41–50 of 189 posts
I don't get the hype around nominal GDP at all – looks great, but tells you little to none about the actual living conditions. Living in Poland, I don't feel richer than an average Belgian person (and I've had contact with many of them across the years).
I saw an interesting stat recently that the poorest USA state, Mississippi, has a larger economy and GDP than 1/3rd of all EU members. It just seems like the EU is too top-heavy and I wonder if that's where a lot of the discontent comes from. It seems like there a lot of micro-nations in eastern Europe that have outsized influence over the union as a whole.
I don't get the hype around nominal GDP at all – looks great, but tells you little to none about the actual living conditions. Living in Poland, I don't feel richer than an average Belgian person (and I've had contact with many of them across the years).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there a lot of micro-nations in eastern Europe that have outsized influence over the union as a whole Would you give an example of when that has happened? > It just seems like the EU is too top-heavy The EU intentionally admitted many poorer countries, to promote freedom, security and stability in Europe in the long term. Without EU membership, they would be under pressure from Russia and others. > discontent What…
> What discontent do you mean? I mean, Brexit was the ultimate discontent and it didn't just come out of nowhere. It's still very recent history and, as far as I know, the circumstances that caused it haven't really changed.
Then instead of accepting the changing circumstances of the world, it is blamed on a single entity “EU” that is single handedly causing all their woes. Just leave and your lives will be better. Well, they learned.
This is how you get people to vote for someone like trump. They claim it is all the fault of some X, get people riled up, promise to fix X, get voted, and then you have to actually make their lives better.
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Wouldn’t „more freedom of expression“ imply less conservative? Or what aspects of conservatism, and what aspects of freedom of expression, are you referring to here?
Not if your tradition is to have freedom. Then to be a conservative means to conserve freedom. Think about the UK & US. The conservatives don't want to change what it means to be American/British, but the far left want to change it all. They want to change: ownership, innovation, free market, property, freedom of speech/expression, freedom of thought/opinion, employment, government, you name it. Conservatives = resis…
And abortions due to fetal abnormalities are no longer permitted in Poland.
Isn’t that at odds with „conserve freedom“?
Poland has made a lot of good moves lately. for techies in the UK/US they might not care that much - but there's also an effect on you. in the U.K - a polish skilled workers are choosing to remaining in Poland instead of moving to the uk. for the US - a lot of firms are setting up polish offices - hence when you hear 'a.i' efficiency most of those jobs have moved to Poland or India. Whether it's big tech, big banks a…
And the people I've had the luck of meeting at a very early age during a student exchange lived up to that.
Poland is an indispensable pillar of the EU, and integrates countries such as UK, Italy, Germany, Greece, Austria, Romania, and many more countries in the east (I just don't want to list all of them here, because it's a slippery slope).
And Poland as a society has gone through a hard struggle to earn their very own power, stance and leverage.
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Not facing the choice of dying or going bankrupt?
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.
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, kicking you even further down. Potentially deep into debt.
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Which metrics are those? Things don’t look great for the poorest Americans, but the average American isn’t living a life that’s even remotely third world.
Dying in the third-world from cancer means you die. Dying in the US from cancer means you probably will bankrupt your family first, and ultimately die faster due to the financial burden/stress.
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 medicaid but don't have decent health insurance, and they're going to have serious financial trouble. But most Americans aren't in that situation.
There's a tendency to look at the worst situations and assume it applies to everyone. How we treat the least fortunate is extremely important and I won't defend the US here, but there's a pretty big gulf between a significant minority who can face massive financial burdens from medical care, and "it's basically a third-world country...."