[jbirer]

As a Romanian person I am baffled hearing the speed and data cap woes of American people. I always saw America as superior and something to aspire to as a kid. What your ISPs are doing is pure robbery and I am surprised there's not more backlash about this.

[mgkimsal]

I was in Bucharest a couple of years ago and used wired broadband in an apartment. It was good - not terribly faster than what I get here, or at least ... not faster such that I'd notice. I suspect the price was cheaper, although unsure what the 'big mac price' might be for people who live there day to day.

I have a 200 down / 20 up connection at my office for $80/month - roughly the same at home for ~$50/month. At home, we don't normally get that unless actually wired in, as the wifi stuff around the house is bad (boosters don't help much). At the office, even over wifi, it can often be over the 200 - the wifi is probably a bottleneck there.

The town where the office is is offering 'gigabit to the home', but only in new construction homes. The downtown spot I'm in won't get upgrades for a while, from what I'm hearing.

I'm in the suburbs of a moderately large tech area, and almost rural by some measures. That said, I know some friends a bit further out aren't served very well at all, and are struggling with satellite connections as their last hope for 'fast' internet (6-10m from what I remember).

> I am surprised there's not more backlash about this.

FWIW, we (USA) get hosed around on so many things (healthcare, net, etc) and are also fed a patriotic diet of "America is the best" growing up. Because we're so large and isolated, many folks never travel, and a couple generations ago, most didn't have access to international publications/media like we do today. All that combines to give many of my fellow citizens a somewhat distorted view of our own standing and quality of life. There's little reason to 'backlash' when you think you're already "the best".

[miahi]

About pricing in .ro: I have a business link with 1000 down / 200 up and static public IP for $25. A similar speed home link is $9. Adjusted for big mac index (2.5x) they would be around $60 / $22.

[mgkimsal]

Thanks for the BMI number. I didn't pay too much attention to pricing of things when I was there (bit of a working holiday), but those numbers help put things in perspective. I've seen some areas in the US with similar speeds like that for business cases be ~$100/month - still more than your .ro pricing, but I think most places that can get those speeds will still have somewhat higher pricing.

Home - most folks I know don't have those sorts of home speeds, nor have access to those speeds in their areas. Often people bundle internet/tv/phones/etc, so they may get a 'better' price thinking about individual components, but... $9 is pretty darn good. My home prices have gone down a bit over the years as speeds have gone up a bit, but I'm still tied to whatever's offered in this geography.

[a2tech]

I have gigabit up and down in my house in Michigan for $49/month. Fiber, a new ISP. We got lucky in my town because the city owns the phone poles and is very open to leasing space.

[mgkimsal]

nice! "a2" - Ann Arbor, by any chance? I used to live in Ypsi, but those were the days of dual-channel ISDN being 'hot stuff'. :)

[a2tech]

Actually, we ARE in Ypsilanti. Ann Arbor has worse options then us--they don't own their poles and they're a bigger city. We're small enough and have the poles to make us a better target for small time rollouts. I'm loving the fiber life style though.

[Mediterraneo10]

> I was in Bucharest a couple of years ago and used wired broadband in an apartment. It was good - not terribly faster than what I get here, or at least.

Often in apartment rentals in Romania, the link to the apartment is a fast fiber one, but 1) the installers didn’t properly connect all eight pins to the ethernet cable, and/or 2) the apartment’s owner has installed a slow router. Gigabit routers have until recently been a specialist item in Romania that had to be special-ordered, and the owners of rented apartments and cafes just bought a cheap slow router at the local hypermarket. So, the internet that customers enjoyed was always slower than the physical connection could have provided.

[miahi]

The 2.4GHz band is saturated (in an apartment building you'll see tens of networks, there's no free channel even if you want to optimize. And there are not many 5GHz-capable devices or they have the 5GHz band disabled (not sure why - I found this also whilst renting/airbnb in other countries, the wifi was bad but the old "admin/admin" login worked on the router, so we could switch it to 5GHz).

And yes, the install teams are outsourced and the quality varies wildly.

