The NHS makes a huge difference. As a single entity it can pivot in a way that I wonder if other countries can come close to.
My daughters dentist commented yesterday that all her surgeries (and her team usually do 50 a week) had been cancelled. The reason? All the anaesthesiologist had been requisitioned as they will be required to do ventilation. All elective surgeries had been cancelled, and her paeds specialists sent on refresher courses for adult patients.
We're in uncertain territory here, the NHS's response may not be 100% perfect and a lot of people will argue that some minutiae could be done better, but I believe it has the huge advantage.
I wonder if other countries, and particularly the US, can manage such a coordinated healthcare response?
It's definitely at an advantage over systems like the US, but the NHS is far more federalised under the hood than you might imagine and there are lots of countries where the government or other regulators can take control of private healthcare when needed so it's not as much of an advantage as you might think.
I'm married to a US citizen. My children have inherited US citizenship via this route. We have to spend thousands preparing tax returns reporting no income each year for three people (the children have bank accounts).
If you buy a house, things are going to be complicated.
If you have a workplace pension from your job, you're probably screwed. State pensions have screwed people too.
If you invest in stocks, or mutual funds, you'll pay more in tax preparation than you'll make.
If you set up your own company and are not paid as an employee but as the owner, you will be screwed.
Rent out a property, screwed.
Fail to declare every account that you're a signatory on? Prepare to pay up to 125% of the contents.
If you're children are beneficiaries of a trust set up by their non-american grand-parents? Totally screwed.
Almost every American expat I've spoken to has had a shock when they find they totally didn't understand their commitments. The only ones who didn't were employees of big banks/hedge funds whose employers paid a big 4 accountant to take care of everything.
There is huge variation in Dairy! French Milk (was) terrible, only UHT widely available, though fresh is now quite common. US milk is nothing like as good as British milk for freshness/flavour (though the latter is subjective).
US eggs are refrigerated, as salmonella is so prevalent. Not so in UK, where they are guaranteed salmonella free (nowadays 'thanks' to Edwina Curry)
And Cheese? Really - I'm fairly sure there is no equivalent of a nice ripe epoisses widely available in the US. Sure, cheap cheddar is just like Monterray Jack, but....
I have lived in the US for 8 years, France/Luxembourg for 2 and the UK for the rest.
There is no nice ripe epoisses anywhere in the world. If you do actually want cheese that smells like feet, perhaps as mosquito bait, you can get that in the USA. (it can not be nice however) Most supermarkets will stock Limburger, kept cold and double-wrapped with foil to avoid offending the shoppers.
We also have both kinds of edible cheese, mild cheddar and mozzarella.
It feels absurd to have to keep asking WTF people mean when they arbitrarily say x in y is better than x in the US (and let’s be honest, that’s a sign it’s not, you’re just nostalgic), but what is better about British milk? And I swear if you say fresh off a local farm whole milk is better than the skim milk you bought in Walmart that one time I’m going to stab you... we are comparing apples to apples here, not apples to white water that isn’t what your mom served you as a kid.
US eggs are refrigerated, as are those in some EU countries. It’s actually variations in temperature that cause condensation and lead to salmonella, so your whole “guaranteed salmonella free” thing is, at best, crap... as long as they are consistently warm or consistently cold you’re fine regardless. And none of that has anything to do with the quality or taste.
With cheese you finally hit a point. You want Epoisses and can’t find a decent one. That is a fair complaint, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of anything in the US. I want a good rich, sharp, non-waxy (“crap”) cheddar. I also cannot find that anywhere... I’m in Europe. In the US I could find one in any grocery store I walked into.
This is about variety and availability, NOT quality. I dislike that I can’t find a nice cheddar, but I’m not writing off entire countries or continents as having nothing but crap because of it - the rest of the locals obviously don’t want it enough to keep it in stock, so it’s just going to mold before it gets bought. They have plenty of other good cheeses, just not the one I’m looking for.
What differentiates the US from other countries is that you CAN, absolutely, without any doubt what so ever, find what you’re looking for somewhere. Sure Walmart and Safeway don’t have it, but there is a smaller shop or a gourmet chain that does. That... isn’t quite true elsewhere.
If you buy a house, things are going to be complicated.
If you have a workplace pension from your job, you're probably screwed. State pensions have screwed people too.
If you invest in stocks, or mutual funds, you'll pay more in tax preparation than you'll make.
If you set up your own company and are not paid as an employee but as the owner, you will be screwed.
Rent out a property, screwed.
Fail to declare every account that you're a signatory on? Prepare to pay up to 125% of the contents.
If you're children are beneficiaries of a trust set up by their non-american grand-parents? Totally screwed.
Almost every American expat I've spoken to has had a shock when they find they totally didn't understand their commitments. The only ones who didn't were employees of big banks/hedge funds whose employers paid a big 4 accountant to take care of everything.
I bailed on KDE overnight at KDE 4.1. You couldn't have an NFS mounted home dir, as they had made mysql a requirement for Akonadi, without which kmail and everything else failed to work.
Suddenly KDE was no longer 'enterprise' ready, as no enterprise I've ever worked for has offered anything but NFS for home directories.
Occasionally I come across a coworker who uses konsole, as they like the tabs. But I've never seen it in use widely again.
20K bankers to shortly find themselves working in a regional office and wishing they could relocate back.
Passporting doesn't require moving your employees wholesale, you just setup a subsidiary within Europe and trade with that legal entity for European trades. A skeleton office is all that is required.
I was thinking that. Nearly all the big banks must have European branches already and presumably someone at Barclays London can log into the systems of Barclays Paris and do a trade there for instance if it has to be done that way.
I've been watching this happen like a scheduled car crash for years. Every 2 years, another open source project succumbs to the problem.
As far as I can tell, when software is open source, the barrier to people contributing is lower. And that leads to a sort of brownian jitter in the system. Once great systems, (kde in general and amarok in particular) suffer from contributions of new features, which add features but decrease reliability. Or they exist for so long that no new exciting features exist to be added, so the inevitable re-architecture death march begins (I'm looking at your kde4. You killed kde as a corporate desktop, so that you could add semantic search?).
Whatever the cause, be it the accretion of "features", or the inevitable "rinse, re-architect, repeat" cycle some project are on, it can only drive people away. But a project that is widely used collects developers, and it is difficult to say no to contributors - a common problem in volunteer projects outside software.
Yeah, for all the derision Microsoft gets for their buggy code we can still use a Win32 binary from the 3.1 days today.
You have some of the same policy at the kernel level with torvalds "we do not break userspace" policy. But the higher layers are just too damn happy with breaking themselves for it to have any meaning.
My daughters dentist commented yesterday that all her surgeries (and her team usually do 50 a week) had been cancelled. The reason? All the anaesthesiologist had been requisitioned as they will be required to do ventilation. All elective surgeries had been cancelled, and her paeds specialists sent on refresher courses for adult patients.
We're in uncertain territory here, the NHS's response may not be 100% perfect and a lot of people will argue that some minutiae could be done better, but I believe it has the huge advantage.
I wonder if other countries, and particularly the US, can manage such a coordinated healthcare response?