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Comment by robert_foss | Hacker News Reader

My personal counter is that I just couldn't morally accept contributing taxes to a nation which:

    - Exploits the poor and non-citizens
    - Overthrows governments and bullies smaller countries
    - Has only the most rudimentary social security system
    - Does not really have a concept of healthy work/life balance. With little time off and none at all for people with newborns.
    - Takes near-zero environmental responsibility
    - Literally spies on the entire population of the rest of the world
    ...

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That starts to rule out a lot of English speaking countries, including probably the UK.

I mean, in the UK alone you'd need to evaluate what, if anything, separates the modern British morals from the morals of the British Empire which was not a very nice organisation [1]. They technically didn't overthrow and bully, but that was because they conquered and colonised. I don't think the lineage of government institutions has changed that drastically.

The modern anglosphere (UK, Australia, US, New Zealand, Canada) are all part of the spying-on-everyone gig.

The social security system and environmental comments I'll grant you; but the reason for that is (ironically, given your comment) that people don't want to contribute taxes for it. Work life balance I have no comment.

[1] EDIT The stereotype I picked up was that a good foundation of modern British wealth was a bunch of things they 'found unattended' overseas. I gather the Indians still claim that some parts of British royal jewelry were stolen from them and should be returned with an apology.

> I gather the Indians still claim that some parts of British royal jewelry were stolen from them and should be returned with an apology.

Bit offtopic, but this is complicated. A lot of the jewellery were taken from present-day Pakistan (or were gifts from kings in that area) so it's not clear to which country they should be returned to.

Yes, they did "technically" overthrow.

The UK, alongside the US, overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953. This is not a point of contention, it's been openly stated by the CIA.

I genuinely thought the GP was making a joke until the bit about time off.

Even on a selfish level, the extra 2-3 weeks of PTO in UK is easily more important than the extra compensation in the US. What's the point of having more money if you are stuck in an office for more of the year and can only spend it on material goods? As you say, for women the difference in maternity leave is laughable.

Eventually at Google US you get 5 weeks PTO, which is the same as in Google London. Plus Google has four more holidays in the US than in the UK.

> Eventually at Google US you get 5 weeks PTO, which is the same as in Google London. Ah but you're cherry picking an example from one company, I am also not sure how long or what role you'd need to accrue that much PTO. In Europe most (all?) countries have a legal minimum of 3-4 weeks PTO in addition to public holidays, regardless of your job or time working.

> Plus Google has four more holidays in the US than in the UK. I'm not sure what the definition of federal holidays is vs. public holidays in Europe, but a quick Google suggests US has 10 while the UK has 8 public holidays.

I'm specifically talking about what Google gives its employees for public holidays. And federal holidays are basically meaningless unless you, y'know, work for the feds.

"Eventually" but to get to that point you have to endure years of getting half the time off that a burger flipper gets in McDonalds UK. Honestly it's a bit humiliating.

The more limited time does suck, but on the other hand the huge amount of money makes it way easier to retire earlier, so you can have more time off in the long run if you want.

>Eventually at Google US you get 5 weeks PTO, which is the same as in Google London. Plus Google has four more holidays in the US than in the UK.

How many engineers do you know who made full use of their five weeks every year and were able to be promoted?

I don't keep track of people's vacation time that closely. When I transferred to Google Munich though I didn't notice a change in work life balance, other than having more vacation.

Were you transferring from the Mountain View office?

Yes.

At the big tech companies the parent references, the PTO and parental leave are pretty competitive.

I work for Twitter in the US and I took 7 or 8 weeks last year, including taking off all of November. We also get 20 weeks paid parental leave (either mother or father) and it includes adoptions and same-sex couples.

Sorry, which country are we talking about? Barring the guaranteed maternity leave I'm not seeing a helluva difference.

Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be a five eyes member than not - but I think it's naive to think any of the member states are innocent of the majority of these statements.

How many countries are left after that list?

You've already ruled out any 'five eyes' countries (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand), much of Europe (for similar reasons), China, Russia (okay, these literally break all of them), Japan and South Korea (work/life balance), almost all of the middle east, much of South America, much of Africa, etc.

Maybe one of the Nordic countries avoids these issues. Maybe.

You forgot:

- Defends the global liberal world order and upholds free trade through spending half it’s budget on a military which protects the entire continent of Europe.

A trade war is a funny way to go about that.

It’s only half of the discrentionary budget, which itself is roughly half of the total budget.

And with the pending trade war with our Allies and Trump’s threats to NATO this point may not be valid much longer.

Because the multiple nuclear states in Europe and its standing army which would give the US itself a hell of a fight are otherwise easy prey for

...

aliens?

Russia's strategic nuclear capability dwarfs that of any country in the EU. The Russian armed forces aren't what they used to be, but without the backing of the US, Russia's conventional military threat to the EU is also serious.

