Or basically all of Europe. Haven't seen $4 lunch bowls (adjusted to local wages) anywhere. Spending "nearly an hour a day cooking" is the norm in most countries here. Eating out is expensive anywhere.
Here in Seattle, it's wildly expensive to go out and we rarely do. When I lived in Portland it was inexpensive (and amazing) so almost everyone went out regularly which supported a ton of restaurants that completed against each other. Not sure what was different but the difference was night and day.
Curious what time period this was. For example, if you lived in Portland in 2019 and Seattle in 2023 it could just be inflation causing people to go out less.
Great point. Temporarily separated samplings would have that effect. However, I moved directly from Portland to Seattle. Further, I have returned to Portland and found it to be just as wonderful a place to eat out as before.
A good start would be to allow everyone living in the city to vote. I don't care about politics, zoning or planning if I am not allowed to vote or participate. There isn't anything I can do, so why bother putting effort into it?
I've lived in various European cities where I was not able to vote for various reasons. Such as living hotel long-term, living in a holiday home, being semi-homeless, sub-letting, crashing on someones couch. Seasonal workers, migrant workers or people with unstable employment are typically in this situation.
What do you think makes someone who’s pretty much just passing by entitled to push their opinions on the locals who’ve lived there their entire lives? Especially when that person
likely won’t suffer the longterm consequences of it
I get the sentiment about "why would I let people who aren't going to stay long term decide how the city is run?" but in the end it creates a city that is indifferent or even hostile to people in that situation. It ends up disenfranchising a population that will always be there, even if the people who make up that population is constantly changing.
Thank you. I know people who have lived in Amsterdam for over five years but can't vote for local politics because of their legal status or because they are illegally subletting due to the shitty housing market in The Netherlands.
Don't complain about people not being engaged with local politics if you don't allow them to vote.
The ones who will “always be there” can get their papers for permanent residence done and vote. If they don’t want to (or can’t since they don’t have the legal grounds to even stay there for longer), then they shouldn’t have a say on decisions that can permanently change things about the place.
There will always be the population of people who will be in short term housing or similar situations, but due to their circumstances the individual people will come and go. 5 years from now the makeup of the itinerant population may be almost entirely different, but the people in that population are in the same circumstances, especially if they don't have any political representation.
Who is going to speak for the people who aren't allowed to vote?
In my country, citizens without a permanent address (which is very few people, those who have no place of theirs mostly register at someone elses for easier administration) can still sign up and vote, so that leaves us with just the people who don’t have the permits to even stay here permanently.
I’m also not expecting to fly to country X, book an airbnb for 6 months or get a summer job, and then just somehow be entitled to vote there.
That is only possible with stable and legal housing. Not everyone is privileged to be in that situation, especially not with the housing market in many countries.
With your thinking you are creating a class of subhumans where you enjoy the benefits of their labour but you are not allowing them to vote. Like African Americans in the US not that long ago.
A yes, why didn't I think of that! Let me just completely ignore the broken housing market, the 15+ year waiting list for social housing and scrape together... lets checks... €400k for a small appartement with a 45 minute commute to work.
Do you have any clue how privileged you sound here? This is peak "have you tried not being poor" attitude.
While I don't know about European countries, given this is an article about America it's worth pointing out that you can, in fact, vote in the US while homeless[0], using a friend/family's home, shelter, or religious center as your address.
Actually yes, that is by design. There is a reason the US had property ownership as a requirement to vote in the constitution. Whether removing that requirement was correct or not is up for debate. But there is a distinction in a democracy between an active citizen and a passive citizen. An active citizen is someone that has skin in the game and is a willing participant in the process. A passive citizen is someone that does not engage in the process, or does not actively have skin in the game. The thought espoused in the enlightenment was that someone with property would be tied to the location long term and would therefore have interest in the long term success of that town/state/nation. Someone who is only in a town for a year doesn't meaningfully have stakes in the town. They don't really care if the schools aren't funded well enough, or if the roads don't have long term maintenance budget, they are only going to care about immediate needs. Someone with a house, that has children or grand children, they are going to not only care about now but 30 years from now as well.
