Honestly I have never failed to meet people complaining about prices anywhere and as far as weather goes even the Russians and Lithuanians seem to do that.
That being said I wish I was a Finnish taxi driver in Norway instead of a Finnish taxi driver in Finland. ;(
I'm a presenter on an FM radio station and I read HN daily.
My work is in a medium many people here would consider to be irrelevant, or even dying.
I'm interested in the world outside my current narrow field of work, I'm interested in how the concepts and ideas discussed here can help my medium stay relevant in this age, and I'm interested in the careers of the future.
My current work won't last forever, I know that, and the more I know now, the better-prepared I'll be.
For the same reason that pizza delivery drivers (ahem) do. The Internet is wide open, and even aspirational hackers and wantrapreneurs can benefit from lessons learned. I read pg's essays starting in 2006.
I try to convert everyone I know to some of the topics found here, it's indeed very useful mainly in times like these where a job is something not available for everyone. I really like seeing all these different people reading HN.
My taxi driver two weeks ago turned out to be a retired IT manager, who liked to have something to do outside of the house, so had three shifts/week lined up.
Hah, I've even heard people complaining about the weather here in the Silicon Valley. That and real estate prices, but the latter complaints are warranted.
Are you expressing surprise that Russians complain about Russian weather, that Russians complain about Finnish weather or that Russians complain about Norwegian weather?
None of those seems surprising since all those countries are, at least in part, cold, gloomy and snowy.
Cote d'Azur, in South France, is arguably the most marvelous place in the world, for its cuisine, its weather, its landscape, etc. (I guess many of the most wealthy people on Earth live there.) I had some local friends there and spent some days with them: They did complain a lot about the weather, and would not go out of the house if the wind was slightly stronger than adequate, or if there was one slight possibility of a thin cloud veiling the sun for some minute in the afternoon.
I once flew from Dali, Yunnan to Chengdu, Sichuan. From the plane's window we saw the moment we entered the enormous, province-sized sea of gray clouds over the Sichuan basin, leaving behind us blue sky and sunny hills. At the airport, the Sichuanese people said weather was really much better here. They actually prefer year-long heavy gray sky!
No kidding.
People complaining about their weather is not related at all to the quality of their local weather, which is not easy to define anyway. It is more a consequence of their way to see things. (Currently reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it resonates...)
That being said I wish I was a Finnish taxi driver in Norway instead of a Finnish taxi driver in Finland. ;(