good things and bad things about your country

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i will just make a list of things that i think are good about my country and stuff that is bad, and i urge you to make the same!

of i go then!

- education is free (well, not exactly.. you have to pay for books, but you also get around a 900 dollars a month just for studying, so it's all good)

- health care is free

- no natural disasters, maybe one micro hurricane per. 8 years or so

- no dangerous/poisonous animals

- it's neither too hot nor too cold.. well sometimes in the summer it can get around 30c or something but that is really rare

- most of the people that live in copenhagen(the capital of denmark) are at least somewhat "free spirited"

- a lot of people ride the bike, or use public transportation

- our general school system

bad stuff:

- huge taxes 50% (doesn't bother me that much now cause i'm a student)

- expensive public transportation (it really should be all free all the time)

- public transportation not frequent enough

- expensive living (groceries, gasoline other activities such as movies or museums)

- rent is very expensive as well. i got a cheap place now at about 600 dollars, and that is probably the cheapest i have ever heard anyone pay for an apartment, i'm renting it btw.
and ain't planning on moving

- expensive internet it's 60 dollars a month for 10 mbit, we have'nt got fiber yet..


well, i am sure there is more on both of the two, but i'm all outa ideas for now!
post your own lists if you please

 

Good Stuff
- More sheep than you can throw a stick at.
- Lots of farmyard animals = high quality steak and milk, and by extension, ice cream.
- Excellent fresh air.
- "Culturally diverse" (= lots of restaurants!)
- Very Arts-orientated. Christchurch, especially - it has an Arts Centre, a live theatre, and a Wizard.
- Fresh water - tap water is drinkable.
- Lots of wide open spaces and parks.
- Generally friendly people.
- Geographical location means safety from pretty much anything that goes on in the world.
- "City of Flowers" bonus.
- Good temperature range.
- Worldwide rugby fame means having something to rely on when all else fails.
- Oh yeah, and Lord of the Rings.

Bad Stuff
- More sheep than you can throw a stick at.
- Dead boring.
- Extremely unpredictable weather. But you get used to this, and you can laugh at newbies.
- An ozone hole right atop our atmosphere...we can't enjoy the sun without getting melanoia.
- Tall Poppy Syndrome.
- Expensive education. Yowch!
- **** of a student loan system...not that I'm a victim of this.
- Nextdoor to Australia .
- Obsession with rugby.
- Loud drunk people.
- Really dead boring.
- Geographical location means hugely expensive/late games/manga/movies, etc.
- People asking about hobbits.
- Tourists...bah.

 

Well...the US is so big and so diverse, it's going to be hard...but here we go:

Pro's

• National parks and monuments galore! From Arches National Park to Zion's, the US has a lot of natural beauty to offer.
• Medal winning athletes...We like to prove that we're better than you.
• The NFL...a football isn't black and white or round here.
• Hawaii - enough said.
• Colleges and Universities like M.I.T. that are leading the way in innovation and research
• When the S*** hits the fan, even in other countries, we dig deep in our pockets and give what we can to help out...and if money isn't enough, we volunteer to do the dirty work.
• A very diverse climate. For example, here in Utah, you can ski slopes of several world class resorts and play a round of golf in the same day...and only drive an hour or less between the two.
• Since the USD is so weak at the moment, it's very cheap for Europeans to take a nice long vacation here.

Con's

• Politics and politicians in general
• We have a president who's mentally retarded
• Our economy is in the toilet
• Everyone hates us
• We touch Mexico and Canada.....
• Speaking of Mexico, we have more illegal Mexican immigrants living in the US than Mexico has legal citizens.

That's all I can think of...the other US members will have to list the rest.

 

Canada:

The Good:

Free Healthcare
Hockey Night in Canada
Canadian Comedy (Air Farce, Rick Mercer, 22 Minutes, Corner Gas)
International Respect

The Bad:

Our politicians are knobs.
The Weather is too extreme on both ends.

 

I'll narrow this down to the areas of most importance.

Awesome Stuff We Invented
The spork
Breast implants
The Karate Kid I and II
Tang
Chicago-style pizza
Star Wars
Taco Bell
Midgets (shut up, we're totally taking credit for midgets)
Pop Rocks
icanhascheezburger.com
The Corvette
Apple pie
The Daily Show
Frank Sinatra
ThunderCats
Me

Wack, Aweful and Embarrassing Stuff We Invented (and are very sorry for)
The IRS
High-fructose corn syrup
Hummers
Hippies
Pauly Shore movies
Crack
Sean Hannity
The Atomic Bomb
Paris Hilton
P. Diddy / Puff Daddy / Poppa-diddie-pop / Whatever stupid name he goes by now
MySpace
Marshmallow Peeps (I don't care what you say, they're the Devil's work)
Only 2-weeks vacation per year

Don't dispute me!