It was because they thought that landowners would direct the votes of the people who lived on that land. The same reason was given for not allowing women to vote. https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1645
Ancient democracies, including those of Greek city states like Athens, restricted voting to landowners because prior to the invention of the printing press, only aristocrats could understand the issues being voted on.
Yeah I know. My point is that in the US, in 2026, whether voting should be restricted to property owners is not "up for debate," except maybe among a certain set of cranks.
Eh, a growing set of cranks. The diversity of political opinion in America seems to have exploded over the last decade. Cranks are now serious contenders for power and influence.
> Ancient democracies, including those of Greek city states like Athens, restricted voting to landowners because prior to the invention of the printing press, only aristocrats could understand the issues being voted on.
This is such bullshit. Pre-literate societies were not ignorant societies, they were not stupid societies, they were not issue-free societies. The printing press gave rise to literacy which then gave rise to both books and print-based issue campaigning. But the idea that before people were able to read they were also unable to understand "the issues being voted on" is ridiculous. People ate, built, got sick, got hot, got cold, got injured, were richer or poorer ... everyone had a framework in which to understand "the issues being voted on".
You could argue it wasn't an educated understanding, and that might be correct depending on your understanding of what "education" is. But the idea that people couldn't actually understand stuff until literacy arrived is just ridiculous.
So are the justifications of Adams and Blackstone. Literacy was the justification given by early Greek democracies with written legal codes, though some, like Athens, later broadened eligibility.
Everyone affected by the laws passed have "skin in the game".
Someone renting an apartment and working a job in a community definitely has skin in the game in regards to local tax rates, building regulations, public amenities, etc.
Sure but there’s degrees to this. If you’re a day laborer renting a room at the local motel, it’s a lot easier for you to say “screw this place I’m going to the next town over” than for someone who has their kids enrolled in the highschool and a mortgage.
Everyone has skin in the game but some have way more.
Renters can also enroll their kids in public schools. And in terms of mobility, renters might be stuck in a one- or two-year lease, far longer than it might take to sell a house.
Maybe those transient homeowners are the ones who shouldn't get to vote...
I think you're kind of (completely) missing my point. Who signs two year leases at a motel?
Obviously someone with a kid enrolled in school and locked into a long-term lease is not transient and has a comparable amount of skin in the game as a homeowner.
Whatever idea you have about how black Americans live is bizarre. And despite being ignorant of us, you attempt to silence discussions by acting like you are us.
There people have residency, they just don't live in a stable form of housing that allows them to register as living in the city. But some of them have lived in the city for years.
I saw your other comment with regards to the Netherlands. If that’s where you’re located, you only need to have a stable location once. Then you can register. Another person can’t unregister you from there, so you can vote even if you then move to a hotel.
Only question remains is how you want to deal with mail, but there are workarounds for that.
...and sorry: Thats absolutely OK. I do not want strangers stopping by for 3 - 4 years to be able to influence the politics of my country? Thats totaly understandable?
I would never to ask to vote at a remote place where I do not live permanently, yet where I even not a citizen?
Somebody who spends 3-4 years in a place has an immense interest in how it's governed. Their view is 100% as valid as yours, and they should have equal voice, if we are going to judge people based on how long they live somewhere.
I live in a college town. Why shouldn't student voices be represented, when they are a huge chunk of our community?
Maybe I'm too US focused, and have been accused of that a lot recently, but your views are fundamentally at odds with basic democracy as I see it as a US citizen.
There's a massive difference between "will be in a place for 3-4 years maximum, then leaving" vs "has been in a place for 3-4 years but is planning on staying permanently." In the former case their interests are going to be short-term and might not align with long-term residences. Per your example, university students would vote against allocating funds toward schools or playgrounds, because they know they're not going to be raising a family there. Or more globally, you have the population of "digital nomads" who are working in Vietnam/Thailand for a few years before they come back to the US.
It's pretty debatable if these temporary residents should have the same voting rights as permanent residents, since their interests are going to be at odds with long-term residents. I would not be happy if schools got defunded because university students who are only going to be there for a few years wanted to lower alcohol taxes.
Permanent residency/citizenship being a prerequisite for voting is used as a (very imperfect) screening for this.
