It is amazing what humans can do when we all work together for something that’s good. I think it’s really when people start trying to take advantage of each other when it all goes downhill…
Doesn’t matter, I can only have two, maybe three jobs at once so any more than that is irrelevant to me
higher growth
I get the same $8/hr whether the GDP goes up, stays the same or goes down. You can’t leave workers out of the distribution of wealth and then pretend that more wealth is good for workers
I don’t understand how the hell people even work jobs that don’t make minimum of $30/hour at least in California and even parts of the East Coast. Like your rent is $1600-$2200. At 0.8*3200 for $ 20/hour with taxes your take home is $2560 for a 40 hour work week. So what are you just not eating that month?
How about healthcare transportation medical 401K literally anything? Pruning of benefits didn’t happen because of corporate greed it happened because people just accepted what they were offered. In the Midwest where apartments might be closer to $700-$900 a month some of this works but on the coasts rent is usually twice that. And a car to get most places is $400 a month with insurance supposing you have the credit.
I work in IT and programming, and Id love to do physical labor and talk to real humans rather than salamanders in silicon valley. But the jobs I see don’t even break $30 an hour. Yet it costed me $27 for ham and cheese and altoids, not even including bread where I live in the bay area. It is fucking expensive.
I feel like America is doing so many things ass backwards greed first. But it’s not like I have the experience of living overseas or in Canada or otherwise so I don’t have much to compare it to, so it’s safer by default to live with the devil you know than the one you don’t.
Christ 250g of deli hame for $27? So probably about 22-25€?
That’s probably a ½-¼ more expensive than good ham from a local italian shop in Germany…Good god.
What people do is pile into apartments. Yeah, to live alone may cost let’s say $2000/month rent. But you can pile 4+ people into a four bedroom apartment that costs $5000, split it four (or more) ways, and they’re paying $1250/month. Some of them have significant others, so then you wind up with two people in one room each paying $625/month. (Just random numbers, but that’s the general idea of it.)
The people I know who do it hate it, but it’s what they can afford while staying in the area they like (and/or were born in, have a community in, etc.).
As an american, who gives a shit about all that stuff when your family savings can be wiped out, home foreclosed upon, and bankrupted just because you get sick or suffer an injury!? Even if you plan and do everything right, it could still happen to you, through no fault of your own.
So, IMO until we have universal healthcare like every other modern nation, they all beat us…
Are we gonna include school shooting deaths in those vacancies? Because for some absolutely unknown reason American schools suffer from mysterious shooting deaths multiple times a year. It’s so strange and mysterious and there is absolutely no way to stop it. Like, there is literally nothing to do about all the school shootings every single year for the last few decades.
What about three weeks of extra annual leave, public holidays, real healthcare with no bullshit co-pays (and unlimited sick days, they don’t count towards “pto”), a maximum 35 hour work week… Because that’s more like what it would look like for a higher value job like that. Depends on the country and the job, of course. But in my case in the UK right now, and in my last job in Germany, my total “pto” in US terms has been roughly two months. (Which is a lot even here, but it’s not by any means unheard of, and easy to get if it’s a priority to you). Doing a job with an average salary of about 100k in the US, and I get paid a little over 50k £ for it, which is about 1.5 times the median salary here, so even after the recent inflation it affords a pretty comfortable lifestyle, it’s enough money to pay the mortgage and take holidays to the continent in my ample time off.
Sorry, this turned into a bit of a rant, but tldr: it’s not just “an extra week”
Still not worth it. I broke my leg 3 years ago I paid $2.4k total with my insurance. Today it’d be more like $5k as my insurance isn’t as good, but it would still be worth it to stay in the US even if I broke a bone every 3 months! However, two months of PTO is certainly something. But to be honest, my mentality is in a place where I’d probably end up doing some work on the side if I honestly had 8 weeks of PTO. Even when I had unlimited PTO, I only took like 4-6 weeks a year.
I think broadly speaking, if you make under $120k/year in the US, your quality of life will be better in Western Europe just because of the social safety net and worker’s protections. And this is especially true if you’re planning on having children.
The obvious problem is that the United States missed the Revolutions of 1848 because they were trying to figure out how to be the Red Wizards of Thay before it existed.