 

The Good:

Ben Franklin
Thomas Jefferson
Rock and Roll
Jazz
Fender & Gibson Guitars
Ludwig Drums
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway - Short Stories
Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird
Ken Kesey - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
H D Thoreau - Walden
Bob Dylan
The Grateful Dead
Steven Colbert
The Three Stooges
Diet Coke
Blue Jeans
New York City

The Bad:

Rap
Rednecks
NRA (see above)
Rush Limbaugh
Ann Coulter
GW Bush
Dr. Phil
MTV
Hollywood
The Jonas Brothers
TV Evangelists
Walmart
Burger King
Dr Pepper

 

The good:
- we have a Deathmage
- we have a Harbourboy
- we have a Rotku

The bad:
- we're incapable of winning the Rugby World Cup
- we didn't invent the Karate Kid

 

The good:

-the food and especially wine and cheese

-the most visited country in the world (and not for no reason)

-cars are driven on the right side of the road

-strikes (at least people rebel a little from time to time)

The bad:

-inflation (everything has become so expensive with the euro)

-our politicians and rulers are either hopeless or greedy and the country is going down the drain

-way too many nuclear power plants for a country that size

-strikes (most of them are pretty useless)

 

US of A

Good:
1) Landscape, you name it we probably have it. We even have a rain forest in Washington State of all places.
2) Diversity in People, again you name them we have them.

) A) Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn, do I ever miss my Near Eastern Food. ​

3) Rock and Roll, Country Music, Jazz, Blues and even some classical.

Bad:

1) Politics, we don't have a politician worth voting for. We need a national third party.
2) Prejudice against diversity. Yeah, it's still here.
3) The name of our country. We end up calling ourselves and being called American leaving out millions of other people who are also Americans.

 

I cannot agree more.

If we're going by China, then:

Good Stuff
- 4000 years of history.
- Invented pretty much everything.
- Incredibly influential in world history.
- Hugely diverse.

Bad Stuff
- 4000 years of tyranny.
- Communists.
- Pollution, etc.

"Aren't you Taiwanese?" I hear you ask. Well...I can't be bothered making another list.

 

Canada:
THE GOOD

As Gnarff said, and it's worth re-iterating:

1: Hockey Night in Canada
2: Free health care
3: Canadian Comedy

From my own mind:

1: Canadian entertainers (see Canadian Bacon for how many really famous entertainers came from Canada!)
2: Many TV shows and movies are filmed here because it's cheap.
3: Beautiful landscapes.
4: Good international reputation (for a long time Americans were told to sew a maple leaf on their backpacks so as to avoid harassment abroad!)
5: Multicultural society that tries to advocate tolerance for all.
6: An excellent education system.
7: No nasty diseases thanks to the cold weather.
8: Lots of natural resources and farming resources.
9: Good Transpolar trade location.
10: No more Celine Dion in residence.

THE BAD

1: Celine Dion
2: the freaking cold weather
3: being cheek by jowl with the Yanks
4: Celine Dion
5: Our lack of investment in defense, relying on the Yanks to protect us.
6: The Sanctimonious attitude that some Canadians have when they say "we're NOT American" -- how about defining yourself by what you ARE instead of what you're NOT, you dorks?
7: The fact that many of our entertainers have to go to the States to make it big.
8: Celine Dion
9: The Quebecois and their constant whining that erodes our national unity.
10: A multicultural society that doesn't succeed at its stated goal -- it boils down to hating Caucasians and calling it balance for the last few centuries. What utter crap.
11: An overly porous immigration system that lets in too many criminals and liars.
12: A weak willed legal system that mollycoddles the filthiest of criminals.
13: Celine Dion

 

Hey! I like Pepper - good stuff.

You'll get no arguments from me on that one... even though I am a Quebecer myself.

Amen to that.

 

The Good:

We're just more better
Our college sports are awesome
Our university's in general
The Diversity
George W. Bush
Like Kit says... despite our debt, we help others (usually)
Dr. Pepper
Forrest Gump
Cheap gas (when compared to most other countries)

The Bad:
Rising gas prices
Economy plummet in general
Two party political system
Britney Spears (now )/Paris Hilton/Lindsey Lohan/All those types
Most country music
Most rap
Soccer isn't too popular
I don't know how to use the strike code

 

Good things:

Jack Daniels
Samuel Adams

Isn't that enough?

Bad things:

After enough JD and SA there really isn't anything bad enough to care about.
...except rap music. There isn't enough JD in Lynchburg to make rap music good.

 

The good:
I have to say that all in all things are generally governed by reason and pragmatism

A history of consensus on the political scene, of course there is partisanship but as far as possible the politicians often try to reach broad solutions.

