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Comment by aa-jv | Hacker News Reader

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Nobody likes taxes, but I guarantee you'd rather be unemployed in Vienna than San Francisco

I'd rather be employed with San Francisco wages, but living in Vienna. That'd actually make it a little more comfortable to be paying Austrian taxes ..

But no amount of wage hike would lure me to live in San Francisco. Its a shit-hole not just because of social policies ..

> Its class system is literally encoded in the streets and districts. Its streets were designed for horses and walkers, and this still shows in its varied cultures.

I have no idea what you are talking about. Can you give an example?

Compare the wealth of the 1st District with that of the 7th .. or 15th .. Vienna's districts are literally a class system, encoded in the streets. And then compare the easier-walking districts, the ones designed for horses (i.e. wealth) versus the ones on the peripheral, and see what the quality of street life is like ..

Wealth inequality in Europe is seldom discussed unfortunately. Everyone focuses on income inequality to demonize well earners and justify taxing them more to pay for the mistakes of politicians and the sinking welfare system, but ignores all that untaxed wealth stashed away in the hands of a few.

Average salary in Austria after taxes is something like 2k/month yet the country is full of flashy cars and houses costs from several hundreds of thousands to millions of Euros. How is that possible? You have mediocre EU salaries at San Diego house prices. Rents are reasonable but I don't see how people are gonna be able to also afford rent from retirement pensions.

> Average salary in Austria after taxes is something like 2k/month

No, average salary in Austria after taxes is about €3000, or about $3,700 after exchange rates and PPP. Which is less than the US, not hardly a poor place by world standards.

Combine that with the long-term wealth you get from being an early-to-industrialise European country that was on the capitalist side on the Cold War, and you've got your explanation.

How is this different than any other city in the world though?

You can plot class by district # in most cities?

Pretty much every city in the world is like that - tell someone where you live and they'll assess you as to wealth/class?

It's not (only) the high-taxes on the local high-income people that have kept Vienna (and Austria as a whole) still in the game, it's also the fact that they did a sort of economic imperialism throughout Eastern Europe after the Wall fell/the Cold War ended and they (Vienna and Austria) have managed to live off that bounty for pretty much the whole time. I'm talking oil companies, banks, wood-processing groups, even construction companies, all getting a piece of the Eastern-European very big pie and repatriating lots and lots of profits.

Trouble is, the war in Ukraine means that both the Ukrainian and Russian markets are now off-limits for them, and the rest of Eastern Europe to which they used to have privileged access to (meaning Romania, from where I'm from, and the Balkans) is starting to "fight" back, so to speak, I'm talking about local capitalists + other foreign (non-Austrian) groups that have become confident and knowledgeable enough in these local markets in order to drive the Austrians out.

Other than that, yeah, Vienna is a wonderful city but a little bit cold for my taste (which is reason enough not to place it in the number one spot as for the "liveability" standings). Its tramway network is top-notch, though, one of the few "Western" European cities that can still say that about their trams, kudos to them for that (it probably helps that, half-jokingly speaking, Austrians are Slavs that happen to speak German so it makes sense that they havent't gotten rid of their trams, just look at the Czechs and the Slovaks next door who also have wonderful tram networks still running).

Huh? Many European cities still have trams. For example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Germany

They're joke of tram systems. Yeah, for (West) Germany Munich is an exception, I guess (and I should have added it), but look at cities like Hamburg, which got rid fo their tram network completely back in the day [1]. To say nothing of very big European cities like Paris, London, Madrid or Rome that are (almost) totally lacking in that respect, and I'm not counting the light-rail thingie, I'm talking about trams that actually go to downtown and to many, many other areas, like a spider web.

This is the Paris tram map [2], it's a joke, to be honest with you. Yes, I know that the metro is supposed to be a substitute for that, but the metro is at least an order of magnitude (if not more) more expensive to operate and it's not the same thing as a tram, where you just pop-in and pop-out while seeing the actual daylight through the tram's windows.

Later edit: For comparison, this is the Vienna tram map, i.e. the spider web network I was talking about [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Hamburg

[2] https://parismap360.com/website/var/tmp/image-thumbnails/0/6...

[3] https://www.urbanrail.net/eu/at/vienna/tram/wien-tram-centre...

> but the metro is at least an order of magnitude (if not more) more expensive to operate

Many metros, specially the automates ones are really cheap to operate. If you compare capacity and cost then metro lines are far more efficient.

A lot of old tram lines are simply done by buses. Often even electric buses.

I'm all for more trams, but they are just one part of a much larger transportation system. Using them as the primary center to outskirts mechanism isn't a good idea.

"imperial, totalitarian-authoritarian desires in mind."

That is what I felt while walking through it. The buildings in the old town center are just a little too tall, in the statues on top of the buildings are just plain creepy.

Plus, it had one of the nastiest McDonald's I've ever been in, which is quite an achievement given that I have tried to go to McDonald's and every city I've traveled to just for comparison sake.

On my first visit, on my first day, I walked by a beautiful Park and saw one blackbird picking the brains out of another blackbird.

That is Vienna to me.

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