I have a cousin in Belgium who was laid off following some restructuring and her severance was 52 weeks. Not out of the goodness of the company's hearts, but mandated by law since they gave no notice and she had accrued seniority. US labor laws are a joke in comparison.
Let's take a look, Safety Index - US 50.8, Belgium 50.6. Health care index - Belgium 75.9, US 67.8, Pollution Index - US 36.7, Belgium 49.2, Climate index - Belgium 86, US 78.5.
As it stands US standard of living is better really only in "you can buy a larger house" (shocking, giving the relative size), and "it'll be slightly cheaper".
vacationing/digital nomading in belgium atm, it looks erhm rich. traveling between brussels, leuven, ghent, bruges, soon antwerp... people dress well, never been anywhere with so many german luxury cars on the road, meals cost about the same as US.
I'm sure statistics this and that, but something doesn't translate, sanguine reality is different.
I've worked in the US and now in the Netherlands, and while I earn less in NL it would take a quadruple of what I used to earn in the US to willingly move back there, and even then I'd GTFO as soon as I possibly could. The US is great for getting an absurd amount of money fast, for basically everything else that matters in life I'll take anywhere in the EU over the US.
His little rant about "freedom" ended up aging poorly as most of the countries he lists as being more free have put serious limits on free speech since then. The most Soorkin screed he has written, might as well be John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged for how much its just the author inserting his political views.
It is a delusion that US is rich because of capitalism.
It is an insult to the people that founded the country and people that developed science/tech/finance etc. in it. And ofc the space, natural resources and isolation from wars.
Saying US is rich because capitalism is about as accurate as saying it is rich because it is christian
Do you think those natural resources would have been taken advantage of as well in some other system? Same with the geography and isolation.
You are talking about entirely different things. Makes no sense whatsoever. You could make your same argument about any economic system. The natural resources are inputs, not the outcome.
> Do you think those natural resources would have been taken advantage of as well in some other system?
What I mean is those factors can obviously effect a country's success. And can be argued that that do much more easier than arguing about religion or ideology.
Similarly it is easier to argue that proper nutrition, sleep, drug usage etc. can effect an athlete's performance very positively. But you would find it much harder to argue on their religion, place they live, how wealthy were their family etc.
As another example I think it is pretty easy to argue that the Jewish scientists going to US because of Hitler was a massive gain for US and a massive loss for Germany. And there are so many concrete factors like this that, all things considered, ideology seems irrelevant in comparison.
You might say "this is all because US is capitalist in the first place". I want to point out how similar this kind of thinking is to the way some religious people think and how inconsequential it is in real world.
Many of us see the existence of Elon Musk as a bug, not a feature. I am personally more and more converted to the idea that billionaires should not exist.
Really depends on the type of job. Software? You are making bank in the US and partly because companies in the US can move quick because of their labor laws.
They are laid off (with severance) not permanently disabled. They most likely will find other jobs (linkedin is already full of recruiting messages). I don't intend to make light of it - getting fired sucks, a lot. It's a terrible experience. But it should be also kept in perspective - software engineers, especially in the US, are very well paid, even in comparison with most other US employees. Compared to, say, Belgium, probably 2x and more. You can say living in a welfare state makes up to it, that's a matter of opinion and preference, but if you look just at the numbers, even with layoffs taken into account, I think US software engineers are quite well paid.
As an extreme example, if Elon got fired from Tesla, I am sure he would be ok. He manages his money well and I am sure he does not think his job at Tesla is some king of God-given lifetime human right. If you are making $250k, a company is not expecting to be your baby sitter. You are a grown man or woman.
An employee needs to manage their economic life without depending on some company to make financial decisions for them. Getting laid off is simply part of life.
If you don’t want to be laid off, you can always start your own company and hire all these people, with your own money of course.
Are you aware for well over a decade US software engineers have been compensated many multiples compared to their counterparties outside of the US? 7% is around 280 employees.
Just because companies are holding layoffs does not mean software engineers are not still making bank.
No, that's not true. Most companies offer at least HDHP plans either fully covered or at minimal cost. HDHP plans, by nature, have high deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, but usually well under $10k per year. So for a typical case, unless there's some catastrophic expense not covered by any insurance, the difference can't be more than $10k per year. The difference between typical compensation for a seasoned SW engineer is much more than that, even before taking options & stock into account. In the US $150-200k is pretty common for a seasoned engineer. In Belgium, you'd look at around E100-110k from what I could find online. And I don't think Belgium has lower tax burden overall. So the health insurance alone doesn't come close to covering the gap.
>So the health insurance alone doesn't come close to covering the gap.
You're right - I was also including all the other taxes - SS/Medicare/Unemployment/State/city etc. For ex: someone living in NYC, with 150-200k would be paying a total effective rate of about 35% (breakdown of 24% Fed, 6% SS, 1.5% Medicare, 9% NYS + 3% NYC). Add in health insurance of around 6% and you're close to what EU employee would take home.