I recall going to the UK after brexit, to a house party with family friends. I was hounded with how do you function with only a 2 week holiday. I then shared i had 4 weeks after 5 years. They were so confused that we could function with less than 6 weeks of vacation.
Burn out in the USA is a real thing. Our politicians will never vote for a mandatory vacation for anyone other than them selves
If you complain about it some Americans will just call you lazy. lol. Same thing with the cost of healthcare. They’ll just tell you to get a better job or better healthcare. They never speak about the root cause of the problem.
I usually just take a week over summer then the other 6 weeks at other times of the year. Hotels, fights and stuff pretty much double their prices over the summer.
God please let me move to Europe I don’t even care what language I have to learn I just wanna be able to live without worrying about affording a doctor appointment.
We’d love to fix what we’ve got if that were a reasonable option. For most people, it’s not.
See, politics are so broken here that it’s really just a dick measuring contest to see who can wax the best poetic. And then even when we do get a decent president—because let’s be clear, Biden isn’t a good president—they often cater to corporations long before they even think about making things better for the working people.
At this point, fixing our political system would require either:
A voting miracle, voting not on party lines but on the actual merits of the candidates, or at least voting for the actual best candidate in the primary of the “least” evil party.
A revolution, either through ratification of a new constitution or actual war.
Most people in America are too uninformed for number one to be realistic within less than an entire generation. Sure, newer generations are far more informed and are actually changing the voting landscape in some ways, but it’s not going to be enough to change everything while we’ve still got boomers voting for politicians who don’t have their best interests in mind. It will take years, if not decades, to get that far.
Meanwhile, most people don’t want to be involved in a revolution. Even if everything is peaceful (which it likely wouldn’t be), and we’re able to ratify the new constitution without many issues (which there would be a ton of), that still leaves us with a tumultuous period of transition. Not many people would really want to live through that. I admit that most people probably would because there’s not much of a better choice during that transition, but I guarantee there would be a huge spike in emigration from the United States.
Moving to Europe or Canada is just the best option for a lot of Americans who feel they can’t deal anymore with our broken politics, substandard workers’ rights, and/or dwindling human rights for LGBTQ people. My family has tossed the idea around of moving to Canada, since it’s close, or even Germany despite the fact that my husband and partner make decent money. We just can’t keep up sometimes, and as a polyamorous household of three AMAB people, two of whom are married, we’re worried for our rights, too.
For most people, moving to a different country is a fresh start, and the majority of them will do their utmost to make sure they respect the country they come into. There will always be some that don’t, especially when they’re coming from a country like America, but for the most part, all we want is basic rights that other people have and not having to worry about putting food on the table some days.
My family has tossed the idea around of moving to Canada
Come to Canada! It’s 70% awesome and the rest is prairies and Republicans! Lend your income to our tax system and help out my neighbours and my family and also get some healthcare (still recovering from covid, but it’ll mend). Yay!
Too bad European countries are following the US footsteps. Finland just ousted their popular prime minister lady with a government of actual ultra right wing nazis, Germany’s AfD is gaining lots of traction and getting crazier with their conspiracy theories about great replacement, Italy is going far right too with their new government. UK and their Brexit night… At least Spain is still not having a far right party in the government, if they can form one.
Idk I’m from the central US and I had a German foreign exchange student tell me we didn’t have a mimicable accent. I know it’s not true but it was interesting to hear that from someone who’s familiar with everyone around her speaking in a completely different way, even when using English.
That’s common if you don’t know a language too well. There is the variant that you learned, and since you don’t know more, you think that this variant has no accent and all the other variants (that you didn’t learn and thus are hard to understand) you think have accents.
Only once you spent significant time with multiple accents will you be able to pick up the differences.
If you work in academia, you don’t need to learn a new language. English is the working language. Also the 5 weeks of holiday is nice, but what really helps is the working day.
I started as a bioinformatician a month ago. I come in to the office at 0830 have coffee from 09:00 til 09:45 with my boss and colleagues, work a bit, have lunch from 12:00 untill 13:15, work a bit, go home at 15:30. That’s my day.
I work in the public sector. If I start my day at 06.00, I can leave at 14.30 👌 Perfect for me since I am an early riser and the days are slowly getting darker and darker again
Don’t know about other countries, but in Norway you always have the option of getting websites and government information in English. Everyone speaks it including cashier’s, cleaners etc.
