501–510 of 540 posts
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Wow, this is literally more than I make after tax :( And I have a senior IT job at a multinational. But I suppose wages take this into account. High rent prices, healthcare etc. Otherwise people wouldn't be able to live off their wage.
Programmers can. Most people cannot.
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I'm afraid this type of law will decrease salaries in Europe compared to US. For instance I work at an international company and I already get paid 2-3x less than same level engineers in US. I feel like this would increase the gap even more. And I'd prefer to have the option to over-achieve if this is what I choose to do with my life.
I definitely get 3-4x less than US in the EU country where I live. But who cares.. I like the low-pressure life here. Rents are lower than the US too. We have socialised healthcare, safe gun-free cities. That's worth a lot more than a number on a bank statement. I hear that in the US people will lose their healthcare when they lose a job and it could cost $1000 a month (which is more than my monthly rent)! Here it's…
This is true with some caveats:
If you lose your job, you lose health insurance from the job by default. But in general you have a choice to buy the same plan you had, at the full cost (including whatever the employer used to pay), which can, yes, be $1000/mo — or significantly more.
However, you will usually also then have the option of buying a plan from your state’s healthcare exchange, which may not be as good as your employer plan, but the lowest cost options will come consistently be far less than $1K/mo. [0]
And depending on income and other factors, you may be eligible for subsidies to pay part or all of the cost of an exchange plan, or you may be eligible for public insurance via Medicaid.
[0] https://www.kff.org/health-reform/state-indicator/average-ma...
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I definitely get 3-4x less than US in the EU country where I live. But who cares.. I like the low-pressure life here. Rents are lower than the US too. We have socialised healthcare, safe gun-free cities. That's worth a lot more than a number on a bank statement. I hear that in the US people will lose their healthcare when they lose a job and it could cost $1000 a month (which is more than my monthly rent)! Here it's…
> I hear that in the US people will lose their healthcare when they lose a job and it could cost $1000 a month (which is more than my monthly rent)! Here it's simply free. That brings a lot of peace of mind. That's not true in most of the states where people actually live. For example where I live in Maryland: https://www.marylandhealthconnection.gov/lost-your-job-you-c... > Yes, you have 60 days from the date of los…
It provides free health insurance; as Maryland Medicaid has cost-sharing requirements, it is not completely free health care. Prescription drugs, in particular, are not free for Medicaid recipients, though they are subsidized ($1-$3/prescription).
https://www.kff.org/health-reform/state-indicator/premium-an...
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This is a bizarre generalization. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people who supported UBI before its moment in the political spotlight in the last five years are not as sanguine about unions as the average person on the left. This certainly describes me: I believe in heavy redistribution and taxation (especially of land!) but think that the left (which I consider myself a part of) has a consistent problem wit…
Both unions and UBI try to address the same problem: make it so that people do not have to choose between abuse and starvation. But they are completely different approaches to this problem. For example, unions do not protect unemployed people, while UBI protects everyone. On the other hand, a union is something you could create tomorrow at your workplace without waiting for the rest of the country to change their min…
Many people have a very simple-minded view of both politics and the world in general, which leads them to a low-resolution model that lumps things into two massive buckets and assume that everyone else takes their set of beliefs wholesale from one of the buckets.
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Yes, but conflating rights you are born with (freedom of speech) with rights you are granted (healthcare) does not seem like a productive way to use language. They are different things with different implications. I prefer to call the former "human rights" and the latter "societal rights". My problem with the EU and others is that they call everything "human rights" with no regard for the distinction, in what I belie…
Where would you put something like "the human right not to be murdered"? On the one hand, it cannot be infringed unless there is someone else there to infringe it. On the other hand, if you exist within any society (the default position of all human beings throughout history), then this right requires active protection to maintain. Overall, I don't think it is a useful distinction to make. For either type of human ri…
Those are very different from healthcare, which is not something you have unless it is infringed. Healthcare needs to be actively provided for you. When you can very clearly put all "rights" into one of the two buckets, it's pretty clear there is a real distinction.
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Programmers can. Most people cannot.
Most people can’t live on their wages? What do they do? You realize that over 90% of US citizens have health insurance right?
