As somebody living outside the US, I would find moving to the states highly undesirable even if it wasn't for the hostility towards non-US citizens.
To me, it would mean a significant reduction in quality of live and I am low-key scared of all the ingredients and additives in food that are pretty much banned everywhere else. Not to mention all risks regarding healthcare.
Yeah the USA has only given lip service for everything it claims to be. Especially in the last 18 months it’s been working overtime to make it even worse.
All the US has done is allow for massive amounts of wealth hoarding and gaslighting of a significant portion of the population into voting and supporting things against their own beliefs or common sense.
If you said “China allows red dye 12 in their food and it’s been proven to cause cancer” they’d freak out about it. But they don’t see any problem back home.
Not to mention school shooting drills. Teaching kids how to behave when someone tries to shoot up your school, because it happens more than once a decade... And then not doing fuck all to fix the root cause, besides thoughts and prayers, because muh freedom.
Incredible that this is the country that has been the dominant global exporter of technological innovation, pop culture and economic policy for so long.
Training kids how to respond to school shootings is like training kids how to respond to dual engine failures on an airplane.
It happens, it's just statistically so unlikely to ever happen to your kid, that the drill essentially serves as ideological propaganda reinforcing fear of the idea of the threat far above and beyond the statistical risk actually posed by the threat itself.
And as a reminder, Europe sees more people die to heat than America sees people die to guns.
Maybe your guild should figure out how to beat the PvE server before lecturing the players on the PvP server on how ridiculous you think our freedom is. Major skill issue, noob.
As a reminder, the heat killing Europeans right now is caused by America pumping ungodly amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere with virility-signalling cars and air conditioning set to 60 fahrenheit everywhere. You are literally mocking Europeans for being killed by your waste.
CO2 emissions have been consistently declining in both the USA and Europe for over 2 decades now. The bulk of the CO2 increase over that time period comes from China and India.
Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel. You're welcome.
Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do more orders of magnitude charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.
Speaking of giving - since 2014, the EU has purchased approximate €700-€900 billion worth of oil and natural gas alone from Russia (total EU imports from Russia exceed €1T in that time period), while offering less than €300 billion in support to Ukraine.
The EU is responsible for funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and has given more than twice as much money to Russia than it has to Ukraine.
America, on the other hand, has given nearly $200B to Ukraine, and paid a tiny fraction of that to total Russian imports.
In other words, America is a net economic supporter of Ukraine, while the EU is a net economic supporter of Russia.
>CO2 emissions have been consistently declining in both the USA and Europe for over 2 decades now. The bulk of the CO2 increase over that time period comes from China and India.
Global warming didn't start two weeks ago, nor two decades ago. Most of human generated CO2 and most of the calories accumulated by greenhouse effect are still directly caused by Americans, both in absolute numbers and relative per capita.
>Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel.
Americans also elected PV panel haters, and are still destroying whole regions to extract more oil, both overseas and at home.
>Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do over an order of magnitude more charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.
Hi, cool, are you going to give AC units to Europe? And the Middle East? And India/Bangladesh etc.? Maybe we should prosternate at your feet and thank you for you magnifiscence, oh great solvers of problem you caused.
The only reason US has more total output than EU, if that's true, is because EU was and is incapable of scaling industry, innovating, creating value, etc, which is why in 2026 they still see a basic AC unit as unaffordable luxury and why we are posting on this American website about American companies all the time.
The odds a child will be killed by an armed assailant at a school in the USA are about 1 in 5 million per year, and if you narrow down to mass shootings at schools, that drops to about 1 in 10 million.
Between 2013 and 2022, a total of 77 students in grades K-12 have been killed in 11 school mass shootings, in a country with 50 million school children.
A child in America is about 500-600x more likely to die in a car accident than a school shooting.
A child in America is about 90-120x more likely to die from a pedestrian fatality than a school shooting.
A child in America is 70-90x more likely to die from choking than a school shooting.
A child in America is 50-60x more likely to die from drowning than a school shooting.
A child in America is 40-55x more likely to die in a fire or from smoke than a school shooting.
A child in America is 10-15x more likely to die in a bicycle accident not involving a motor vehicle than from a school shooting.
Comparable risks to dying in a school shooting include a fatal sting from a bee or wasp, (about twice a likely), or dying from being struck by lightning (about half as likely).
School shootings, while tragic, do not pose nearly as much of a statistical threat as you think they do, even if they still pose more than they ought to.
It is statistically likely that one will happen somewhere in the country , but it is also statically unlikely that it will happen at the one you are at.
One could suspect that the number in the next decade should be between 2000-3000 incidents. Since 2000 is a bigger number than 1 yes more than once a decade.
Mass shootings more broadly are even worse with 167 in Jan-June 2026.
> And then not doing fuck all to fix the root cause, besides thoughts and prayers, because muh freedom.
We can't do anything to fix the root cause because the root cause is an inviolable Constitutional right.
So we simply must accept that school shootings/mass shootings/gun violence in general are the price we pay to be able to shoot watermelons and the occasional politician and remain the only truly free nation on earth.
> even if it wasn't for the hostility towards non-US citizens.
The US welcomes more people legally than any other country in the world, and half of its politicians think welcoming illegal immigrants is a good idea too.
1. Past policies don't dictate current policies. And current policies are wildly different from policies of 5 years ago, which are again different of policies of 20 years ago and even before that.
2. Amount of immigrants doesn't say anything about standard of living. And we all know immigration (and even illegal immigration) was promoted by all parties because this meant cheaper labor costs. And often also, exploitable labor.
And finaly... it's not a surprised that the third largest country in the world, who was considered an immigrant nations for well over 2 centuries has the most immigrants?
It very much depends on life situation. For instance, if you are less than 50 and on good private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada.
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
Also, my father-in-law went from consultation to a full knee replacement surgery within 3 weeks. Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
A lot of people in the UK (with professional jobs) top up their state health provision with private medical insurance provided by their employer. This isn't a bad mix.
You read that? I can get either in a day or two if I need it, they want much longer-term planning though.
For a vaccination I'll call several weeks in advance. If I want an appointment before/after work I'll call well in advance, if I want something tomorrow they may say "11:30, take it out leave it", which isn't great for my work.
Don't trust whoever wrote what you read there. FUD scaremongers.
For vaccinations like the flu shot [1], I call them or send them an e-mail and then I can usually come by any morning I like without an appointment (they'll just administer the shot between appointments, since it does not take much time).
When we lived in Germany, we got TBE shots (area with a lot of ticks that carried it). IIRC we could also get an appointment in a few days.
(Though I think with vaccinations it's similar in the US.)
[1] Not eligible yet, so I pay 25 Euro to get one every year. Worth it for not getting the flu.
Healthcare varies widely in Europe. It's not one country. But the "on private health care" part is they key. It's really not that different in lots of parts of Europe with the difference that people who do not have that still have access to the healthcare system without going bankrupt, albeit slower.
You are misinformed. A lot of people in Europe and Canada also have private insurance, sometimes paid by the employer as well, and with that the wait times are usually very short. Going through the public healthcare system you may indeed wait months for non urgent matters.
This is wrong, you can get same-day appointments for anything time-critical including dental. What takes a long time to schedule is mostly free preventitive care.
There is also the same private healthcare that americans enjoy. You have the option of spending $50 to $100 to go to a private clinic and get same-day admission. In the US services like that cost nearly 10 times the price due to the whole insurance bullshit.
