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linguae a day ago

The scary thing is I don’t know of a place that would be better for Americans in the next 20-30 years:

- Western Europe needs to figure out quickly how to adapt to a likely diminished or non-existent American role in NATO while at the same time dealing with a very assertive Russia.

- Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are nice but have astronomically high housing prices.

- Japan is struggling with three decades of stagnation, an aging population, and the weak yen.

- Taiwan faces an existential crisis should mainland China attempt to repossess it.

- South Korea is a bright spot, but it has to deal with North Korea and (to a lesser extent) China.

- The developing world is still developing and still needs more time to approach a standard of living that matches that of the developed world.

- China is probably going to overtake the United States in terms of economy, and it has a high standard of living in its urban areas, but living in China means living under CCP rule.

I’m not optimistic about the US in the next few decades, but I’m not optimistic about other developed countries. I’m in my late 30s; sadly if the next 20-30 years are rough, then that’s the rest of my working life…

gucci-on-fleek a day ago | parent | next [-]

> - Canada, [...] are nice but have astronomically high housing prices.

Vancouver, Toronto, and the surrounding areas have crazy housing prices, but the rest of the country is still mostly okay. These are the two biggest English-speaking cities, and about a third of the country lives in either of them, so they're where most new immigrants tend to go, but there are still tons of other great cities in Canada with better housing prices.

bluefirebrand a day ago | parent [-]

Calgary's housing has gone kind of out of control too. It's slowed down now, but for a while it was crazy. I own my house in Calgary and my property value went up by ~250k since I bought in 2018. Lucky for me but kind of insane growth

gucci-on-fleek a day ago | parent [-]

I'm in Calgary too, and housing has definitely jumped a lot since Covid, but we're still not quite at the Vancouver/Toronto insanity of $1MM for a 1-bedroom apartment (and hopefully it stays that way!).

bluefirebrand 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I agree. As much as I like seeing the value of my property grow, I don't think it's overall very good for the city or society if no one can afford homes

tedggh a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Add to Europe’s challenges: Africa’s population will be 6X bigger.

watwut a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Western Europe needs to figure out quickly how to adapt to a likely diminished or non-existent American role in NATO while at the same time dealing with a very assertive Russia.

Primary, western europe seems to be last chance for democracy. Like, last democracies standing.

nostrademons a day ago | parent [-]

That assumes only nation-state-level entities. This has been a very poor assumption: even within my lifetime, the last ~40 years, we've seen nations like Yugoslavia and the USSR break up, and some of the successor states (eg. Slovenia, Croatia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States) have developed robust democracies where previously totalitarian communist governments existed.

Within the territory of the U.S, states like California and NY and Massachusetts continue to have robust democracies even if the federal government doesn't. In California's case it's often a bit too robust, and we often get ourselves into trouble with ballot propositions that have a lot of popular support even when they're economically unworkable.

curio_Pol_curio a day ago | parent [-]

According to 2024 GDI, using the generous "HN definition" which includes Finland and Czechia, only 1/2 of robust democracies are in "Western Europe"

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-state-of-democracy-arou...

Bonus: https://old.reddit.com/r/imaginaryelections/comments/krvb1y/...