For some reason France really doesn’t like giving english (or any other than french) options on their gov sites. Every other country in the eu are fine.
In France, I feel French is heavily a part of their identity; and contrary to Americans fairweather-jeering their best revolutionary ally, the French do not surrender lightly. It feels like that’s the one thing even the poorest French person has, and taking away one iota of that will be met with a resistance we’ve learned to respect.
I would most certainly disagree that every person speaks English. Especially older people don’t, but in general many people here do not speak a good english
No, pretty much anyone in Norway can speak English, some don’t feel confident in their ability though. But if you ask any rando on the street if they speak English you get the answer of course ".
This is true but also keep in mind that Dutch is still leading in most cases. E.g. if you have a contract that’s both in English and Dutch, if issues arise the Dutch translation will usually be the one that is followed
Sint Maarten should check-in and tell us about the English-Dutch separation and the class system it all but foments. It’s 90% fascinating if 10% disappointing.
Scandinavia is absolutely killing it for bilingualism, among so many other ways they’re killin’ it – no, really, other countries should just study them for clues in general. My experiences (just Sweden, Denmark and bonus Iceland, so far) is that they say Hej and listen for your “hello”, flipping over into beautiful and perfect English without hesitation. Their language programmes are just fucking astounding, really.
Spain’s fine in the touristy spots, but Spanish itself is VERY accessible as a language, so it’s kinda moot like France.
In Germany I will have to rely heavily on the kindness of strangers as I will never grok the language.
They’re exposed to English every day from multiple sources. You aren’t allowed into university unless you can read and write English to a high level. Your text books are in English at university and classes open to exchange students are taught in English. All English media is subtitled. And school lessons in English start when they’re 6. No mystery, just practice.
Those are summer hours. In the rest of the year I’ll be expected to work an additional 45 minutes. Officially we only get 30 minutes for lunch, but no-one cares. When our contact in admin is in we keep it to 45 minutes.
Well this might be an anomaly but the company I worked for in the Philippines gave you a dedicated hour for lunch and two 15-minute breaks, plus two hours weekly for any of the workshops/learning opportunities they provide.
Work in IT.
Start at 9:00
Lunch 13:00-14:00
Go home at 18:00
Commute (if construction does not tear up the main crossing) is around 30min 1-way with bus or a 15-20min bicycle ride.
I think IT might not be as easy as you think. Academia is a bit more open.
IT isn’t quite high skilled enough to get in. They’d almost certainly need an employer to say they couldn’t find a European to do the job, which is exceedingly unlikely.
I think he’s saying it’s harder to get a work visa taking a job in IT, as the EU company would have to first prove that they couldn’t find a European citizen to take the job before they can start hiring foreigners.
It hasn’t been my experience though, we hire lots of foreigners on work visas. Many from India and former Soviet countries especially.
In Spain we do have non-EU people, but oftentimes they come here, live in Spain “irregularly” at some point, and then manage to get residency through means other than an employer sponsoring them. That might not be the case everywhere though.
I’m not in a big corp so I can just assume:
Do some countries require to proof local citizens are not worthy enough so you need to import work force from abroad?
Outsourcing generally means that you hire a (often foreign) consulting company to do your work for you, instead of having your own employees do it. That’s much different from getting an immigrant a work visa and having them work for you.
Both of y’all are melting American brains trying to do the math on figuring out what times you’re talking about.
Most Americans have no clue that 13:00 is 1:00pm because 12+1 is too difficult, and God help you if you say 22:00, because 22-12 might as well be euclidean geometry.
THIS is how Duolingo will get my money. That’s some value-add right there.
But the quebecois stuff just sounds religious. Weeeird. (I kid, I kid. I once had a sergeant mutter ‘sacre bleu’ to me, and I almost chuckled realizing it was an actual curse, which is the only way the day could have been made worse)
Top panel is explaining why Americana are better than Europeans. Bottom panel retorts with saying that they’re on vacation. Europeans get more paid vacation time than Americans.
EDIT: Added “paid” vacation time. Also, someone else mentions that it’s obligated, so they have to take it. I’m not sure about this, so I’m not editing above to include it, but there you go.
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