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Comment by drstewart | Hacker News Reader

>The US just took away the constitutional right to bodily autonomy.

Can you point to, say, the UK's constitutional right to bodily autonomy so I can compare? I assume that there will be one as not having a strong constitution guaranteeing these rights is massive internal oppression that is very scary. Also: speaking of the UK and taking away its citizens rights... ever hear of Brexit?

>Europe is not at war. War in Ukraine is due to an external force that affects barely anybody in Europe

Ukraine is not in Europe? Also, the original commenter claimed inflation were a result of war and pandemic. So does it affect people or not?

>What a bizarre nationalistic reply this is, to be so insecure about the landmass you happen to live on.

I agree, the Europeans in this thread are bizarrely nationalistic. My sense is that there's a large contingent of political redditors in here.

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People are mostly just pointing out the very objective losses to quality of life in the US compared to Europe, which is a fair answer to the original question.

And day to day quality of life has nothing to do with geopolitics for most people. US just simply ranks far lower than Central Europe and the Nordics in these measurements. A lot of it is just city planning and infrastructure.

Norway has 5 million people, insane gas reserves, is a monoculture of ethnically similar people, has basically no immigration to speak of, and owns 2% of every publicly traded country worth a damn. I can’t believe anyone would point to this country smaller than a single metro area of the USA as something that is replicable.

Ok, take Spain. Quality of life there is just substantially better than pretty much all of the US.

In what way? Do people live on huge ranches / estates, walk through large redwood trees, ski down a glacier, watch professional football/hockey/basketball live? Can they hunt, fish, shoot or run into hollywood celebrities?

Can they even buy a house or do they have to settle for an apartment?

Quality of live might be great in Barcelona if you like to drink and eat and want to work less. But Spain is so small comoared to the US. The US has so much more variety.. deserts, tundra, forests, palm trees, rocky mountains, cities..

> In what way? Do people live on huge ranches / estates, walk through large redwood trees, ski down a glacier, watch professional football/hockey/basketball live? Can they hunt, fish, shoot or run into hollywood celebrities?

What... world do you live in that Europeans* can't do all of that except the last?

> Can they even buy a house or do they have to settle for an apartment?

Of course... wtf? lol 76% of people own their homes in Spain. Home ownership in the US is only 65%...

* Spanish people can go anywhere in the EU with just an ID, no passport needed, just like in the US.

Spain is much smaller than Europe and houses are much smaller and salaries are smaller and the political divide is much worse in Spain. Two different states want out and after a vote they arrested the head of state for those regions. The legacy of Franco..

Did you check your numbers this time or are you still just making things up? I'm going to trust you know nothing about the politics of Spain and ignore that comment.

> Two different states want out and after a vote they arrested the head of state for those regions. The legacy of Franco..

You must be trolling. You literally had a civil war for the same exact reason... Unfortunately, no state allows any subset of itself to secede.

I have lived in Spain. Taxes are high, salaries are low, bureaucracy is a lot worse than the US, most people live in small apartments and they certainly don’t own US sized houses. Cost of living can also be high, if one tries to meet the same standard that he would have in US (electricity, gasoline prices are a lot higher).

I could pick pretty much any US state over Spain and with a US engineering salary enjoy a vastly better standard of living.

Enjoying a materially higher standard of living with large houses doesn't really match how people actually enjoy experience and happiness. The thorough social disconnect in the US, in great part explained because said large houses have to be set up in the relative middle of nowhere, counts far more for "standard of living" in my book as well as those of a lot posters here.

Addendum: used to live in a very wealthy suburb in the US. Said houses are creaky, have constant humidity issues because the mildest of winds would blow out the roof tiles, and have a very low standard of construction coming from other places. More square footage is not indicative of a higher quality of life; many rooms sat mostly empty and did nothing for us.

> is a monoculture of ethnically similar people, has basically no immigration to speak

This isn't even true (immigration accounts for half of Norway's population growth) but let's take a more extreme example: Sweden, the country with 7th highest quality of life on planet Earth yet every 1 in 11 people is an immigrant. This single case proves your generalization wrong. Every 16th person is a first generation immigrant originating from outside of Europe.

You seem completely ignorant of the fact that we took hundreds of times more immigrants per capita than any country on Earth yet we all dominate the fuck out of ALL of quality of live rankings.

Norway's population grew under 50,000 which means they welcomed 20,000.. Cities like Toronto are welcoming 10 - 15 times more people from a much wider variety of places.

The ethnicities in Norway are recorded as Norwegian 83.2%, other European 8.3%, other 8.5%

Your vision of Norway and the numbers don't lineup. 92.9% of people are white..

I think you misread what I said.

Take a look at the Abortion Act 1967 if you're acting in good faith.

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