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The thing about Norway is that it’s a cold, barren, remote place where very few people want to live. Most of the year it’s cold and gray, and most of the countr
by mogadsheu 2y ago
The thing about Norway is that it’s a cold, barren, remote place where very few people want to live. Most of the year it’s cold and gray, and most of the country is uninhabitable.
The result is that its natural resources haven’t been consumed to the degree that most developed countries’ resources have, and there aren’t as many people to consume them.
I find it a strangely fair situation. Their luck comes from having friendly neighbors who care about their well-being and responsible development.
- samastur 2y agoWhat the hell are you talking about? I've been to Norway 4-5 times and will visit again in about a month. It's wonderful throughout and wish we could live there.
- b112 2y agoThat, and the heroes that risked life and limb to start those first oil rigs, many dying, so a poor country could use the wealth to help its own people.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoNorway has been relatively wealthy since 1870...
- anonyfox 2y ago> where very few people want to live just as a sole data point: been there a few times, and my personal ideal weather _is_ cool/gray/wet with ideal outside temperature of 15C. I can withstand the cold, but find it hard to tolerate heat (as in >20C). Purely from a weather perspective, I'd move there. What holds me back is that I also need dense urban surroundings nearby with all the buzz it brings (cyberpunk style) - norway is lacking that, including Oslo. _Too_ quiet/beautiful/peaceful for my liking.
- NegatioN 2y agoWhat gets most foreigners is usually the darkness in the winter, and not the temperature fwiw. It's hard to describe, but many people end up quite depressed.
- konschubert 2y agoLiving in northernmost Germany, I can confirm. It’s not the cold or the endless weeks of rain. It’s the days that barely feel like daylight.
- mattpallissard 2y agoLiving in Alaska I struggle more with the endless daylight than the short dark days. It messes with my sleep too much.
- dylan604 2y agoThere's ways to black out windows and darken rooms to counter all of that daylight, but when it's dark it's really hard to counter that when going outside. Without actually personally experiencing it, I think I would have the opposite struggle. If it were dark for that long without clouds so I could have all of that extra time to view the sky I think it would be a much different situation though.
- grugagag 2y agoHave locals adapted to this or they’re generally more depressive over the winter months?
- foobarian 2y agoIt's actually surprising how north the famous EU countries are. Already south France and Italy are about the same latitude as New England; Norway must be like Alaska as far as daylight goes. If it weren't for the warm Atlantic current the place would be a glacier.
- input_sh 2y ago
- pier25 2y agoFor me it's the food. Norway is a beautiful country. I love cold weather and grey skies but all that fish stuff is not for me.
- dagw 2y agoWhat fish stuff? I grew up in Norway and lived there for a chunk of my adult life, and honestly Norwegians (at leats in/around Oslo) seem to eat less fish than most other European countries I've been to.
- boringg 2y agoI think globally norway cuisine is identified with cured or other fish etc. thats probably not what the local diet really eats probsbly (based on two comments in this thread)
- vidarh 2y agoI grew up in Norway, and I hardly eat fish, and we hardly ever had fish for dinner when I grew up.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoWhen in Norway, the only thing I didn't like was that sweet, brown cheese :-)
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- novaRom 2y ago> my personal ideal weather _is_ cool/gray/wet with ideal outside temperature of 15C 15C day temps? morning/night temps can be much lower. Winters in Norway are much colder. If you are looking for stable day-night temps year around in that range, then there is no such place in Europe, well maybe except Ireland?
- anonyfox 2y agono, more like ideal lunch time temp, lower is okay, above 20 and I start to feel miserable. Yes very cold is also okay :-) The only thing that sucks is hovering around 0C for a long time, since this means oscillating between frozen/mud
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- baq 2y agoOnly San Francisco has San Francisco weather...
- datameta 2y agoWell, temperature-wise mid-April SF struck me as almost exactly like CDMX in early December.
