Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I had to do some hunting to figure out how a thread about AirPods descended into arguments about life expectancy and pensions. This is where it began. Please take care to avoid starting flamewars like this in future. We all have to consider the consequences of what we post, and it's against the guidelines to post inflammatory rhetoric for precisely this reason.
Americans consume more goods and services, live in larger homes, and have a higher material standard of living than Europeans, on the median. The US does spend much more on healthcare, but the outcomes are largely comparable to Europe’s (meaning universal healthcare has not actually given Europeans a clear advantage in lived results).
Europeans also get mandated parental leave and vacation time, far better labour laws, better health-related regulatory conditions (e.g. food, drugs, agriculture, environment, gun control, etc.), and so on, and don't go bankrupt and lose everything because of a heart attack or pregnancy complications.
Having a big house and more money doesn't mean you have a better life; this seems to be the main point of the article you linked, but your comment seems to imply that you missed that point (though I could be misreading). Case in point, this quote from the blog:
> I could go on, but the pattern is pretty clear. The U.S. in general is less healthy and less safe than Europe.
> Having a big house and more money doesn't mean you have a better life; this seems to be the main point of the article you linked, but your comment seems to imply that you missed that point (though I could be misreading). Case in point, this quote from the blog: [...]
No, I didn't miss the point; there's excellent data in that article for people who think the US is a great place to live, and people who think Europe is a great place to live. That's the beauty of the article, and the crux of my point: both of those groups can be correct – there's no single "this is the greatest place to live for all human beings, periodt" out there. The article concludes:
> But as one final thought, I’d like to offer the hypothesis that life is just about equally as good in all developed countries. There’s personal preference, of course — if you want a big house and a lawn, you might prefer America or Canada, whereas if you want national health insurance and lower crime rates, you might prefer Japan or France. But in terms of where the average person would want to live given the choice, I think all these rich countries are in the same ballpark.
Sure but Paris at 3.8 is twice that of San Francisco at 1.7 so SF is so much better and that’s with the stricter definition of counting deaths after 20 weeks as infants instead of excluding all younger than 22 weeks gestation like France does. It’s why I live here and had my child here.
Frankly I think we need to establish a definition for comparable if you're going to nitpick the numbers of infant mortality rates and life expectancy between two modern Western democracies. The average infant mortality rate in Canada is 4.4 deaths per thousand, is that comparable to the EU? The UAE is sitting pretty at 4 per thousand so that's obviously more comparable than Canada. Russia's at 6.42 so they're out.
Anyway, my point is those numbers are comparable when there are countries like Mexico, Brazil and India out there with an infant mortality rate of 11, 12.5 and 25 deaths per thousand, respectively.
(For the record I don't think the US is a better place to live than the EU, I just don't think it's worse either.)
>You really think the USA having nearly twice as big an infant mortality rate is nitpicking?
Come on, are you going to make my argument so easy? Twice of two drops of nothing is four drops of nothing. You're nitpicking numbers that frankly don't make a difference because they're too close to matter. But don't argue with me, argue with the author of the article where you can see all of the data and comparisons for yourself.
And the difference between Romania's mortality rate and Italy's mortality rate is shameful, how could the EU let there be such a stark gap between them?
I'm just not interested in nitpicking superfluous numbers with you. You've got the data in front of you showing that outcomes are, by and large, the same across the US and Europe, but you've decided to plant some jingoistic flag on a molehill of miniscule differences when there are countries in your own union with equally "shameful" results.
Please don't waste my time further by harping on these minute differences, I won't respond.
> how could the EU let there be such a stark gap between them?
It doesn’t. A significant share of the EU budget actually goes toward helping the poorest members in catching up.
> You've got the data in front of you showing that outcomes are, by and large, the same across the US and Europe
Sorry but the data shows the reverse of that. I’m not wasting your time. You are in denial.
The US has high consumption but garbage metrics of approximately everything else. The GINI coefficient is extremely high. The infant mortality rate is poor. Life expectancy is bad for an OCDE country. Homelessness is so high you could believe it’s a developing country. Imprisonment rate, awful, literacy rate, very poor for a developed nation, social mobility, very low, the list goes on and on.
The USA is paradoxical in that it’s the only rich democracy which actually doesn’t take care of its population.
I’m glade you have the privilege of being rich there and I know you have been indoctrinated from birth into believe the US is exceptional, still, the numbers don’t actually look that good when you look at them.
