Today we looked at a list of the world's most livable cities — decided by pure science and not just some arbitrary criteria, obviously. America's biggest city, New York, was pretty low on the list! Some of you might disagree with that assessment, but one commenter resignedly doesn't.

From badasscat:

New York seems too high at 44th.

I've lived all over the place; I think about ten years ago I counted and I had lived in 22 different cities in my short life up to that point, and I've stayed for an extended period of time in several others around the world. (Since then I've pretty much stayed put.) So I have *some* basis for comparison. I guess New York is where it is on the list because of "culture", which is also the reason why I am still here and most of the people I know too, but almost everything else about New York puts me a little closer to clinical insanity every day.

Housing costs, commute times, traffic, public transportation costs and reliability, education, infrastructure, crime, they all suck compared to the top cities on this list, and in ways that make it really hard to justify staying here a lot of the time. Honestly, I probably wouldn't still be here if my wife didn't want to be, even though my business basically depends on it (my business is alternative fashion and wouldn't work in most other cities). I would find something else to do somewhere else.

That's not even counting things that are harder to quantify like "people actually doing their jobs properly", ie. if you call any random plumber out of the phone book, what are the chances that he/she will actually fix your problem and then not charge you ten times more than it should cost to do so? What are the chances you will get the correct order at McDonald's? What are the chances you can go to a hospital and the doctor there will not completely mis-diagnose your life threatening condition? These are all the kinds of things I feel like I have to worry about more in New York than elsewhere (and I know this from first-hand experience).

Sometimes I feel like I am living in a third-world city with first-world art museums, fashion and theater.

[Photo via Getty]