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To be honest, as a european, I don't really understand all this fuss about exceptionalism, being the biggest economy in the world, having the highest amount of

To be honest, as a european, I don't really understand all this fuss about exceptionalism, being the biggest economy in the world, having the highest amount of billionaires in the world, etc. I know that it is all a big deal in US and the Americans I speak with every now and then all proudly always talk that greatness, but I would just care about being able to live a life with dignity with socialised services, government pension, sick days, etc, that do not depend on a specific company benefit but belong to the human being as a human being So I still believe US has greatness, I can see Jeff Bezos created an empire, but then courier have no rights and people dies in a warehouse peeing in a bottle, I see the greatness of Elon Musk but then he just behaves like a child on twitter with non-sense leeching taxpayers I've gone a bit off topic, but my point is, I am an employee with a government pension, 8% holiday allowance, sick days contribution that are paid monthly from my salary to the department of welfare with pension plan, as many in Europe, and my boss isn't worth thousand times than the average employee and I am not sure if he's classified in the wealthiest person of the world, I don't mind, we're not exceptional, but do our job and have life, I guess European exceptionalism is the lack of it?

systemvoltage 5y ago
What do you think about mega corps in Europe? VW, Siemens, etc? I was just trying to get some perspective, so thanks! I’d like US to adopt some of the EU bits but without losing the entrepreneural drive and atmosphere. I believe some of them are mutually-exclusive. Also worth noting corporate policies in EU: > Sometimes European integration is a byproduct of American policy. Stubbornly national elements of policymaking, such as corporation tax, are slowly being mangled into EU matters thanks to American action. A recent American-led push to set a global minimum tax rate for big business has done more to shunt the EU towards a common tax policy than years of nagging and legal tricks by Brussels. Within the EU, low-tax countries such as Ireland and Hungary wield a veto on its tax affairs. Diplomatic force majeure by America overcame that. Source: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/06/17/the-eu-made-in-america https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/06/17/the-eu-made-in-a...
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  I am not sure what to think about those mega corps, my idea is that they exist, but their relationship with their workers is subject to the oversight of governments regulations and the relationship they have with the forming unions, etc. I think their workers have a month of paid time off? The ability to have sick days without receiving them from coworkers? The ability to access socialised health care when they need it without going bankrupt? Paternity and maternity leave which might be nice or not depending on the union country in this case, for Siemens and VW in Germany I guess they have a lot of time off, as Italian I believe Italy doesn't have a good law on paternity leave, but that's improving afaik -- I think as a system EU is good for being working class, but to be honest in the past few years I've met some cases where I was not happy, I have lived in Germany for few years and I left because the last company I was working with fired 5 people who were trying to set up a worker's union, and my last boss in Netherlands was too self-centric on the way he built his startup, so on his exit he bought a big villa with swimming pool, a new tesla, but of the marketing guy who grew the company 150% YoY for the last 3 years, backend developers and frontend developers, CS, no one got anything While a friend's company who exit being sold to a US corp, gave even 3k to people who were interns for less than 6 months, and people working there longer got even bigger perks. So I think bigger companies are more regulated compared to smaller ones, so I am not worried about them, some smaller ones have owners appear to have a big ego and greed drive, which is something I would like to improve in seeing beforehand
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  Another thing I wanted to say is that when I was in Berlin I lived with an American European history/philosophy scholar for a while, and as far as I understood is that US has always been a working class supportive country up to a certain point after the WW2, so I am not surprised to learn that EU is a product of US, I think a lot of working class rights come from policies that originated in US, I just think that at a certain point US diverted from shared wealth and started caring too much about single people wealth EDIT: So I think you shouldn't take anything from working culture, I think you guys should just go back to where you were a while ago

systemvoltage 5y ago

What do you think about mega corps in Europe? VW, Siemens, etc? I was just trying to get some perspective, so thanks! I’d like US to adopt some of the EU bits but without losing the entrepreneural drive and atmosphere. I believe some of them are mutually-exclusive. Also worth noting corporate policies in EU: > Sometimes European integration is a byproduct of American policy. Stubbornly national elements of policymaking, such as corporation tax, are slowly being mangled into EU matters thanks to American action. A recent American-led push to set a global minimum tax rate for big business has done more to shunt the EU towards a common tax policy than years of nagging and legal tricks by Brussels. Within the EU, low-tax countries such as Ireland and Hungary wield a veto on its tax affairs. Diplomatic force majeure by America overcame that. Source: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/06/17/the-eu-made-in-america https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/06/17/the-eu-made-in-a...

lnxg33k1 5y ago
I am not sure what to think about those mega corps, my idea is that they exist, but their relationship with their workers is subject to the oversight of governments regulations and the relationship they have with the forming unions, etc. I think their workers have a month of paid time off? The ability to have sick days without receiving them from coworkers? The ability to access socialised health care when they need it without going bankrupt? Paternity and maternity leave which might be nice or not depending on the union country in this case, for Siemens and VW in Germany I guess they have a lot of time off, as Italian I believe Italy doesn't have a good law on paternity leave, but that's improving afaik -- I think as a system EU is good for being working class, but to be honest in the past few years I've met some cases where I was not happy, I have lived in Germany for few years and I left because the last company I was working with fired 5 people who were trying to set up a worker's union, and my last boss in Netherlands was too self-centric on the way he built his startup, so on his exit he bought a big villa with swimming pool, a new tesla, but of the marketing guy who grew the company 150% YoY for the last 3 years, backend developers and frontend developers, CS, no one got anything While a friend's company who exit being sold to a US corp, gave even 3k to people who were interns for less than 6 months, and people working there longer got even bigger perks. So I think bigger companies are more regulated compared to smaller ones, so I am not worried about them, some smaller ones have owners appear to have a big ego and greed drive, which is something I would like to improve in seeing beforehand
lnxg33k1 5y ago
Another thing I wanted to say is that when I was in Berlin I lived with an American European history/philosophy scholar for a while, and as far as I understood is that US has always been a working class supportive country up to a certain point after the WW2, so I am not surprised to learn that EU is a product of US, I think a lot of working class rights come from policies that originated in US, I just think that at a certain point US diverted from shared wealth and started caring too much about single people wealth EDIT: So I think you shouldn't take anything from working culture, I think you guys should just go back to where you were a while ago