A city isn't just for the long-term residents. It must serve short term residents too. Those interests must be represented.
In the US, people get to vote where they live. We used to require silly things like owning land or being male or being white, but that was a really bad idea.
It is not debatable at all if short term residents should had the same voting rights as long term residents. It is very settled constitutional law in the US, and a completely radical idea to suggest changing a principle that has been fundamental for the period of time when the US has been a strong country.
> Per your example, university students would vote against allocating funds toward schools or playgrounds, because they know they're not going to be raising a family there
I think you have very bad intuitions here. In my college town, long term residents get upset that college students vote in favor of school funding, because the long term residents have kids that have already graduated and they don't want to pay for it anymore.
Shorter term residents have significant disadvantages in local politics, as local politics is largely a function of long term relationships and getting the word out on obscure elections where there's almost zero coverage of candidates, and for positions where few know what they do. Depriving short term residents of even using a vote is a huge perversion to the idea of democracy in the US.
> It is not debatable at all if short term residents should had the same voting rights as long term residents. It is very settled constitutional law in the US, and a completely radical idea to suggest changing a principle that has been fundamental for the period of time when the US has been a strong country.
Sorry what? Only US Citizens are legally allowed to vote in federal and state elections. This explicitly excludes a vast swarth of short-term residents who are there on school visas, work visas, or permanent residents who haven't gotten citizenship yet.
Because people do not vote "for local interests" but for "the interests they are carrying with them according to their believes", which are usually not on par with the interestes of the long-term-resident local community.
So what? Why does that matter on being able to vote? Shouldn't people bring their values to voting, isn't that the entire point?
Should we deny long term residents the right to vote becuase they aren't voting in the interests of short term residents? I don't understand the principle here, unless you think that short term residents are not residents, or full people, or something.
That is OK but OP should not be complaining about people not being engaged with local politics if you are excluding a large part of the people living in the city from voting.
Are a large part of the people living in a city the kind of semi-transitory-but-also-there-for-years people you describe?
I'd wager that's a small proportion of almost every city. Most cities will have tourists who are visiting for a few days or weeks, and long term residents who have a permanent address there. The percentage of people living full time in hotels or airbnbs must be tiny. Perhaps in high cost of living cities there's more "hidden homeless" living on couches, but even then it's not going to be "a large part" of a city.
I don't have sources but for cities like Amsterdam I wouldn't be surprised if 5% of the population isn't registered with the municipality for various reasons. But have been living there for years. Plenty of people I know would sublet empty rooms of their social housing apartment, which is highly illegal but for some people the only way to find a place to stay. But you obviously can't register because then the person subletting would be kicked out.
Among those that are registered to vote locally, most don't. Regardless of whether or not people should or shouldn't be able to vote, many of those currently with the ability to do not.
There’s a lot you can do. Voting is the entry stake. You can make a big impact with a very low level of political engagement.
Allowing popular referendum for everything just invites a particular and usually really dumb level of politics. You can influence a board’s decision and get some or all of what you want.
IMO one of the biggest problems with society is that you have this view that politics is this idea that it’s some sort of magical thing that is done to you. I can get my city councilman on the phone easily. Probably would get a meeting with my state senator in a few days if need be. Just show up and work with people.
People who live in the city for the majority of their time. They should be able to vote. Regardless of their housing situation. In basically all of Europe, voting for local elections is tied to having stable housing.
I don't disagree with you per se, but how would that work in practice? How could you actually tell someone lives there if they don't have an address to back up that claim?
Yes, because they don’t legally permanently live in that place. Sorry not sorry. Why do
you think anyone can just sign up for some local elections and vote for a town they’re not even legally permanently situated in??
Then change the fucking system so that people who have been living in a city for years can legally do so. Or kick them out. But don't have this vague system of sub-humans that are not allowed to influence their surroundings by voting.
I'm not saying GP was implying this, but my read of their comment is that it would be a bad thing for everyone to start to voting. If a person doesn't know what they're voting for, they're not more likely to make good decisions. They're just more likely to cancel out the vote of someone who did educate themselves.
I've been to the US a couple of times and most restaurants I visited did not have any parking spots at all. I have also seen plenty of food-carts operated by a single person, comparable to the Japanese mini-restaurants described here.
