If we can laydown undersea internet cables all across the world, surely the nuclear power plants can be someplace else and energy generated can be transferred.
Securing nuclear power is a pain and US oscillates between far left and far right. France is the nuclear power horse of Europe and supply the excess power all around.
The cognitive decline can also be attributed to extreme isolation that everyone was subjected to. My super enriched, flow like heavenly water life came to a complete standstill. All future plans and timelines thrown in disarray. Covid has ended but my life trajectory has completely changed
Yes, I mean it's been shown how people with a loss of hearing have an increased risk of dementia and it's natural that this would apply here as well. It's just another form of lost stimuli. But there might also be medical reasons behind this and this serves to show how complex this is to research.
Ireland should be an international study about how a state destroyed itself by running a gigantic welfare state despite all of world's money pouring into it
Almost €300B national debt. Government is giving free houses, money to people who don't work. It's the only relatively wealthy European country with unlimited dole. And people make a lifestyle out of living on welfare forever.
This is despite huge corporation tax receipts and income tax receipts by largely foreign born workforce
One in five people are directly or indirectly employed by the government of a tiny country.. it's just a waste from bottom to top and all are complicit
How has the state destroyed itself? Most of the debt is from the bank bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis (debt quadrupled between 2007 and 2013)
> Government is giving free houses, money to people who don't work [...] and people make a lifestyle out of living on welfare forever
This is just the usual blah blah moaning about welfare states in general. What do you mean by "unlimited dole"?
Unlimited weekly money of €250 for people who don't work. This isn't a small amount. Specially on top of free housing by schemes like HAP. That can give as much as €2000/month in rent
End result is a destroyed housing market and young people who rather get trapped into welfare
Your framing is all wrong and certain points are incorrect too.
Clearly it's not a waste when at a GDP per capita level the country is in the top 5 in the world (and certainly the one with the largest population). Even if you want to strip out the tax aspect, the country has managed to improve living standards and now it ranks above average in living standards and earnings in Europe.
Debt means nothing when the population have the earning capacity to pay it off (people don't give loans they don't expect you can pay back).
This is clearly being invested well and in productive capital.
It is definitely not unlimited dole.
The social housing component ensures sufficient social mobility, so you actually can improve your own position in life.
The country also has the most progressive tax system in Europe i.e. people pay their fare share (relatively speaking to other countries).
I will make a point on an assumption you infer, and no you are wrong, trickle down economics does not work. And secondly, there is value in investing in your residents.
Yes I'm as strong a critic as you'll find but GP's points are some fox news nonsense. The money was siphoned out and given mostly to corporations and homeowners.
Property construction has effectively halted, health services are catastrophically underfunded (search UHL crowding), public transport is less effective than horses and there's a collapse in recruiting for teachers and police because they can make 2-3x in Australia so they do.
As a result of lack of policing, anti-social behaviour is in full swing.
I agree with you on your point on siphoned off funds.
Property development hasn't ground to halt but is insufficient for the ever increasing demand, developers are focusing on improved margins over volumes. A symptoms of their market first approach more than anything else.
Definitely need more investment in housing, public transport and healthcare, some ambition there would be very useful.
More policing won't do anything for social issues, solve the underlying issues, social disengagement, lack of opportunities, nip any new toxic laissez-faire/not my problem culture in the bud.
I don’t like my high tax bill just as much as the next person, but of all the things the money gets spent on, social housing isn’t something I’m particularly upset about.
The only failings I see with the Irish model is they don’t go far enough in some areas.
I’d like to see the healthcare system expanded for example.
Per captia they are extremely wealthy. Have free education including third level. No student debt. Are extremely educated. Very low crime (including a tiny murder rate). Very low homelessness (although pressure has increased on the system in the last few years because of refugees from Ukraine and asylum seekers - but I’m happy they are helping people and I think most Irish people are too).
They frequently rank highest on happiness measures and the fact that they worry about how young people feel about their future and are willing to make policy changes to accommodate them is a sign of strength not weakness.
Also caring for the less fortunate is a huge positive not a negative.
