Not if you rate your quality of life by the amount of material goods you own, like most of the population of the western world.
Step one before buying anything should be "can I realistically afford this without going into debt or otherwise ruining my personal financial situation?".
Step two should be "do I really need this?".
Impulse purchases are the bane of the western world.
Buy a used car with cash instead of going into debt on a new car. Don't buy a giant house that'll end up mostly wasted space for you, your partner and your 2.5 kids. There is no shame in living in an apartment. Be frugal, not wasteful.
In short, it's sci-fi about a post-oil world in which calories are everything and bioterrorism is rampant. One of the main characters is an artificially-grown girl who used to be the property of a rich japanese businessman until she was left in streets of Bangkok to fend for herself, more or less left to the fanatically nationalist officers of the Environment Ministry, who habitually kill New People because they consider them an abomination against nature and soulless automatons. They then unceremoniously mulch them and throw them into methane digesters along with any other available "trash" biomatter to produce methane used for power an lighting.
I like how it touches on her efforts to be recognized as a sentient being and not just a piece of property to be disposed of at will.
That's exactly what I mean by "trickle-up economics".
It's the complete opposite of trickle-down economics, where the richest are given all the benefits in the hope that they will trickle down to the lower rungs of society. History has shown that this does not work.
Instead, I want a trickle-up society, where the lowest rungs are helped out and given enough purchase power that they can create a greater demand for products and services. This will trickle up into the rest of society and benefit everyone.
I agree 100% with you that instead of focusing blindly on prices, people should buy quality products that are made to be serviced and repaired for many years. They represent a larger investment, but will earn that back in savings in the long run. I want products built up to a quality, not down to a price.
Google the Bastoy prison in Norway. It looks like a damn summer camp, where the inmates can go swimming, cook their own food (they're given knives!), watch TV. Hell, their "cells" look more spacious than my old dorm room.
Criminals sent there have some of the lowest recidivism rates in the entire world. It works because the Norwegians believe in rehabilitation instead of retribution.
Obviously, the absolute numbers are not huge, but most or all of these deaths could have been prevented through better shelter and soup kitchen offers rather then the bare minimum that is currently on offer. Initiatives such as letting homeless people help and give a hand in the soup kitchens could help them feel some self-worth again, which leads to motivation to at least try and do something about their current station in life.
I work a full 37 hour work week including the occasional paid overtime. I don't consider any of those hours to be "working for the government", I have no idea how that silly simplification has taken root with you guys.
You know what? I don't mind that 70-year old fat asshole getting a new heart. I sure don't mind children getting the urgent medical care they need, either. Nor do I mind anyone, no matter their station in life, viewpoints, personal wealth, race, creed or color, getting the medical help they need. Who are you to put different amounts of worth on different people's heads?
Please note that your current insurance-based privatized health care system is massively more expensive than the public health care systems of the countries you usually compare yourselves to. They're getting better health care for less: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/graphs.html
I pay my taxes gladly. With them, I buy civilization.
There's no need to get personal, but let's have a look at what you're saying, disregarding the insults.
First off, I'm from Denmark. We've been able to weather the crisis relatively well due to our fundamentally well-oiled system of social democracy. We are pulling ourselves out of the depression again in cooperation with our Scandinavian and Northern European neighbors. Our economy is stable, thanks to this.
Of course your demographics are different, you have a small problem with illegal immigration and the severely disadvantaged lower class your country created because they thought slaves were cool. The latter is absolutely not valid as any kind of excuse. Your country fucked them over, your country should therefore take care of them and help them instead of supporting the institutionalized racism that continues to this day.
But you still have over ten times the amount of homeless per 1000 citizens compared to most other countries in the western world. I don't care how you count it, whether you count the number of people who are homeless at some point of the year or if you count the number of chronic homeless, that's still a huge amount of your population that has been screwed over by the system.
Even if you only count the chronically homeless, the ones who literally have no food or shelter that's about 0.035% of your population, going by your 110K figure. Here, it's 0.003% (200 out of 6 million). It's still a factor of ten!
