So I'd be interested what he means too.
What is for sure better in the US: There is way more space.
if you want other landscapes, you can travel outside of switzerland... it's easy...
America has the best healthcare. Not the best value, but the best healthcare. It has low taxes, lots of world class cultural institutions, and varied beautiful geography. It is the Rome of our age. Corrupt, amoral, and exploitative? Sure, but with money you can overlook that.
Scenario 1: You fall head first from a 10th floor. US healthcare has higher chance of saving your life. Scenario 2: You are an average person that hopes to get preventive medical care. You will die in the U.S of the most basic medical condition.
Unlike the US, Switzerland has the added bonus of having a very stable democracy.
However if you are willing to go with de facto rather than de jure, plenty of places in Africa and Latam can be freer on these points, especially if you have a little coin.
Financially though, places like Dubai blow away the absolutely dystopic USA controls like FATCA and world taxation/filing, KYC, AML and other madness USA uses to keep an iron grip on traditional finance channels.
But I suspect that the people who care about these things care about them a LOT.
I take it as a given that being in America in general means you could be shot randomly, with a uniform, but low probability distribution. It doesn't really matter what the state's gun laws are. So outside of notoriously "unsafe" areas, it doesn't play into my mind at all.
Same goes for being a victim of a criminal offense.
Against what/who are your defending with those firearms in the US?
No one knew who he was until he was arrested and for the most part until he was dead. His european friends would be saying the same thing as you, "don't know anyone with guns..."
Lots of guns in Europe by people who aren't supposed to have them. Either because they are criminals thus don't care about gun laws, or if they are 'good' people then they should know not to pull out a gun unless their other option is to be dead -- at which point 'fuck the law' and better to be in a jail cell than dead.
Most guns are owned by relatively few people. Nobody from the common crowd here thinks about owning fire arms, virtually nobody does. Maybe that's a cultural gap hard to imagine from an US perspective.
The question remains, against what and who are you even defending? Maybe it's different in Europe because it's densely populated, but people generally don't consider fire arms being a net plus to the security of themselves and that of their family.
It also just doesn't seem useful to move to a state with loose fire arms laws - it's much better to move to a state/city/neighborhood with low crime rate instead.
If I'm not allowed to have guns, then I am physically unsafe, because someone from government will use violence against me if they both discover it and have the ability to do something about it. I wouldn't feel safe anywhere violence is used for malum prohibitum 'crimes.' In fact I don't feel safe basically anywhere a government exists because they all do this; this is part the reason why I live in a rural area with basically no government services, no police, no public utilities or anything like that with involvement by the state beyond the bare minimum possible in the USA.
Your proposition also relies on the place itself not changing, and my and my offsprings atrophying their practice of skills of self defense and therefore not needing them when moving elsewhere. But sure if you had a magic wand and could trade 'no guns' for anyone for world peace, I'd take it.
This is a statement so far removed from reality that it makes anything else you say immediately suspect.
You appear to view "government" as an entity whose primary purpose is to bring violence against anyone who cannot resist that violence with lethal force. There is no possible justification for that as a blanket definition.
If you are omitting, perhaps, the fact that you are a wanted and dangerous person, who has, for instance, committed a string of murders, and that is why the government would "use violence against you", then that would seem to make anything you say quite inapplicable to anyone else's situation.
This discussion is, very specifically, about leaving that country for other countries.
IF the government decides to use violence against you do you really have a chance with a gun? or 10?
To your specific question, probably not, but the better question is whether you have more of a chance with or without a gun? If you look at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising for example, having a gun bought those people hours to days, which is better than nothing. Of course if you look at places like Chechnya, it bought them outright years that they were able to obtain independence from the brutality of Russia (even if not from their own brutality) as a result of militia activity in the first Chechen war.
If I understand correctly, the reasoning is a kind of long-term best-practice thinking?
And that best-practice is a high enough priority that it would prevent you from moving someplace that was otherwise better than a place that would let you have guns?
Is it only reasoning, or it there also a psychological component, like you'd also feel unsafe without guns, maybe due to past or current threatening situation (e.g., physical danger, or economic)?
If I understand correctly, you have both practical (near-term or long-term) and also philosophical objections, to the power imbalance between citizen and state, when citizens can't have guns. And it's a high priority.
