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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

The continent is well ahead in health, quality of life, justice and society, partly due to regulation.

Those are all irrelevant. The market will magically fix everything, don’t you know that?

It’s funny because there are people in USA who actually believe health and quality of life are irrelevant because they’re not measured by GDP.

I hope all this stays true without growth. I hope it wasn’t a temporary utopia built on the tail end of centuries of theft and violence all over the world, and a relative peace subsidized by the US Navy. American problems generally last 4 years, and even our bigger problems sit on top of relative self-reliance. As far as I can tell you can’t even heat your homes in winter without Russian or American gas.

> American problems generally last 4 years, and even our bigger problems sit on top of relative self-reliance.

America, the famously self-reliant giant. This has to be satire.

> As far as I can tell you can’t even heat your homes in winter without Russian or American gas.

LOL? Is this some strange side quest started by Russian propaganda? I wish I could link it but there was a literal Russian propaganda ad showing Europeans freezing during the winter of 2022 due to no Russian gas imports... which obviously did not happen.

1. Do you realize that the Russian energy sector is screwed for good, after the start of the war? European gas imports from Russia are basically 0. And Europe has diversified, it's now importing from the US, from Qatar, from Algeria, from a lot of places. Germany built a bunch of LNG terminals in 6 months. Russian gas imports are never going back.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_Europe...

The EU (and Europe in general) is investing like crazy in renewables. Heat pump sales are up 3 digit percentages since 5 years ago. EVs, ebikes, solar panels, wind farms, etc, etc, etc. In 20 years there will be hardly energy dependency on anyone external.

> I hope it wasn’t a temporary utopia built on the tail end of centuries of theft and violence all over the world.

You mean, just like the US theft and violence all over the world? :-)

Pot, kettle, something.

* * *

Edit: found the Russian propaganda video: https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/zuj7lx/russian_st...

I think the concern is the fiscal ability for eu nations to continue to pay for the things that help it stay high on those metrics, especially without innovation.

The productivity numbers for the eu are dreadful so something needs to change.

The distribution of productivity gains in the US is beyond dreadful, so something needs to change.

Besides, it's screamingly obvious the US has literally chosen to pivot back to the Middle Ages, so even these captured productivity differences won't be an issue for much longer.

How is the US anything like the Middle Ages?

You did say literally so can you do a point by point comparison?

We have other people claiming the US is fascist and one of the aims of fascism was to take European culture and religion back to before the Middle Ages - they wanted to emulate the Roman Empire.

That's because many European countries now already had 4 months of basically all media reporting daily of how Trump is dismantling the US.

Public perception for many people is that the US is on its way to become a failed state.

> The productivity numbers for the eu are dreadful so something needs to change.

A happy, healthy society does not need to change to meet capitalist productivity goals. Consumption is killing the world, led proudly by the US.

What needs to change are the metrics we use to judge a society, because if financial success leads to the United States, that's the cautionary tale for the rest of the world, not the example.

That may be true if the things driving quality of life metrics don’t require productivity. But many of them clearly do (e.g. social security for the aged in the face of demographic shrinking).

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