If you think that's "different", then you're even more ignorant than I thought. You're commenting on an article which talks about a girl whose family is living in a shelter, while suggesting the US doesn't implement shelters? Are you retarded?
This particular thread has turned to a more general discussion of homeless and homelessness in various countries. Are you unable to read?
The difference is that our "homeless" aren't put on the fucking street because local government is too lazy to implement proper shelters and soup kitchens.
Out of the 8000 homeless in Denmark (less than 0.14% of the population), about 200 live and sleep on the streets. Everyone else has at least a roof over their head and at least one hot meal per day.
Compare to the US where your rate of homelessness is hovering around 1.7% (3.5 million) of your population.
Read the reports you linked. The numbers are tiny. I never claimed our system was perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what you lot have managed to put together.
You have around 3.5 million homeless people in the US. In a population of ~300 million, that's about 1.7%.
Europe has around 3 million homeless people. In a combined European population of ~730 million, that's about 0.4%. That includes Eastern Europe and formerly Soviet bloc countries, most of which are still struggling with massive corruption. In Scandinavia and Northern Europe in general, the number is around 0.15%.
You have more than four times as many homeless people compared to your population as the average European/Scandinavian social democracy-based "socialist hellhole" and the countries who were mercifully untouched by the "fascism with a communist face" of the Eastern bloc have less than a tenth the amount of homeless people that you do.
Social democracy (or "socialism" as you yanks erroneously call it) works.
I'll be watching when your so-called "greatest nation on Earth" implodes on itself. Hopefully, you'll build something sensible out of the ashes.
In Denmark, the definition goes roughly like this:
A homeless person is a person who lives in a deficient housing situation, for example in an illegal encampment, a condemned building or a severely overcrowded building (mostly illegally). It also includes people living in unsafe conditions, for instance living under threat of eviction or under a bankrupt landlord, or in a violent home. Furthermore, it includes people without a home, ie. currently sleeping under temporary conditions in an institution, a shelter or similar. Lastly, it includes people with no roof over their head, ie. living without any sort of shelter or housing, sleeping on the street.
So you see, our definition of being homeless is pretty well-defined, you have to be in some real shit to count as homeless.
You have around 3.5 million homeless people in the US. In a population of ~300 million, that's about 1.7%.
Denmark has around 8.000 homeless people. In a population of ~6 million, that's about 0.14%. Of those, only 200 or so actually sleep in the streets.
You have more than ten times as many homeless people compared to your population as the average European/Scandinavian social democracy-based "socialist hellhole".
Wealthiest nation on Earth, sure. But at what cost?
Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Since we've already fucked up again and made another depression, it stands to reason that we should follow through and solve it how history has shown us.
With opportunity to succeed comes opportunity to fail.
Oddly enough, the Scandinavian countries are bristling with new business ventures and entrepreneurs. Skype is probably the most recent highly-successful venture.
Why? Because our social safety nets gives you the opportunity to succeed, while still catching you if you should fail. This encourages people to try out new ideas instead of being deadly afraid of what should happen if they fail.
Poor people are dying in the streets, because the "American Dream" fucked them over, because they were unlucky and because they couldn't afford health insurance.
Face it, the main reason you have an easy life is because you got lucky. It hurts to admit that it wasn't 100% down to hard work, but that's the hard truth.
There is not nearly enough food and shelter for everyone who needs it, and the right-wingers in your country are trying to cut it back even more. They're systematically worsening the living conditions of the majority, in order to sweeten the life of the wealthy elite even further. It's never been about "supporting the job creators", it has always been about "how can I make sure the majority of wealth created in this country continues to flow into my pockets?".
Wake up, your "nation that values work" is systematically grinding you down with 40-50-60 hour work weeks and hardly any vacation at all, for pittance pay. The US is one of the worst countries in the western world rated by ability of people to break free of their social station (rated by the relative income difference between parents and their children).