FWIW, I sympathize with vigilance. Though my own priorities around guns are different. I live in a fairly safe city, with good police. Where I live, the prevalence of citizen guns seems to create more problems than it solves. The problems I have don't seem to be solvable with guns. I might feel differently, if I lived in a less-safe place or in different circumstances.
And how your gun can prevent this now? If you are allowed to carry a gun police will act like you have one lane shoot you. While in other case they will just beat you with stick.
It's much more likely that you shoot yourself or your kid shoots you or your husband/brother/other-troubled-man has a bad day and shoots you than a criminal shooting you.
The relationship between gun deaths and guns is not correlative, it's causative. Because, surprise! Guns cause gun death.
Generally, less guns = less gun death. Which might seem like such a simple understanding that it must be naive or stupid. But no, it's actually just that simple.
On a related note, less automobiles = less automobile deaths.
>Generally, less guns = less gun death. Which might seem like such a simple understanding that it must be naive or stupid. But no, it's actually just that simple.
It's really not, in many cases it's been found anti-correlative i.e. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/guns4.jpg
"Virtually all of this risk involved homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance."
Even thinking this through for a second, it makes sense someone expecting to be murdered by a family member or intimate partner might be more likely to keep a gun, as it might be useful in frustrating that effort.
Maybe you could be the first!
Kudos for engaging civilly and earnestly on this even though the majority here seem to disagree with you. It’s rare that I encounter someone coherently articulating a belief system so wildly divergent from my own.
i myself am a maximalist about this and i don't feel safe unless i carry some strains of ebola with me. it would be nice if you could support my ebola open-carry efforts (dm me for details).
[] https://1943.pl/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Kobiet...
Where I live in Arizona you can 3d print a handgun, load it, stick it down your pants, and walk around with it around town all day doing basically whatever (as long as you don't go to a school, jail, or courthouse basically). All with zero background checks, licenses/permits, or even needing to carry an ID. Can I do that in Switzerland? I doubt they would let you do that even with a long rifle, unless you are going to/from some sort of approved activity.
The only euro-controlled place I know where you can basically do that is Greenland, as long as it is a bolt action rifle. Greenland is actually looser than USA in that regard, you can buy a bolt rifle like a hammer from a hardware store in Greenland with zero checks or license (IIRC, even as a foreigner) whereas in USA you could only do that if you bought it privately or made it yourself.
The domestic intelligence service can monitor or restrict anti-democratic parties, and Germany’s civil society, courts, and media are structurally hard to capture. An AfD-led government would hit legal and institutional tripwires long before it could rewrite the system.
Of course such coalition has a big number of ultra expensive and effective weapons like planes, ships and tanks. That number of weapons will last for 3 months or so. Then what? Ruzzia is not a Taliban or Hamas, you can't just bomb them with impunity. Even half a century old soviet SAMs are valid threat to anything in the air, let alone newer ones. Plus Ruzzia is not alone, they have whole Axis manufacturing power potentially behind them - Iran, China, NK etc.
I would be very concerned about Ruzzia, if I were you. Just a thought experiment, what would Germany do when Ruzzian force will appear on the Poland-Lithuanian border, annexing all Baltic states?
Even in a hypothetical total Russian victory, Moscow wouldn’t “gain” a second army. It would inherit a hostile, traumatized population and an ungovernable territory, not a usable military force. And in any case, Europe’s combined militaries (and economies) are still far larger than Russia’s, so the claim simply doesn’t hold up.
Nobody's going to ask them. Since 2022, Russia has forcibly conscripted 300 000 men from the occupied parts of Ukraine. https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/07/moscow-inches-closer-to-...
That's one of the most "German" things that's ever been said on HN.
The bottom 80% is also going to find it hard to move to another rich country. Countries in general want highly paid professionals, not a 50th percentile desk jockey.
Even poor people carry phones that have the internet, news, weather, and a million useful apps. Food is available to everyone, nearly every church has a food pantry. Even cheap houses are climate controlled. Even the homeless have shelters in most places.
For garden variety household emergencies, GoFundMe is democratized charity. It seems it often comes to the rescue for people suffering terrible luck.
Healthcare is expensive, but ACA makes it more available than before. Even early retirees get it.
Cars are expensive, too, but the get great mileage, better performance, and last longer than what we used to have.
Having grown up in the 6s and 70s, I can say with confidence that even less fortunate people have better lives than almost everybody 50 years ago. ( At least as far as material things go. )
The people who are unhappy are often comparing themselves to other people as portrayed by media and social media. That’s a sure way to feel you aren’t doing very well.