By law all new developments are required to have 20% social housing. And google search will show you the extent of corruption and free money that goes hand in hand
Literally in the headline of the source you linked states 20% are affordable or social housing, not all social housing.
And a ten second google about what "social housing" means as I'm not Irish and don't know, tells me that social housing is not, in fact, free and is instead adjusted rent based on your ability to pay. I suppose it's not impossible that some of it is free, since some people may not be able to pay anything, but this is some incredible goal post shifting from:
> Government is giving free houses
To:
> By law all new developments are required to have 20% social housing
Which then after going to your linked source became:
> Law change to make 20% of units in new developments affordable or social homes
So 1 in 5 newly developed homes has to be affordable or social housing, which is rented, not gifted as property to the unfortunate resident. The horror.
You're of course entitled to disagree with these measures and programs, but if you have to go so far as to be within shouting distance of outright lying, it kind of implies you don't have a good position that can be backed by the actual facts on the ground as opposed to your ideological predispositions.
Have you heard of HAP? Please read up on it. It's budget and impact on the everyday person. It's a roundabout way to giving free housing to people who don't work by taking money from people who do.
Sure. But speaking as an American, our housing market is plenty inflated and absolutely ridiculous, and we do everything just about short of shooting the homeless on sight here. So giving people places to live I don't think is the direct correlation to an inflated market that you think it is.
And like, to be totally honest and pinko commie scum of me, I am completely fine with being slightly less well off if it means people in my area get taken care of. That doesn't bother me.
I totally agree on principle but for those who are stuck in a transactional mindset (conservative/libertarian etc) I would argue that paying for housing and welfare for poor people is just good business sense.
Crime is incredibly expensive and when pushed to the edge people disconnected from society are more likely to both need to perform crime to survive but also have nothing to lose from performing criminal acts. If you take care of people's basic needs with a safety net you actually enable them to contribute to society (economically and culturally) and it is a couple of order of magnitudes cheaper than criminalizing them.
And guess what, people still desire to earn more money, so they still have plenty of drive to better themselves, they just aren't completely fucked if they fall on hard times.
Oh yeah, this has been understood logic for like... ever. I felt this way even back when I self-identified as a libertarian. Now as a lefty I feel similarly.
But people in the states especially and even in parts of Europe are so hard up on this notion that the criminals are just criminals from birth, barely even human, just waiting for some way to exploit larger society or worse, them personally, somehow to "steal" their way to "the easy life" and it's just so detached from reality. Are there people who are just remorseless psychopaths ready to harm anyone at a moments notice for their own gain? Yeah, sure are, most of them end up being cops. The rest are people who are given few if any options to get by, and if crime is your only option to getting a meal, of course you're going to commit a fucking crime. It's like these people expect the homeless to just lie down and await death instead of stealing food.
Ireland has almost the lowest unemployment rate in Europe, and a pretty high job vacancy rate.
> However, it's a tax heaven within Europe, therefore companies are not incentivized to create jobs, that's the problem
Eh? The tax haven aspect has created about 300,000 jobs, if you only count IDA client companies (and not companies who benefit from spending by those companies and their employees). Ireland had high unemployment from before independence to the 90s; since the tax haven (or, as an old Taoiseach insisted on calling it, "small open economy") thing got going, unemployment has plummeted.
I mean let’s be honest adults here - a 300B national debt is literally nothing. Not even worth discussing in a post or even acting like it’s a problem. Ireland ran a 4 billion euro deficit last year; again this is meaningless. You can dislike these policies you mentioned(on whatever basis…) but let’s not act like Ireland is burning here or something
What are you talking about? Ireland's population is mere 5M. That's €60K debt for each soul. And over €200K debt for a family. What does Ireland has to show for all this debt?
Others have pointed out that this amount is comfortable enough relative to GDP, but I also want to point of your method of arguing is dishonest. There will never be a day where the entire debt of a country is divided up among the citizens and then they each would have to pay that amount, so saying it’s 60k debt per each soul is kind of like a football fan saying that each Kansas City Chiefs fan each won .00001% of a Super Bowl Trophy last year. It’s sovereign debt.