It's not federal. It'll come down to the state and municipality. If you were in a denser city, it's likely they didn't have that requirement. Lots of New York City doesn't have this kind of requirement, but you may see that if you were in a more suburban area
I'm guessing you stayed in a major city and didn't drive anywhere outside of it? If you flew in and didn't have a rental car, odds are your itinerary was biased towards places that didn't need a car?
In The Netherlands the first generation RPi was only sold to users with a Chambers of Commerce registration, I figured this was always the typical end user for it. Like schools, universities, prototyping for companies. Was the RPi in the rest of the world targeted towards home users?
What? I ordered the original Pi in May 2012 from Farnell/Element14 without a Chamber of Commerce registration (KvK nummer). A couple of my colleagues did too.
If you are able to make it work in Belgium it's a great move. Free education, free healthcare, 20 days PTO minimum, public transport, 15 weeks of maternity leave, labor protections, basically no crime, no guns, no weekly school shootings, total tax rate of at most 60%.
This person is leaving a regime where the physical safety and liberties of immigrants like him/her are in jeopardy, and HN starts a 50+ comment thread about high taxes. Peak commentary.
When we lived in Cal decades ago, taxes weren't all that much lower. Federal taxes and state taxes (higher) on a larger salary, lots of social security and other fiddly little taxes and 100-200/check for 20% of my health insurance. The only good thing about social security is that while you pay a more the benefits are larger 62+. I'm trying to remember, but like 25% for the feds, 8-10% for the state, 6% for social security and the health insurance. Call it high 40's or so, maybe 50%? Yeah, sales tax was lower vs. vat but I thought Cal had about the highest sales tax in the states?
It all depends on what the aggregate deductions that are outside your control sum to, and what you get for the money.
In Ontario, it would be about 38%, and that’d include healthcare. Canada is very efficient though. At least a decade ago, Canada’s non-defense spending per person was less than the US’s.
In Germany it would be about 44% total. Of course, in Germany, $200k is a top 2% income. In California it’s only a top 8% income.
That's what's directly taken out of your check right? But how much more do you pay after that in other taxes? And if you go even further, how much higher are the prices of everything that you purchase due to the various taxes involved in their production?
Does your Germany figure include healthcare and church tax? That could push it over 50%. Though church tax is optional and you can go private for healthcare.
Yes. Apart from the countries which live off of foreign direct investment, taxes are generally pretty high.
Also, in many EU states, companies contribute to social security. In some this is indexed to profits, but on others this is indexed directly to wages, so if you count that bit, taxes directly attributable to your income can easily exceed 60% of what a company pays out.
I don't know if Belgium is using that loophole when counting the 60%, though.
>Apart from the countries which live off of foreign direct investment, taxes are generally pretty high.
I have no idea about this. Can you explain what you mean and give some examples of such countries ?
>Also, in many EU states, companies contribute to social security. In some this is indexed to profits, but on others this is indexed into wages, so if you count that bit, taxes directly attributable to your income can easily exceed 60% of what a company pays out.
True. Some EU countries also tax the gross salary the employer has to give you before it gets to you, which is in bad faith not included in payslips. So when you negotiate your 60k gross wage, it's actually costing your employer something like 72k Euros. I hate this shady practice.
Their inward FDI stock to GDP ratio is around 250%, which is about 4× the EU average; and Ireland does this with a decently sized economy.
And then there's Luxembourg (1400%) and Malta (2000%) which arguably do much “worse” but are comparatively tiny.
I didn't do the math for every EU country. Those were just some of the few that came to mind. For instance, Cyprus has similar values to Ireland, but the Irish economy is 15× bigger.
When there's a lot of foreign money going through your economy and you can tax it to moderate amounts, you get to offer lower rates to your own citizens.
Which is great, but obviously doesn't scale if every country tries to do the same.
> I have no idea about this. Can you explain what you mean and give some examples of such countries ?
Probably countries like Ireland, Montenegro, Belize, etc which act as tax havens for foreign corporations. Or Singapore, while also a tax haven, acts as a center for regional trade.