It actually can't, not generally at least for US labor.
One of the most important measures of quality is work-life balance. Basically, your life kinda sucks if you work all the time, and then you also get fat and sick and die young(er).
People in the US work a lot, and often the more wealthy, but not most wealthy, work A TON. In programming, it's not atypical to have "superstar" staff engineers putting in easily 60-70 hours a week. Of course, not including the commute.
But then there's the time off. Oh, where to begin. We're at a point where 10 days of PTO accrued a year is considered decent. It's work work work, and you can put in 20 years of service... and get, like, an extra couple days. Maybe.
None of this scales down. For example, I'm supposed to be working 40 hours a week. I'm not of course, the baseline is 45 because 9-5 is actually 9-6. And I haven't left at 6 in at least a year, so even that is underestimating it. But suppose I do work 40 hours a week.
Would I take a 50% pay cut to work 20 hours? Fuck. Yes. Yes. In a heart beat. But I can't, I'd actually be taking an 80% pay cut if I do that, so I couldn't live. And it's like this for literally ALL jobs. I can't just "move up", because the work-life balance doesn't get better, it actually just gets worse! And at no point can I take a "step down" and work less, because then I'm flipping burgers.
Below the teaser blurb ending "The Netherlands offers one way out," and the byline, where you'd expect the article to start, is the text "Your window is closing."
Fortunately, if you scroll further, the ominous warning turns out to only be for the paywall.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/1862716/542-days-brussels-brea...
New Zealand? Canada? Japan? France? I mean you really aren't trying there.
> if not further along.
The only places further along are China, Russia, Georgia, Venezuela, and Hungary. Even Slovakia or Poland or Germany aren't as bad (though still troubling). It's really hard to be more authoritarian than the US is now still. The Feds claiming they'll keep going at Comey yet again really seals the deal there .
Not saying it's worth it for you, but there are lots of places.
But the courts ruled in Comey's favor. There is no reason to think that, if the feds try again, the courts won't rule for Comey again. That's still "rule of law", no matter how hard the current administration is trying to make it otherwise.
Now, sure, in an ideal world the case should never have been filed. In a just world, he would not have been put through that. And in an even-somewhat-ideal world, the case would not be re-filed. Absolutely. But for all that, the situation in the US is not (yet) as dire as you are painting it.
The safeguard against this is supposed to be that Congress would eventually put a stop to it, or that the people wouldn't vote someone in who'd abuse the power of the executive branch to extrajudicially punish opponents. Neither of those safeguards have worked. Courts can tell them to stop but they have to keep telling them with each case, after everyone goes through all the motions (so to speak).
And there's a statute of limitations here. It has already elapsed, in fact, though the administration is trying to argue that they way they're doing it allows for an exception. If that doesn't fly, then it's just over.
Also, with the sole exception of Hungary, no place in Europe is remotely on the same authoritarian track as the US. And the democratic systems and institutions are much more robust, too. More consensus, less first-pass-the-post bullshit.
I know what the comments will be.
And the US is one of the top immigrant countries in the world. Always worth reflecting why people choose that when there is greener gras.
It's nowhere the top as a percent of the total population. It's at the top in absolute number because it's the largest developed country by far.
E.g. Switzerland has an unusually high immigrant population, but also an unusually high emmigrant population.
The U.S. has 52m immigrants and 4.8m emmigrants. [1] Nowhere else is nearly that ratio. Next closest would be Canada.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_im...
Even adjusted for CoL and public benefits, the U.S. pays well, at least on the upper end.
With the €100k fees for certain visas, with all the news about ICE, with the requirement to have public social media profiles to get in combined with the other news about people getting deported for having politically unacceptable opinions?
According to this, the USA was net-negative on immigration by 1.4 million people between Jan and June 2025, but I don't know how seasonal things and partial data modify that: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
Blip, or long term change? I also don't know.
Go to Eastern Europe, Switzerland, Scandinavia, maybe Italy or Greece.
Where you can expect salary to be a half of salary in Netherlands and even less returns from your taxes, which are anyway >30% Good choice!
:)
Learn something new every day.
To be clear, I just didn't think anyone would refer to someone from Paris specifically (rather than, "French").
I mean, a lot of places you would add "-ite" but I'm guessing that would be a less-than-ideal suffix for this particular city lol
https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...
Seems weird to me, I'd just use a hyphen, but that's how they roll.