Going off the 2019 numbers, so pre-pandemic: 10% of Americans have a negative net worth. 30% of americans are on means-tested benefits: Medicaid, foodstamps, TANF, WIC, welfare, or section 8. An additional 20% on top of that, or more than 50% of Americans, receive federal subsidies, so do not fully pay for their own insurance.
Even for those who qualify as "with insurance", for the above specification, do not possess insurance nearly to the scale that is implied in the above quote of $2500 per month. Of the 86% insured (the number rose from 10% in 2018 to 13.7% in 2019), 20% are on individual plans with a deductible over $5000.
Fewer than 40% of Americans actually have healthcare insurance of the quality implied above -- which makes sense, because $2500 a month is actually a reasonable figure, and that exceeds wages for 40% of Americans. Reminder that 30% of Americans live at or below the poverty line, and receive government assistance for basic needs of food and shelter.
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Most people can’t live on their wages? What do they do? You realize that over 90% of US citizens have health insurance right?
Go into debt, mostly. Going off the 2019 numbers, so pre-pandemic: 10% of Americans have a negative net worth. 30% of americans are on means-tested benefits: Medicaid, foodstamps, TANF, WIC, welfare, or section 8. An additional 20% on top of that, or more than 50% of Americans, receive federal subsidies, so do not fully pay for their own insurance. Even for those who qualify as "with insurance", for the above specifi…
If you are free to set metric arbitrarily, you can always ensure that majority of Americans do not meet it. For example, fewer than 40% of Americans drive cars that are younger than 5 years old. Does it mean that driving is out of reach for most Americans? Clearly, it's not.
More concretely, despite that "fewer than 40%" have healthcare coverage of the sort you arbitrarily chosen, it turns out that 70% of Americans rate their healthcare coverage as either excellent or good ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar... ), and this figure has been stable for last 20 years.
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And if you have kids, it's like grand per kid for daycare right? The US tech sector is _perfect_ for a single male engineer, who doesn't have any health issues. You can work 16 hour days, sleep on the office sofa and earn six-seven figures before you're 30. But as someone who's definitely not 30 any more, with a family and health issues there is no way I'm even considering moving to the US. I could easily triple or q…
> And if you have kids, it's like grand per kid for daycare right? It depends on your income. Here in Maryland, families of four making up to $70,000/year are eligible for childcare subsidies. These numbers come from high income people who try to imagine what it would be like to be low income but don’t actually know about all of the programs the US, especially blue coastal states and the Midwest, have for people unde…
From ages 0-5 you need to pay for childcare, pre-school starts at 6 and that's free. Pre-school isn't 8 hours a day though, so you need to pay around 100€ to supplement it with childcare.
After that it's school, high-school and university, all free again. High-school & university require you to buy the books though, which do have a cost, but nothing like the US schoolbook prices from what I've gathered. It's hundreds of euros per term if you buy new.
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> And if you have kids, it's like grand per kid for daycare right? It depends on your income. Here in Maryland, families of four making up to $70,000/year are eligible for childcare subsidies. These numbers come from high income people who try to imagine what it would be like to be low income but don’t actually know about all of the programs the US, especially blue coastal states and the Midwest, have for people unde…
On the other hand, in Finland the cost is around 200-250€ a month per child and the cost goes down with each child currently enrolled. From ages 0-5 you need to pay for childcare, pre-school starts at 6 and that's free. Pre-school isn't 8 hours a day though, so you need to pay around 100€ to supplement it with childcare. After that it's school, high-school and university, all free again. High-school & university requ…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely get 3-4x less than US in the EU country where I live. But who cares.. I like the low-pressure life here. Rents are lower than the US too. We have socialised healthcare, safe gun-free cities. That's worth a lot more than a number on a bank statement. I hear that in the US people will lose their healthcare when they lose a job and it could cost $1000 a month (which is more than my monthly rent)! Here it's…
> I hear that in the US people will lose their healthcare when they lose a job and it could cost $1000 a month (which is more than my monthly rent)! This is true with some caveats: If you lose your job, you lose health insurance from the job by default. But in general you have a choice to buy the same plan you had, at the full cost (including whatever the employer used to pay), which can, yes, be $1000/mo — or signif…