They have a lot of nukes because nukes are cheap and Russia's economy is pretty small - a good bit less than Italy and less than half of the UK.

They probably do pose a realistic threat to the Baltic states - but that's because they are very small and isolated.

They're not that cheap. Russia spends about 230 billion USD annually, and spends about 10 billion on nuclear weapons. That's more than any country other than the USA.

>They're not that cheap. Russia spends about 230 billion USD annually, and spends about 10 billion on nuclear weapons. That's more than any country other than the USA.

Where are you getting these numbers? I really doubt that Russia is spending 1/5th their GDP on the military. Wikipedia says it's $69 billion, which is more than order of magnitude below NATO [0], [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_Russian...

[1] https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2017_...

230 billion USD is, according to Wikipedia, Russia's annual spending (not just military spending). I can see how that figure could have been interpreted as referring to military spending in the context of my post, but that's not what my post actually said.

The figure of $69 billion overall military spending seems consistent with the 10 billion figure I gave for Russian spending on nuclear weapons.

I got that figure from here: http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/catastrophic-harm/a-diversion... The figures are a bit old and I accidentally used the older of the two. But unless they're way off, it's true that Russia is spending more on nuclear weapons than any country other than the US. It's also spending more than France and the UK combined (France and the UK being the only European countries with a strategic nuclear capability).

Besides all that, the idea that nukes are somehow the cheap option for Russia is pretty nuts when you consider that Russia still maintains a fleet of ballistic missile submarines -- an expensive hobby by anyone's standards. You could pay for lots of conventional weapons with the money spent on that. They're even building shiny new ones: https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/russia-to-launch-its-deadlie...

Russia is about as broke as the Soviets were - nukes are by far the cheapest way of them being considered a major power:

http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/02/news/russia-defense-spending...

Calling them "Upper Volta with Missiles" was a bit harsh - they do spend a larger percentage of their GDP then most European countries but with such a small economy I'm not sure it makes much difference. After all - nobody feels particularly threatened by Canada.... (which has a larger GDP).

>by far the cheapest way of them being considered a major power

Cheap compared to what alternative? It's not clear what you mean by this. They're spending a fat chunk of their military budget on nukes, they're spending far more on nukes than they need to spend just to be a nuclear power (since they're maintaining all three delivery options), and they're spending more on nukes than any other country except the US.

>they do spend a larger percentage of their GDP then most European countries but with such a small economy I'm not sure it makes much difference

Just check the figures. Russia's military budget is a bit higher than the UK or France's. Russia generally ranks 4th or 5th in the world for military expenditure.

>. After all - nobody feels particularly threatened by Canada...

Because Canada doesn't have nukes or anything like the same military budget. You seem to be confusing GDP with the level of military threat posed. They're only loosely related.

Russia's nuclear capacity? How is that relevant? The UK alone has 215 nukes (just checked wiki), so yeah maybe Russia could kill all of us and we'd only kill 90% of them but past a certain threshold additional nuclear weapons are irrelevant.

My last post as HN is supposed to be better than this kind of nationalistic -swinging but I think the idea that Europe is reliant on US for protection is pretty absurd. Multiple nuclear states, you can't just assume that all of our nukes are faulty (and nor would anyone else). Nor would they be unable to maintain them without the US if relationships soured so far. We lease them from US companies because we are (historically!) allies! Similar level of standing military as the US, which could be ramped up above given larger population and GDP.

There's a fair statement: "US contributes unfairly much to NATO" And a completely mental statement: "Europe is dependent upon the US for protection"

That's supposing that the weapons work as advertised. The UK is entirely reliant on Trident for its nuclear deterrent, and it is reliant on support from the USA to maintain Trident. If Trident turns out not to work very well (which is entirely possible), or if relations with the USA sour, or if ballistic missile submarines turn out to be easier to detect and/or more vulnerable than expected, then the UK could very well not have an effective nuclear deterrent.

>you can't just assume that all of our nukes are faulty (and nor would anyone else)

No, but you also can't assume that we have enough nuclear capability to successfully respond to Russian first strike. No-one really knows how well the relevant systems will work. France is the only other EU country with any significant nuclear capability.

There are also Germany, Italy, other states which have nukes through NATO. If the US is serious about withdrawing from NATO then the nuclear capability of these states would end up being completely independent from the US, and EU has the tech and money to scale their nuclear capacity up to any necessary level.

You're right they're not Germany's, my bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing

They're the US' nukes but this is all predicated on NATO which was previously assumed. If US withdraws from NATO then they won't get to keep nukes in Germany, so they either lease them or withdraw them.

