happy with Hillary. None of the 16 Republican candidates in 2016 made me happy, which was why I switched my political registration to Democratic in late 2015. Now we're stuck with sore loser Donald Trump, who is neither a conservative nor Republican, and, until a few short years ago, was a Clinton Democrat. Sad!
A culturally homogenized society is happier than a very diverse one where conflicts is bound to happen! NO WAY!
In other news water is wet...
It is well known homogeneous cultures, with as little income disparity as possible, report highest levels of contentedness.
The "most diversity makes things best" line of reasoning is never based in reality. Of course - the people screaming at the rest of the country for more diversity - Seattle and Portland - are some of the least diverse cities in the nation.
until I discovered how unhappy I should be.
But, we chose the entertaining choice! How could we not be entertained? Trump is the only person I can think of that would be more absurd as a president than William Shatner when in-character.
I think the problem might be the same with someone trying to make a sequel of the 1950's, without understanding it, and trying to fix that by just going completely over the top in terms of ambition, trying to make up for a completely broken budget process. It's entertaining in a sense - but sort of a sad entertainment.
The folks that supported trump did seem to do it out of a sense of ironic satisfaction rather than actually something they wanted.
Turns out though, it's not a sequel to the 1950's, it's actually a sequel to the Robber Barons, it just couldn't be marketed that way, because that's only ever been popular with a small audience.
Ryan Fenton
If you read the actual report (figure 2.3, Changes in happiness from 2005-2007 to 2014-2016), you see that pretty much every first world nation except Germany and South Korea, and Norway and Switzerland (barely - within the confidence interval) have gone down in happiness, not just the U.S. The U.S. isn't even the first world nation with the biggest drop (Italy is, with Spain close behind).
A more fitting headline would've been "Happiness is on the wane in developed nations. Which might actually help explain the rise of nationalism in recent elections.
but he makes me really, really happy to be Canadian!
Or, maybe they just found a nice balance between capitalism and socialism, unlike the rest of the world.
Here in the USA, we are taught to "work hard and play hard", which is a recipe for getting worn out both physically and mentally. We have to keep up with the Jones' both at work and at home.
The "work hard and play hard" mantra could be said to be from the "protestant work ethic", or could be from plutocrat propaganda, being that working hard and playing hard gets the plutocrats the most profits: employees that work their asses off, then get home and spend their asses off on the plutocrats' hyped products and fashions.
Table-ized A.I.
"It's not Amateur Night on Planet Earth anymore, things have gotten terribly, horribly real,"
Poor people are living longer, earning more, eating more, all over the world. There are fewer large wars.Sure there's a few existential problems around, but you are living in a very successful century so far as homo sapiens is concerned.
It's been free falling since 2007.
No comment on who was the American President for 89% of that time...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Dude, you're on an aging, mostly white discussion board devoted to technology: If you want to troll slashdotters, say something about how it's important to cut research funding.
"I'll be so sad when they cut funding for useless nuclear fusion research, LOL, we don't need another chernobyl. We should spend the money on copyright protection instead, crack down on linux ripping off windows!"
Dunno about that.... Canada has *roughly* the same amount of cultural diversity as the USA, and is consistently placed near the top of these kinds of lists.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Rather than argue about which side is the most evil/bad/mean/incompetent, let's agree the culture war in the USA is intensifying, which is a big source of tension in the USA for both sides. Remember, Texas talked of secession after Obama's election win.
Progressives want bigger gov't-backed safety nets and education opportunities, and conservatives believe that the private sector will make everyone's boat float higher if the gov't gets out of the way such that they don't need a safety net. (And there's also climate change, abortion, pollution, etc. etc.)
I believe heavy-trickle-down is kaflooey* in modern times, but realize I'm not going to change conservative minds on that such that both sides are stuck at an impasse, thinking the other side is getting in the way.
Perhaps it's time to split the USA rather than waste resources and anger on gridlock and seesaw politics.
* The benefits of increased economic activity from lower taxes and deregulation almost always have flowed UPward since about 1980, not outward. Automation, offshoring, and the death of unions changed things toward the 1% compared to pre-1980. Trickle down ain't work anymore; the TD model is broken and leaking oil.
Table-ized A.I.
There's NO evidence they commit more crimes than the average population, and even less by some estimates. Most come here to work; they can commit crimes in their home country better because they know the language, if crime were their goal.
The crime angle on that is a Fake Problem. Bad Trump.
Table-ized A.I.
So...the UN is telling us that the way to increase happiness in your country is to make it whiter and less diverse, then? Was the lead author a guy named Adolf, perhaps?
Actually, ethnic diversity has increased considerably in Norway in recent years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Please visit Geneva. Because of the concentration of international organisations, it's one of the most diverse place in the World.
There is close to 1/3 of foreign living or cross-border working in Switzerland.
Switzerland certainly enjoy a stable political system in the World since 1848, and this is the most important point to me. The process of getting a new president is done every year in less than one hour without any glitch. Compare that to almost all others "democratic" counties, especially this time...
No, average population, period.