> [...] we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,” “co-operate,” and “coöperate.” Back when the magazine was just getting started, someone decided that the first misread and the second was ridiculous, and adopted the diaeresis as the most elegant solution with the broadest application.
There are some (big) downsides though. Properties are very small and very expensive compared to other European countries, so you can't expect a high standard of living in this aspect unless you have plenty of money. Taxes are also very high. In addition to the usual income taxes, you pay a wealth tax and the threshold is very low (around 55k EUR in savings/assets) so this isn't only targeting very rich people. This makes it a pretty bad place to live if you care about investing and saving for the future.
If it wasn't for these last two points I'd almost definitely move there.
This was a deal breaker for me as someone on the FIRE path. It's neighbor, Belgium, is much better in this respect.
There are ~200 countries doing worse.
I could understand Amsterdam/Berlin for the vibe and the fact that everyone speaks english. Portugal/Spain/Greece/Italy for the weather, the nordic countries for nature and the overall lifestyle... but Belgium, really ? no offence but it's like Luxembourg, if it wasn't for tax reasons nobody would ever willingly move there
What if you plan to stay permanently? Does that change your priority for accumulating more personal wealth?
If you have an ultra-low risk investment strategy focused on value preservation and inflation beating (where your expected returns are in the low single digits e.g. 2 - 3%), that does start to look like being robbed blind.
> It is only fair that those that have a lot of money contribute
Really? 60k is "a lot of money"? Yes, it's a lot in the sense that many people have far less than that, but it's not "a lot" in the scheme of things when we're talking about saving and investing.
With 60k you'll be lucky even to get the down-payment on a mortgage for a small apartment, which you'll then be paying off every month for the next several decades. Should we be taxing people on their wealth before they've even had the chance to own their first home? I would argue that such a person can't legitimately be called wealthy.
> concludes by: "it would be perfect if not for taxes"
People wouldn't be as friendly and well educated if they went bankrupt when losing their jobs, getting a cancer, had to take $100k loans for uni, &c. the towns wouldn't be nice and clean if people didn't pay taxes for regular cleaning, ...
There are very very few countries with low taxes and nice quality of life for the average Joe, and the exceptions usually don't want you to move in. Try Albania or Bulgaria, you'll quickly understand why most people are mostly happy about paying taxes
Taxes these days keep up the ponzi scheme of european pensions and an influx of low skilled migrants that are not incentivized to work.
There is a a lot of budget between ur citizens not going bankrupt when they get sick and taking 50% of their salary.
It's always been a ponzi scheme, even 20 years ago when you enjoyed it and thought everything was perfect.
> low skilled migrants that are not incentivized to work.
Including all the FIRE people and tech migrants who come to take freebies while not chipping in
Aka a low wage labor pool to plug the youth demographic gap.
If European countries had sustainable fertility rate, then they could be choosy about immigration.
At 1.3-1.5, well, people have to come from somewhere...
But having a wealth tax with a very low threshold is something else entirely. It means that I'm not free to invest and grow the money that is already mine, that I already paid taxes on in the first place. It means I'll always be held back and prevented from advancing as much as I could. It means that improving your situation so that next year you're doing a little better than this year, is something that the system actively pushes you away from.
There are also practical problems with taxing wealth. Income tax is "easy": by definition you have the money to pay for it because it's charged on money that you've received. With a wealth tax, you might not have the money. For example, if you own an investment apartment or some other illiquid asset you can't just sell a piece of it every year to pay the tax. You'll either have to find the money out of income (assuming you have enough) or ruin your investment strategy by selling the whole thing when you didn't plan to.
It also distorts the risk/reward tradeoff: many investments might not make sense at all if you're suddenly paying 2% a year of the value.
This is a strawman trotted out against wealth taxes.
Stated another way: no, people shouldn't be able to put their wealth into an arbitrary form to make it untaxable.
After that, it's standard planning. Owe an unexpected amount of tax on a high performing asset you don't want to liquidate? Take a loan with it/gains as collateral. (The same as people do now!)
The bigger issue is valuation of illiquid assets. I.e. how to properly tax someone benefiting from opaque trusts or with shares of non-public assets (which they might be inclined to hide the profitability of).
For one, they ruled that the wealth tax is against the EU human rights agenda. So they're scrambling to come up with a solution. Even with this tax, the projected weight isn't terrible. For reference my wife and I are CoastFIRE here with ~2mil USD in NW and the tax is marginal compared to our returns.
