Off the top of my head as a non-European: GDPR, 2-year warranties and other consumer protection laws
This is the "everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" of consumer rights. Everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed capitalist overlord.
"Rich" people don't want socialized healthcare because of perceived or real disadvantages of that system. Not because "the poors might get it".
Also the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" is another strawman, used by those who dislike capitalism. People can and do support a variety of causes and policies without they themselves benefitting from them.
That's fair, I should have said "because the poors might benefit". Rich people don't like socialized healthcare because they, by definition, will pay for people who can't afford it.
The problem is when people who will benefit from this identify with people who will lose from it.
> People can and do support a variety of causes and policies without they themselves benefitting from them.
They do, but here we're talking about the opposite: People being against policies they benefit from, because they identify with the group that will not.
P.S. I liked your comment, it was a reasoned reply that furthers the debate, thank you.
The two commonly held arguments against socialized healthcare in America are: First, a distrust that the government will create a system that is good and a belief that quality will decrease under such a system, and;
Second, that such a system would be funded by a large tax increase and that Americans are in general hard to get excited about tax increases. The financial concern is in the taking, not in the getting.
I'm afraid your experiences are not universal.
There is a very strong streak of this in the US, significantly (though probably not wholly) traceable to the Calvinist roots of the Puritans who were a profound influence on the early culture of the country. When you believe that people's position on Earth is due to their level of deserving (Just World Fallacy), it's very easy to extend that to "and therefore we shouldn't try to help poor people; they're just being punished for being bad people."
There are genuinely many people who wholeheartedly believe that the poor deserve to be poor, and that helping them is bad. Some of them aren't even that well off themselves, but have bought into an ideology that's detrimental to them.
If you haven't encountered these people, then count yourself lucky, but don't try to deny their existence or assume your own experiences are universal.
You can't deny the politics of retribution exists, because politicians only give oblique references to it; voters certainly believe it, hence one voter who complained about Covid shutdowns thusly: "He's not hurting the people he needs to be"
It's an unsavory thought, but the US has a significant amount of people employed in the business of denying healthcare to other people, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Any politician attempting to fix this would be committing political suicide.
Are you talking about me, personally, or Americans in general? I suppose it doesn't really matter - you'd be wrong in either case. The median person in the poorest US state is richer than the median person in the UK, for example.
Most Americans grumble about paying for healthcare, and we are getting ripped off, but it's also very rare for someone to actually die because they can't afford it. Anyone in the top, say, 80% of American society has some form of employer-subsidized insurance.
These words are doing some very heavy lifting.
This is due to the garbage GDP numbers. Based on these, the quality of life in the Mississippi is better than in Japan. Not a single chance. The US numbers are highly inflated by the financial sector and real estate. It'll take a financial crisis and dethroning of US dollar to show how truly poor these places are.
Source? Are you adjusting for cost of living, per capita, and using the median?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
> Are you adjusting for cost of living, per capita, and using the median?
Yes, yes, and no (irrelevant because it barely shifts the result)
Come on, this is Econ 101 and basic logic.
> Come on, this is Econ 101 and basic logic.
You griping about luxury goods on principle isn't "Econ 101" or "basic logic".
You can look at basically any material metric you like (cars owned, house size, etc.) and Americans come out ahead. Nominal GDP numbers are kind of nonsense, but they're directionally the same nonsense everywhere, so they actually work OK as an international comparison.
Rate of personal bankruptcies? Homeownership rate? Median household net wealth?
The amount of cars Americans have on absurd loans is entirely irrelevant to their personal wealth or lack thereof.
The allocation of debt is essentially irrelevant - there are materially more, bigger, better cars per capita in the USA. Whether those cars get repo'd and transferred to richer Americans is irrelevant - you can't fake the material presence of more stuff.
Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP or the presence of billionaires and unicorns, as if between you, Zuck, and Musk you have an average wealth of $500B. There are much poorer GDP-wise countries where people live better and are happier than the US :)
The median American has all of these things better than the median European, except maybe healthcare. That's tough to compare. Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US.