They could also mean resource rich countries that sell mineral rights to foreign corporations, who made investments in infrastructure in order to facilitate their operations, and they pay back dividends to the state, which offset the tax burden of the local population.
If an American factored in the totality of their tax burden, it would be pretty high. The USA has the benefit of higher incomes and a gigantic population, so there's some economies of scale. But even so, add up all of income tax (federal, state, city, county), sales taxes, property taxes, tariffs, tolls, etc and the % is already pretty high. After factoring the cost of benefits that are free/subsidized in other countries, and the cost probably averages out to the same.
Of course, European countries can also have those same consumption taxes. But I'm not sure if OP factored that in.
> sales taxes, property taxes, tariffs, tolls, etc and the % is already pretty high.
These taxes you mentioned (ignoring income taxes) are even higher in many EU countries than the US, especially sales tax. Same for tolls, tariffs, etc. they're all higher here and they're increasing them and adding new taxes on top, because EU coffers are being bled dry right now with the economy, trade wars, and actual wars going on.
Also, commodity products and services are generally more expensive here than in the US too. Like, I see on youtube the hobby stuff Americans do in their garage with home labs, electronic measuring equipment, power tools and stuff, all gotten nearly for free on craigslist, but if I want to replicate their setups it would cost way more here(from a smaller wage too), not to mention buying a house with a garage in Europe is very much of out of budget to most working class in Europe to begin with.
All this stuff being so cheap and readily available is probably why Americans in their garages have been so much more inventive and entrepreneurial than Europeans.
>After factoring the cost of benefits that are free/subsidized in other countries, and the cost probably averages out to the same.
True, but a lot of free stuff you get back from the government is sometimes of low quality compared to what you pay for in taxes on a high income, due to never being enough money for everything everyone needs, and not being able to attract and keep qualified and motivated workers to stay in the public system when they can earn more privately, and it's only been getting worse and worse since Covid and Ukraine, with no signs of improving.
For example, I am now paying ~1000 Euros for private physiotherapy after my accident, since the free government one is abysmal, which I am forced to pay for anyway out of my salary even though it's useless.
Another example, after my jaw surgery at the public hospital here they just strap cold packs to your face like in WW2, while in the US, my ex-boss who went through a similar procedure at a hospital there they had specialized head cooling devices for your post-op recovery, instead of medieval ice packs, while also being free of charge from his employer insurance. So you might pay more in the US for health insurance, but you also get more in return.
Overall I think I'd still prefer living here than in the US, but there's valid reasons why immigration to the US, and especially the success of immigrants there from an integration and financial perspective, is so high compared to here despite all the issues the US has.
In Brussels? Over half your net income would go to rent. If you are frugal then maybe you can get it to work out. This is not the type of income where you eat out every week.
providing healthcare and education are costs easily overlooked by most americans. But the reality is, these are costs borne by americans as well. and likely at a higher rate: americans pay more per capitia on both of those versus most other nations.
The top marginal tax rate in 2024 (assessed 2025) was 50%. But that's not the total tax take - that's the marginal rate of tax for income above 48320 euro.
This is not easy to compare. When you take into account all the costs up to and after retirement this is another perspective. The cost of life is another factor.
And then of course quality of life, but that's very individual.
Absolutely not. What a depressing country. Soulless people. Literally.
Try Belgium in winter.
And today with the European white guilt it's full of Africans who hate not only their people , but European traditions and culture. This is the reality.
What you listed for the past 10 years in Belgium is an average week in Chicago.
And Chicago had 2853 gun violence incidents in 2024. On a population of 2.7 million. Belgium had 184 incidents on a population of 11.8 million. That is about 67 times more incidents.
>What you listed for the past 10 years in Belgium is an average week in Chicago.
Wait a second friend, first you claim "basically no crime, no guns", then when confronted with the facts, instead of taking accountability and correcting, you move the goalposts to some high-crime US city.
I'm sure Brussels is super safe if you use Mogadishu as the point of comparisons, but if we were to keep the discussion in good faith and stick to comparisons with EU cities, my eastern european city has literally zero crime and guns making Belgium look like a warzone by comparison.
We have literally zero people killed by suicide explosives, guns or machetes compared to Brussels. How can people look at those crimes and go like "yeah, it's not so bad, you only have a relatively small chance of being killed" ?