Yes, and about half the Netherlands is below sea level, something I cannot abide.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=relocateme.substack.c...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/comments/urwlbr/a_guide_fo... is also helpful.
(no affiliation, I just like folks helping folks get out)
That you'd give up so easily when your voice, presence, and vote, matters most. It's being tested right now, and leaving is the only way to fail.
Also, why do you think any other country would -love- to have you?
As I often ask when problem scoping, "What is your time horizon?" Will things change in 3, 5, 7, 10 years? ~2M voters 55+ die every year in the US, ~5k per day (mental models are rigid, progress occurs one funeral at a time as Planck said). Young voters were very excited for this admin, and now that vibes have met reality, they are not so excited, with a roughly 50 point swing in favorability in polling. I expect a swing back, considering recent elections over the last few weeks, but it will take quite some time.
So, from a first principles perspective, if you can live somewhere safer, better, or other idea of more favorable while losing nothing, why not? You can always move back if the US gets its shit together, and if it doesn't, you have made a home and life for yourself somewhere more favorable. Leaving is not giving up, it is merely having a better life experience while sacrificing nothing except US in person work opportunities and proximity to friends and loved ones (if applicable) for the time horizon in question. Some may feel entitled to functional governance systems, and they should (imho) vote with their feet and wallets. It is a rational evaluation in a volatile environment.
And if another country is offering you a residency visa or path to citizenship, they clearly want you. You might not be aware, but the developed world is going through a working age population crunch due to structural demographics; skilled workers are in demand, as well as those with either investment, pension, or social security income.
(think in systems)
You can think of it as the grey rock method in a political and expat context. You don't engage, doing so would be of no value; you just ignore and leave. Life is short, optimize accordingly.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/10/30/...
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5325977-trump-budget-...
If.
Are you really losing nothing?
The reason why I personally have been rolling the idea of leaving the country around in my head is because I'm gay and Hispanic (though born here), and I am NERVOUS about the direction this country is going. I do feel guilty about the idea of jumping ship, but it seems like it might be legitimately dangerous for people like me in the near future.
I probably won't leave, all my family and friends are here and it hurts to think about uprooting myself and leaving them, but it's NOT unreasonable. It's scary to be in an outgroup right now.
There have been concerted efforts over the last couple decades (arguably much longer) to erode these things; gerrymandering, voter roll purges, eliminating/restricting polling locations and absentee voting, corporations and wealthy individuals have basically unlimited spend on electioneering and lobbying giving them a disproportionate voice, a worsening state of effectively dysfunctional/maligned politicians, corporate censorship, so on and so forth. In my state, a majority passed two state constitutional amendments and the establishment (gerrymandered) politicians didn't like that, spending the past couple of years rules lawyering, delaying, etc. to try to subvert the will of the people. Hell, they ignored multiple state supreme court orders on top of voter’s wishes.
Anyways, my point being that wanting to leave a country with increasing social, economic, and political troubles isn’t entitlement, anymore than you were entitled for immigrating to the US.
Personally, I agree that I’d rather stay and fight, not that I really can afford to do otherwise, yet I understand people frustrated about the notable decline we have seen in our lifetimes and worried about the knife’s edge we find ourselves upon regarding tyranny and authoritarianism.
What the GP is probably trying to say is that what the US is going through at present has been the default state for most of the developing world. And these things have been eroding in many of the western democracies for the past decade. Those that have been able to preserve it may not be more attractive in culture, geography or economic terms.
Hence the entitlement part where I think the people in the US took for granted what they have/had. We always realize the true value of something when we don't have it.
Are you not guilty of exactly the same thing from the perspective of your own country?
Although if you have that much money life in the US right now probably isn't personally on the extreme decline.
My quality of life has increased dramatically with every move. Europe as a place to live is just so much better than Aus->USA ever was .. better health care, better food, better people and culture.
Only thing that falters is the weather - but I tell you, there is nothing more joyous than Vienna in spring time.
Anyway, I've run the gamut on western civilization. I won't go back to the USA or Australia, no sir - and even if, only as a tourist, never to reside again. Ask me anything.
Europe is wonderful, but to quote Joni Mitchell, "it's too old and cold and settled in its ways here." (Not to mention the looming spectre of war...)
My personal reason for leaving Australia is that I don't want to participate in a racist society. Read its constitution, its an utter embarrassment.