Most of the top colleges are American. American homes tend to be much larger and nice than European homes.
> Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP
The distribution is really not that skewed. In most states, median income is within 40% of mean income.
Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
No. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
By median, the US is on par with Italy. If you adjust for property prices (cheaper in Italy), then it's definitively lower.
How about the median Western European (including nordic)?
>Most of the top colleges are American.
Yes, because that's where the money and companies are. Those concern a miniscule minority of the population - with most either not having access to education, or only through huge personal debt. And even there, take away the majority Europeans, Asians, Indians, etc doing the research in these (after having been educated in their local countries), and it would be a wasteland.
>Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US
The UK had better healthcare than the US for the average person, it only fell behind because of opening itself up too much because of immigration (without sufficient funding increases) and also because of following US-like neoliberal policies in the past 20 years or so that hurt the NHS.
>Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
Not exactly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
US ranks 3 by mean but 15 by median. It's ahead of most European by mean but by median most West European are ahead. And this doesn't adjust for property prices.
Yep! And the European countries behind include like ex-soviet bloc countries and such (basically starting from very low in 1989-1991). And as you not, the cost differences (not accounted in the table) push European countries even further than this ranking.
Besides mean vs median, I'd point also quality of life factors not measured in dollars or euros.
To be fair to them, i think it was sarcasm.
Like, the pendulum swung WAY too far in the other direction.
None of which are required by GDPR. In fact, those obtrusive "consent" forms are usually violations of GDPR.
The laws are great because every cookie consent form is essentially saying, "we as a company want you to accept a cookie that is unnecessary."
If you don't install unnecessary cookies, you don't need to have a consent form.
2. It clearly explains which cookies it uses in the linked policy page
3. It has an opt-out that is as easy as the opt-in (as required by law)
As is explicitly required by law
There’s a different issue here: lawyers and companies are often concerned that what they deem necessary will be deemed unnecessary when challenged. So, they require cookie consent preemptively to avoid liability in case they get it wrong.
It surfaces which websites use stronger tactics to track you, and which allow consumer friendly opt-outs. There are even many websites that don’t need the notices as they don’t use cookies for tracking a natural person (their cookies are not associated with personally identifiable information).
So we can choose what we use because we are informed.
The problem is I didn't see a single web site that I visited where this was apparent. It was a mess of opt-in pop-ups and settings and whatnot that completely overwhelmed me with actionable things I had to do before I could interact with a site, and often many companies clearly just said F it and blocked anyone from Europe.
Some websites have become region-locked, but I found that it's mostly those who cater to American audiences anyways. Perhaps if you travelled to Europe, this was more of a problem for you because you wanted to read the local news back home. For us, back home is here, so local American websites region-locking us out isn't a big inconvenience. They probably only do this if European audiences don't make up much of their readership anyways — they wouldn't want to lose significant ad revenue.
Imagine if companies didn't collect copious amounts of user data and didn't try to use every trick in the book and all known dark patterns to make you give up that data.
"We care about privacy by selling your data to 2765 'partners' and are blaming GDPR for this"
So to me this seems more like the tech-companies and websites being annoying at implementing an easy solution, in order to rebel against the laws and make people angry at it for the inconvenience, then the law itself being bad.
(https://measuredcollective.com/why-your-cookie-banner-is-pro...)
On mobile every page load ends up with me spending the first minute or so on page dealing with the half-screen "don't sell my info" cookie dance, followed with the ad-block pop-ups.
It usually isn't the law's job to dictate an implementation.
> shitty implementers ended up making the browsing experience horrible with intrusive pop-ups and geo blocking.
How is the law that doesn't even talk about browsers or cookies responsible for this?
But it's also driven some pretty interesting projects, so I'd probably call it a wash or perhaps a slight positive, even if I were to ignore the major benefits as a consumer