I got free same-day heart check-up and $80 paid same-week heart monitoring check-up.
There are horror stories and footage of the UK NHS, but that's mostly just london and in reality pretty much every city that large suffers from that.
For instance, if you are less than 50 and on private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada.
Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though. They will always have enormous bargaining power over you and I think it also leads to chilling effect, when your health is literally dependent on your job, you will think twice to go on strike, unionize, or freely express your thought, especially when combined with at-will employment.
Secondly, I would also debate the better health care. I recently had two health scares in my direct family (one time cancer, one time another tumor) and in both cases care was quick and excellent. Of course, there is quite a lot of variance between countries. We lived in Germany for a while and I was less impressed by health care there (though it's probably still much better and definitely cheaper than the average health care in the US).
America has some of if not the best hospitals in the world. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean equal access, but those are facts not ideology.
We can argue if that is fair or not, but if you have a well paying job with good employee provided HC, America is [one of] the best places to be for medical care.
It's sickening to watch America go from everyone being fairly equal to this sort of elitism. 'America has some of the best hospitals in the world' 'if you are under 50 and have a great job, life is great'.
If you are 50+ with a average job in an average town, America is much worse now that it was prior to the 2000s. And nobody cares because 'America has some of the best hospitals in the world' 'if you have a good job, aren't really all that sick or are on someone elses insurance plan, and if you are under 50'.
Also in the US. In many other countries, you do not only initially get unemployment benefits, but also a form of basic income if the unemployment benefits expire and you haven't found a job, plus rent compensation, etc.
> In many other countries, you do not only initially get unemployment benefits, but also a form of basic income if the unemployment benefits expire and you haven't found a job, plus rent compensation, etc.
It's the same everywhere in the US. Colloquially called "collecting unemployment".
You get unemployment benefits. For a little while. In some places there may also be something like rent compensation, but generally unemployment benefits are supposed to be all-encompassing. (They are nowhere near enough to be all-encompassing.)
Once the unemployment benefits end, you better have a job.
My wife lost her job in the summer of 2020. We were incredibly lucky that the lockdowns meant extended unemployment benefits. They still lasted....I forget exactly, but I believe it was no more than about a year.
This often comes up in discussions pitting the US against the EU countries.
I'm not familiar with all of them, but here in "free, socialized healthcare" France, if you don't have a "mutuelle", which seems similar to "employer-dependant healthcare" in the US, you're going to have to pay out of pocket quite a lot of money. Maybe not as much as in the US (not familiar with that country), but very much not free. Think dental, glasses, needing to spend a night in a hospital for whatever reason (even public ones!), etc. On top of your salary being much lower.
Sure, you don't need an employer to have a mutuelle, you can pay for your own. But it's usually pricier and worse coverage.
> Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though. They will always have enormous bargaining power over you and I think it also leads to chilling effect, when your health is literally dependent on your job, you will think twice to go on strike, unionize, or freely express your thought, especially when combined with at-will employment.
As an American who's had to deal with the ramifications of employer-based health insurance first-hand, I can confirm that this strikes me as accurate. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where even being out of work for most of last year did not hurt my financial situation very much (my wife and I were actually able to buy our house during my unemployment), but even being in that fairly privileged position, due to her autoimmune condition, we've had to go through quite a lot of annoying bullshit from a lack of healthcare options due to basically being stuck with whatever my employer happens to offer.
With my previous health insurance (from a startup where there were around 10 employees during my time there), we were able to get the semiannual procedure she's been getting for years from her specialist doctor approved relatively quickly, but with the insurance from my current job, it took months earlier this year to get it approved because they kept denying it due to her condition (which is pretty rare in general, and even more rare for anyone to have it as long as she has; one of the first doctors she saw for it years ago told us "you're not going to find a support group for this online", and we've literally yet to find anything online about anyone else ever having it for as long as she has) not being on the list of pre-approved conditions. This was typical across several insurance companies for the initial request, but with this insurance company, they put us through an extremely convoluted process for appealing. First, they told her doctor that he couldn't email or fax them his letter of medical necessity and had to send it through snail mail, which even a month later they claimed they had never received. They told me I could email it to them, which I did, only for them to later claim I didn't have authorization to do that on behalf of my wife (something that never came up in the call where they told me to email it to them despite us both being there on speaker phone), and she had to fill out and email them a form authorizing me. She did that, but then after a while they still just sent us a blanket rejection for it not being on the initial list (as if there were any chance of it magically appearing on the list between when they initially denied it and when they finally processed the appeal?), and they could not provide us with any evidence that an actual doctor looked at the letter where her doctor stated definitively that he would expect her to likely experience permanent and potentially fatal organ damage with the treatment due to none of the other options having mitigated her symptoms in the past. After filing a grievance, they insisted that if her doctor filled out the information in a separate form that they had never mentioned to either him or us before, they would take it into account, so he did that, and then after a while they still rejected it with identical language to before. Finally after three months, they gave us the ability to have her doctor talk directly to an actual doctor on their end, and then it got approved within the next week. No one was able to provide any sort of coherent explanation as to why they kept putting us through such bullshit procedures that had no effect instead of letting us just do that in the first place.
I don't pretend to have any first-hand experience with healthcare in other countries, but no sane system would end up with such disparate outcomes for the exact same condition for the exact same patient due to literally nothing but how much bullshit the insurance company feels like putting you though. There's literally no way for us to...
> Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though
It absolutely is.
America is great if you make at least 150k a year and never get sick.
The moment you get sick with anything serious your employer might fire you. Labor protections in America are a bad joke. Your boss wants to fire you because your taking time off to look after a sick relative, I guess you can sue, but they’ll blame something and probably win.
Your boss lies to your face about pay and benefits, ohh well sucks to suck.
Very minor illnesses turn catastrophic. Several stories have emerged of otherwise healthy young people going without insulin and not doing so well…
> Parents sue over son's asthma death days after inhaler price soared without warning
Cole Schmidtknecht, 22, had insurance but couldn’t afford to refill his asthma inhaler after the cost jumped from $70 to more than $500.
Half the country cheers this on. The idea of some ‘lazy’ person getting something they don’t deserve rationalizes this dystopian system.
Of course the American system ends up costing significantly more for worse outcomes.
Access to therapy is usually gate kept to those with expensive insurance plans. Medicare, if it covers it at all can easily have a 1 year wait list for therapy.
Not to mention that most people get no meaningful vacation time.
Want to quit because you’re burnt out. Even if you have savings you won’t have health insurance. You won’t be able to afford therapy without it.
Get back on the hamster wheel.
I do regret not making a better effort to leave earlier. It’s not going to get better
UK: A dentist will see you for an emergency appointment pretty quickly. I can usually get a routine appointment within a few weeks, but if it's a routine check-up I don't mind scheduling it for a few weeks/a month out. If I'm going private I can usually get a routine appointment same week.
For more urgent enquiries with an NHS doctor I can usually get a phonecall next day, and they'll ask me to come in if it's serious. For routine/non-urgent stuff you might wait a week or two.
Obviously this is going to vary depending on where you live, and the NHS is not without it's problems... But it's essentially free and a wonderful thing.
Aren't NHS medical workers in a constant state of protest over low wages and bad working conditions? I know the doctor/nurse brain drain from Canada and the UK to the US used to be really bad. I haven't seen what the statistics are recently.