Things are organised

Reasonably good at sports

People who think they "are something" are frowned upon

People do not show emotions unless absolutely nescessary and even then people will think you are a bit cooky

The bad

Smug, Swedes are damned smug. Un-Swedish is a positive word here but we are still convinced that we are the crown of creation and our modesty in denying it just proves our point.

We export lots of crappy music (Backstreet boys, Britney Spears and so forth).

We only have two seasons, three weeks of summer and the rest a grey overcast and 12 degrees celsius.

Most of our holiday food revolves around pickled herring

IKEA

 

Good things about Germany:

- while the Hobby of many Germans, at times including me, is to complain about our government, laws, and taxes, when compared with some other governments in the world (even in Europe), we actually have a pretty good government. It works, it is quite fair, and rather stable government. It's not perfect, of course, but it works well and good.
- Nivea creme
- Brausepulver
- Depending on where you are, a large International community. Frankfurt has some of everything, though especially a large Korean population. In Düsseldorf you'll find a great number of Japanese people instead.
- Weißwurst
- Handkäs mit Musik
- Marlene Dietrich
- Franz Marc
- In my opinion the best public transport system there is. ^_^
- Many germans tend to be very exact and try to do everything punctually.





The Bad:

- Dieter Bohlen
- Neonazis. While not legal, there's always some extremists.
- Airport Frankfurt Hahn. Seriously, the thing is closer to Mainz, and 2 hours from Frankfurt! And there's not even a train connection like they have for the more remote airports of London, for example, only Shuttle Busses. If you want to visit Frankfurt am Main, you should be aware that Frankfurt Hahn, even though the flight there might be cheaper, it is *NOT* at all close to Frankfurt.
- Dieter Bohlen
- Many germans tend to be very exact and try to do everything punctually.
- There's this guy called Dieter Bohlen...can someone please take him off our hands? Seriously, we don't want him!

The Spork is indeed awesome...but the German name for it is even more awesome: It's called "Göffel". ^_^

 

The Good:

-Lo and behold, if the good things in my country aren't almost same as joacqin's!
-But besieds that...I don't know, Nokia? Linux?
-Definitely the amount of money we pour into public education. Our fine library institution is a good example, even though there's only 3.5 million items in libraries of the Helsinki Metropolitan area (what metropoly?)
-Nature. Hey, if you're a finn, you're basically bound to say nature as the thing that we have. That's basically saying that's all we have. Which has been true for centuries under the oppressive bootheel (might be exagerrating here a bit ) of the Russian and Swedish empires. During our history we've basically been good for nothing but a piece of land and resources to squabble over between those two.
-almost 100 years of independence. Then we joined the becoming glorious United States of Europe


The Bad:

-Whatever the swedes done, we try to emulate with poor success.
-We beat the swedes in hockey! Once! In -95! Hooray!
-Whatever the russians do, we usually treat it with suspect, fear and almost panic. ("Russian rich people buying property from around here? Oh no, they're coming to invade us again!")
-Wonderful cinematic history of Helsinki as the best equivalent for Moscow when there was all that shebang with the iron curtain. See if you can try to spot Finlandia-house from Gorky Park, for instance.
-Incredibly low self-esteem as a people. Hey, what can you expect? It's the oppressors fault! Bloody swedes *grumble grumble* Bloody russians *Eek! Runaway!*

The Ugly

-Interesting war history: Beating the Russian invasion in the winter of 1939-1940. Then trying to invade Russia with our Nazi allies, then getting our hineys handed over (as if that couldn't have been expected, who tries to invade Russia?), then kicking some Nazi butt (it's not a question who betrayed who, we kicked their butt)

 

Huh? They're Swedish? Or did you mean "import"? I'm confused!

On another note, who is Dieter Bohlen?

 

Dieter Bohlen

You might know him as the light haired guy from this.

Saying he's an a-hole is giving him too much credit. He might be rude, and yes, probably also an a-hole. Mostly that's because he's got too big of an ego (His ego is so huge that it's got an ego itself. ). He can't actually sing himself (long story, with lots of scandal here in Germany), at least not the way seen in that video, and yet he makes fun of all those guys applying for Germany's version of "Pop Idol" (though it's true that some of them are rather awful.). Why don't I just not watch the show, you ask? Well, I don't, and I never did. But for some reason several channels see the need to show a recap of the castings for that show *ON THE NEWS*, so when watching it, I often have no chance but getting a glance of this before realising what was going on and changing the channel.


But that isn't the problem. The guy is just plain annoying is the problem, and what's worse, people pay him too much annoying. These days I myself ignore it whenever anything about Bohlen comes on the news, but others don't. And he thrives from that attention. Seriously, won't someone take him off our hands? Though I'd understand if you don't want to - I wouldn't want that guy on my worst enemy, he's that annoying.

 

Gee, Thanks LKD, I was trying to forget Celine Dion...