[EdwardDiego]

I think that exceptionalism rote taught explains a lot of America's inherent conservatism - why change if you're already the best?

[rayiner]

We’re conservative because we’re rich and comfortable. We have the highest disposable income in the OECD: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/teaser/14773.jpeg. The median household income of a married couple with kids is $95,000. And the taxes are extremely low in that bracket. Our unemployment rate in the midst of Trump’s botched handling of COVID is less than what France’s unemployment rate is in a normal year.

Even when you hear complaints about things like healthcare, the debates are more about universal coverage than the quality or affordability of care itself. Americans are overwhelmingly satisfied with their own healthcare: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar.... (And, Americans being preternaturally optimistic, just assign less value to the security of a safety net in the case they lose their job, etc.)

Americans live in houses far larger than the average European: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7ei5f4/com.... We have more TVs, more cars, etc.

It’s easy to assume that Americans are just ignorant and irrational. But Americans know that Europe has a bunch of services we don’t, and they pay much higher taxes in return. Democrats make that comparison all the time. People are aware of it. But the fact is that the current system works pretty well for your typical voter. A flatter society with more social services would be better for a lot of people. However, your average suburban married couple would take a significant hit to their standard of living if they lived in France instead.

[EdwardDiego]

> We’re conservative because we’re rich and comfortable.

Some of you are.

You're only surpassed by Romania, Costa Rica, and South Africa in this chart: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm

Romania, Italy, South Africa in this one: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-gap.htm#indicator-c...

Doing better in this one, in that now you're behind Bulgaria, Turkey, Chile, Costa Rica and South Africa. https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm#indic...

I'm assuming that disposable household income per capita doesn't quite capture the severely unequal distributions of disposable household income.

> Americans live in houses far larger than the average European: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7ei5f4/com.... We have more TVs, more cars, etc.

That's a cultural difference, not at all indicative of anything - European cities are typically built for denser living - far fewer McMansions, far more well built, sound proofed apartments with ample public transport networks, to the extent that one can work and live in a city without owning a car. Although there are a bunch of bicycles.

In fact, very few of my German colleagues own cars because they have no reason to, as they all live in major cities. If they need a car for a holiday, they rent one.

> Americans are overwhelmingly satisfied with their own healthcare

Which is exactly the point I was making, I mean, the country with one of the lowest passport holding rates doesn't really have much to compare their health system to.

[zajio1am]

The OECD poverty line is defined as a half of median income, so it is problematic to compare that between countries with much differenent income levels. People on poverty line in rich countries still have higher income (even after PPP adjustment) than median-income people in poor countries.

[SamReidHughes]

Yeah, by plain math, making the working class richer will make your poverty rankings worse.

[rayiner]

I’m not really disagreeing with what you’re saying. My point is that people are voting in their own interest. If you’re employed, 30+, married married, and in the top 60% of the income distribution, then in terms of quantifiable income and consumption metrics you’re probably better off than you’d be in say France. And these are the people who vote.

As to housing patterns, I’m sure it’s a combination of preference, availability, and affordability. I know Germans from suburbs in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg and they drive everywhere and enjoy the convenience. These are the same preferences of folks in the US.

As to health care: for people who have decent insurance, you’d be surprised by how nice American healthcare is. When my son had chronic ear infections, in sometimes went down to the pediatricians office multiple times a day. It’s not free at the point of use, but it’s cheap enough where it might as well be. It’s not obviously something that needs fixing.

Again, it’s not like the American left hasn’t been making the pitch for socialized medicine for decades now. At this point Americans probably have an overly rosy picture of European healthcare. They don’t know that French national healthcare has 20% coinsurance, or that many European countries still have insurance companies. It’s just that most voters either have insurance from their employer, and it actually tends to be pretty good, or they have Medicare, which also tends to be pretty good. The fact that some people don’t have that doesn’t motivate the average voter very much, and they don’t want to pay more taxes. Americans don’t have the same sense of solidarity Europeans have, and are much more individualistic.

[jahaja]

> My point is that people are voting in their own interest.

