5 ms·

People are mostly just pointing out the very objective losses to quality of life in the US compared to Europe, which is a fair answer to the original question.

People are mostly just pointing out the very objective losses to quality of life in the US compared to Europe, which is a fair answer to the original question. And day to day quality of life has nothing to do with geopolitics for most people. US just simply ranks far lower than Central Europe and the Nordics in these measurements. A lot of it is just city planning and infrastructure.

seibelj 4y ago
Norway has 5 million people, insane gas reserves, is a monoculture of ethnically similar people, has basically no immigration to speak of, and owns 2% of every publicly traded country worth a damn. I can’t believe anyone would point to this country smaller than a single metro area of the USA as something that is replicable.
- Daishiman 4y ago
  Ok, take Spain. Quality of life there is just substantially better than pretty much all of the US.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      - _-david-_ 4y ago
        Can you name a country who hasn't done bad things?
        guerrilla 4y ago
        Can you name another country that's done bad things to other countries for every year of its existence aside from a decade?
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        UK
        guerrilla 4y ago
        Well, that was the British Empire, but I'll give it to you... fair enough.
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        The UK has continued doing bad things. So has almost every country.
        helloworld11 4y ago
        The USSR. (I know, doesn't exist anymore) but I can't think of a single year of its existence in which it wasn't occupying, invading or repressing some subject foreign nationality or population in some way, usually many of them simultaneously.
    - Daishiman 4y ago
      I see you've never even seen the population of immigrants in Spain.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    In what way? Do people live on huge ranches / estates, walk through large redwood trees, ski down a glacier, watch professional football/hockey/basketball live? Can they hunt, fish, shoot or run into hollywood celebrities? Can they even buy a house or do they have to settle for an apartment? Quality of live might be great in Barcelona if you like to drink and eat and want to work less. But Spain is so small comoared to the US. The US has so much more variety.. deserts, tundra, forests, palm trees, rocky mountains, cities..
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      > In what way? Do people live on huge ranches / estates, walk through large redwood trees, ski down a glacier, watch professional football/hockey/basketball live? Can they hunt, fish, shoot or run into hollywood celebrities? What... world do you live in that Europeans* can't do all of that except the last? > Can they even buy a house or do they have to settle for an apartment? Of course... wtf? lol 76% of people own their homes in Spain. Home ownership in the US is only 65%... * Spanish people can go anywhere in the EU with just an ID, no passport needed, just like in the US.
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        Spain is much smaller than Europe and houses are much smaller and salaries are smaller and the political divide is much worse in Spain. Two different states want out and after a vote they arrested the head of state for those regions. The legacy of Franco..
        guerrilla 4y ago
        Did you check your numbers this time or are you still just making things up? I'm going to trust you know nothing about the politics of Spain and ignore that comment. > Two different states want out and after a vote they arrested the head of state for those regions. The legacy of Franco.. You must be trolling. You literally had a civil war for the same exact reason... Unfortunately, no state allows any subset of itself to secede.
      - 4y ago
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > is a monoculture of ethnically similar people, has basically no immigration to speak This isn't even true (immigration accounts for half of Norway's population growth) but let's take a more extreme example: Sweden, the country with 7th highest quality of life on planet Earth yet every 1 in 11 people is an immigrant. This single case proves your generalization wrong. Every 16th person is a first generation immigrant originating from outside of Europe. You seem completely ignorant of the fact that we took hundreds of times more immigrants per capita than any country on Earth yet we all dominate the fuck out of ALL of quality of live rankings.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Norway's population grew under 50,000 which means they welcomed 20,000.. Cities like Toronto are welcoming 10 - 15 times more people from a much wider variety of places. The ethnicities in Norway are recorded as Norwegian 83.2%, other European 8.3%, other 8.5% Your vision of Norway and the numbers don't lineup. 92.9% of people are white..
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      I think you misread what I said.

seibelj 4y ago

Norway has 5 million people, insane gas reserves, is a monoculture of ethnically similar people, has basically no immigration to speak of, and owns 2% of every publicly traded country worth a damn. I can’t believe anyone would point to this country smaller than a single metro area of the USA as something that is replicable.

Daishiman 4y ago
Ok, take Spain. Quality of life there is just substantially better than pretty much all of the US.
- seibelj 4y ago
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    - _-david-_ 4y ago
      Can you name a country who hasn't done bad things?
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        Can you name another country that's done bad things to other countries for every year of its existence aside from a decade?
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        UK
        guerrilla 4y ago
        Well, that was the British Empire, but I'll give it to you... fair enough.
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        The UK has continued doing bad things. So has almost every country.
        helloworld11 4y ago
        The USSR. (I know, doesn't exist anymore) but I can't think of a single year of its existence in which it wasn't occupying, invading or repressing some subject foreign nationality or population in some way, usually many of them simultaneously.
  - Daishiman 4y ago
    I see you've never even seen the population of immigrants in Spain.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  In what way? Do people live on huge ranches / estates, walk through large redwood trees, ski down a glacier, watch professional football/hockey/basketball live? Can they hunt, fish, shoot or run into hollywood celebrities? Can they even buy a house or do they have to settle for an apartment? Quality of live might be great in Barcelona if you like to drink and eat and want to work less. But Spain is so small comoared to the US. The US has so much more variety.. deserts, tundra, forests, palm trees, rocky mountains, cities..
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    > In what way? Do people live on huge ranches / estates, walk through large redwood trees, ski down a glacier, watch professional football/hockey/basketball live? Can they hunt, fish, shoot or run into hollywood celebrities? What... world do you live in that Europeans* can't do all of that except the last? > Can they even buy a house or do they have to settle for an apartment? Of course... wtf? lol 76% of people own their homes in Spain. Home ownership in the US is only 65%... * Spanish people can go anywhere in the EU with just an ID, no passport needed, just like in the US.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Spain is much smaller than Europe and houses are much smaller and salaries are smaller and the political divide is much worse in Spain. Two different states want out and after a vote they arrested the head of state for those regions. The legacy of Franco..
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        Did you check your numbers this time or are you still just making things up? I'm going to trust you know nothing about the politics of Spain and ignore that comment. > Two different states want out and after a vote they arrested the head of state for those regions. The legacy of Franco.. You must be trolling. You literally had a civil war for the same exact reason... Unfortunately, no state allows any subset of itself to secede.
    - 4y ago
guerrilla 4y ago
> is a monoculture of ethnically similar people, has basically no immigration to speak This isn't even true (immigration accounts for half of Norway's population growth) but let's take a more extreme example: Sweden, the country with 7th highest quality of life on planet Earth yet every 1 in 11 people is an immigrant. This single case proves your generalization wrong. Every 16th person is a first generation immigrant originating from outside of Europe. You seem completely ignorant of the fact that we took hundreds of times more immigrants per capita than any country on Earth yet we all dominate the fuck out of ALL of quality of live rankings.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Norway's population grew under 50,000 which means they welcomed 20,000.. Cities like Toronto are welcoming 10 - 15 times more people from a much wider variety of places. The ethnicities in Norway are recorded as Norwegian 83.2%, other European 8.3%, other 8.5% Your vision of Norway and the numbers don't lineup. 92.9% of people are white..
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    I think you misread what I said.