Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brexit is widely regarded as both a failure (in the UK) and a cautionary lesson (in the rest of the EU).
By widely you mean the guardian readership ? Or some left leaning poll ? What’s your source ?
Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
171–180 of 186 posts
Re: Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is fairly clear that all polling favours rejoining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_re-accession_of_the_... Interestingly, the inflection point seems to have been within months of the UK actually leaving (while the UK formally left in Jan 2020, nothing changed until Jan 2021).
i see. so according to you (and the polsters) i guess its fair to conclude that a significant majority either wanted to remain in the EU or came to feel that way after brexit ... to further play along .. nigel farage .. an outsider to the political system (lets call him political white hat hacker) .. was able to exploit vulnerabilities in this system and the public opinion to get brexit over the line .. I'm curious t…
It was really more Johnson than Farage, though he was by no means the only mover. There had been a campaign to convince the British people that all their problems were down to the EC/EU since the early 70s.
Remember, a lot of brexit voters voted for, essentially, a completely fantasy situation; they thought they'd be getting a situation similar to Norway, only with no free movement and with opt-outs from all rules. The EU was extremely clear from the beginning that this was not on the table (it never made sense in the first place; you can't have a single market where one participant is excused from following any of the rules), but Johnson et al were telling them that was what they were voting for. The hard(ish) brexit they ended up with is very much not what most people will have been expecting.
Re: Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
100,000,000 American owe $220 billion in medical debt. https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/scheinman-institute/blog/healthc... In the US medical bills are half of all debts sent to collections. 41% of US adults have health care debt, 14 million had medical debts over $1,000 and 3 million had debts over $10,000. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/the-burden-of-medi... 65% of US bankruptcies are due to medical debt http…
100 million Americans owing $220 billion in medical debt is an average of $2,200 per person. That's too much, but that's not bankruptcy levels of debt. 100 million Americans owe $1.6 trillion in auto loan debt. 530,000 medical bankruptcies per year, in a country of 350 million. That number is too high, but the average American does not go through this. Please understand the difference between saying "everything is gr…
Bankruptcies normally impact whole families. So 530,000 bankruptcies could easily be 4,000,000 people impacted, per year. Over the last 20 years that is over 20% of the population.
Re: Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not really sure what you are getting at. I can't imagine you don't understand that some people think that a fetus, being a creature that is alive and has human DNA is considered a human. You may disagree with such an opinion but it is held by huge amounts of the population. Once you understand that you should be able to understand that some people would continue along the logical conclusion that all humans shoul…
Right. So the same people protect people from being killed by providing them with healthcare, food and shelter? After all to do that doesn’t require involuntary servitude to carry a fetus for 9 months
The Polish government provides that for its citizens along with foreigners.
https://www.gov.pl/web/family/social-assistance-principles
The Catholic Church also provides additional services that includes food, healthcare and shelter.
So yes, it seems like the people who support abortion bans do provide them with healthcare, food and shelter.
Re: Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maternal/infant mortality, lifespan, and murder rate are all in a realm I'd call not-great-not-terrible, where we're toward the tail of wealthy countries, but not close to the average of the third world. Those also tend to correlate poorly with what we'd generally consider "first/third world." For example, #1 in maternal mortality is Belarus, not generally a country to be envied or emulated. Indonesia has one of the…
Yeah, us American's don't even want lower Childbirth mortality, longer lifespan-healthspan, lower murder rates, paid vacations, lower worked hours per year, job security, etc. Those things are just for crappy countries. You sure defended the heck out of our big, beautiful, great again, rapidly declining shit sandwich. Not sure the euros will buy it (it's a shit sandwich after all) but we can feel less bad about our d…
I'm looking at facts. If someone tells me that the US qualifies as a third-world country based on metrics, and those metrics don't support the claim, I'm going to point that out. I'm sorry if this upsets you. (Not really.)
Should we do better? Absolutely. Are we a third-world country based on the listed metrics? No.