Well, 223bn, but what's 77bn between friends? About 40% GDP. This puts it fairly low as far as developed countries go (Germany's 66%, UK 97%, US 130%, Japan 264%).
> Governing is giving free houses
I mean, not notably.
> money to people who don't work
Ireland has functional full employment (about 4% unemployment rate). Social welfare isn't particularly lavish by Western European standards.
> One in five people are directly or indirectly employed by the government of a tiny country.
That's reasonably low by western European standards.
Ireland has lots of problems, but _not spending enough money_ isn't one of them. We're not a particularly high-tax country by Western European standards, and we're running a surplus. If anything we should probably be spending more, to sort out the housing crisis if nothing else.
Yeah GDP is cooked and is largely inflated by the foreign corporations. What does Ireland have to show for that €223B debt? All of that money was thrown into the welfare pit.
What does Ireland has to show for such a large government employees. Health service is in tatters, so is housing. Come on. Put down the rose tinted glasses.
The debt was built up majority bailing out the banks from the 2008 housing crisis to the cost of $85B. If it was spent on welfare, it was on corporate welfare.
As for health,the health outcomes are 6 years more life per person for $7.1k/person/yr compared to the US which costs $12.5kpp/yr.
> All of that money was thrown into the welfare pit.
Largely bailing out the banks, actually. Debt fell to practically nothing prior to the financial crisis, then leapt up, and has been kinda flat ever since. So, I mean, arguably welfare for the rich? We were arguably over-generous with the banks.
> What does Ireland has to show for such a large government employees. Health service is in tatters, so is housing.
Again, that is because we _don't actually spend very much on it_, to a large extent. As I said, I think we should be spending more, particularly on building housing.
I'm a bit confused; what sort of changes do you want to see? Cuts to the dole? That wouldn't make any significant difference to the state's finances. Cuts to pensions (the bulk of social welfare)? I mean, good luck with that; no politician is going to run on a policy of annoying old people.
About 12% of the population are non-citizen, 20% were born outside the state. Unemployment is 4%. How they're getting "largely foreign born workforce" from this, I don't know. It is numerically impossible.
That's no different than saying most/all corporations are foreign owned. Why is that a right wing claptrap? Irish right wingers are the dumbest people on the planet. Living off the foreign population in one of the largest welfare state
Sorry, I have to counter you. Because someone close to me has always been about countering survivorship bias. And they have absolutely ruined their life. It's an easy out that people who are sharing their successes with you and the world have a survivorship bias. This is a fairly recent idea and quite a poison in itself.
What it actually preaches is don't look and emulate the successful people in your environment and society as this is all based on luck. Can't disagree more
Skill and hard work are what buy you the lottery ticket. Luck is what determines if the ticket pays or not. That's why almost all successful people have a string of failures behind them, and why the truism "you've only really failed when you stop trying" exists.
However, you can have skill and put in hard work and still never have the success you're seeking. It happens all the time.
Although much of this depends on how you define "success". I'm assuming here that it means monetary gain, but most people don't have "get rich" as their measure of success. In reality, success is being able to live a life that provides satisfaction and happiness. That's an easier thing to achieve.
I think the luck factor is over-interpreted in this comment.
The reason most successful people have a string of failures behind them is because they learn from past experience and build networks and profile over the course of their career.
Luck applies most at the starting line - your location, your family and their wealth/status/connections [1], the traits and health you inherit, your education and the people you know who can mentor you, invest in you and work with you.
Over time the role of luck recedes and the role of experience becomes more significant (which is why, a few 20-something tech billionaires notwithstanding, most high-growth companies are founded when the founder is in their mid 40s [2]).
Also, “skill and hard work” are not the most important factors; in my experience the most important factor is the ability to self-improve, which takes humility and patience.
[1] It’s certainly not a given that being born into vast wealth equals luck in this context: plenty of heirs to vast fortunes turn out to be deadbeats. They may still be able to become successful in their own career but in a fairly pathetic, unearned kind of way. The right kind of luck for entrepreneurial success is a moderate degree of privilege (just enough not to spoil you) with a moderate degree of hardship (just enough not to break you). This certainly applied to Steve Jobs. Bill Gates too if you include the bullying at school.
