PPP is a very inaccurate measure of quality of life and cost of living. Countries with a bigger income inequality leads to far higher cost of living and much poorer quality of life. So suggesting that having a high PPP is good when the US on the Gini indices (which measure income inequality) rates a 45 and the EU rates a 31 is seriously screwed up and seriously misleading.
Ignorance goes a long way, and Americans (both through blogs and the American media) repeatedly release BS like this, claiming the US is 'better' than Europe for an endless list of reasons. There was one of these racial BS things posted a few weeks about how Europe was worse off than the US because it doesn't have Wal-Mart. Ironically the UK does have Wal-Mart and it's being beaten by Tesco, and Tesco since 2007 has opened stores in the UK to directly compete with the US. Carrefour is the largest supermarket retailer in the world and far out beats the US in terms of hypermarket square footage. Two of the Big Three Supermarket chains are from Europe (Carrefour and Tesco). France also has a huge established systems of Cooperatives that far pre-date the founding of Wal-Mart and who have had hypermarkets long before Wal-Mart even owned a store overseas.
The promotion of these articles repeatedly is showing a very disturbing trend in the US posters on HN. I'm unsure if this is a reflection of the US as a whole or not, but it appears to me to be a strong effort by Americans to say "well it was already worse elsewhere, so it's not so bad here" to the economic recession. I find it worrying.
Comments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...
PPP is a very inaccurate measure of quality of life and cost of living. Countries with a bigger income inequality leads to far higher cost of living and much poorer quality of life. So suggesting that having a high PPP is good when the US on the Gini indices (which measure income inequality) rates a 45 and the EU rates a 31 is seriously screwed up and seriously misleading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_Hum...
Ignorance goes a long way, and Americans (both through blogs and the American media) repeatedly release BS like this, claiming the US is 'better' than Europe for an endless list of reasons. There was one of these racial BS things posted a few weeks about how Europe was worse off than the US because it doesn't have Wal-Mart. Ironically the UK does have Wal-Mart and it's being beaten by Tesco, and Tesco since 2007 has opened stores in the UK to directly compete with the US. Carrefour is the largest supermarket retailer in the world and far out beats the US in terms of hypermarket square footage. Two of the Big Three Supermarket chains are from Europe (Carrefour and Tesco). France also has a huge established systems of Cooperatives that far pre-date the founding of Wal-Mart and who have had hypermarkets long before Wal-Mart even owned a store overseas.
The promotion of these articles repeatedly is showing a very disturbing trend in the US posters on HN. I'm unsure if this is a reflection of the US as a whole or not, but it appears to me to be a strong effort by Americans to say "well it was already worse elsewhere, so it's not so bad here" to the economic recession. I find it worrying.
Wal-Mart was also in Germany but they didn't last long for whatever reasons and sold their stores to Aldi or Lidl I think.