Even if that would be true, The elephant in the room here is the abysmal participating rate of US elections and general voter suppression. There's no way the Republican party would ever win a fair, easy-to-vote, EU-style, election.

> Americans don’t have the same sense of solidarity Europeans have, and are much more individualistic.

But universal healthcare has been popular in polls throughout the population for a long time, even though I assume that in a class based society like the US it must feel regressive, as upper middle-class and up, to be threatened by having to wait in the same queue as the poor for healthcare.

[lostlogin]

Your “cultural difference” point is a good one.

More cars and more house and things many want, and I find it baffling. My measure is that I want to vacuum the house from one power point, and not worry what happens to the car.

[NicoJuicy]

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...

Fyi, an interesting statistic is that Eg. Houses in Belgium are more expensive to buy and way cheaper to rent.

[zajio1am]

> European cities are typically built for denser living - far fewer McMansions, far more well built, sound proofed apartment

Well, here (Prague) you can have small flat in city for the same price as full-sized house with garden in suburbs (villages around Prague), so it is mostly question of preferences.

[Fnoord]

Do all of these cars and TVs make you happy? Rhetorical question; if they did you wouldn't need more more more.

A minority is rich and comfortable. This elite uses propaganda rhetoric such as polarisation by a platform such as Fox News to manipulate people into a political candidate which, ultimately, does not serve in their benefit but in the benefit of the elite majority.

Then there's the other party who are only marginally better. The poor get to pick the best option of two terrible options, and they could have achieved so much more in their life with just a minor bit of compassion from said elite. If greed is one of the seven sins, none of these elites are the devout Christians they claim to be.

I normally don't speak out about this; thanks for the inspirational post.

[rayiner]

Again, it’s easy to tell yourself that Americans are just irrational, harder to reconcile that with the facts. It’s not just a minority that’s richer and more comfortable: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/04/24/middle-class-f...

A middle income household in the US has $15,000-25,000 more per year in disposable income than a middle income household in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, or the UK (comprising 70% of the EU population).

You can say that some of that goes to employee-paid premiums and things like that, which are excluded from the OECD analysis. But for households with employer-paid health insurance (which is the vast majority of middle income households), the typical out of pocket costs for those things is a fraction of the income differential: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/2019-05...

The median spending on premiums and out of pocket costs in the US is $3,700. And note that European countries also have out of pocket expenses of $500-1,000: https://www.oecd.org/health/health-systems/OECD-Focus-on-Out....

So at the end of the day, a middle income American household with employer-paid health insurance has $12,000-22,000 more in their pocket each year. (You could adjust for other social services, but those tend to be a drop in the bucket by comparison. For example, the average student, of the minority of Americans that graduates college, is $30,000. Thats a one-time debt, compared to a lifetime of earning thousands of dollars more.)

Fox News manipulating people into “voting against their interests” is mostly a myth. The poorest people do in fact vote Democrat. If you look at profiles of Trump voters, they tend to be non-college-educated people who are doing well in places with low cost of living. In my county, the guys that own a little contracting or construction company vote for Trump. This is entirely in their interest. They would not be personally better off paying a lot more taxes to get marginally more benefits. I spent several weeks in East Texas last year. This is Trump country. It’s also quite prosperous. The men work in the oil industry and the women work in healthcare. They have big trucks and big houses and shiny new stores and restaurants.

[Fnoord]

Irrational is a stretch from being manipulated by propaganda. Definitely not my choice of word.

I only checked your first link, and after processing that I called it. The data is from ~1991 and 2010. The link says Western Europe. I consider the Scandinavian countries Northern Europe, and the Mediterranean Southern Europe. Southern Europe and Eastern Europe (all ex Iron Curtain) are poorer than Northern Europe, Ireland, United Kingdom, Belgium (left out -- why), Austria (idem), Switzerland (idem), Sweden (idem), Finland (idem) (though last two are also Northern Europe and Scandinavia).