It's complicated. They are underpaid relative to inflation, but there's also a massive queue of graduates who want to replace them. If the govt aquiesces to their demands then they may need to do the same for other unions.
This just isn't true and really glosses over the downsides of the US healthcare system.
Employer health plans are only good as long as you pay - if they are good. Lots aren't and they require you to pay so much upfront. Waiting time for specialists and surgeries depend on the area you live in: Not common to wait months for a specialist in the US. You won't get seen if you can't pay for the doctor upfront and medicines are expensive.
I moved from the US (Indiana) to Norway. I've never had an issue seeing a doctor or dentist if I'm sick or in pain since I've been here. I can plan routine things in advance, but I don't need to plan months in advance. I'm just not getting in the same day because they save those times for folks that are sick and need seen sooner. I'll never have a bill if I'm hospitalized. Doctors tend to offer less invasive treatments first - they would have tried to avoid a knee replacement. And if the wait was long (which again, really isn't different from the states, depending on where you are and if you have money enough), the safety net helps out. Reduced work hours and paid time off work and stuff like that. The emergency room sends folks home with medicine instead of expecting you to go to the pharmacy afterwards! ER waiting times aren't longer and honestly, I can call ahead and suffer at home instead of in a waiting room if it isn't actually an emergency, but need urgent care. My partner was seen immediately when he cut off part of his finger, I was seen immediately when I had severe pain, but you'll wait longer for an uncomplicated broken bone and things like that.
And this is all relying on the public system - People can get shorter waiting times if they use the private system.
> I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
Can you share a reference for that statistics?
FWIW, I live in Europe and I always got dentist appointments within a week. For a severe issue (pain involved), I got appointment on the same day.
> I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want.
This is very much location- and provider-dependent, regardless of rural or urban setting. You also have to factor in that some doctors do not work at a single clinic but may schedule their week to spend certain days at one facility and the rest at others (ex. Monday and Thursday at Facility A, Tuesday and Wednesday at Facility B, Fridays off) which can limit the ability to see them in the same week especially if the facilities are not owned by the same organization.
Healthcare access and quality aren’t consistent. Some states or areas in the same state will have better providers than others. Some health insurances will cover things without question and others may fight against you on covering things.
I recently had knee surgery and hit my deductible due to the procedure but insurance billed me for full price on part of the it because they deemed it to be “experimental and unnecessary.” There was some back-and-forth between the surgeon’s office, my insurance, and myself to understand why only a part of it wasn’t covered. This was an additional $1,200 that eventually I had to pay for; even after paying $1,100 up front because of my high-deductible health plan. I’m financially stable enough to cover it without it destroying my savings but this kind of surprise isn’t uncommon for US citizens even with recent laws trying to make costs more predictable.
It is impressive how misinformed you are about the reality of health care in Europe. It is almost as if you were being lied to in order to make you accept being mistreated.
> if you are less than 50 and on private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada
Even if it's true now, I wonder for how long—insurance is getting worse and worse every year.
I had skin cancer. I talked to my doctor and to the local skin care clinic. Because of my deductible, the final cost for removal would be the same with or without insurance. If I bypassed the American insurance hellscape, I could have the removal surgery that week. If I used my insurance, went to all the specialist referrals they wanted, etc it was minimum 3 months before I could get the surgery because of wait times for appointments to have confirmation what the skin care clinic tested/told me same day.
I'm in Canada. Earlier today I called the doctor's office to make an appointment for my wife. She'll be in tomorrow.
Last month had to get my son in to get checked out, turned out he just had a nasty cold, but they were able to get him in day-of. Mind you, that's not the emergency room, that's my _family doctor_.
Two weeks ago my mother had kidney stones, went to the ER. Had a stent put in, sent along her merry way in I want to say 4 hours?
When my sciatica flared up several months ago, I was in the ER for several hours just because there were much more severe cases ahead of me, which makes perfect sense. I got xrayed that day, bloodwork, among other shit.
I could go on and on, but these cases aren't outliers for us, they're the norm.
I regularly see this making the rounds that "you can see your doctor in the US right away whereas in <socialist healthcare country of your choice> you have to wait months!"
I call BS. I have a great healthcare plan and appointments with my PCP are weeks out if at all; I was lucky to find some other random PCP who was available for a Telehealth consult only. Our kid has a rare disability that requires lots of different doctors, and we have to book literally months in advance for consults.
My (now retired) parents live in Ireland and get better healthcare than we do in the US.
Availability and wait times vary widely by location. I'm on Vancouver Island in a city of 100,000 and can see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want (though for a while, getting a cleaning required making an appointment months out). I've been to the general hospital for three separate procedures in the last six months, each time getting scheduled within two weeks (and each time getting a marvel of efficiency, arriving in the morning and out by lunchtime).
When my brother was in Columbus, OH, (pop. 1.5 million) he got a referral to a neurologist for a pinched nerve in his neck and was scheduled 9 months out. The situations are far too varied for easy generalizations.
yeah the hostility started recently with trump and his ilk - fighting for nationalism of a bygone era.
if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare, you can also get organic food and dare I say better housing, private infra. what the US could/should improve on is have public clinics ie for preventative and quick care. public hospitals in the long run have many problems.
in the U.K for example - I used private healthcare, could've I have to the NHS - yeah but it means waiting times.
the southern states in the US are also what bring the quality of life down.
>yeah the hostility started recently with trump and his ilk - fighting for nationalism of a bygone era.
It definitely didn't start with Trump, it just became policy under him.
Trump would never have had a chance if Americans didn't already blame immigrants for the effects of neoliberalism rather than the billionaires who put it into practice, and if the rural white populace weren't already afraid losing the cultural power of their demographic majority and identity. People forget how much of a joke candidate he was until racists took him seriously.
>if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare
If you can afford it, anywhere has excellent healthcare.
> If you can afford it, anywhere has excellent healthcare.
I don't think so, judging by the many heads of state and other filthy rich people choosing to get healthcare in the West instead of their local countries.
Per the AI:
> U.S. insurance coverage is broadly divided into Private Insurance (66% of the population) and Public/Government Insurance (36%), with about 8% to 10% remaining uninsured.
The US system is far from perfect, but the comic book depictions of some hellscape are slightly overblown. Healthcare _is_ great here, wait times are basically non-existent. That's why our healthcare is expensive: it doesn't scale, we use a lot of it, and demand the absolute latest, best technology and treatments.
Should we expand Medicaid to cover the gap of the uninsured? Probably. And once we stop fighting culture wars, maybe things can get done.
"estimates suggest that inability to afford costs of medical care contributes to at least 530,000 personal bankruptcy filings annually. Approximately two-thirds of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are associated with medical expenses or illness-related loss of work."
> Trump would never have had a chance if Americans didn't already blame immigrants for the effects of neoliberalism rather than the billionaires who put it into practice
That's by design.
The billionaires who own the media conglomerates have spent decades airing propaganda to that effect, as well as perpetuating the myth that anyone can become wealthy if they just work hard enough, with the implicit contra-positive being that the poor are poor because they are lazy, thus deserving their poverty.
To be fair, the UK isn’t high on my list either and I’ve lived in Finland and Austria before and I know people from china and their experiences with infrastructure and healthcare.