Tourists don't often get through this bubble, seeing only the shiny bits, but for those WSG's of us who grew up in the countryside, also with Aboriginal friends and family members, the dark underbelly of Australian society rubs us a bit raw - or at least it does in my case. Casual racism in Australia is like none other in the world, and I find it detestable, personally, so I have no desire to participate in its economy. I left as soon as I could, to follow my own American dream - which reality quickly revealed was little more than a Disney fantasy.
Europe has its own problems - sure, the Ukraine war is a catastrophe of uniquely European origins - but I'd much rather live in a country that isn't involving itself in the worlds wars at the moment. Austria has been an absolutely great place to raise kids with a cosmopolitan, international attitude that will stand the test of time - of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, but in my personal case, its just been a better place to live, period. Only issue I have is the weather can be hard for someone who grew up on the beaches and in the outback, but the spring and summer always makes up for it.
The thing that truly disturbed me about life in the US was its nationalist groupthink, which seeks to justify the atrocities the American people enact on those cultures its ruling classes have deemed inferior. Same is the case with Australia. I guess I freely admit, that as a foreign ex-pat living in a non-native bubble, its a lot easier to avoid the groupthink by just moving to Europe - where of course it also exists in spades - but I'd rather live the life of a refugee or interlocutor than participate in the Wests' heinously racist wars.
My kids have been raised multi-lingual, speak German/English very fluently, and are also learning Russian and Ukrainian in school to prepare themselves for a future where Austria is, once again, a safe place for citizens of both countries to co-mingle, as they once did. That is a forward-focused quality of life issue that simply doesn't exist in either the USA or Australia: the kids in this part of the world actually want to learn each others languages. Just like it was the norm in Aboriginal cultures, incidentally. (You were considered defective if you only spoke one language...)
The Netherlands is already doing well today, and don't have the grim outlooks of the current US. It's not perfect and the fall of the US would have enormous impacts, of course, but this seems like a total non sequitur.
What brought them to the US is that if they have a kid, now their kid is a citizen. Green card etc waived - you wouldn't deport a family would you? Now they nominally have zero income so they qualify for full on super duper welfare - food, house, medical care. Of course find a job, too - but has to be under the table because no green card. Meaning no taxes either. So free food, free house no rent, free medicine, no taxes. Medical care legally requires accomodations for foreign languages - don't need to speak English either.
I mean, if Japan said, "if you have a kid here, live here on our dime, eat on our dime, free medical care, no taxes" yea I would take that deal!! Can't blame em
Irony of the whole thing? This actually kinda solves the population crisis. Forces people to have a kid. Actually an interesting finding but poorly explored since the powers that be like to bury their head in the sand and pretend 50 million people haven't exploited this.
Other point is well, why did this even happen? Well, the landlords are quite happy to see the feds paying for rent, they'll collect that check, as with the food suppliers and the medical care practitioners - a very nice niche. And the small businesses are more than happy to pay someone under the table untaxed, lower overhead. So the people coming in illegally, they benefit, the people collecting the taxes paying for them, they benefit, everybody else, welp, there goes your tax money
You think produce gets picked, meat processed, and/or construction completed without immigrant labor?
If the plan is to clamp down on illegal immigration, then immigration reform to loosen the legal pathways for low wage labor needs to be passed at the same time.
Many people don’t realize how much European countries have advanced. Poland and Romania, for example, have been among the major beneficiaries of EU integration. At the same time, American tech companies enjoyed relatively easy access to the European market for years, operating with limited regulation, while countries like Russia and China restricted foreign platforms early on and invested heavily in developing their own cloud and digital infrastructures.
In my own experience, I quickly saw and stared to miss the many strengths of our way of life.
For the curious about which country it was, see my username.
If it wasn't, then why would the American school system teach American students that it is?
For pete's sake, it's not legal in many states to even cover slavery, the indian genocide, or japanese internment in a way that actually holds the US responsible
Putting up a GoFundMe for healthcare expenses seems like a uniquely American phenomenon.
And there's simply no equivalent of something like skid row or the tenderloin in any major European city. We let our neediest simply... fall through the cracks. Then step over them on the way to work.
Is it tariffs? Taxes are higher there. Is it the social services, health care, foreign invasions? Half of these people were Republicans until five minutes ago, and physically participated in our most unjustifiable wars. The Netherlands I assume is like the rest of Europe and is fanatically anti-Palestinian (they love any excuse to pretend the Nazis were somebody else) and anti-Russian to the point of demanding invasion. They're upset because Trump is marginally not aggressive enough for them, and is not financing foreign interventions more. They think that the US taxpayer might only pay for 75% of it, rather than 90%.