> Wait a second friend, first you claim "basically no crime, no guns", then when confronted with the facts, instead of taking accountability and correcting, you move the goalposts to some high-crime US city.
OP is right, if those are the worst things to happen in the past 12 years, that's effectively 0 crime.
Especially when you consider that so much of what you listed were actually terrorists attacks conducted by an organization that hasn't conducted a foreign terror attack since winning control of their own territory from foreign occupiers.
>OP is right, if those are the worst things to happen in the past 12 years, that's effectively 0 crime.
If that's "zero crime" from your frame of reference, then what are the cities that have actual zero crime? -1000 crime? NaN?
I'd also be curious to know, if for example you or a family member would have been a victim in one of those violent incidents that don't happen in other EU cities, if you'd still have considered it "zero crime".
Is it one of those cases that when people see so much violent crime it's just a statistic that they had waive it easily? Because I can't.
Then please argument using logic why it's obvious. I explained why it isn't oblivions, as per HN rules.
Subjectively sure, each to his own, it might be obvious to you if you're ideologically aligned with the poster, but for good faith debate, you'll need to add actual arguments to convince the other people of your take. Imagine telling the judge "it's obvious your honor" as your only argument to why you're in the right.
>As a passerby, I'm honestly not sure what pedantic hill you think you're dying on.
No hill dying here, I'm just pushing for facts over blind ideologies.
I meant compared to the US it has basically no crime. Total gun incidents in the US is 10x more than Belgium.
And yes obviously there are guns in Belgian society but with no guns I was referring to how regular people don't walk around with guns. If you play football and your ball enters someone yard you don't have to worry about getting shot.
> I'm sure Brussels is super safe if you use Mogadishu as the point of comparisons
I believe their point was that Brussels is “super safe” compared to Chicago. 67 times fewer gun incidents is quite a lot.
I live in Dublin, Ireland, which is a lot smaller than Brussels, and when there is a shooting it gets on the news. You can imagine how amused I was coming from São Paulo that a full-on gang war was going on when I arrived here and 4 people had been shot in the previous year.
A friend of mine who also came from São Paulo, a trauma surgeon, had to change specialty here because there simply isn’t enough work.
People need to take the name Chicago out of their mouths. If a message board thread is a poker game, bet the bank when someone tries to make a political argument using "Chicago" that they've never set foot here. Someone who grew up in Brussels would be approximately as safe in Chicago as they would anywhere in the United States --- less safe than in Brussels, because of overall automobile and firearms deaths in America, but no less safe than in any major city.
(In fact, your life expectancy in Cook County is several years higher than in the rural south.)
The gun violence in Chicago is tightly constrained to places and populations unfamiliar to the median Belgian. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods and structurally segregated by almost a century of redlining and "urban renewal" that created hyperconcentrated pockets of crime. It's a human tragedy and fully worth dunking on, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with how safe a visitor would be to the city.
(Chicago is also not even in the top 10 in US cities by index crimes, but whatever).
Like I argumented before, comparisons with random high crime cities across the pond are in bad faith, which is why i proposed sticking only to EU cities to make the comparison fair, and Brussels does fairly bad at that level.
If you insist to go this route, you can definitely find cities even in the US with less violent crime than Brussels.
Because it ignores the fact a white European, the vast vast majority of Belgium, won't actually experience that kind of homicide rate in the USA if you pluck them out of Belgium and dumped them there.
If you look at places in US with similar white European demographics (New Hampshire at <2 per 100k) the homicide rate isn't that much worse than Belgium (~1.2 per 100k).
The best predictor of being a victim of violence in the USA is to be black, the ~second best predictor is to be in a state with a high proportion of black people. If you are in a state that is ~as white as Belgium, the rate goes way way down.
Well said. After reading your comment and ruminating on it a bit, I think people handwaive the violent crime in Brussels since native Belgians (and possibly other well off immigrants) aren't very likely to live in Brussels city that's only 22% native Belgian and 78% foreign born.
I expect small cities and towns in the suburbs, where native Belgians are a majority, to have virtually zero violent crime, which would flatten out the crime spike of Brussels into good looking national averages.