There are plenty of things that are actually wrong with this place without making up stuff like Americans working more and having worse job security than first-world countries.
Re: Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
100 million Americans owing $220 billion in medical debt is an average of $2,200 per person. That's too much, but that's not bankruptcy levels of debt. 100 million Americans owe $1.6 trillion in auto loan debt. 530,000 medical bankruptcies per year, in a country of 350 million. That number is too high, but the average American does not go through this. Please understand the difference between saying "everything is gr…
Bankruptcies normally impact whole families. So 530,000 bankruptcies could easily be 4,000,000 people impacted, per year. Over the last 20 years that is over 20% of the population.
Or they could all be single people who went bankrupt because they gambled away all of their money, but they list medical bills as a contributing factor because their bankruptcy filing included a $20 copay for treating their gambler's elbow. See, I can make up stuff too.
Re: Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't abuse "objectively." There's no objective measure of what "working OK" even means in the first place, let alone objective information that says whether or not we meet that bar. EU life expectancy was 81.7 in 2024. Two years makes one of them OK and the other not? What do we call a place like Hungary which is quite a bit below the US here? Or maybe it's OK because they don't spend as much? I also said for…
If you pay much more and get worse results that's objectively not OK. It means the system is inefficient and could be easily improved saving lives and money. > Bad life expectancy is concentrated in the poorest Americans. Which is not a good thing to say about this country, but it does mean that most Americans live longer. I've seen this defence many times, in different contexts, and it always strikes me as very stra…
> Why do you assume most Americans are rich? And why do you assume they are the ones that matter? Very weird. But let's take it at face value.
Seriously? The quote you're responding to divides Americans up into "the poorest" and everyone else. By definition, most Americans are not "the poorest." I'm not assuming anything.
This comment tree is very frustrating. People don't seem to understand the idea of metrics, or "objectively," toss out sophomoric "America bad" nonsense like, "you don't get paid vacation" (almost everyone does), "you go bankrupt if you get cancer" (almost nobody does), "you work more than other rich countries" (we don't), and act like any correction is a equivalent to saying we're the best.
There are real criticisms to be made about the US. There are ways in which the US is behind other wealthy nations and we shouldn't be. But it is very much not "basically a third-world country masquerading as a first-world one...."
Re: Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently HN commenters have difficulty with the concept of "metrics." What are the numbers? The US system sucks in a lot of ways, but it works OK for most Americans. If you're very poor, you'll have Medicaid and it'll cost you nothing. If you're an average middle class person, you'll have decent health insurance and your costs will be affordable. There's a slice of people in the middle who don't qualify for medicai…
> but there's a pretty big gulf between a significant minority who can face massive financial burdens from medical care "significant minority".
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Re: Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn’t learn. Those That voted to leave are either dead now, or still think it’s right, but the uk was “holding it wrong”. The majority of taxpayers wanted to stay. The majority of under 65s wanted to stay.
Wrong. I’m a 40 something ethnic minority guy and I voted to leave. Back then I was in my 30s. Whats true is that remainers were more vocal and loud about their message, whilst the silent majority did what silent majorities do .. quietly won, they always do.
you’re in the minority of under 65s who voted to kill the economy and take away freedoms. You’re in the minority of workers (assuming you work).
Nobody claimed no one under 65 voted for Brexit, just the majority. At your age in rhe 25-35 bracket you were outnumbered 2:1.
If votes were weighed by years you have to live with it remain would have won with about 65%.
I hope you’re enjoying it.
Re: Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the metric for that? The average American has decent health insurance. Our system can be painful and I'm not advocate for it, but the average American is not going bankrupt due to medical issues.
I know this is anecdotal from what I read here and the few engineers I’ve spoken personally. Having a good job is the only way to get good/decent health care. Even then, there are many surprises in terms of what you have to pay yourself and how expensive certain things are. Basically any chronic disease will be very expensive. And don’t lose your job either because then you can kiss the insurance goodbye as well, kic…
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