There are ways that your comment and the parent are both right.
I’m very much on board with the idea of eschewing victimhood thinking, and I generally see the invocation of survivorship bias as a pretty sad indicator of someone’s attachment to victimhood.
However I also recognize that the world isn’t great at empowering people to get out of difficult situations in life. Once you’re down, the world has all kinds of ways of keeping you down. “Just work hard and save money” seems like simple stuff that anyone can do but it doesn’t get you very far if you’re at the bottom of the heap, especially if you’re dealing with illness, family problems, or other burdens.
I do believe there are things that almost anyone (without irrevocable health problems) can do to go from a bad situation to a very good one over the long term (I’ve done them), but these things are not widely known or accepted by mainstream society.
So I sympathize with the sense of futility that many people hold.
That only causes Accenture etc. body shops to thrive in EU market. EU as a market is very government policy driven. Government contracts are lucrative but typical body shop pays 1:10 as compared to what they are paid. And then the "employee" also pays high taxes on the income. Not sure what can change it. May be more US companies should get contractor friendly in EU markets?
Not buying this. People choose their quests by societal pressures and what's rewarded. Dumb money loves VC. They eventually find even more dumb money in pension funds. This is what society rewards. These are our heroes. Want to change this, come up with a different societal game of rewards
Yes they do. All plumbers rely on internet to get their job. Bakers advertise and are found by people on through their phones. Policeman, increasing rely on computers for data verification and all sorts of communications
Tobi announced an AI chat assistant for Shopify merchants today. The breathless video did little to mask that this was released in the wake of laying off thousands of talented people who have gone to work elsewhere in the ecommerce space. While I do think it's fair to say they overhired prior to that, it also seems like they're falling into a pattern of over-correction. I'm sure they'll weather it long-term, but they're going to skid around a lot in the mean time.
Bad layoffs are extremely costly. More costly than bad hires. Shopify and others signalled to everyone that they are replaceable at the onset of a recession. The people who stayed have seen the blood.
How likely is it that the people who were not laid off will stay if economy enters a boom cycle? Not very likely. This article is a tongue in cheek admittance that they messed up. IC tracks being prioritised because people who contribute to product development in a growing tech company are much more valuable than managers.
In the coming years many managers will be forcefully moved to IC tracks and will be laid off if they aren't keeping their builder chops up to date. We have seen this happening at Meta.
This man has patience of a sage. He's considering not using Amazon devices? I would had thrown all of it by now. Poor man locked himself in a digital jail
I was astonished with that phrasing too. It immediately takes out all the impact of his rage. You take away all of your services for a week and he's only considering not using them anymore? It's the empties threat I've heard in a long while :-(
Taxation is highly dependent on location and personal factors (single income vs double income household) and other factors that are irrelevant in this context.
Also "benefits" in the American sense aren't really a thing in the EU.
> I think like 60+% of engineers get company cars.
Honest question: How useful is when we frequently hear that Europe doesn't use cars as much as in the US? I can't fathom someone in a major European city finding much use for a car.
Very usefull. Many people live outside the city centers (which are very small in Belgium) and use cars to commute.
Public transport is relatively good within a city, but if you come from outside the city it can get really bad. 20 min by car can be 1 hour by bus for example.
It is but at a hilariously cheap rate. It’s pennies on the dollar (or euro, in this case) compared to owning a car outright.
It’s a fringe benefit that was invented in order to enable employers to sweeten the pay package without having to straight up pay more, and respectively pay a lot more taxes.
We’ve a large bunch of these tax efficient fringe benefits in Belgium but the company car is by far the one that provides the most value.
Yup, so Belgium has a lot of weird things like that, but it's really hard to take it away since it's such an important part of salary for many people and taxation is really high so most people are very opposed to losing benefits like this.
Yeah healthcare is for sure better in EU and so less of a benefit, but I still get additional insurance through my company and most white collar jobs do. It's for the extra costs of hospitalisation such as upcharges for a single room and other costs general health care doesn't cover.
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Securing nuclear power is a pain and US oscillates between far left and far right. France is the nuclear power horse of Europe and supply the excess power all around.