Economics is hardly a reproducible science, but an American company has basically instant access to 350 million consumers (and workers) with no language barrier and little inter-state red tape.
It's hard to imagine that this isn't a larger differentiator than the ability to fire hundreds at will.
You would be surprised. Don’t think about it as firing but also being overly cautious. If you run a division in the EU you are overly thoughtful for every single HC you add. You don’t take risks because that HC at minimum is going to cost a year of severance. It’s a balancing act, maybe less new jobs but you get less layoffs.
That’s right but depending on country there may be other legal requirements necessary so the costs tend to add up quickly and on average when you peak behind the curtains at an EU company you see it’s often easier to retain low performing members than it is to go through legal expenses and the notice period. You tend to be more thoughtful if you want to add HC on that region and avoid restructuring the company.
Maybe it works out on average but there are distinct pros and cons. On the net you get less job creation, less innovation and on the flip employees have more protection from being fired.
Perhaps, but one does have to wonder why the US favors making life easier for founders and venture capitalists over making life more livable for people who aren’t already rich.
Like, a while back my employer had 10% layoffs, and their most profitable year ever, in the same year. There’s a real reason why that happened, ans the reason is that the C suite seriously fucked up on managing the company’s finances. In a sane world they should be the first to bear the consequences. Instead they got fat bonuses while hundreds of people who had no part in creating the problem lost their jobs. And the moral justification for a society that allows this is somehow, “But isn’t it great that it’s easier for privileged people to play fast and loose like that?” That is, at best, circular reasoning.
>Would you rather they never hire those people? Because that is one option.
Yup, and that way those people should be hired by companies who are in it for the long term and not looking just at the next quarter (and using hiring as a way to deny employees to competitors).
I don't think there exists a company (at least in the US, in Asia they do have "lifetime employment" system even though that gets eroded too) that can promise it will never have a layoff. Did you know any such company that when it hires you it would tell you "we're here for the long term so you will never laid off, no matter what"?
>You should start that company and guarantee that you will never lay anyone off.
Long term does not mean "never". It just means looking beyond the next quarter and/or hiring based on business needs and not based on hype or a target eps.
It’s not like countries that decided against kleptocracy are drowning in unemployment. On the contrary, they often enjoy a happier population, a better standard of living, or both.
Well, millions of people risk their lives to come to the USA. There is a reason for that. While many come to be takers and abuse the system, many come because of the freedom to take care of your own destiny without expecting someone else to take care of their lives.
> Perhaps, but one does have to wonder why the US favors making life easier for founders and venture capitalists over making life more livable for people who aren’t already rich.
because US government is more controlled by business interests than population voting power.
This is a tough problem because it’s not always great. There is a reason companies largely (not all!) think twice about innovation, hiring and building out new facilities in European countries and part of that are those labor laws. So you miss out on upside but maybe it evens out on average.
This is not me advocating for either side but it’s one of the reasons most startups exist in a country like the US.
ASML is over 30 years old. It also has a massive IP and financial moat that's impossible to replicate by start-ups competitors seeking to disrupt it. Labor laws don't matter at this point as that's not the limiting factor, it's IP and capital.
But SW can be much more easily disrupted, and if you can move faster and stay leaner than your EU competitors due to laxer laws, then you will win. SW success is often about time to market, not IP, since a lot of companies and countries can build a Airbnb, a Booking.com, a Spotify, etc there's no rocket science, they dominated because they were first to market but they can also be easily disrupted by other SW companies if they drop the ball and piss off their userbase as the cost of building SW is much cheaper than building an EU machine.
Also, there's a reason people can only name ASML as EU's shining examples but nothing else.
>booking.com is in NL, and Spotify in SE. Both outcompeted quite some US competitors.
Like wich? Does it count that a lot of their shareholders and managers are in the US? Does it count that Apple music can do the same thing as Spotify and that Booking has loads of competitors that do the same thing? They have no technical moat other than being first to the market. ASML does have a moat.
>I would add Hetzner as an example that EU labor laws are no obstacle to being competitive with US companies.
Sure, but Hetzner is a dust spec compared to AWS, virtually irrelevant outside of EU/Germany. They also came to the market much later than AWS once building a hyperscaler became more of a commodity.
One one hand, lax labor laws means you can be first to market and capture most of it before the EU can wake up from their 3 month holiday and decide to pivot but can't because unions are blocking it. See VW.
On the other, Austria has very lax labor laws around firing people, similar to US and they have next to no big tech companies so that's not the entire formula. You also need the VC capital of Sequoia and AZ16 which doesn't exist in Austria, you need the scale which doesn't exist in Austria, the low tax caproate environment which doesn't exist in Austria, and a small government regulatory environment which doesn't exist in Austria.
in the United States, any business which can pull of scenario where a small group of rich people is exploiting large group of poor people is never going to fail - hence Uber is not a good comparison :)
Some people who actually live in Mississippi do so by choice, ya know, and feel that it's important to contribute to the improvement of the citizenry. But yeah, take the local minimum and compare it, apples to oranges, to a local maxima of a top EU country. Even so, there's still a lot going for Mississippi.
