The entire situation where you have great rights for “permanent” workers but nothing but precarity for so called “temporary” workers has been a disaster in Europe. It creates an entire underclass, even for people in high paying jobs. It was easier to get a mortgage, etc. in the US as an at-will employee who could be fired at any time than it was as a worker on a temp contract in Europe, in part because at least in the US there was a level playing field.
I realise the UK isn’t in the EU but it is part of the broader trend of creating a privileged class of permanent workers over all others.
This also increases friction in the labour market since changing jobs means likely giving up a permanent contract.
There are some scenarios where it’s a coordination problem. People could drive light fuel efficient vehicles if so many other people weren’t driving large, heavy, dangerous ones, for example.
Those large heavy vehicles are incentivized by loopholes in regulations because politicians were afraid of affecting "domestic jobs" as US automakers weren't even trying to compete with JP fuel-efficient imports.
Yeah, apparently it was originally to try to stop the rules from killing Jeep, which was having a hard time. New ones that allow more emissions for bigger vehicle footprints are also a big issue since it encourages larger vehicles.
Similarly saying “you can’t have slavery but you can buy stuff made by enslaved people abroad” is morally inconsistent. I don’t know the obvious answer to this though.
Having owned a couple European houses they’re horrible to alter and mediocre on energy. I miss nice adaptable wood structures. Bizarrely Europeans seem to think their cinderblock homes are nicer…
I've never wanted to adapt a house that significantly. But yeah, I much prefer the cinderblock homes and miss them. Something about the wood and drywall houses just feels incredibly cheap, and I don't like the aesthetic (de gustibus et coloribus..)
Houses change over time. A house could have been build in 1920 without a toilet or central heating. Then over time it got a fireplace on the second floor, an indoor toilet, indoor bathroom, then central heating with gas, extra insulation, a couple decades later double paned windows, hybrid heating with a heat pump, then full electric heating, underfloor heating, solar panels, home battery.
Houses change a lot over time, it is nice to be adaptable and not need to carve out stone and concrete every time you add a feature to a home.
The most beautiful homes I have been inside in Europe were wooden cabins in Sweden. The exposed wood ceiling beams, the unpainted wooden panels everywhere, the little details. I never had that with stone or brick buildings. Mainly because they got plastered and painted over, you almost never see the raw materials on the inside.
It's not the unavailability of trees. European countries have wisely decides that cities built of wooden houses are prone to massive fires. USians haven't learned that lesson and the Los Angeles fire isn't going to be the last one.
A yes, the wise Europeans like the Dutch who have homes in Amsterdam that are sinking into the ground due to rotting wooden beams sinking in swamp ground and homes in Groningen with cracks all over due to the earthquakes that came with pumping gas out of the ground.
Or the dozens of structures in Italy that came crashing down, like the various bridges over the past twenty years (250 bridge collapse events in Italy between January 2000 and July 2025).
Yes us Europeans are indeed superior and we never pick the wrong building material ever.
> To each their own I guess. I’ll happily move walls, add or remove a bathroom, add windows, etc.
A sign of the restlesness. Once you find a house to settle in, why would you need to change it ? European houses are typically versatile, US houses aren't due to having closets (which make a room's layout very inflexible) as well as electrical outlets being mandated exactly in the middle of the wall precisely where one would like to place furniture. US building codes are beyond stupid.
> Terrible carbon footprint for concrete too.
Carbon footprint is not that important. I want comfort. More specifically: if you are somewhat wealthy (in the top 10% of incomes, like most of the people here), in the continental Europe you can nowadays easily buy an apartment in a Passivhaus (or almost if renovated) building, with underfloor heating throughout the place, supplied by a geothermal heat pump, with triple-glazed windows and external covers that give you the utmost quietness even when there's traffic just outside. You can't get that in the US because even if you were willing to pay, there exist only a handful of construction companies that know how to build that, and they're all booked for years.
> I know modern structures are better but I also don’t entirely trust block in an earthquake. Obviously less of a concern in most (not all!) of Europe.
You can take a look at Japan. Modern buildings can withstand earthquakes. The issue in the US is that developers are allowed to just build without a civil engineer or architect designing the building. I wouldn't trust that either.
I'm an Irish artist, living in Ireland. I'm very far from a rich kid. Like most Irish artists, I make some of my living from my "artistic" work, and some from what others here might call "real work". Sometimes there's not a clear division between the two, and anyway the ratio of one to the other changes every year.
Because of the cost of living here, particularly in Dublin, there is no way that the Basic Income would provide me with anything like what most people here would consider a decent standard of living. (It would currently leave me with about €200 left over every month, after I pay just my rent. That's before any bills or groceries or anything.)
Plenty of people find a way to continue to make art that other people value, even if the cost of living continues to spiral ever upwards. This payment is simply a buffer to make making art a little easier, for a fraction of the many people who contribute to the social, cultural, and intellectual life of this country. For some it pays their rent or mortgage, for some it pays for childcare so they have time to work, for some it facilitates research or purchase of materials, for some it allows them a workspace outside their home.
It's not perfect, as no public arts funding is perfect but, to me, the kind of cheap cynicism displayed in this comment comes from a place of deep ignorance and bitterness.
Working artists, spouses, and semi-retirees are relatively common.
‘2,000 creative workers’ would make this quite competitive, even if it’s only 20k USD/year that could easily enable people to be artists who wouldn’t make a career of it on their own.
Many people who are artists can’t afford to stay artists.
Pulling a 80 hour workweeks at 24, supporting yourself while doing something else is not sustainable. Similarly someone supporting themselves as an artist + a kid is suddenly a very different situation.
Exactly. A sketchbook and pencils cost next to nothing. But being able to take that and turn it into an oil painting on a giant canvas costs real money.
Writing a few songs on a guitar from Facebook marketplace is cheap. Turning that into a live show is expensive and time consuming.
Writing some Irish language poems on your lunchbreaks is cheap. Doing public readings as an unknown poet is not.
> Writing some Irish language poems on your lunchbreaks is cheap. Doing public readings as an unknown poet is not.
How is doing public reading of poetry not cheap?
I have friends who do standup comedy and they just show up at open mic nights and it doesn’t cost them anything. One is good enough that now the venues are paying him a little bit.
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