I am mostly comparing these places to all first world countries, rather than just the anglosphere.
Housing is the only one I can agree on. The place is so damn big that outside of places like New York, you can get 2/3 times the space for the same money, in a lot of places even more!
His ilk is the Heritage foundation, and not just nationalism, some fascism with a bit of 18/19th century great white man imperialism. They're arguably even the cause of this article as Raegan implemented many of their proposals that has lead to this.
I live in the US. I disagree about the hostility towards non-citizens. If you are talking about ICE, it's more about racism. They are not gunning down Brits, Germans or Australians.
Agree about the rest. Can I come live in your country? :)
Not from the population itself but the changes to policy and hostility at the border. This includes restricted access even to visas, but also handing over your unlocked phone if you are a foreign national. Nothing of that sort is done when you make a visit for China. In fact, I could go there for 2 weeks without the need for a visa.
For over a year it has actually been the official recommendation to bring a burner phone to the US if you area a European citizen. To me personally, this feels like an invasion of privacy that makes me feel deeply resentful.
It really is astounding how bad national brands are. Everything loaded with sugar and salt. Lowest quality ingredients in everything, and I do mean everything.
I bought a package of national brand slice turkey. Threw it right away. It was dripping in chlorine. Things like national or regional brand ground beef is vile, and nothing can be done to it to make it edible. I bought a package years ago, grilled up burgers. I had to throw every single one of them away because they STANK.
Our bread is a joke. Bakeries no longer smell like bakeries because they aren't making bread, but a bread substitute. Chemical leaveners, trash flour, loaded with sugar and salt. Extra absurdity? Some brands dye the crusts brown because the leaveners they use doesn't brown in the oven.
Candy is also a joke. Fake chocolate, tiny portions and very chemically tasting. Expensive, too. 75 cents for a bar the size of my ring finger.
Extra insults? Everything is shrinkflated. Less product for higher prices.
It is not that astounding that the cheapest possible product legally available is not good quality. You are free to pay what UK pays for meat (a lot) and get great product.
I'm not sure what bakeries you're visiting but that's not my experience; there's nothing cheaper than flour and yeast and baking soda. If the bakery bakes things in store, rather than getting shipped in, it's pretty likely to be made with those. Of course if you want to buy the sandwich bread that lasts 4 weeks on the shelf then it's not going to be 2 ingredients.
The rest is just global inflation. EU doesn't have cheaper cocoa or wood pulp imports. Every problem begins with inflation. COVID QE fucked it all up.
I have no idea why you are getting downvoted. I don't know the specifics, but just comparing the ingredients of foods between the US and the EU really speaks for itself. Just compare something seemingly innocuous like Ketchup ffs.
UK: Tomatoes, spirit vinegar, sugar, salt, spice and herb extracts, spice
About the same total sugar per 100g.
Of course Heinz also sells "no sugar added" and "Simply Tomato Ketchup with No Artificial Sweeteners" versions in the US. Complaining about food being loaded with sugar/salt as a national issue is pretty dumb, because you can just buy the healthier stuff if you want that. What it amounts to is "US mainline premade foods are not to my tastes." That's fine, but... have you seen an American grocery store? There are infinite options all along the health spectrum. It's not hard to eat cleanly, it's just slightly less automatic.
And no, it is not cheaper to eat healthy in EU either. The cheapest US food is generally cheaper than the cheapest EU food because the quality is worse. If you buy the EU-quality-equivalent foods they are EU-price-equivalent as well. Compare across price brackets, not across the worst possible legal quality of item.
If you look at the immigration numbers across the board, apparently most people disagree :) just purely by numbers other than vibes or rare scary scenarios, the living standards in the US make most other OECD countries look poor. Not even speaking of the fact that immigrants can always go back so it's even better for them. I hiked with a guy who lived between US and Canada because he liked US better but needed expensive surgeries (that were also optional, kinda) so he did the minimum in Canada to qualify. Or worked with a European who outright said after making money it would be a good idea for him to go back and (ab)use the welfare state. Americans can't do that!
Looking at the state of infrastructure, public transportation or the quality of food doesn't exactly make a compelling case for the US. Public schooling isn't something that wants me want to move either. I really enjoy walkable cities and I am absolutely not a car person.
Sure, none of these are a problem if you earn a shitton of money... but where doesn't this apply?
Look, I'm not saying the US is necessarily a bad place to live in but I really enjoy live in a high wellfare societies and will happily trade away a good chunk of my salary for higher quality of living.
I do wonder how real the base number - the GDP - is. The wealthy have been accumulating wealth rapidly but it’s all on paper and the entire thing is underpinned by assumptions of USD reserve currency status.
As if workers got paid by "what $wealth allows".
As if there was a "right to dignified work" (what is "dignified"?).
As if there was a "right to fair income" (whats "fair"?).
This is, in the immortal words of Norm McDonald, some "commie gobbledygook". I don't think there is any "newspaper", as in traditional print publication, left worth reading.
After all of that, you still seem to be familiar with the concept of "fairness". And yet you feel you shouldn't try anything because you don't have the perfect universal answer... are you sure you're posting on the correct forum?
>If the U.S. changed some policies – such as increasing the federal minimum wage – 46 million people could earn enough to rise above that fair pay line.
You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.
There is bias in which states increased minimum wage or not. It's like attributing the massive tech salaries in Silicon Valley vs Maine because minimum wage exists.
> You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage [...]
This way of thinking is what's wrong with USA (among many other things).
You don't (or at least shouldn't) hire lots of people because it's cheap.
I don't go on Reddit, but you seem to still have people on here who are hard of thinking and believe that increasing the minimum wage has no second or third order effects.
On other hand if you can not afford to pay your employees wages they can survive on you do not deserve to be in business. You should go out and any resources you use should instead be used in way that can reasonably sustain workers.
As much as I think you can't raise minimum wage indefinitely, I kind of agree with this a bit as well.
I would be in favour of some sort of mechanism that ties "Number of your employees needing additional benefits to survive" (Universal Credit in the UK) to "How much in profits you can give to shareholders". Even an annually published official list of "inadequately paying companies" would be something.
Ok great. I will stop deserving to be in business, my employees will all lose their jobs and then likely their homes, and this is considered A Good Thing. And no, they won't just go get a higher paying job because if their labor was worth that they'd have done that already.
It is not employer's responsibility to subsidize their employees poor financial decisions. It's people's own responsibility to live within their means and find higher paying jobs. It's not an employers fault that someone working part time 1 hour a week can't afford the rent on their $10k a month apartment.
And reeks of the same sort of reallocation fallacy that makes people think the rich making too much makes them poor.
If we really just say 4xd everyone’s salary in America. Prices are gonna rapidly rise in everything.
Things don’t get materially better unless we build the material things we need. We need to come up with a way to build more houses. Lower the cost of healthcare. Not just increase everyone’s money supply.
International comparisons are tricky, and you should always check the data definitions carefully.
The first metric on that page is household income divided by the square root of household size. That has some unreasonable consequences. For example, if housing is unaffordable, children live longer with their parents, and measured income is higher.
The second metric measures either net income or consumption, depending on the country and the year. It takes taxes, benefits, and purchasing power into account but fails to consider savings and subsidized services.