- mrspuratic 2y agoJune-Sept in most places in Ireland has a mean daily temp of around 15C, and around 6C winter time. It infrequently gets much above 20C, or much below 0C year round. 5 consecutive days of 25C is the meteorological definition of "heatwave". As a predominantly temperate maritime/oceanic climate it's unpredictable and erratic, from 15C mid-winter days to 4C mid-summer nights :/ Plenty of grey and wet though.
- skilled 2y agoThe weather in Norway sucks big time. In some parts of the country it is really bad, especially if you live near the sea. Summer isn’t guaranteed either. That’s a pretty big price to pay for an otherwise great country with really chill people.
- elygre 2y ago20c/68f outside in Oslo, at 5pm today. High of 27c/80f in may. I’m satisfied.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago> The weather in Norway sucks big time. Seems like a matter of taste, but then I live in Alaska. :-) Edit: right now it's 50 degrees F and misty. Perfect, as far as I'm concerned.
- epolanski 2y agoOf course it's a matter of taste, but statistically humans prefer warmer climates.
- dehrmann 2y agoI remember Swedes telling me summer is the nicest week of the year.
- somenameforme 2y agoHistory would disagree with you there pretty strongly. Norway (and Scandiland in general) was fought over for millennia, leading to an extremely rich, interesting, and bloody history - even well after the Viking era. As a somewhat random aside this [1] book is an extremely interesting read for anybody into history - the 'King's Mirror.' It's a book written around 1250 intended exclusively for the education of a Norwegian King. It takes the Plato-type style of a question and answer session between a learned man (father) and pupil (son). It covers basically every aspect of life, but the most interesting thing about it that it was written near a millennia ago now, yet so many things in it feel so incredibly familiar. The Wiki page links to a bunch of different free translations. Here [2] is the one that I read. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konungs_skuggsj%C3%A1#Editions,_facsimiles_and_translations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konungs_skuggsj%C3%A1#Editions... [2] - https://archive.org/details/kingsmirrorspecu00konuuoft https://archive.org/details/kingsmirrorspecu00konuuoft
- SoftTalker 2y ago> it was written near a millennia ago now, yet so many things in it feel so incredibly familiar It's sometimes forgotten that 13th century humans were the same as us.
- dieselgate 2y agoPretty crazy how that’s not even 1k years ago. Humans have been the same for like, at least dozens of thousands of years? Maybe even more?
- temp0826 2y agoHomo sapiens (with the exact hardware that we carry today) emerged ~300k years ago. Wikipedia says- "Humans began exhibiting behavioral modernity about 160,000–70,000 years ago, and possibly earlier."
- datameta 2y agoI think modern hardware would be more like 200k, no? I believe 300k is robust/archaic Homo sapiens.
- ajmurmann 2y ago> The result is that its natural resources haven’t been consumed to the degree that most developed countries’ resources have, and there aren’t as many people to consume them. I find this a strange train of thought in this context of rare metals like this. Did other countries truly discover their Neodymium reserves decades or centuries ago and exhaust them back then or did they never have them in the first place?
- Loughla 2y agoI'm with you. What were people in the early 1900's using rare earth metals for that they would be used up by now?
- adrian_b 2y agoThe first large-scale use of the rare-earth metals was since the last decade of the 19th century in gas lamps with high brightness, which were used especially for street lighting in Europe, until they were replaced by electric lamps. The next large-scale use appeared soon after the start of the 20th century, in the portable lighters, which are still used today.
- tyfon 2y agoBeing born in Norway and living here (on a remote island with only ferry connection as well), I personally wouldn't want to live anywhere else. There are areas where it is cold and barren, but not the cost. Writing this on the ferry on the way home from work :)
- veqz 2y agoEh, don't know about that... We're really just like anyone else, we've just ended up with a fairly decent political environment by the time we found oil, specifically. We've been pretty good at mining out our copper ores and everything else that we knew of that had value; we've built a whole bunch of hydro plants and have dammed up numerous valleys; no one thought there was oil in the North Sea or that it was valuable enough to get it up, but now we have a pretty extensive petroleum industry, and it barely took five decades since the first oil was discovered. What resources we have been good with, however, is fish. But that's just proper regulation over the last century or so. As for our friendly neighbours... Norway was ruled by Denmark for 400 years and we've been part of all their wars, for a start. Our national anthem has 8 verses, 6 of them are about how we killed Swedes, Danes and Scots. And we'd like Jamtland, Herjedalen, and all the islands in the Atlantic back, thankyouverymuch!