It seems to me that, and it shouldn't be surprising considering the outlet, that it's just a bunch of wealthy people who are embarrassed to be ruled by a wrestling valet game show host. The reason why we got the clown is because these people are so awful. It's nothing but an improvement for the US to dump them on Europe. As their old asses get sick, Europe can take care of them for free while they still have their millions (from getting in early on the property market and getting jobs back when there were still pensions) invested in Vanguard funds.
The Netherlands is one of five countries to withdraw from the Eurovision over Israel being allowed to participate in 2026 (the others are Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and Iceland), fwiw.
> and anti-Russian to the point of demanding invasion
... Eh? Russia is currently invading Europe. You may be a bit confused about that one.
We have a gigantic and near unsolvable housing problem. We have thousands of refugees/immigrants with residence permits waiting for housing already (currently stuck in hotels and bungalow parks just to give them a roof over their heads), and we don't even have enough affordable houses for our own.
On behalf of everyone in the Netherlands waiting to start a family in their own affordable house, thank you.
1970-01-01•22h ago
phantasmish•22h ago
lifeisgood99•22h ago
qaq•22h ago
ben_w•22h ago
Even the British survived the end of the British empire, and that was bigger relative to the world than the US is now.
victorbjorklund•22h ago
qaq•22h ago
kibwen•22h ago
Here in 2025, you live in a globalized world. The rats are soon to be out of ships to flee to. There's no free society in the Sol system that survives rampant and unchecked authoritarianism in the triad of the US, China, and Russia. Europe is a military vassal of the first, an economic vassal of the second, and an energy vassal of the third (though increasingly of the first two). By all means, I'm happy for Europe to wake up and prove me wrong, but looking at their tepid reaction to being invaded by Russia three years ago I'm not holding my breath.
seszett•22h ago
What an hyperbole.
There are also other places in the world besides Europe, the US and China.
phantasmish•22h ago
ben_w•22h ago
The UK may be something close to a military vassal, what with its "independent" nuclear deterrant relying on US missiles, but the French deterrant is not and France is not.
Economically, we're all interdependent right now: China depends on the US and Europe, Europe depends on the US and China, the US depends on China and nad Europe. Current US policy is pushing everyone everywhere to disconnect from the US, ironically without even doing the one thing tariffs are supposed to be a tool for which is protrcting strategic domestic industry.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed the EU away from Russian energy much faster than it would otherwise have done from decarbonisation efforts. Given who the world's factory is, I'd expect a lot of our PV and wind turbine components to come from China, and even if they don't directly for the Chinese supply to substantially impact the price.
Ylpertnodi•22h ago
1970-01-01•22h ago
outside1234•22h ago
I'd recommend establishing that in a swing state.
lazide•22h ago
Better for everyone to stay and fight.
But the issue right now is, everyone is stopping anyone from fighting.
So isn’t the fight already lost? If so, back to step 1.
trvz•22h ago
1970-01-01•21h ago
wing-_-nuts•22h ago
saulpw•21h ago
phantasmish•20h ago
It's a fact of voting that most folks can vote in every election they can for their entire lives and never make any difference whatsoever, as in, change zero outcomes.
We have social pressure and propaganda otherwise to get people to do it, because if too many people rationally stay home then the system works poorly (in aggregate, that does change outcomes). It'd be much better to just mandate voting, because it is individually irrational and it's not great to base a system on tricking everyone into behaving irrationally.
This feels different because they're not bothering to even count them, but it's not materially different from any voting.
(barring the "sometimes not even counted then" part, of course)
saulpw•17h ago
Also, it's a mistake to think that the only result of voting is to produce the winner of the election. The margin matters also. A politician winning by a large margin (or even a majority) can claim a 'mandate'; one who only wins by a plurality will have more spirited opposition.
We've seen this in the most recent US election; imagine if small percentage of those who didn't vote in the solid blue states because their vote didn't matter (a refrain I've heard from many people) actually voted, and Trump swept the swing states but lost the popular vote. The entire political landscape would be different, and we might even have momentum in the coming years to abolish the Electoral College.
So if we are fans of liberal democracy, we should be doing everything in our power to structure the system to make people feel as though their voice and vote matters.
phantasmish•16h ago