Salary alone is meaningless if you don't factor in purchase-power-parity and other quality of living aspects. E.g. a lot of people are happy to move to Denmark, and accept a paycut because they are leading with their social facilities and family support. Salary alone will not conjure good infrastructure
Yes, at the lower end of those salaries, you have to do things (and this is one single example btw) like have roommates, which drastically increases your housing instability. Why? Because you have to rely on your roommates' ability to pay rent. If they don't, what happens? You lose your PrIvIlIgE to live there! Most places in the US do not have protections for this. So you can try really hard to find another roommate, but you have a very limited amount of time to do so (basically until the next rent payment). So then you get evicted. Now your ability to find a new place to live is damaged because you have a permanent "evicted" mark on your credit/tenant report. Oh, and of course, the landlord can go to court and try to get the court to force you to pay the remainder of the rent or at least continue to pay the rent until they lazily find a new tenant. So now you're financially damaged too. There are so many footguns like this in the US that people, on HN especially, are ignorant to. Imagine trying to keep a job while also dealing with all these shenanigans. Can you even get time off work to go to the court hearing? If you don't, the landlord can get a default judgement.
Oh and sorry because this is HN and people will automatically assume I mean owning the property and renting rooms out to others, I mean both people are renters in this case.
> Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
Why? Once you pass a level of wealth where basic needs like, food, housing and healthcare are met your happiness probably depends more on how you perceive your position to be compared to people around you. Even your post suggests that, as you're comparing your position to people wealthier than you, even though you likely have your basic needs met. Once you get the US median salary, you'll just switch to comparing yourself against the really wealthy people. It's easier to be happy with what you have in a more equal society.
This is yet another article that doesn't understand what wealth is. There is almost no point talking about these numbers, because they mislead more than they inform.
Agreed - it also doesn't understand rights. A right to someone's labor is slavery. It's great to have robust social programs. However, they aren't a right - they are benefits. Changing the definition of rights is a trick to idea smuggle politics.
If you're a politician you can tax $500 from one productive member of society and redistribute $100 to four unproductive and lazy members. You get four votes instead of one. It's called job security.
I know what they want to say, but I think their argument is quite weak, because essentially you have US industries that aren't tech. American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries. In fact many industries are lagging behind. So actually US workers are being paid more not less than elsewhere.
Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry.
So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make.
And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.
> American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries.
I used to think that also, probably because FAANG salaries had skewed my perception, but after looking at the data, this does not seem to be actually true, at least not in general.
For example, Germany has a somewhat higher annual median gross salary for full-time employees than the US (PPP-adjusted, BLS/DESTATIS salary data, OECD PPP values).
Of course, this is the median salary. America absolutely offers higher salaries at the top end (and I mean much higher, often by a factor of 2-3 for highly qualified professionals, such as software engineers and doctors). But that also means correspondingly lower salaries at the low end. And of course, labor is taxed heavily in Germany, so discretionary/disposable income may look different in the end on a case-by-case basis.
You would also need to adjust for the huge medical expenses Americans face if you are doing that as Germans don't have that. Maybe the 401K savings Americans do for retirement (if Germans have a better societal retirement payout than Americans). And the other social benefits that are accounted for by German taxes that Americans still have to account for in some way. You can't just lump those in on the Germans and not account that Americans pay it some way as well.
First of all, yes, labor is taxed much higher in Germany than in the US (PPP adjustment already takes VAT on prices into account, so that doesn't matter in this case). In fact, Germany has one of the highest taxations of labor in the world.
What makes this analysis tricky is disposable vs. discretionary income. The US clearly comes out on top when it comes to disposable income (labour is taxed too much in Germany compared to capital income and wealth).
The picture gets more complicated when you look at discretionary income, which also accounts for regular bills, such as rent, college tuition, out of pocket expenses for health care, childcare, and such. All the taxes you pay in Germany do also pay for something, after all. There is unfortunately very little data for this type of comparison.
I believe Americans are naive to the bad deal they're currently sitting with. It is the most materially wealthy place on earth, yet with terrible distribution – this is not a technical problem, it is a cultural problem.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.
I grew up in "walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact" outside the US. Thank you, but no thank you. Crowded, nosy judgemental people, noisy and small properties with constant fights with neighbors.
You're projecting you personal tastes onto others and thinking everybody else is getting a bad deal.
So the stereotypes are true. My friend in elementary school told an amusing story about his friend, in a Swedish family, who moved from our nice suburb to a suburb in another state, one like the grandparent is describing. They didn't understand why there was such a vast difference between the two. It seemed obvious to me, but I guess it's not obvious to foreigners.
You ran right past the GP's statement too:
> yet with terrible distribution
applies to the quality of a suburb too. Obviously. You wouldn't catch me dead in a Texas suburb or Florida suburb.
You can apply the same argument to wealthy dense neighborhoods in affluent areas full of designer coffee and organic produce vs dense neighborhoods in poor areas of a city with monthly food poisoning at local restaurants. Vast difference, go check Latin America for examples of terrible dense neighborhoods.
My argument is that not even nice dense neighborhoods are that nice compared to nice suburbia.
It's a matter of the person's life values and I believe the majority wouldn't necessarily pick the nice dense neighborhoods over nice suburbia. Also, I'd pick bad suburbia over bad inner cities.
I'd pick the worst version of suburbia over the best downtown city in the world. I've lived in many of each. Suburbs came into existence for a reason! People like them! I've never been closer to ending it all than when I lived in a Seattle highrise surrounded by bodegas and "things to do".
I would expect fortune to be able to understand basic economics, but I guess not. I can't verify because it is a paywalled article, but if this article isn't about oligopolies abusing labor market power, then it is intensely wrong headed. Paying workers less is a good thing to a point, it means less dead weight loss to the economy from labor abusing market power (which is basically the worst thing you can do in economics). If it's about abuse of monopsony power in the labour market by oligopolies then I apologize, that's the one case where paying people less is bad, but it's also kind of rare these days.
It's hard to understand that more and more countries are becoming better than the USA.
You can live in a "developing" country and feel safer and better.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 15.2 ms ] threadTo me, it would mean a significant reduction in quality of live and I am low-key scared of all the ingredients and additives in food that are pretty much banned everywhere else. Not to mention all risks regarding healthcare.
All the US has done is allow for massive amounts of wealth hoarding and gaslighting of a significant portion of the population into voting and supporting things against their own beliefs or common sense.
If you said “China allows red dye 12 in their food and it’s been proven to cause cancer” they’d freak out about it. But they don’t see any problem back home.
Incredible that this is the country that has been the dominant global exporter of technological innovation, pop culture and economic policy for so long.
It happens, it's just statistically so unlikely to ever happen to your kid, that the drill essentially serves as ideological propaganda reinforcing fear of the idea of the threat far above and beyond the statistical risk actually posed by the threat itself.
And as a reminder, Europe sees more people die to heat than America sees people die to guns.
https://fortune.com/2026/06/26/heat-death-europe-ac-american...
Maybe your guild should figure out how to beat the PvE server before lecturing the players on the PvP server on how ridiculous you think our freedom is. Major skill issue, noob.
Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel. You're welcome.
Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do more orders of magnitude charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.
Speaking of giving - since 2014, the EU has purchased approximate €700-€900 billion worth of oil and natural gas alone from Russia (total EU imports from Russia exceed €1T in that time period), while offering less than €300 billion in support to Ukraine.
The EU is responsible for funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and has given more than twice as much money to Russia than it has to Ukraine.