Oh I am well aware, but that's more of a slam on those countries for having such poor economic product. Low GDP means lack of growth and lack of opportunity in the future.
Then consider that Luxembourg and Ireland only top the list as a result of being tax havens for the world's rich. The picture looks grim.
Mississippi isn't well populated but most European countries are...so while those countries may be nicer places to live now, Mississippi's future looks brighter.
20 years of totally flat GDP growth capped by a brutal recession was more than enough for Sweden to switch gears and backpedal on an enormous amount of social welfare policy in the early 90s.
The scenario usually bandied about is AGI self-improving at an accelerating rate: once you cross the threshold to self-improvement, you quickly get superintelligence with God-like powers beyond human comprehension (a.k.a. the Singularity) as AGI v1 creates a faster AGI v2 which creates a faster AGI v3 etc.
Any AI researchers still plodding along at mere human speed are then doomed: they won't be able to catch up even if they manage to reproduce the original breakthrough, since the head start enjoyed by AGI #1 guarantees that its latest iteration is always further along the exponential self-improvement curve and therefore superior to any would-be competitor. Being rational(ists), they give up and welcome their new AI overlord.
And if not, the AI god will surely make them see the error of their ways.
We assume a self improving AI will lead to some runaway intelligence improvement but if it grows at 1% per year or even per month that’s something we can adapt to.
Assume the AGI has access to a credit card and it goes ahead and reserves itself every GPU cycle in existence so it's 1 month is turned into a day, and now we're back to being fucked.
Maybe an ongoing GPU shortage is the only thing that'll save us!
It seems to me that non-General AI would typically outcompete AGI, all else held equal. In such a scenario even a first-past-the-post AGI would have trouble becoming an overload if non-Generalized AIs were marshaled against it.
Or contain, or counter, or be used as a deterrent. At least, I think that's the idea being espoused here (in general, if not in the GP comment).
I think U. S. VS Japan is not.necessarily the right model to be thinking here, but U.S. VS U.S.S.R., where we'd like to believe that neither nation would actually launch against the other, but both having the weapon meant they couldn't without risking severe damage in response making it a losing proposition.
That said, I'm sure anyone with an AGI in their pocket/on their side will attempt to use it as a big stick against those that don't, in the Teddy Roosevelt meaning.
I think that was part of the LessWrong eschatology.
It doesn't make sense with modern AI, where improvement (be it learning or model expansion) is separated from it's normal operation, but I guess some beliefs can persevere very well.
Modern AI also isn't AGI. We seem to get a revolution at the frontier every 5 years or so; it's unlikely the current LLM transformer architecture will remain the state of the art for even a decade. Eventually something more capable will become the new modern.
Every single government employee and their family/friends vote in local elections, and other people do not. You will not win an election without their votes, and you can use opaque compensation like DB pensions and whatnot to hide and punt forward the costs of the compensation.
You will never find a non taxpayer funded entity promise something like this:
>After 30 years of service, LA lifeguards can retire as young as 55 on 79-percent of their pay.
Go ask an insurance company how much an annuity for even $80k would cost starting at age 55 until death. It would be $1M+.
Social Security averages out your earnings for your whole lifetime to calculate the benefit, and that is with the power of the federal government. City and state governments regularly promise employees final average 1, 3, 5, and at best 10 pay formulas. So you see cops/firefighters/lifeguards/etc spiking their overtime and working 80 hours per week for the last few years, doubling and tripling their DB pension benefit.
And you simply will not see this outside of taxpayer funded entities.
Another part of the challenge is overtime -- it ends up costing a lot to pay out time-and-a-half on an already fat paycheck. I think we should figure out some binding pre-commitment to forbid or at least minimize regular overtime. Something like "if > 50% of one employee's worth of overtime is required a new role must be opened instead of paying overtime".
I understand that unions like OT for their members (of course they would!) but as an employer it's insane to be handing it out as regularly as government employees get it.
No, I think it is still too complicated of an issue to burden voters with understanding. The better solution would be restricting all employer employee compensation arrangements to cash only.
That would solve politicians being able to pay with unaccounted for benefits that become a burden decades later, and increase labor price transparency and result in better functioning markets once employers are out of the health/vision/dental/public transport/retirement benefit business.
And a third bird it kills is reducing the advantage big businesses have over small businesses.
These waterfront lifeguards have a lot more in common with EMTs and firefighters than have with the teenager who watches septagenarians do laps at your local pool, and they're compensated as such.
No CEO or programmer dies in the line of duty, yet you can't throw a rock on this site without hitting thkse kinds of compensation.
Exactly, the average techbro's output working at a FAANG company likely ruins more lives than the average lifeguard saves. The compensation is clearly just.
I recently flew between Oahu and Molokai. My return flight was delayed seven hours. I literally could have paddled a canoe home faster. Mokulele deserves all the negative press it gets.