Yeah that's probably the thing that will occupy my mind on my death bed, all the money I could have made as an "entreprise dev" in a "tier 2 city", I get such a hard on just writing these words, thanks for making my point btw
This is nonsense. The stock market had been propped up by FAANG. But with AI we have a few trillion dollars of value being created by new entrants (e.g. OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic) and legacy companies newly stepping on FAANG (e.g. Oracle, Perplexity).
It may all be a fever dream. But like the dark fiber of the 90s, it should—worst case—leave behind a lot of energy and datacentre infrastructure. (If Washington would get out of the way.)
The AI companies that are famously making massive profits and have found a well working way to make money, correct? They aren't just propped up by the sale of a fantasy world full of money that's always just a couple months or years away. Just a couple billion more, I swear.
And none of those are public companies and no one knows how much any of those companies are worth.
Right now using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns * some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable.
> using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable*
This metric has nothing to do with whether a company is public or private.
But no one knows how much a company is truly worth until it goes on the public market and if all of the private companies “worth billions” went under, only VCs would be harmed. This isn’t like the dot com bust.
> no one knows how much a company is truly worth until it goes on the public market
Nobody ever knows what a company is worth other than the people buying and selling it in an M&A transaction at that precise moment. Public markets just have more transactions than private markets—the mechanism of price discovery is similar, if not the same.
> if all of the private companies “worth billions” went under, only VCs would be harmed
I’d be shocked if it didn’t take out the banking system.
You’re describing the annihilation of trillions of dollars of pension, endowment and retirement wealth; to say nothing of the effects on municipal, state and federal payroll finances; to say nothing of the asset-backed loans tied to these assets and purchases they make from public companies and their employees’ spending.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I had to do some hunting to figure out how a thread about AirPods descended into arguments about life expectancy and pensions. This is where it began. Please take care to avoid starting flamewars like this in future. We all have to consider the consequences of what we post, and it's against the guidelines to post inflammatory rhetoric for precisely this reason.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It seems like I can't help myself and keep sliding back into old habits without realizing. I am sorry, I will think twice next time.
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Americans consume more goods and services, live in larger homes, and have a higher material standard of living than Europeans, on the median. The US does spend much more on healthcare, but the outcomes are largely comparable to Europe’s (meaning universal healthcare has not actually given Europeans a clear advantage in lived results).
Source: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-generally-richer...
Europeans also get mandated parental leave and vacation time, far better labour laws, better health-related regulatory conditions (e.g. food, drugs, agriculture, environment, gun control, etc.), and so on, and don't go bankrupt and lose everything because of a heart attack or pregnancy complications.
Having a big house and more money doesn't mean you have a better life; this seems to be the main point of the article you linked, but your comment seems to imply that you missed that point (though I could be misreading). Case in point, this quote from the blog:
> I could go on, but the pattern is pretty clear. The U.S. in general is less healthy and less safe than Europe.
> Having a big house and more money doesn't mean you have a better life; this seems to be the main point of the article you linked, but your comment seems to imply that you missed that point (though I could be misreading). Case in point, this quote from the blog: [...]
No, I didn't miss the point; there's excellent data in that article for people who think the US is a great place to live, and people who think Europe is a great place to live. That's the beauty of the article, and the crux of my point: both of those groups can be correct – there's no single "this is the greatest place to live for all human beings, periodt" out there. The article concludes:
> But as one final thought, I’d like to offer the hypothesis that life is just about equally as good in all developed countries. There’s personal preference, of course — if you want a big house and a lawn, you might prefer America or Canada, whereas if you want national health insurance and lower crime rates, you might prefer Japan or France. But in terms of where the average person would want to live given the choice, I think all these rich countries are in the same ballpark.
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Sure but Paris at 3.8 is twice that of San Francisco at 1.7 so SF is so much better and that’s with the stricter definition of counting deaths after 20 weeks as infants instead of excluding all younger than 22 weeks gestation like France does. It’s why I live here and had my child here.
https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/serie/001745304
https://www.kidsdata.org/topic/294/infant-mortality/table#fm...
Frankly I think we need to establish a definition for comparable if you're going to nitpick the numbers of infant mortality rates and life expectancy between two modern Western democracies. The average infant mortality rate in Canada is 4.4 deaths per thousand, is that comparable to the EU? The UAE is sitting pretty at 4 per thousand so that's obviously more comparable than Canada. Russia's at 6.42 so they're out.
Anyway, my point is those numbers are comparable when there are countries like Mexico, Brazil and India out there with an infant mortality rate of 11, 12.5 and 25 deaths per thousand, respectively.
(For the record I don't think the US is a better place to live than the EU, I just don't think it's worse either.)