If T wanted to reduce crime in general, which should be the logical goal, he should ask, what's the best way to reduce crime per federal dollars spent? I've seen no evidence that spending more fed dollars on JUST illegal immigrants is more effective than spending on it on general law enforcement, such as more FBI staff, systems, and/or more cops.
He's just obsessed with "outsiders" as a personality quirk. It's not based on any sound crime-solving monetary/resource allocation logic or model. I don't think he'd have the patience to review any such study or model with a critical eye. By all appearances, it's his gut tribalism instinct driving his decision process, not math, models, and logic. You are welcome to demonstrate he has given crime-fighting resource allocation some real thought...
Table-ized A.I.
and a huge cut in public services for everybody else. This isn't rocket science. Elections have consequences. 22 million will lose health care under Trump (getting a paltry $3000 tax credit in it's place). There are massive cuts to science programs coming. The EPA is getting slashed. Water will be less clean, and in poorer cities contaminated with lead. Air will be dirtier. Kids will get asthma. These things will happen. It's got nothing to do with Red/Blue. It's just what happens when you deregulate. Those regulations weren't made to spoil anyone's fun. They were made to solve problems.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
he's actually putting the interests of the USA before those of foreign nations
Sure, if our interests are cutting education funding, cutting the EPA, cutting elderly food programs, cutting women's rights, cutting healthcare, and increasing racism and military spending. Nothing will make America great again like a generation of stupid kids, sick and hungry people, and weapons.
Or, maybe they just found a nice balance between capitalism and socialism, unlike the rest of the world.
For very socialist values of balance, at least here in Norway. According to the world bank we have third lowest Gini coefficient in the world, meaning our income is extremely evenly distributed by international standards. There is not a lot of really poor nor very wealthy people, with notable exceptions of course but looking at income stats if you divide into 10% slices the 80-90% slice make just under twice as much as the 10-20%. The best paid executives in Statoil, our huge mostly state owned company the CEO makes about $1.7 million a year. If you go to a similar foreign oil giant like say Schlumberger the CEO makes $18.6 million a year. Working at McD you earn ~$15/hour the first four months if you're 18-20, after that or from day one if you're older ~$18.50/hour. And you don't need health insurance or a 401(k) on top of that, the public healthcare system and public pensions are entirely adequate. Granted you can't directly compare prices, but you live okay on one "minimum wage" job. So at McD you make $35k/year and your average doctor makes $95k/year, the tax system makes the difference even less in practice. But we want it. And a very high percent of the population works, that helps. It's still an odd country.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's completely and utter non-sense. The U.S. Federal Government's primary reason to exist is to enable the pursuit of happiness. They help build roads which allow you to move from place to place, they create law enforcement frameworks so you have consistency across the union.
In more recent history they cleaned up the rivers and lakes that were so polluted they would catch on f'in fire. This hate of government bs is what got us where we are with our current President. It is stupid, government can does certain things well, there are certainly things it should not do as well. That is why we have a legislature and a Supreme court and even a President.
I hate this I got mine so screw everybody else crap. We are by far the richest country in the world and yet we are gonna make our children go hungry because we somehow can't afford to feed them? We are gonna kick millions off healthcare and discourage younger people from obtaining insurance and penalizing them if they get the balls to get try and get it so we are gonna kill more and more hospitals as uninsured people show up again.
Well, you can prove anything if you get to make up the categories, but seriously, lumping Europe with Asia? 60% of the world's population lives in Asia, and 15% of the world's population lives in Europe. So it's hardly amazing that if one of your categories comprises 75% of the people on the Earth that there there doesn't appear to be a lot of diversity. Your friends could include a Pakistani, Tibetan, Uygher, Eskimo, Finn, Scot, Basque and Serb and they wouldn't be a "diverse" group.
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Your argument relies on an arbitrary selection of the criteria, namely the top 10. If you expand it to the top 20, all countries which are not far behind the leaders, there are several quite diverse countries including the US and UK.
Pretty much all anti-immigration/white supremacy arguments are just this kind of abuse of statistics.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Those who value greed more than happiness, will be unhappy. Sad but true and note they will make all those around them unhappy too, that greed attacks the happiness of others.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Ahah! So it's not really about crime itself, but a political power battle to you. Your true colors are shining through.
And I'm saying this is why the Dems are so recalcitrant about stopping any flow of 3rd worlders into the US. Because they vote Democrat. Imagine if there were a magic portal from Fundieland, where productive safe white fundamentalist Christians were being persecuted and killed by evil atheists. So if we started taking Fundieland refugees and shoveling them by the millions into California, changing the voting demographics there to Republican, I guarantee all of this "refugees welcome" crap would turn around really fucking fast.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You still changed the subject away from crime itself.
Both parties have been laxidasical on the issue, but for different reasons. I will agree a good many Democrats view them as a future source of votes, but as I mentioned nearby, businesses also see them as cheap abusable labor, and lobby GOP to look the other way. GOP only gives the issue lip service, and STILL does in terms of business inspections. When W had both houses, GOP stonewalled on reform and did nothing. Democrats also proposed a bill to increase border guards, but GOP invented silly excuses, including budget reduction, to turn it down and showed no interest in renegotiating a revised bill.
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