Add "pervasive unhappiness due to daily assaults on everything humane and decent in our society" to the list of social determinants holding down U.S. life expectancy.
Finland is Nordic country, not Scandinavian. It’s a common point of confusion, but important to some Finns as well as to some Scandinavians. The Scandinavian countries sharing common linguistic roots are Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language, sharing common linguistic roots with Estonian, Karelian, Sami (distantly), and Hungarian (even more distantly), as well as some ethic minority languages in the general area of the Ural Mountains in Russia Proper and northern Siberia.
Thanks for the correction (Finland is number one in happiness!). When I lived in Japan, I was told Finnish is the hardest language in the world to learn. Japanese, an altaic language, was right behind it.
Our healthcare problems are legion. Half of the voting population is propagandized to believe nobody must ever tell them what they can and cannot do regarding their healthcare. They have also been propagandized into believing unrestrained capitalism is the only possible economic system for us so of course the middle class is disappearing. They have been propagandized into believing the immigrants have stolen their jobs when the oligarchs outsourced them to countries with cheap, almost slave labor. This is just a temporary reduction in deaths of despair - when the oligarchs cancel everyone’s access to healthcare we’ll fall off the cliff. And the underlying cause of it all is entrenched special interests everywhere you look in American business. In healthcare it is a system which uses private, fee-for-service, for-profit healthcare. Alas, short of a French style revolution, I see nothing to actually fix things on the horizon.
Finland is Nordic country, not Scandinavian. It’s a common point of confusion, but important to some Finns as well as to some Scandinavians. The Scandinavian countries sharing common linguistic roots are Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language, sharing common linguistic roots with Estonian, Karelian, Sami (distantly), and Hungarian (even more distantly), as well as some ethic minority languages in the general area of the Ural Mountains in Russia Proper and northern Siberia.
Thanks for the correction (Finland is number one in happiness!). When I lived in Japan, I was told Finnish is the hardest language in the world to learn. Japanese, an altaic language, was right behind it.
President Jimmy Carter's malaise speech is finally acknowledged. km.
Our healthcare problems are legion. Half of the voting population is propagandized to believe nobody must ever tell them what they can and cannot do regarding their healthcare. They have also been propagandized into believing unrestrained capitalism is the only possible economic system for us so of course the middle class is disappearing. They have been propagandized into believing the immigrants have stolen their jobs when the oligarchs outsourced them to countries with cheap, almost slave labor. This is just a temporary reduction in deaths of despair - when the oligarchs cancel everyone’s access to healthcare we’ll fall off the cliff. And the underlying cause of it all is entrenched special interests everywhere you look in American business. In healthcare it is a system which uses private, fee-for-service, for-profit healthcare. Alas, short of a French style revolution, I see nothing to actually fix things on the horizon.