I think the two important points are that 1. Europe has the capacity to build and sustain a massive nuclear arsenal 2. They already have enough to usher in the apocalypse for anyone who invaded them including Russia. 500 vs 3000 is kind of irrelevant when you could already kill millions upon millions. 3. Some of the seeming reliance of Europe on America for nukes is by choice and a consequence of the previously rock-solid alliance. In the event of the breakup of that alliance the independent capacity of Europe to summon the apocalypse would be a lot more obvious

You're misinformed. Neither Germany nor Italy has nuclear weapons.

>500 vs 3000 is kind of irrelevant when you could already kill millions upon millions.

No, it's not. The reason for having thousands of warheads is not to blanket the earth in a nuclear apocalypse. It's to have enough failsafe and fallbacks that you are guaranteed to destroy the opposing force's arsenal before they can hit you. 5 missiles at once can be trivially intercepted. 500 missiles at once is unstoppable. The first exchanges in a nuclear salvo would be aimed directly at each other's silos. The vast majority of research in nuclear weapons today is in penetration capability of hardened targets (which systems like the UK's Trident do not possess) not widespread killing of civilians, and whoever maintains a superior capability in this respect will have the upper hand in any negotiation.

The whole point behind building nuclear defence systems was to render the risk of consequences from a first strike too grave to attempt it, not to achieve perfect balance between the city-eradication potential of the respective nuclear powers. Nobody is about to evaluate how well Trident works in practice by launching a first strike on London.

For all of Trident's limitations, it is impossible to argue with a straight face that the current US executive's desire to maintain the liberal world order and free trade (hahahaha) offers the UK a more reliable defence from threats against UK interests.

>Nobody is about to evaluate how well Trident works in practice by launching a first strike on London.

Let's hope not.

>not to achieve perfect balance between the city-eradication potential of the respective nuclear powers.

The UK's nuclear deterrent consists of one or two Trident submarines active at any given time which carry 8 Trident missiles each. (They can carry up to 16, but don't at the moment.) Don't be under the impression that the UK can deploy anything like its full stockpile of warheads in the event of a nuclear conflict.

>it is impossible to argue with a straight face that [...]

You're reading some kind of political slant into my comment that just isn't there. I'm not a fan of the current US administration.

I'm reading the political slant into the comment upthread I quoted from; not really sure why we're engaged in the tangent of questioning the adequacy of Trident if you acknowledge it's a better deterrent than the present "Special Relationship" (and an expensive one paid from our taxes). The UK's non-operational stockpile means ample capacity to expand upon the currently operational missile stock in the event of a ratcheting up of tensions, and frankly if there's a hostile leader who considers even 8 nuclear missiles to be insufficient deterrent, the UK faces bigger problems than lack of retaliatory capacity.

Trident is (and is widely acknowledged to be) about the bare minimum required for a semi-credible nuclear deterrent. It's just about enough to make a country like Russia think twice. Probably.

The deterrent provided by the US is not the special relationship, but the US's enormous nuclear arsenal, which it probably would deploy against Russia if Russia launched a nuclear attack against the UK. They would do the same if Russia launched a nuclear attack against any NATO power, so the special relationship doesn't really come into it.

As I said above, it is difficult to argue with a straight face that Putin will be less concerned by a direct threat to his eight largest centres of population than the possibility a US executive far less enthusiastic about NATO than cordial relations with Russia might choose to sacrifice its citizens to escalate that threat. Not even if one believes in the uniquely British conceit that our bilateral relations are more special still.

None of which has any real bearing on whether the UK might be a more or less unpalatable place to live than the US for political reasons anyway. :-)

Huh? It's not at all difficult to argue with a straight face that Russia would take into account the likelihood of a massive retaliation from the US if it launched a nuclear attack on another NATO country. Again, the special relationship has nothing to do with it.

You can't seriously be saying that the Russians are now confident that they would receive no nuclear response from the US if they decide to, say, nuke Paris, just because Trump is in power.

The UK's Trident missile system is not dependant on the US for launch control[0]. All the other what ifs you've mentioned are the same for both sides.

The thing about nuclear war is that you can't attach the UK without attacking France. What's more, you can't attack Russia without attacking the UK and France. In a nuclear winter we all die. Everywhere.

It's like letting of a hand grenade in an elevator. You can throw it at the guy in the corner if you like, you're still going down too.

[0] https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/no-america-doesnt-control-br...

>The UK's Trident missile system is not dependant on the US for launch control[0]

I didn't say that it was. But we do depend on the USA for maintenance and support. The independent all-party Trident commission concluded that the deterrent could not be maintained for more than a few months if the US were to withdraw cooperation: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/defence-and-security-blo...

>All the other what ifs you've mentioned are the same for both sides.

No, because Russia and USA have the nuclear triad. The UK only has one method of delivery. France has two.

Damn, so you want to live in a country that exploits the rich (you) ?

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