America, on the other hand, has given nearly $200B to Ukraine, and paid a tiny fraction of that to total Russian imports.
In other words, America is a net economic supporter of Ukraine, while the EU is a net economic supporter of Russia.
You are not "the good guys" that you think are.
Global warming didn't start two weeks ago, nor two decades ago. Most of human generated CO2 and most of the calories accumulated by greenhouse effect are still directly caused by Americans, both in absolute numbers and relative per capita.
>Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel.
Americans also elected PV panel haters, and are still destroying whole regions to extract more oil, both overseas and at home.
>Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do over an order of magnitude more charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.
Hi, cool, are you going to give AC units to Europe? And the Middle East? And India/Bangladesh etc.? Maybe we should prosternate at your feet and thank you for you magnifiscence, oh great solvers of problem you caused.
The head killing Europeans right now is caused by everyone pumping CO2, including Europeans.
Between 2013 and 2022, a total of 77 students in grades K-12 have been killed in 11 school mass shootings, in a country with 50 million school children.
A child in America is about 500-600x more likely to die in a car accident than a school shooting.
A child in America is about 90-120x more likely to die from a pedestrian fatality than a school shooting.
A child in America is 70-90x more likely to die from choking than a school shooting.
A child in America is 50-60x more likely to die from drowning than a school shooting.
A child in America is 40-55x more likely to die in a fire or from smoke than a school shooting.
A child in America is 10-15x more likely to die in a bicycle accident not involving a motor vehicle than from a school shooting.
Comparable risks to dying in a school shooting include a fatal sting from a bee or wasp, (about twice a likely), or dying from being struck by lightning (about half as likely).
School shootings, while tragic, do not pose nearly as much of a statistical threat as you think they do, even if they still pose more than they ought to.
https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings#:~:text=NUMBER%20OF%20SHOO...
One could suspect that the number in the next decade should be between 2000-3000 incidents. Since 2000 is a bigger number than 1 yes more than once a decade.
Mass shootings more broadly are even worse with 167 in Jan-June 2026.
We can't do anything to fix the root cause because the root cause is an inviolable Constitutional right.
So we simply must accept that school shootings/mass shootings/gun violence in general are the price we pay to be able to shoot watermelons and the occasional politician and remain the only truly free nation on earth.
The US welcomes more people legally than any other country in the world, and half of its politicians think welcoming illegal immigrants is a good idea too.
1. Past policies don't dictate current policies. And current policies are wildly different from policies of 5 years ago, which are again different of policies of 20 years ago and even before that.
2. Amount of immigrants doesn't say anything about standard of living. And we all know immigration (and even illegal immigration) was promoted by all parties because this meant cheaper labor costs. And often also, exploitable labor.
And finaly... it's not a surprised that the third largest country in the world, who was considered an immigrant nations for well over 2 centuries has the most immigrants?
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
Also, my father-in-law went from consultation to a full knee replacement surgery within 3 weeks. Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
For a vaccination I'll call several weeks in advance. If I want an appointment before/after work I'll call well in advance, if I want something tomorrow they may say "11:30, take it out leave it", which isn't great for my work.
Don't trust whoever wrote what you read there. FUD scaremongers.
When we lived in Germany, we got TBE shots (area with a lot of ticks that carried it). IIRC we could also get an appointment in a few days.
(Though I think with vaccinations it's similar in the US.)
[1] Not eligible yet, so I pay 25 Euro to get one every year. Worth it for not getting the flu.
There is also the same private healthcare that americans enjoy. You have the option of spending $50 to $100 to go to a private clinic and get same-day admission. In the US services like that cost nearly 10 times the price due to the whole insurance bullshit.
I got free same-day heart check-up and $80 paid same-week heart monitoring check-up.
There are horror stories and footage of the UK NHS, but that's mostly just london and in reality pretty much every city that large suffers from that.
Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though. They will always have enormous bargaining power over you and I think it also leads to chilling effect, when your health is literally dependent on your job, you will think twice to go on strike, unionize, or freely express your thought, especially when combined with at-will employment.
Secondly, I would also debate the better health care. I recently had two health scares in my direct family (one time cancer, one time another tumor) and in both cases care was quick and excellent. Of course, there is quite a lot of variance between countries. We lived in Germany for a while and I was less impressed by health care there (though it's probably still much better and definitely cheaper than the average health care in the US).
We can argue if that is fair or not, but if you have a well paying job with good employee provided HC, America is [one of] the best places to be for medical care.
If you are 50+ with a average job in an average town, America is much worse now that it was prior to the 2000s. And nobody cares because 'America has some of the best hospitals in the world' 'if you have a good job, aren't really all that sick or are on someone elses insurance plan, and if you are under 50'.
It's the same everywhere in the US. Colloquially called "collecting unemployment".
You get unemployment benefits. For a little while. In some places there may also be something like rent compensation, but generally unemployment benefits are supposed to be all-encompassing. (They are nowhere near enough to be all-encompassing.)
Once the unemployment benefits end, you better have a job.
My wife lost her job in the summer of 2020. We were incredibly lucky that the lockdowns meant extended unemployment benefits. They still lasted....I forget exactly, but I believe it was no more than about a year.
I'm not familiar with all of them, but here in "free, socialized healthcare" France, if you don't have a "mutuelle", which seems similar to "employer-dependant healthcare" in the US, you're going to have to pay out of pocket quite a lot of money. Maybe not as much as in the US (not familiar with that country), but very much not free. Think dental, glasses, needing to spend a night in a hospital for whatever reason (even public ones!), etc. On top of your salary being much lower.
Sure, you don't need an employer to have a mutuelle, you can pay for your own. But it's usually pricier and worse coverage.
As an American who's had to deal with the ramifications of employer-based health insurance first-hand, I can confirm that this strikes me as accurate. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where even being out of work for most of last year did not hurt my financial situation very much (my wife and I were actually able to buy our house during my unemployment), but even being in that fairly privileged position, due to her autoimmune condition, we've had to go through quite a lot of annoying bullshit from a lack of healthcare options due to basically being stuck with whatever my employer happens to offer.
With my previous health insurance (from a startup where there were around 10 employees during my time there), we were able to get the semiannual procedure she's been getting for years from her specialist doctor approved relatively quickly, but with the insurance from my current job, it took months earlier this year to get it approved because they kept denying it due to her condition (which is pretty rare in general, and even more rare for anyone to have it as long as she has; one of the first doctors she saw for it years ago told us "you're not going to find a support group for this online", and we've literally yet to find anything online about anyone else ever having it for as long as she has) not being on the list of pre-approved conditions. This was typical across several insurance companies for the initial request, but with this insurance company, they put us through an extremely convoluted process for appealing. First, they told her doctor that he couldn't email or fax them his letter of medical necessity and had to send it through snail mail, which even a month later they claimed they had never received. They told me I could email it to them, which I did, only for them to later claim I didn't have authorization to do that on behalf of my wife (something that never came up in the call where they told me to email it to them despite us both being there on speaker phone), and she had to fill out and email them a form authorizing me. She did that, but then after a while they still just sent us a blanket rejection for it not being on the initial list (as if there were any chance of it magically appearing on the list between when they initially denied it and when they finally processed the appeal?), and they could not provide us with any evidence that an actual doctor looked at the letter where her doctor stated definitively that he would expect her to likely experience permanent and potentially fatal organ damage with the treatment due to none of the other options having mitigated her symptoms in the past. After filing a grievance, they insisted that if her doctor filled out the information in a separate form that they had never mentioned to either him or us before, they would take it into account, so he did that, and then after a while they still rejected it with identical language to before. Finally after three months, they gave us the ability to have her doctor talk directly to an actual doctor on their end, and then it got approved within the next week. No one was able to provide any sort of coherent explanation as to why they kept putting us through such bullshit procedures that had no effect instead of letting us just do that in the first place.
