Hacker News Reader

Comment by goodpoint | Hacker News Reader

> Today, America's poor have a better quality of life than medieval kings.

And work two jobs and go bankrupt and die of some treatable disease? I'd rather be poor in any european country or Korea or Japan.

Besides, that's a pretty cheeky comparison.

View on HN

There weren't treatable diseases in medieval times, even if you were king. You either recovered on your own, or you died.

That's the cheeky part of the comparison. Cherry-picking two distant points in time and two very specific categories of people.

>And work two jobs and go bankrupt and die of some treatable disease? I'd rather be poor in any european country

Belarus?

> I'd rather be poor in any european country

Bulgaria welcomes you

Bulgaria has free healthcare and university education. People in Bulgaria are also very unlikely to be killed by police or die in a mass shooting. Bulgaria also has less people incarcerated per capita than the US. Bulgarian workers get mandatory 20 day of PTO a year.

I could imagine lot of people who would think they are better off there than in the US.

E: There's of course a lot of things that aren't great about Bulgaria - it is probably the least developed and most corrupt EU country - but since US is very unequal, it depends whether your baseline is millionaire FAANG software engineer or minority person working in Walmart.

> I could imagine lot of people who would think they are better off there than in the US.

I love Bulgaria (beautiful country, great people) but it's just your imagination: there are still more Bulgarians emigrating to the USA than Americans to Bulgaria. Lots more. Like almost one-way street, really.

Poor minority Walmart employees having no idea how good they would have it in Bulgaria instead...

At the same time, I assume Americans would love to have 20 days of PTO, and not be afraid they end up in debt over disease or die because they can't afford insulin.

Maybe they would - but not enough to give up all other US' advantages and emigrate to Bulgaria.

> Like almost one-way street

Sure, but that proves nothing.

Correction, higher education is dirt cheap, not free. My English degree cost me about $600 in tuition, CS is about double that. Of course international students pay more, but it's still cheap by Western standards. Healthcare is free, at least in theory. In practice you may need to grease some palms to get decent treatment. There is a thriving private system, not too expensive either. American-style health insurance is a standard perk for tech companies. Hopefully it won't end up driving prices to the roof.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com