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As an European who've tried the American way. I have to say that it is clearly worse. In the EU country I was, when i get a job/flat/whatever, I give a copy of
by user5994461 10y ago
As an European who've tried the American way. I have to say that it is clearly worse.
In the EU country I was, when i get a job/flat/whatever, I give a copy of my national ID and tax statement, and that's alright.
In the USA/UK, when I get a job/flat/whatever, noone trusts me or the government. I have to give plenty of documents and 5 years of history to a 3rd party shady check agency, that's gonna resell the data and spam me.
You can be sure that after a few years of your life, everything about you have been resold by these agencies and is available to the world: all your addresses, jobs, income, family situation, etc...
You American guys have hundreds of private big brothers incentivized against you, all because you wanted to avoid trusting a government. That didn't go well.
- snarfy 10y ago> all because you wanted to avoid trusting a government. That didn't go well. I'm not so sure considering the current administration.
- 0xfeba 10y agoWell, perhaps, but even the one thing we did trust them with (OPM data) all got pilfered away.
- user5994461 10y agoThe administration already has all these information. You're registered for taxes, healthcare, criminal background, etc. You're not hiding anything from them and you're not helping yourself by duplicating that to shady agencies.
- Super_Jambo 10y agoYou trust people who sell your info to spammers not to sell or even give it to the gov?
- oblio 10y agoI'd say that the two are connected. The US has a such an anti-government attitude that the Republican Party becomes the majority party instead of being laughed out of Congress. A party whose members frequently advocate cutting healthcare for the poor, reducing education budgets, scaling back environmental policies, etc.
- karmajunkie 10y agoIronically, the current administration is in power in no small part due to a constituency that doesn't trust the government. Self-fulfilling prophecies...
- MrBuddyCasino 10y agoIt really seems that americans do not want a functioning government. But maybe its just the curse of large countries to have disfunctional governments, and it can't be fixed.
- virmundi 10y agoI would say that the United States does not want a functioning government and that is by design. Remember the Federalists? They argued for a better government than the US had under the Articles of Confederation (kinda EU like body before our current Constitution). Many Americans read these guys and agree. What we often forget is the AntiFederalists, amongst them was Jefferson. As a result of the Federalists and the AntiFederalists, the US has the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Guess which side brought what to the party. Our current problem is that under FDR the government got too big, but we didn't ever try to clear it up later. As a result we have a pretty shitty hybrid of big government and Republicans running around not doing their jobs of removing the root. This leads to a hodgepodge of restrictions and regulations that make it hard for big government to streamline/be efficient. It also makes it hard for small government to take root since everything has to be done in the bureaucratic manner.
- justavoice 10y agoWait, you're saying that, instead of trusting a couple of companies that can only hinder you financially we should trust a large company that can jail us forever?
- hansthehorse 10y agoAmericans distrust national ID. Several administrations have floated the idea and have quickly learned that fact. We do have a de facto national ID in drivers licenses. If we had a medicare for all health system we would than have a national ID and a lot of those problems would go away.