- KingOfCoders 2y ago"The thing about Norway is that it’s a cold, barren, remote place where very few people want to live." We walked 700km through Norway in the summer, from Oslo to Trondheim (the South were most people live). The country was sunny and warm, it seldom rained, people were exceptionally friendly, and it had the best wild strawberries and raspberries I ever ate. The Dovrefjell was the only very cold place. We'll might move there in the future.
- Someone 2y ago> We walked 700km through Norway in the summer “in the summer” must have helped. In the depth of winter, there’s less than 6 hours between sunrise and sunset in Oslo (https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/oslo?month=12 https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/oslo?month=12), just over 4 1/2 in Trondheim (https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/trondheim?month=12 https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/trondheim?month=12). To make matters worse, the sun doesn’t get high in the sky.
- NorwegianDude 2y agoThere is not much sun in the winter, but that also means there is more sun in summer. The variance is greater, but it averages out.
- bongodongobob 2y agoIt's summer for like a month. Living that far north is hellish for most people. It's not just like a colder Seattle or something.
- Toutouxc 2y agoThe country lies north of the Northern Tropic, which means that it gets less sun in summer AND significantly less sun in winter.
- ithkuil 2y agoLess sun intensity but longer days during summer
- gklitz 2y agoWhat a strange perspective, the oil reserves aren’t located anywhere near the “barren remote” parts of Norway, consider the famous ekofisk oil field, it’s in the ocean roughly in the middle between Denmark England and Norway. And the southern Coast of Norway isn’t dramatically different from Denmark climate wise, they do have amazing cliffs there though and the culture around boating to town is a sharp contrast to Denmark. Anyways, hardly a rough barren wasteland with dreadful weather as described. This discovery is at Fen which is much more north, but it’s near a fjord, and a skiing resort. It’s hardly some uninhabitable place. It’s true Norway stretches very far north and some parts are not inhabited, but that’s not anywhere near where the resources that have provided the Norwegian wealth are, and not this time either. Now if you want to dive into the true reason for their wealth it’s a cultural thing, when the negotiations around ekofisk took place they famously got the Danish foreign minister of the day, Per Hækkerup so drunk while he visited Oslo that he agreed to pretty much just give them all the oil. Ever since Danes lost all respect for him, not for giving up the oil, but for not being able to hold his liquor. This last part is of cause all hyperbol, part myth part joke, but many did believe that he just gave it up to easily because no one expected this amount of oil off the coast of Norway.
- fuglede_ 2y agoSaid myth being debunked: https://videnskab.dk/kultur-samfund/myte-foraerede-haekkerup-nordsoeolien-vaek-i-en-brandert/ https://videnskab.dk/kultur-samfund/myte-foraerede-haekkerup...
- bruce511 2y agoGetting someone drunk in Noway is not cheap. Getting an oil field in exchange is about right...
- Moldoteck 2y agoYou say that like norway can't and didn't sell a lot of these resources
- antisthenes 2y ago> The thing about Norway is that it’s a cold, barren, remote place where very few people want to live. Most of the year it’s cold and gray, and most of the country is uninhabitable. It would be true if the Gulfstream did not exist. But it's not.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoThe thing about money is that people will chase it regardless of the weather conditions if they can make enough of it. The folks out there in the Gulf of Mexico who spend 16 hour days working on oil rigs aren't there because it's fun.
- dikaio 2y agoI for one would love to live in Norway.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> result is that its natural resources haven’t been consumed to the degree that most developed countries’ resources have This also describes Saudi Arabia.