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Comment by zz865 | Hacker News Reader

Also quality of life in Europe is much higher. US everything is bigger, but Europe wins for Food quality, cleanliness, crime & safety, holidays, design.

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This kind of comparison makes no sense because whether quality of life is better in US or Europe depends on the US city/state vs European city/country you are comparing in each, as well as whether you're comparing someone of lower, lower middle, upper middle, or upper class.

US upper class in a wealthy area is very different from US lower middle class in another. And the same goes for Europe.

This is true in some respects, but as someone who recently moved from Munich back to the states, there's definitely some aspects of life that I prefer here.

I'd list them now, but that would just invite the European Defense Squad to come out and tell me how all those problems are specific to Munich/Bavaria/Germany, ignoring how the original comment I was responding to was generalizing the same way.

The truth is that there are some things you can generalize okay on (e.g. healthcare being cheaper in Europe than the US, or the US having poor public transit), but many things really are specific to the particular European country at least. Biking, for example, might be amazing or completely terrible depending on the part of Europe.

The quality of life may be higher for lower middle class or poor people, but not for developers making $150k+ a year with benefits. And most of your points are just silly or negated by having money.

I've heard so many stories of people with top-tier insurance still going through medical bankruptcies in the US. And while you can pay to mitigate the crime risk in some ways, you can't avoid it entirely without seriously restricting your life.

There are upsides to the US, but when I realised that I could never see myself retiring there I realised it made no sense to spend my working life there, even if the salary would be higher.

Crime risk? Where were you living?

I've lived in various places at various times, what specifically are you asking about?

I have never experienced what I would call “crime risk” in the US, much less anything that would require “seriously restricting my life”, so I’m curious if you are referring to a particular area, because I’m sure they exist.

I'm thinking of central/downtown New York and San Francisco (most good developer jobs seemed to be in the big cities). I had enough colleagues get mugged (and got pretty aggressively hassled myself) that it was worrying. What I was getting at with the "seriously restricting my life" was that it seemed like the only way to avoid the risk would have been to never go downtown.

Especially when you consider bacon.

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