It's time for a new New Deal. It's time for "trickle-up" economics.
Look at her family - father a sporadic alcoholic with a crappy job. Mother injured and unable to work. And you wonder why they ended up temporarily homeless? Please. Show me a country where their situation would have been different.
Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, The Netherlands, just to mention a few.
We take care of our people here, no matter how desperate their situations.
My boss encourages me to make sure I use all my vacation time (31 days/year). In fact Human Resources will be giving him a stern talking-to if he doesn't do that.
Of course, he can veto our vacation requests if a high-profile project is planned and we can't find a suitable replacement or if our schedules clash. In those cases, we sit down and work everything out collectively.
I'll take my unionized 34.5 hour a week, decently-paid, double pay for overtime job right here in "socialist" Europe. You Americans can keep your soul-destroying workplaces to yourself.
34.5 hours a week, EUR75K/year salary at 31 days + public holidays and doubled hourly pay for overtime work, doing performance measuring (mostly scripting) and IT service management.
The price tag of changing lanes is very low. Regardless of this, no one is forcing anyone to do anything. I drive at a reasonable distance from the car in front of me, but the area behind me is not my responsibility, strictly and legally speaking.
I fail to see how keeping a proper, safe following distance is "hogging space". It's not like I keep hundreds of meters of space, I generally try to keep 2-3 seconds worth of space in front of me.
I want to make one thing very clear here: I drive the speed limit. I keep right except when overtaking and I don't give a damn how fast anyone else wants to go.
But if we're on a road with one lane in each direction and no overtaking possibilities, they will just have to stay behind me at the speed limit. Fuck 'em if they think I'm going to break the law to accommodate their need for speed.
Considering the extreme unlikelihood that you have ever been a passenger in my car or shared the road with me, I find it odd how you are somehow able to judge how well traffic flows around me.
It works perfectly fine, BTW. People don't seem to be too upset at having to go the actual speed limit for a little while, since I'm not hoggin the left lane or any other disruptive behavior. And because I do the speed limit, overtaking me takes much less space than overtaking someone going 10 over.
I'm not the guy you're replying to, but yes, that does happen to me sometimes. Why?
Because I drive the speed limit, I don't treat the stop lights as drag strips and I like to keep a sensible distance to the cars in front me. But I don't block traffic or care how fast anyone else wants to go, they're free to overtake me if they want to.
Currently, I average about 56mpg in my diesel car, on a combined cycle with plenty of city and motorway driving. On super grippy winter tires. It's better than the specified mileage of the car by a few MPG and it's even better on low rolling resistance summer tires.
It really isn't that hard to drive economically. Just relax and let the traffic flow. Try not to move traffic but to move through it and look as far ahead as you possibly can.
You obviously need a truck for your work and you use an F-150, which I would say is about a mid-size truck in the US.
I think he was referring to people who buy large trucks and SUVs to use pretty much exclusively as personal transport, for transporting themselves and perhaps 3 other people at most. Not to mention a couple of bags of groceries. It really is the height of wastefulness when an ordinary sedan or (SHOCK AND HORROR) a wagon would work just as well and get significantly better gas mileage.
I do that regularly in my little 55mpg hatchback with no problems at all. For the relatively rare occasions where I need a larger vehicle, I rent one.
Slashdot Mirror
Not if you rate your quality of life by the amount of material goods you own, like most of the population of the western world.
Step one before buying anything should be "can I realistically afford this without going into debt or otherwise ruining my personal financial situation?".
Step two should be "do I really need this?".
Impulse purchases are the bane of the western world.
Huawei is one of the most popular brands of 3G/4G modems, I hardly ever see any other brand in use and I work at an ISP/Telco.
The brand name may not be well-known to most people, but have people take a look at their 3G/4G modems. I'll bet most of them are made by Huawei.
The moral of this can be summed up easily:
Don't buy shit you can't afford.
