- > The difference is this, some try to impose their opinions on society
So literally Musk and his pals?
> society’s well-being should stop meddling.
So again, Musk et al.? I'm really confused... what are you trying to say. That only some people are allowed to meddle while everyone else should shut up and mind their own business? How do you determine that? Wealth? Political opinions? Class? Race?
- > The elected representative of the country made
Elected by 23.41%? What about the remaining 76.50%? Also 30% didn't even vote.
Also what about the president of Poland and other victims of the nazis? Did they "exonerate" him?
Of course to be fair its hard to blame a drug addict who seemingly lacks self control for his erratic public behavior.
> seems performative
If those people stop buying Tesla's cars and that hurts its share price its not performative anymore.
- > a representative of Jews
So if a Trump made a Twitter post "exonerating" someone who said something awful about America that would be the same? Because he represents 100% of the country.
Almost half of the countries hates Netanyahu and he's only in charge because of the support from far-right.
Regardless of this you think that a certain limited subsection of Israeli population who share Netanyahu and not the millions of Israeli's who don't let alone all the people who are Jewish are not allowed to have an opinion about his actions? Rather a silly thing to say.
- > but if any of my 20 employees did the same
You could all then march around the office or even out on the street with your hands raised. Surely nobody but snowflakes could be offended by that.
- > he's a friend to the Jewish community
So? Does that means nobody else is allowed to have an opinion about the salute that he made. Sure he's pro Israel, that's not uncommon at all amongst the far right these days.
> who might have been offended by his gesture
What about the people who seem to be highly offended by people who have been offended by his gesture. What do you call them?
- It can but I don't think it is. I can't find direct stats (I mean I can find nominal but not equivalized/ social transfer adjusted figures) to compare but e.g. 1st quantile income cut-off in Sweden is 64% of the median while for first decile it's 49%
Utah on the other hand (surprisingly or not) has the highest first quintile mean (yeah.. slightly apples and oranges but gives an advantage to Utah) in the US, yet it's still only around 25% of the state median.
So if compare Utah to the national average and use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c... to compare it with Sweden
it's 62.30 * 1.28 (Utah vs US median in 2022) * 0.25 = $19.936
Sweden:
43.9 * 0.49 = $21.51, so a 1st decile Swede has higher PPP + social transfers adjusted income that the first quintile mean in Utah.
If course it's rather convoluted since I'm too lazy to find directly comparable data. Disregards (uses US PPP + social transfers instead of just Utah's etc.).
However I think it's broadly accurate(ish), considering that Utah has higher than average median income and the highest first quintile income all other states would do even worse.
Of course Eastern European states are poorer but Sweden is closer to the EU average than Utah is to the US average (and Sweden's GINI is around average in Europe while Utah's is the lowest in the US).
- Median not the mean(average). So no, not mathematically..
- PPP adjusted median household disposable income per capita (with social transfers like public healtchae and stuff) in US was $62k back in 2022. West Virginia is ~72% of the national median. So Sweden?
Of course, money obviously isn't everything (not /s). And income inequality is much higher in WV than in Sweden. It's actually higher than in any European country. Which makes comparisons like this rather tricky (it's not even rich vs poor but median vs poor which is the problem in the US when you compare it to Europe).
The most equal US state (Utah) is still more unequal than the EU country which has the highest income inequality ( Bulgaria).
Interestingly enough before taxes France, Finland, Italy, UK etc. have comparable income inequality to the US.
West Virginia isn't the poorest state though (e.g. it's about on par with New Mexico). Mississippi and Louisiana are.
- > "So look, you can't afford rent, you can't afford groceries due to inflation, your student loans and medical bills are crippling, but the good news is tech stocks are up 200% since last year"
You can compare the disposable incomes in Europe and the US. I mean a median American can afford a whole lot more of those things than a median European.
- > Europe understands that innovation is not good per se
Same applies to economic growth and higher disposable incomes I presume?
> and that an economy should follow the people, not people following the economy.
It's not exactly working though is. Or are you saying that Europeans are somehow "stagnant" therefore the economy should also be stagnant? Which doesn't sound that reasonable or a nice thing to say...
- > The things they're forcing Apple to allow, Microsoft already allows
Apple's and oranges? MS doesn't have a phone OS anymore...
- You mean legally mandating all electronics stores to stock computers with Linux installed regardless if there is demand for that or not? Because how else exactly could this work?
- Perhaps. But I don't think that's the public consensus. So it's hard to accept such arguments without any evidence.
AFAIK in Europe most food safety regulation is coming from the EU directly and not the national governments. Also it's not like all countries in Europe have public tax funded healthcare systems.
Fundamentally some are inherently not that different from the one in the US (i.e. semi-private or even entirely privatized) it's just that they much better regulated and much more efficient.
Even if we exclude private spending the US government already spends more per capita on healthcare than most other countries so why would anything change if e.g. Medicare was extended to a higher proportion of the population?
- Can you not buy more or less as unhealthy products in countries with universal healthcare as in US?
e.g. smoking rate is considerably higher in France or even in Spain
Sugar consumption isn't relatively that high either compared to most European countries:
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...
- > Finland is also just about the most ethnically, religiously, demographically and linguistically homogenous nation you could pick from.
Considering it has pretty much had effectively two primary languages for the past several hundreds years that seems like a stretch? Two of the most famous Finns of all time like Linus Torvalds or Mannerheim didn't even speak Finnish as their first language. Not exactly a sign of "linguistic homogeneity"..
- Well... if we're living in a imaginary/video game world where US invades Canada it wouldn't be too far fetched to expect Britain and France to intervene? I mean which is more absurd?
- > The way the electrical system works.
But that's hardly comparable? Each kWh costs some amount of energy to generate. Do you think it costs an ISP meaningfully more to run a 10 Gbps at 90% than 70%?
- At least the Scots and Welsh still exist (e.g. unlike the Occitan people or the Bretons) and were actually allowed to have a referendum (unlike the Catalans).
- That's not relevant for anyone making Chromebooks (especially low to mid end ones) though. Unless you can get an equivalent RISC-V chip significantly cheaper than an off the shelf x86/ARM one why would they do it (considering the extra costs/overhead from supporting a niche platform in addition to lost sales).
Yes but tech companies and startups are still highly concentrated in a handful of locations.