Comments by "Halfdan Ingolfsson" (@Halli50) on "VisualPolitik EN" channel.

How has Norway managed it's oil wealth? Wisely! How does Norway compare to other nations regarding quality of life? Always in the top tier! As a role model, Norway shines.
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@TK199999 Swedes, Norwegians, Danes and Finns are typical siblings, and will reserve the right to take the mick out of each other all the time - as siblings do! Outsiders, however, will meet a solid united front if they try to meddle. Icelanders and the Faeroese are like the young siblings that moved far away and are mostly left out of the fray.
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@JoeZorzin Norwegians and Swedes mostly understand each other completely. When they meet, the Norwegian speaks Norwegian and the Swede speaks Swedish - the only potential fly in the ointment being that if either uses a difficult dialect. In that case, they simply switch to English to fill the gaps.
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Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe? Does that mean Russia (the western part) is NOT considered to be on the European continent? Russia itself is definitely the most corrupt of the larger countries in the world, Ukrainian corruption is just what Ukraine inherited from the Soviet era! True, they need external help to clean up, and Russia's invasion, with it's associated bloodbath, pain and suffering, can only help urging the cleanup along.
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This situation is beyond weird: A country that is the largest in the world, area-wise (but also the most inhospitable, climate-wise), yet has a GDP that is smaller that Italy's. A country that, while rich in resources, has managed to mismanage this wealth to the point of near-extinction. A country whose only strength seems to come from inheriting all the military resources (nuclear and conventional) from a now-dead empire (the Soviet Union), yet has also managed to mismanage that inheritance to near uselessness. One wonders how functional their purported nuclear arsenal is, with 50+ years old technology that has no doubt been as thoroughly corrupted as the rest of their military. By all metrics, Russia is a hopeless has-been that is being isolated from most of the industrialized world. Thanks to Putin, the Russian people are in for a decades-long rough ride and years of misery, regardless of how the Ukrainian war ends.
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@abstractmonstrosity6757 , Norway has the "bad fortune" (government-inflicted) of being directly connected to the gas and electricity markets of Europe, and becomes the victim of the madness that frequently infects those markets. My country (Iceland) has no gas infrastructure, and your 100% renewable domestic electricity system is NOT connected to Europe. We have stable domestic electricity prices. There have been attempts by "interested parties" to connect our system with the European system via undersea cable, but we have not yet been fooled by that Pie-In-The-Sky scam.
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@kk440635NORWAY , to other nations the average income seems high, but is simply "on par" with the cost of living in Norway. It does not mean a life of luxury because Norwegians live in Norway, one of the most expensive countries in the world - in part because there are functional social safety nets and affordable health care and education for everyone. The good news for Norwegians is that when visiting other countries, almost everywhere else seems cheap. The same applies to us in Iceland, even if we are the most 'Muricanized and corrupt of the Nordic countries and not nearly as well off as Norwegians in that sense. The Nordic countries are always i the top tier of "the happiest countries" - an exaggeration, if only because we would rather describe it ourselves as being "the least discontent".
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