Buy a used car with cash instead of going into debt on a new car. Don't buy a giant house that'll end up mostly wasted space for you, your partner and your 2.5 kids. There is no shame in living in an apartment. Be frugal, not wasteful.
Read "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi.
In short, it's sci-fi about a post-oil world in which calories are everything and bioterrorism is rampant. One of the main characters is an artificially-grown girl who used to be the property of a rich japanese businessman until she was left in streets of Bangkok to fend for herself, more or less left to the fanatically nationalist officers of the Environment Ministry, who habitually kill New People because they consider them an abomination against nature and soulless automatons. They then unceremoniously mulch them and throw them into methane digesters along with any other available "trash" biomatter to produce methane used for power an lighting.
I like how it touches on her efforts to be recognized as a sentient being and not just a piece of property to be disposed of at will.
That's exactly what I mean by "trickle-up economics".
It's the complete opposite of trickle-down economics, where the richest are given all the benefits in the hope that they will trickle down to the lower rungs of society. History has shown that this does not work.
Instead, I want a trickle-up society, where the lowest rungs are helped out and given enough purchase power that they can create a greater demand for products and services. This will trickle up into the rest of society and benefit everyone.
I agree 100% with you that instead of focusing blindly on prices, people should buy quality products that are made to be serviced and repaired for many years. They represent a larger investment, but will earn that back in savings in the long run. I want products built up to a quality, not down to a price.
Mr. Breivik is hardly minimum-security material, not least for his own safety ;-)
I think so.
Although it is a minimum-security prison, isn't it telling that Norway treats its prisoners better than the US treats its welfare recipients?
And on the whole, people are happier in Norway. Imagine that :-)
Google the Bastoy prison in Norway. It looks like a damn summer camp, where the inmates can go swimming, cook their own food (they're given knives!), watch TV. Hell, their "cells" look more spacious than my old dorm room.
Criminals sent there have some of the lowest recidivism rates in the entire world. It works because the Norwegians believe in rehabilitation instead of retribution.
http://www.wifr.com/news/headlines/Homeless_Deaths_in_the_Stateline_136027648.html
http://www.kulr8.com/news/local/Dozens-Gather-To-Remember-Homeless-Deaths-136039473.html
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/dyingwithoutdignity/dyingwithoutdignity.pdf
This one has a positive tone, at least something is being done:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/27/local/me-skidrow-deaths27
Obviously, the absolute numbers are not huge, but most or all of these deaths could have been prevented through better shelter and soup kitchen offers rather then the bare minimum that is currently on offer. Initiatives such as letting homeless people help and give a hand in the soup kitchens could help them feel some self-worth again, which leads to motivation to at least try and do something about their current station in life.
I work a full 37 hour work week including the occasional paid overtime. I don't consider any of those hours to be "working for the government", I have no idea how that silly simplification has taken root with you guys.
You know what? I don't mind that 70-year old fat asshole getting a new heart. I sure don't mind children getting the urgent medical care they need, either. Nor do I mind anyone, no matter their station in life, viewpoints, personal wealth, race, creed or color, getting the medical help they need. Who are you to put different amounts of worth on different people's heads?
Please note that your current insurance-based privatized health care system is massively more expensive than the public health care systems of the countries you usually compare yourselves to. They're getting better health care for less:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/graphs.html
I pay my taxes gladly. With them, I buy civilization.
There's no need to get personal, but let's have a look at what you're saying, disregarding the insults.
First off, I'm from Denmark. We've been able to weather the crisis relatively well due to our fundamentally well-oiled system of social democracy. We are pulling ourselves out of the depression again in cooperation with our Scandinavian and Northern European neighbors. Our economy is stable, thanks to this.
Of course your demographics are different, you have a small problem with illegal immigration and the severely disadvantaged lower class your country created because they thought slaves were cool. The latter is absolutely not valid as any kind of excuse. Your country fucked them over, your country should therefore take care of them and help them instead of supporting the institutionalized racism that continues to this day.