I don't pretend to have any first-hand experience with healthcare in other countries, but no sane system would end up with such disparate outcomes for the exact same condition for the exact same patient due to literally nothing but how much bullshit the insurance company feels like putting you though. There's literally no way for us to...
It absolutely is.
America is great if you make at least 150k a year and never get sick.
The moment you get sick with anything serious your employer might fire you. Labor protections in America are a bad joke. Your boss wants to fire you because your taking time off to look after a sick relative, I guess you can sue, but they’ll blame something and probably win.
Your boss lies to your face about pay and benefits, ohh well sucks to suck.
Very minor illnesses turn catastrophic. Several stories have emerged of otherwise healthy young people going without insulin and not doing so well…
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shane-patrick-boyle-died-a...
Even if you have insurance, ohh well…
> Parents sue over son's asthma death days after inhaler price soared without warning Cole Schmidtknecht, 22, had insurance but couldn’t afford to refill his asthma inhaler after the cost jumped from $70 to more than $500.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/asthma-death-pres...
Half the country cheers this on. The idea of some ‘lazy’ person getting something they don’t deserve rationalizes this dystopian system.
Of course the American system ends up costing significantly more for worse outcomes.
Access to therapy is usually gate kept to those with expensive insurance plans. Medicare, if it covers it at all can easily have a 1 year wait list for therapy.
Not to mention that most people get no meaningful vacation time.
Want to quit because you’re burnt out. Even if you have savings you won’t have health insurance. You won’t be able to afford therapy without it.
Get back on the hamster wheel.
I do regret not making a better effort to leave earlier. It’s not going to get better
For more urgent enquiries with an NHS doctor I can usually get a phonecall next day, and they'll ask me to come in if it's serious. For routine/non-urgent stuff you might wait a week or two.
Obviously this is going to vary depending on where you live, and the NHS is not without it's problems... But it's essentially free and a wonderful thing.
[0] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/02/19/uk-nhs-doctor-s...
https://privatisation.everydoctor.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/...
Employer health plans are only good as long as you pay - if they are good. Lots aren't and they require you to pay so much upfront. Waiting time for specialists and surgeries depend on the area you live in: Not common to wait months for a specialist in the US. You won't get seen if you can't pay for the doctor upfront and medicines are expensive.
I moved from the US (Indiana) to Norway. I've never had an issue seeing a doctor or dentist if I'm sick or in pain since I've been here. I can plan routine things in advance, but I don't need to plan months in advance. I'm just not getting in the same day because they save those times for folks that are sick and need seen sooner. I'll never have a bill if I'm hospitalized. Doctors tend to offer less invasive treatments first - they would have tried to avoid a knee replacement. And if the wait was long (which again, really isn't different from the states, depending on where you are and if you have money enough), the safety net helps out. Reduced work hours and paid time off work and stuff like that. The emergency room sends folks home with medicine instead of expecting you to go to the pharmacy afterwards! ER waiting times aren't longer and honestly, I can call ahead and suffer at home instead of in a waiting room if it isn't actually an emergency, but need urgent care. My partner was seen immediately when he cut off part of his finger, I was seen immediately when I had severe pain, but you'll wait longer for an uncomplicated broken bone and things like that.
And this is all relying on the public system - People can get shorter waiting times if they use the private system.
I am in the EU and I can do that too?
Just to help out there :)
This has been the case in every country I've lived in within Europe (3 and counting). And a mix of rural (50,000 town) and big urban areas.
Can you share a reference for that statistics?
FWIW, I live in Europe and I always got dentist appointments within a week. For a severe issue (pain involved), I got appointment on the same day.
This is very much location- and provider-dependent, regardless of rural or urban setting. You also have to factor in that some doctors do not work at a single clinic but may schedule their week to spend certain days at one facility and the rest at others (ex. Monday and Thursday at Facility A, Tuesday and Wednesday at Facility B, Fridays off) which can limit the ability to see them in the same week especially if the facilities are not owned by the same organization.
Healthcare access and quality aren’t consistent. Some states or areas in the same state will have better providers than others. Some health insurances will cover things without question and others may fight against you on covering things.
I recently had knee surgery and hit my deductible due to the procedure but insurance billed me for full price on part of the it because they deemed it to be “experimental and unnecessary.” There was some back-and-forth between the surgeon’s office, my insurance, and myself to understand why only a part of it wasn’t covered. This was an additional $1,200 that eventually I had to pay for; even after paying $1,100 up front because of my high-deductible health plan. I’m financially stable enough to cover it without it destroying my savings but this kind of surprise isn’t uncommon for US citizens even with recent laws trying to make costs more predictable.
Even if it's true now, I wonder for how long—insurance is getting worse and worse every year.
Last month had to get my son in to get checked out, turned out he just had a nasty cold, but they were able to get him in day-of. Mind you, that's not the emergency room, that's my _family doctor_.
Two weeks ago my mother had kidney stones, went to the ER. Had a stent put in, sent along her merry way in I want to say 4 hours?
When my sciatica flared up several months ago, I was in the ER for several hours just because there were much more severe cases ahead of me, which makes perfect sense. I got xrayed that day, bloodwork, among other shit.
I could go on and on, but these cases aren't outliers for us, they're the norm.
I call BS. I have a great healthcare plan and appointments with my PCP are weeks out if at all; I was lucky to find some other random PCP who was available for a Telehealth consult only. Our kid has a rare disability that requires lots of different doctors, and we have to book literally months in advance for consults.
My (now retired) parents live in Ireland and get better healthcare than we do in the US.
When my brother was in Columbus, OH, (pop. 1.5 million) he got a referral to a neurologist for a pinched nerve in his neck and was scheduled 9 months out. The situations are far too varied for easy generalizations.
if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare, you can also get organic food and dare I say better housing, private infra. what the US could/should improve on is have public clinics ie for preventative and quick care. public hospitals in the long run have many problems.
in the U.K for example - I used private healthcare, could've I have to the NHS - yeah but it means waiting times.
the southern states in the US are also what bring the quality of life down.
It definitely didn't start with Trump, it just became policy under him.
Trump would never have had a chance if Americans didn't already blame immigrants for the effects of neoliberalism rather than the billionaires who put it into practice, and if the rural white populace weren't already afraid losing the cultural power of their demographic majority and identity. People forget how much of a joke candidate he was until racists took him seriously.
>if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare
If you can afford it, anywhere has excellent healthcare.
I don't think so, judging by the many heads of state and other filthy rich people choosing to get healthcare in the West instead of their local countries.
The US system is far from perfect, but the comic book depictions of some hellscape are slightly overblown. Healthcare _is_ great here, wait times are basically non-existent. That's why our healthcare is expensive: it doesn't scale, we use a lot of it, and demand the absolute latest, best technology and treatments.