The numbers seem perfectly comparable though?
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>You really think the USA having nearly twice as big an infant mortality rate is nitpicking?
Come on, are you going to make my argument so easy? Twice of two drops of nothing is four drops of nothing. You're nitpicking numbers that frankly don't make a difference because they're too close to matter. But don't argue with me, argue with the author of the article where you can see all of the data and comparisons for yourself.
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We're talking about statistics here, don't moralize at me for not putting your preferred amount of reverence around the number at hand.
The difference between the US and the EU is the same that between the US and Kazakhstan. I’m sorry but that’s not a small difference at all.
The US infant mortality rate is shameful. Not as shameful as its poverty and homelessness rates but still shameful anyway.
And the difference between Romania's mortality rate and Italy's mortality rate is shameful, how could the EU let there be such a stark gap between them?
I'm just not interested in nitpicking superfluous numbers with you. You've got the data in front of you showing that outcomes are, by and large, the same across the US and Europe, but you've decided to plant some jingoistic flag on a molehill of miniscule differences when there are countries in your own union with equally "shameful" results.
Please don't waste my time further by harping on these minute differences, I won't respond.
> how could the EU let there be such a stark gap between them?
It doesn’t. A significant share of the EU budget actually goes toward helping the poorest members in catching up.
> You've got the data in front of you showing that outcomes are, by and large, the same across the US and Europe
Sorry but the data shows the reverse of that. I’m not wasting your time. You are in denial.
The US has high consumption but garbage metrics of approximately everything else. The GINI coefficient is extremely high. The infant mortality rate is poor. Life expectancy is bad for an OCDE country. Homelessness is so high you could believe it’s a developing country. Imprisonment rate, awful, literacy rate, very poor for a developed nation, social mobility, very low, the list goes on and on.
The USA is paradoxical in that it’s the only rich democracy which actually doesn’t take care of its population.
I’m glade you have the privilege of being rich there and I know you have been indoctrinated from birth into believe the US is exceptional, still, the numbers don’t actually look that good when you look at them.
Quality of life depends on wealth creation to finance it.
This and social benefits are becoming unaffordable as the economy falls behind.
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Heck even enterprise devs working in tier 2 cities make a lot more than they do in the EU.
Yeah that's probably the thing that will occupy my mind on my death bed, all the money I could have made as an "entreprise dev" in a "tier 2 city", I get such a hard on just writing these words, thanks for making my point btw
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> whole US economy is propped up by FAANG
This is nonsense. The stock market had been propped up by FAANG. But with AI we have a few trillion dollars of value being created by new entrants (e.g. OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic) and legacy companies newly stepping on FAANG (e.g. Oracle, Perplexity).
It may all be a fever dream. But like the dark fiber of the 90s, it should—worst case—leave behind a lot of energy and datacentre infrastructure. (If Washington would get out of the way.)
The AI companies that are famously making massive profits and have found a well working way to make money, correct? They aren't just propped up by the sale of a fantasy world full of money that's always just a couple months or years away. Just a couple billion more, I swear.
"our companies are worth gazillion units of the money we print like there is no tomorrow and which isn't actually backed by any tangible thing"
Yeah OK, cool I guess
And none of those are public companies and no one knows how much any of those companies are worth.
Right now using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns * some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable.
> using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable*
This metric has nothing to do with whether a company is public or private.
But no one knows how much a company is truly worth until it goes on the public market and if all of the private companies “worth billions” went under, only VCs would be harmed. This isn’t like the dot com bust.
> no one knows how much a company is truly worth until it goes on the public market
Nobody ever knows what a company is worth other than the people buying and selling it in an M&A transaction at that precise moment. Public markets just have more transactions than private markets—the mechanism of price discovery is similar, if not the same.
> if all of the private companies “worth billions” went under, only VCs would be harmed
I’d be shocked if it didn’t take out the banking system.
You’re describing the annihilation of trillions of dollars of pension, endowment and retirement wealth; to say nothing of the effects on municipal, state and federal payroll finances; to say nothing of the asset-backed loans tied to these assets and purchases they make from public companies and their employees’ spending.
Private equity makes up less than 1% of pensions
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/11/private-equity-wants-a-large...
Is significantly more for pensions. The article says 1% of retirement is for retirement plans, which are predominantly 401ks.
The article claims pensions, on the other hand, as one of the leading investors in private equity.
The term retirement plan is radically different from pensions.
By way of example, your local teachers union pension is probably massively invested to private equity. Your tech worker 401k is not.