But you still have over ten times the amount of homeless per 1000 citizens compared to most other countries in the western world. I don't care how you count it, whether you count the number of people who are homeless at some point of the year or if you count the number of chronic homeless, that's still a huge amount of your population that has been screwed over by the system.
Even if you only count the chronically homeless, the ones who literally have no food or shelter that's about 0.035% of your population, going by your 110K figure. Here, it's 0.003% (200 out of 6 million). It's still a factor of ten!
If you think that's "different", then you're even more ignorant than I thought. You're commenting on an article which talks about a girl whose family is living in a shelter, while suggesting the US doesn't implement shelters? Are you retarded?
This particular thread has turned to a more general discussion of homeless and homelessness in various countries. Are you unable to read?
I'm not American, jackass. Learn to fucking read.
Right. You're still a cunt, though.
The difference is that our "homeless" aren't put on the fucking street because local government is too lazy to implement proper shelters and soup kitchens.
Out of the 8000 homeless in Denmark (less than 0.14% of the population), about 200 live and sleep on the streets. Everyone else has at least a roof over their head and at least one hot meal per day.
Compare to the US where your rate of homelessness is hovering around 1.7% (3.5 million) of your population.
Read the reports you linked. The numbers are tiny. I never claimed our system was perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what you lot have managed to put together.
You have around 3.5 million homeless people in the US. In a population of ~300 million, that's about 1.7%.
Europe has around 3 million homeless people. In a combined European population of ~730 million, that's about 0.4%. That includes Eastern Europe and formerly Soviet bloc countries, most of which are still struggling with massive corruption. In Scandinavia and Northern Europe in general, the number is around 0.15%.
You have more than four times as many homeless people compared to your population as the average European/Scandinavian social democracy-based "socialist hellhole" and the countries who were mercifully untouched by the "fascism with a communist face" of the Eastern bloc have less than a tenth the amount of homeless people that you do.
Social democracy (or "socialism" as you yanks erroneously call it) works.
I'll be watching when your so-called "greatest nation on Earth" implodes on itself. Hopefully, you'll build something sensible out of the ashes.
In Denmark, the definition goes roughly like this:
A homeless person is a person who lives in a deficient housing situation, for example in an illegal encampment, a condemned building or a severely overcrowded building (mostly illegally).
It also includes people living in unsafe conditions, for instance living under threat of eviction or under a bankrupt landlord, or in a violent home.
Furthermore, it includes people without a home, ie. currently sleeping under temporary conditions in an institution, a shelter or similar.
Lastly, it includes people with no roof over their head, ie. living without any sort of shelter or housing, sleeping on the street.
So you see, our definition of being homeless is pretty well-defined, you have to be in some real shit to count as homeless.
You have around 3.5 million homeless people in the US. In a population of ~300 million, that's about 1.7%.
Denmark has around 8.000 homeless people. In a population of ~6 million, that's about 0.14%. Of those, only 200 or so actually sleep in the streets.
You have more than ten times as many homeless people compared to your population as the average European/Scandinavian social democracy-based "socialist hellhole".
Wealthiest nation on Earth, sure. But at what cost?
The solution to the current Great Depression is oddly enough the very same solution that worked the last time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_new_deal
Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Since we've already fucked up again and made another depression, it stands to reason that we should follow through and solve it how history has shown us.
With opportunity to succeed comes opportunity to fail.
Oddly enough, the Scandinavian countries are bristling with new business ventures and entrepreneurs. Skype is probably the most recent highly-successful venture.
Why? Because our social safety nets gives you the opportunity to succeed, while still catching you if you should fail. This encourages people to try out new ideas instead of being deadly afraid of what should happen if they fail.
The depth of your delusion is astounding.
Poor people are dying in the streets, because the "American Dream" fucked them over, because they were unlucky and because they couldn't afford health insurance.
Face it, the main reason you have an easy life is because you got lucky. It hurts to admit that it wasn't 100% down to hard work, but that's the hard truth.