Then I scrolled to the bottom and saw this linked [1]. The title being: In Western European countries studied, up to eight-in-ten adults live in middle-income households; U.S. has among the highest lower- and upper-income shares and guess what the USA's middle class is 75% the size of the mentioned non-Southern European countries.

Now, I happen to know also that apart from Southern Europe all of the mentioned countries have adequate healthcare while in the USA (before Obamacare, which the two statistic metrics are about) that isn't the case.

My conclusion is indeed that the middle class in the USA is marginalized. Though not yet as severe as in a fascist country it might be heading that way.

I would like to comment on one more thing:

> This is entirely in their interest.

No, it is not, only in their short term myopic vision. A long-term interest is that you invest in your fellow civilians. It is also selfish, because you expect something in return. But it is what I call intelligent selfishness as its long-term. Much like VC, the USA is focussed on short-term gains.

Now, surely the American people must live a happy and free life, right? Not quite. If we look at the above statistics and the data from Democracy Index, Reporters Without Borders about the freedom in all of the countries we are discussing then the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, Tge Netherlands, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Ireland (ie. entire Western Europe) are far ahead in terms of freedom than the self-proclaimed Land Of The Free.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/04/24/middle-class-f...

PS: As for your Fox News rebuttal see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819418

[sunshinerag]

2 cars and 3 TVs seem to be enough. Who said more more more?

[oblio]

Yeah, but what everybody is pointing out is that your poor are faring worse than poor people in other developed country. And the paradox of that thing is that's happening despite you being:

> rich and comfortable

That's what baffles everyone. The American social contract seems to be "if 80% of the population can be 20-30% richer than the rest of the world, let's throw the 20% at the bottom under the rhetorical bus".

And I should point out that these days those 20% at the bottom are about 70 million (!) people. Plus I imagine that the poverty rate will only go up, not down, considering how US politics are looking.

[tzs]

Too bad that poll on healthcare didn't break it down by whether or not you pay for it yourself.

I was quite pleased with my costs when I got it through my employer and so didn't actually see the cost of insurance. I'd indirectly see it when every few years my employer would change providers, and then I'd have to worry about whether or not my doctor was in the new provider's network.

Co-workers who wanted to add spouses to their plan did have to pay for it themselves on some of the plans, and they grumbled about the cost.

Now that I buy insurance myself on my state's health insurance exchange, cost is one of my top complaints.

[StavrosK]

> It was good - not terribly faster than what I get here, or at least ... not faster such that I'd notice

That's more about proximity than about bandwidth. Whenever I'm SF, I'm surprised at how quickly everything loads, mainly because the datacenter is next to me rather than on the other side of the world.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

It seems to be in the DNA of the "system". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Wars

[rayiner]

Its not just ISPs. It’s part of a larger problem with building infrastructure due to our regulatory environment and high labor costs. In my state, they’re building a tram line through the suburbs that is costing as much per mile as Copenhagen’s new fully automated circle line subway. That’s a public project, but costs are still insanely high.

[Gigarex]

I'm a romanian too and happen to agree with you. Our own publicly traded company DiGi has around a 2% dividend yield while At&t has a 7% dividend yield, a bad product and a high price.

[throw0101a]

America has a lot of legacy.

A lot of stuff was built out post-WW2 when everything was still green fields. Now, several decades later, all of this infrastructure still (mostly) "works" so everyone is not enthusiastic about spending money to make it 'better'.

I'm guessing that during those same decades many/most Communist countries did not have awesome infrastructure, and so when they became more open, there was a lot of catching up to do. So in many ways you are in a country that is (relatively speaking) like the US was during the 1950s and 1960s. In some ways you 'skipped' a generation and so leap-frogged America a bit.

Also, it seems that Romania has a population bulge of people our 40 years of age:

* https://www.indexmundi.com/romania/age_structure.html

When those people hit their 60s, like the Baby Boomers in the US now are, then you may find economic growth to be more of a struggle (see Japan).

* https://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/age_structure.html

* https://www.indexmundi.com/japan/age_structure.html

[cblconfederate]

Romania should take advantage of the move to remote work to attract businesses and workers.