ths

Let's also not forget the fact that Norway is a very oil-rich country which brings a huge degree of wealth into the economy, and this skews the image considerably. You might have noticed that the guy the article talks about got rich selling stuff to -- guess who? -- the Norwegian oil industry.

The number of startups in a given community doesn't causate a great entrepreneurship scene. By that metric Norway could just give every team that's interested 50k dollars from their oil, call them a startup and automatically have a more vibrant startup scene than Silicon Valley. Troll economics, anyone?

People also overestimate the degree to which the US is capitalistic. Government spending in the US is now around 40%, with the free-market days of the pre-WWII era long replaced by a heavy-handed state that has never shrunk meaningfully. Maybe we Scandinavians run our bloated government bureaucracies more efficiently in our comparatively small, historically homogenous societies, but they're certainly not the reason we're rich. We're rich because we've been relatively free and capitalistic for a long time, also historically enjoying relatively low political corruption and a strong rule of law. At least that's the picture as I see it, being an Icelander that has lived and worked in Denmark I feel I grok the way these relatively small communities of my kinsmen work on a gut level.

One more thing: New Hampshire is one of the richest states in the USA, has about the same population as Norway and has a higher GDP per capita. If we're going to compare the US to Norway (one of the richest European countries) while excluding other much poorer countries from the equation, we should also compare New Hampshire to Europe to put things in proper perspective.

The projection of as complex and multidimensional a thing as political views onto a one-dimensional left-right or liberal-conservative axis is necessarily an oversimplification. For example, would libertarians be classified as conservatives using this analysis because of their free-market emphasis? Would big-government neocons be classified as liberals because of their fondness for big government? If that is the case, I expect that a lot of "lefties" and "liberals" would demonstrate a "right-wing" or "conservative" mindset (and vice versa) if they participated in a similar examination.

Emacs isn't vim. I think vimpulse gives the most essential bits of vim, while the other bits can be replaced with emacs functionality without a loss of efficiency. I don't miss any of my vim plugins. The only plugin I use that brings emacs closer to vim is viper/vimpulse. Vim still feels slightly (maybe 5-10%) slicker when editing text (I'm a long-time vimmer that moved to emacs a few months ago). In return you get (IMHO) superior indentation, better integration with external processes (such as debuggers and REPL sessions) and easier customization.

What exactly is it that you miss from vim that you're not getting in emacs? Is it only a generally decreased feeling of efficiency? Because that definitely went away for me once I learned to leverage and customize emacs.

"emacs is a decent operating system, lacking only a good editor"

viper/vimpulse solves this quite neatly. I find the mix of emacs with viper+vimpulse to be the best of both worlds: The efficiency of vim when doing fine-grained text manipulation and navigation, and the completeness of emacs for integrating my workflow (running shell processes, switching buffers and finding files with the built-in fuzzy matching ido-mode). It's just so much better to have the terminal in a split window, interchangeable with code buffers, than having to alt-tab all the time. Emacs brings vi to the whole workflow, in my experience. All the little things, like selecting and yanking text to and from shell buffers (all with vim keybindings), just make it feel good. Also, the indentation is great, keyboard macros are much better (you can record commands other than simple keystrokes, e.g. searching) and the language modes just seem to understand their subject languages more "deeply" somehow.

vim and emacs + viper/vimpulse are both programming environments that implement vi's modular editing philosophy. It's the vi editing model that I couldn't possibly leave behind me, not vim. I might even be able to survive a modern "IDE" were I able to use well-implemented vi/vim keybindings :)