51–60 of 66 posts
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>Europe keeps regulating itself to death and america isn’t. Given that the life expectancy in the US is falling which is unprecedented in an industrialised society, and on average below some second world countries that post has an involuntary morbid spin.
Leading cause of death for under 45 in the US is traffic fatalities.
Europe keeps regulating itself to death and america isn’t. That’s why most modern innovation (Intel, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX, Uber, Airbnb, Etc) is coming from the US and not Europe. If you lived in both continents you would know
The innovation you speak of is either completely superfluous or actively harmful to society. No one needs a Tesla or SpaceX, and society would be much better off without Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple or Facebook. That you consider these companies, all with a notorious track record of badly treating their employees and mishandling their user's data, as good things, speaks volumes about the mindset of some Americans.
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What if--And I'm just riffing here--what if America doesn't have nearly the cult of individualism that everybody seems to think it has? What if America has a strong authoritarian inclination, as seen by its extreme focus on patriotism and patriarchal style of Christianity? What if the "Uniquely American cult of individualism" is (a) Something Americans tell themselves in a "She doth protest too much" attempt to avoid…
Interesting thoughts. I think the part that comes closest to my own beliefs is this: > (b) Propaganda that has been thundered ... as a lever for avoiding regulation and oversight. I think the belief in individualism is real and sincere. It is also exploited ruthlessly, sometimes - but not always - by those who are moving in the exact opposite direction. Where's the authoritarian message in an ad telling you to be you…
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Interesting thoughts. I think the part that comes closest to my own beliefs is this: > (b) Propaganda that has been thundered ... as a lever for avoiding regulation and oversight. I think the belief in individualism is real and sincere. It is also exploited ruthlessly, sometimes - but not always - by those who are moving in the exact opposite direction. Where's the authoritarian message in an ad telling you to be you…
The ads deposing you to "be yourself, express yourself, etc" are doing so not out of any sense of benevolence, but rather to tap into the self image Americans hold in order to brand themselves as part of your ingroup, to sell more of their product.
It is a confluence of many independent factors that cut across culture, economics, history, political structure, and geography. This applies to almost every comparison of Europe and America. A key difference is in the default definition of what "privacy" is relative to. In America, there is a strong notion of privacy from the government but a much weaker notion of privacy from companies. In Europe, it is the other wa…
No, not at all. US states being somewhat like countries can't put the USA behind the EU. EU states are countries.
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The innovation you speak of is either completely superfluous or actively harmful to society. No one needs a Tesla or SpaceX, and society would be much better off without Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple or Facebook. That you consider these companies, all with a notorious track record of badly treating their employees and mishandling their user's data, as good things, speaks volumes about the mindset of some Americans.
If what you’re saying was right, these companies wouldn’t have any customers. Clearly society values these companies above zero.
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How does regulation help with obesity? And if it does, why are Europeans very nearly as fat as Americans?
> [...] why are Europeans very nearly as fat as Americans? They really aren't "very nearly". According to [0], US' obesity rate is 36.2%(highest of OECD) while the EU country with the highest obesity rate is UK with 27.8%. Every other EU country's rate lies below that, e.g. Germany is at 22.3% [0] https://obesity.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0060...
Nobody with a 1 in 4 obesity rate is in much of a position to point fingers, it's pretty clearly a global problem. I see no reason to suggest that regulation is helping anyone. Food culture is probably the biggest single factor.
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If what you’re saying was right, these companies wouldn’t have any customers. Clearly society values these companies above zero.
That's a non sequitur. Demand is orthogonal to value. Heroin isn't valuable to society yet it exists.
The customers of the companies mentioned above obviously see some value in using their services, otherwise they wouldn’t do so.
You seem to be using “is valuable” to mean “is good for”. I’m using it in the economic sense.
It's because politicians can be more easily influenced with cash in the USA than in Europe. The US supreme court hasn't done any favors in this regard either.
It is a confluence of many independent factors that cut across culture, economics, history, political structure, and geography. This applies to almost every comparison of Europe and America. A key difference is in the default definition of what "privacy" is relative to. In America, there is a strong notion of privacy from the government but a much weaker notion of privacy from companies. In Europe, it is the other wa…
> If you model individual States as "countries" conceptually, the political dynamics make a lot more sense. No, not at all. US states being somewhat like countries can't put the USA behind the EU. EU states are countries.
As a simple illustration, the US has no national ID because the individual States have sole authority for managing the identity of their citizens. Similarly, it is why all contracts denote the State whose legal system has jurisdiction over interpretation of the contract -- there isn't a meaningful Federal jurisdiction over such things. This is also why the US Federal government can't just "pass a law" to do things, what they can actually do is severely limited by what the States feel like allowing them to do. While the States don't flex their autonomy very often these days, almost all power in the US rests with the individual States.