Should we expand Medicaid to cover the gap of the uninsured? Probably. And once we stop fighting culture wars, maybe things can get done.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2026/04/05/increasi...
That's by design.
The billionaires who own the media conglomerates have spent decades airing propaganda to that effect, as well as perpetuating the myth that anyone can become wealthy if they just work hard enough, with the implicit contra-positive being that the poor are poor because they are lazy, thus deserving their poverty.
I am mostly comparing these places to all first world countries, rather than just the anglosphere.
Agree about the rest. Can I come live in your country? :)
For over a year it has actually been the official recommendation to bring a burner phone to the US if you area a European citizen. To me personally, this feels like an invasion of privacy that makes me feel deeply resentful.
I bought a package of national brand slice turkey. Threw it right away. It was dripping in chlorine. Things like national or regional brand ground beef is vile, and nothing can be done to it to make it edible. I bought a package years ago, grilled up burgers. I had to throw every single one of them away because they STANK.
Our bread is a joke. Bakeries no longer smell like bakeries because they aren't making bread, but a bread substitute. Chemical leaveners, trash flour, loaded with sugar and salt. Extra absurdity? Some brands dye the crusts brown because the leaveners they use doesn't brown in the oven.
Candy is also a joke. Fake chocolate, tiny portions and very chemically tasting. Expensive, too. 75 cents for a bar the size of my ring finger.
Extra insults? Everything is shrinkflated. Less product for higher prices.
https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/ $22 for a package of toilet paper that has 1/3 less paper than before.
Prices are out of sight. 3 years ago, 1lb of real deli roast beef was $7. Now $20. Costs almost $30 to make a pot of stew. Used to cost $10.
I could write for hours on this subject. The garbage produced is that prolific.
I'm not sure what bakeries you're visiting but that's not my experience; there's nothing cheaper than flour and yeast and baking soda. If the bakery bakes things in store, rather than getting shipped in, it's pretty likely to be made with those. Of course if you want to buy the sandwich bread that lasts 4 weeks on the shelf then it's not going to be 2 ingredients.
The rest is just global inflation. EU doesn't have cheaper cocoa or wood pulp imports. Every problem begins with inflation. COVID QE fucked it all up.
UK: Tomatoes, spirit vinegar, sugar, salt, spice and herb extracts, spice
About the same total sugar per 100g. Of course Heinz also sells "no sugar added" and "Simply Tomato Ketchup with No Artificial Sweeteners" versions in the US. Complaining about food being loaded with sugar/salt as a national issue is pretty dumb, because you can just buy the healthier stuff if you want that. What it amounts to is "US mainline premade foods are not to my tastes." That's fine, but... have you seen an American grocery store? There are infinite options all along the health spectrum. It's not hard to eat cleanly, it's just slightly less automatic.
And no, it is not cheaper to eat healthy in EU either. The cheapest US food is generally cheaper than the cheapest EU food because the quality is worse. If you buy the EU-quality-equivalent foods they are EU-price-equivalent as well. Compare across price brackets, not across the worst possible legal quality of item.
Sure, none of these are a problem if you earn a shitton of money... but where doesn't this apply?
Look, I'm not saying the US is necessarily a bad place to live in but I really enjoy live in a high wellfare societies and will happily trade away a good chunk of my salary for higher quality of living.
if you paint a masterpiece worth millions and keep it in your closet it has negligible impact on GDP. only once it is sold does it have an effect.
“The first is linked to something showing the author knows it’s an apple.”
“Yes.”
This is, in the immortal words of Norm McDonald, some "commie gobbledygook". I don't think there is any "newspaper", as in traditional print publication, left worth reading.
You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.
"then why not make sleeping illegal? obviously there's a limit"
This way of thinking is what's wrong with USA (among many other things).
You don't (or at least shouldn't) hire lots of people because it's cheap.
I would be in favour of some sort of mechanism that ties "Number of your employees needing additional benefits to survive" (Universal Credit in the UK) to "How much in profits you can give to shareholders". Even an annually published official list of "inadequately paying companies" would be something.
And reeks of the same sort of reallocation fallacy that makes people think the rich making too much makes them poor.
If we really just say 4xd everyone’s salary in America. Prices are gonna rapidly rise in everything.
Things don’t get materially better unless we build the material things we need. We need to come up with a way to build more houses. Lower the cost of healthcare. Not just increase everyone’s money supply.
The first metric on that page is household income divided by the square root of household size. That has some unreasonable consequences. For example, if housing is unaffordable, children live longer with their parents, and measured income is higher.
The second metric measures either net income or consumption, depending on the country and the year. It takes taxes, benefits, and purchasing power into account but fails to consider savings and subsidized services.
Oh and sorry because this is HN and people will automatically assume I mean owning the property and renting rooms out to others, I mean both people are renters in this case.
Why? Once you pass a level of wealth where basic needs like, food, housing and healthcare are met your happiness probably depends more on how you perceive your position to be compared to people around you. Even your post suggests that, as you're comparing your position to people wealthier than you, even though you likely have your basic needs met. Once you get the US median salary, you'll just switch to comparing yourself against the really wealthy people. It's easier to be happy with what you have in a more equal society.
Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry.
So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make.
And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.
I used to think that also, probably because FAANG salaries had skewed my perception, but after looking at the data, this does not seem to be actually true, at least not in general.
For example, Germany has a somewhat higher annual median gross salary for full-time employees than the US (PPP-adjusted, BLS/DESTATIS salary data, OECD PPP values).
Of course, this is the median salary. America absolutely offers higher salaries at the top end (and I mean much higher, often by a factor of 2-3 for highly qualified professionals, such as software engineers and doctors). But that also means correspondingly lower salaries at the low end. And of course, labor is taxed heavily in Germany, so discretionary/disposable income may look different in the end on a case-by-case basis.
What makes this analysis tricky is disposable vs. discretionary income. The US clearly comes out on top when it comes to disposable income (labour is taxed too much in Germany compared to capital income and wealth).
The picture gets more complicated when you look at discretionary income, which also accounts for regular bills, such as rent, college tuition, out of pocket expenses for health care, childcare, and such. All the taxes you pay in Germany do also pay for something, after all. There is unfortunately very little data for this type of comparison.
Yeah, relative income isn't really a good measure. You want to raise the floor for people, not (necessarily) narrow the gap between rich and poor.
I generally agree that if it was true that the inequality would lead to consistent floor raising it would be fine, but it doesn't.
To say the results are suspect is understating things.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.
I grew up in "walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact" outside the US. Thank you, but no thank you. Crowded, nosy judgemental people, noisy and small properties with constant fights with neighbors.
You're projecting you personal tastes onto others and thinking everybody else is getting a bad deal.
You ran right past the GP's statement too:
> yet with terrible distribution
applies to the quality of a suburb too. Obviously. You wouldn't catch me dead in a Texas suburb or Florida suburb.
My argument is that not even nice dense neighborhoods are that nice compared to nice suburbia.
It's a matter of the person's life values and I believe the majority wouldn't necessarily pick the nice dense neighborhoods over nice suburbia. Also, I'd pick bad suburbia over bad inner cities.
Wealthiest 1% of earners - 50.1%
Top 90-99% of earners - 37.3%
Top 50-89% of earners - 11.7%
Bottom 50% of earners - 1.1%
Source: Federal Reserve/Reuters