641–650 of 944 posts
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Europe is the birthplace of democracy, socialism, feminism and secularism. Ofcourse Christ conservatives hate it.
Good thing we are a Democratic Republic :)
I live in Poland. This headline is misleading. Poland didn't build a top-20 economy. Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap. There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies. The "growth" is branch offices of German and American corporations taking advantage of engineers who'll work for 40% of Berlin rates. Remove the foreign-owned sector and you're l…
Singapore isn't a "fake rich" country because most of the companies that have settled down there are international businesses, the money is as real as anywhere else, so are the jobs. Always strikes me as a bit atavistic when people talk about companies as if they're owned by a country despite the fact that the value creation and supply chains run through two hundred countries.
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Not arguing for this one way or another, but as countries become more economically developed, they invariably move off of manufacturing and more into services because it's a higher value part of the economic food chain (wish I could find the research article with all the data - I remember reading it as part of a post arguing that Trump's attempts to "bring back manufacturing jobs to the US" was doomed to fail) So, th…
> So, the reason you can buy motors and robotics components from Poland and not Canada is because Poland has lower costs I hear you, and I partially agree. What I worry is that this made more sense ten or twenty years ago, though. Living in Canada for 40 years, I'm no longer confident that we can continue using economic levers to allow ourselves to output less and buy more from poorer countries. We're stagnating, and…
I live in Poland. This headline is misleading. Poland didn't build a top-20 economy. Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap. There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies. The "growth" is branch offices of German and American corporations taking advantage of engineers who'll work for 40% of Berlin rates. Remove the foreign-owned sector and you're l…
What kind of dev salaries are you seeing in Poland? I have family in Poland, they are from smaller villages and they ALWAYS complain about EU and the economy. I wonder if things are similar in large cities.
Also, people like to complain.
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> We should be able to do this. That would require work. Canadians just want to buy real estate, watch it go up 10x, then sell and retire in Mexico.
You're describing something that some Canadians did (and very few still do), but this is not reflective of the vast majority of us. For most Canadians, especially as our economy declines, our extremely expensive homes are more like death sentences for our financial futures. We're not going to profit off of these things—ever—unless decades-long trends rapidly begin to reverse rather than accelerate.
The point is that capital holders decided doing risky things isn't worth it, so they invested in unproductive low-risk assets, then the government juiced the immigration rate, said assets rose, capital holders are making off like bandits leaving Canadians behind in a stagnant economy holding the proverbial bag...
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Do you have any sources for the claim that a large part of growth is off-shoring? Because that seems extremely implausible, and actually very insulting to the incredible success of Eastern Europe, before and after joining the EU, in closing the gap to Western Europe over the last 3 decades. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
I’m so confused. At least in tech all the big companies I work with are hiring in Poland because it is about the same as India after losses around fake hiring and the quality averages better. It is absolutely a huge offshoring target at least for the US.
Anecdotes from your bubble inside one particular industry, that represents a small fraction of the economy of a nation, do not adequately explain the post soviet transformation of economies containing hundreds of millions of people. That's all.
Specifically I asked for evidence that current GDP growth is significantly driven by this specific type of foreign investment, as claimed. None has been forthcoming.
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Poland's first partly free election was on 4 June 1989, preceded by the roundtable negotiations. The protests in Czechoslovakia came later, called the Velvet Revolution, from 17 to 28 November 1989. In June 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections, a year after Poland. Poland paved the way for the whole of central and eastern Europe. The Round Table produced the negotiated-exit template that Hungary b…
The protests in Czechoslovakia came earlier, in 1968! The Soviets rolled in the tanks in response. Poland had a mass solidarity movement rise up in 1980. The USSR didn't decide to send in the military then; they were lucky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_reaction_to_the_Polish_... There was a lot of unrest in Poland, and general strikes. Martial law was imposed. If you were an immigrant from Czechslovakia in a…
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You haven’t seen that much of the US if your only impression of small towns and rural areas is rundown and poor. There are some vibrant and beautiful towns scattered throughout “flyover country”. Plenty that are decrepit too, but rural America is not a monolith.
> There are some vibrant and beautiful towns scattered throughout “flyover country”. In my experience, these places tend to be where rich people from cities own vacation property or can commute to a city for work. An example in Minnesota is the Brainerd Lakes area, which subsists almost entirely on people from the Twin Cities visiting their lake cabins from May to September. There are some nice small towns and plenty…
You’re right about limited economic opportunity, which comes with its own problems. That doesn’t preclude towns from responsible use of their natural resources or using the tax base to reinvest in the town. Not all do, but some do, to varying degrees of success. This idea that the majority of the US outside of urban areas is in a state of rotting collapse simply isn’t true.
Poverty rates in urbanized vs nonmetro areas are only a few percentage points apart: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rur...
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German working class is actually benefiting from this as Poland it one of their biggest importers now. And they are still benefiting from slave labor, stolen precious metals, and art they got during the WW2. Not to mention the Marshall Plan. They really can't be complaining.
German working class is displaced or has their salaries driven down by either Poles or Romanians working in Germany while their families live cheaply at home or by corporations moving factories to Poland and Romania. You have no clue what you are talking about. I wonder why this sort of obnoxious reasoning always comes from Poles and never from Czech people for example.
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German working class is actually benefiting from this as Poland it one of their biggest importers now. And they are still benefiting from slave labor, stolen precious metals, and art they got during the WW2. Not to mention the Marshall Plan. They really can't be complaining.
> German working class is actually benefiting from this as Poland it one of their biggest importers now. Yes they do. > And they are still benefiting from slave labor Not sure whether that really matters now-a-days for the economy. > stolen precious metals One of the cores of industrial and mine centers that made the German Empire thrive during the Belle Epoque, are now owned by Poland. > Not to mention the Marshall…