There is not nearly enough food and shelter for everyone who needs it, and the right-wingers in your country are trying to cut it back even more. They're systematically worsening the living conditions of the majority, in order to sweeten the life of the wealthy elite even further. It's never been about "supporting the job creators", it has always been about "how can I make sure the majority of wealth created in this country continues to flow into my pockets?".
Wake up, your "nation that values work" is systematically grinding you down with 40-50-60 hour work weeks and hardly any vacation at all, for pittance pay. The US is one of the worst countries in the western world rated by ability of people to break free of their social station (rated by the relative income difference between parents and their children).
It's time for a new New Deal. It's time for "trickle-up" economics.
Look at her family - father a sporadic alcoholic with a crappy job. Mother injured and unable to work. And you wonder why they ended up temporarily homeless? Please. Show me a country where their situation would have been different.
Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, The Netherlands, just to mention a few.
We take care of our people here, no matter how desperate their situations.
My boss encourages me to make sure I use all my vacation time (31 days/year). In fact Human Resources will be giving him a stern talking-to if he doesn't do that.
Of course, he can veto our vacation requests if a high-profile project is planned and we can't find a suitable replacement or if our schedules clash. In those cases, we sit down and work everything out collectively.
I'll take my unionized 34.5 hour a week, decently-paid, double pay for overtime job right here in "socialist" Europe. You Americans can keep your soul-destroying workplaces to yourself.
34.5 hours a week, EUR75K/year salary at 31 days + public holidays and doubled hourly pay for overtime work, doing performance measuring (mostly scripting) and IT service management.
No degree, IT-focused vocational school only.
Not bad for a "socialist" country, eh?
How do you know this?
Who was talking about commute hours only?
I drive like that no matter what time it is.
The price tag of changing lanes is very low. Regardless of this, no one is forcing anyone to do anything. I drive at a reasonable distance from the car in front of me, but the area behind me is not my responsibility, strictly and legally speaking.
I fail to see how keeping a proper, safe following distance is "hogging space". It's not like I keep hundreds of meters of space, I generally try to keep 2-3 seconds worth of space in front of me.
I want to make one thing very clear here: I drive the speed limit. I keep right except when overtaking and I don't give a damn how fast anyone else wants to go.
But if we're on a road with one lane in each direction and no overtaking possibilities, they will just have to stay behind me at the speed limit. Fuck 'em if they think I'm going to break the law to accommodate their need for speed.
Considering the extreme unlikelihood that you have ever been a passenger in my car or shared the road with me, I find it odd how you are somehow able to judge how well traffic flows around me.
It works perfectly fine, BTW. People don't seem to be too upset at having to go the actual speed limit for a little while, since I'm not hoggin the left lane or any other disruptive behavior. And because I do the speed limit, overtaking me takes much less space than overtaking someone going 10 over.
I'm not the guy you're replying to, but yes, that does happen to me sometimes. Why?
Because I drive the speed limit, I don't treat the stop lights as drag strips and I like to keep a sensible distance to the cars in front me. But I don't block traffic or care how fast anyone else wants to go, they're free to overtake me if they want to.
Currently, I average about 56mpg in my diesel car, on a combined cycle with plenty of city and motorway driving. On super grippy winter tires. It's better than the specified mileage of the car by a few MPG and it's even better on low rolling resistance summer tires.
It really isn't that hard to drive economically. Just relax and let the traffic flow. Try not to move traffic but to move through it and look as far ahead as you possibly can.
You obviously need a truck for your work and you use an F-150, which I would say is about a mid-size truck in the US.
I think he was referring to people who buy large trucks and SUVs to use pretty much exclusively as personal transport, for transporting themselves and perhaps 3 other people at most. Not to mention a couple of bags of groceries. It really is the height of wastefulness when an ordinary sedan or (SHOCK AND HORROR) a wagon would work just as well and get significantly better gas mileage.
I do that regularly in my little 55mpg hatchback with no problems at all. For the relatively rare occasions where I need a larger vehicle, I rent one.