> PATRIOT, FISA and Bush's surveillance programme imho give more powers to certain agencies today already than are codified in EU law.

This is not true. Whether you believe that FISA courts have teeth, or whether 3 letter agencies abide by the law, in most of Europe you do not even have the pretense of this. UK/FR and to a lesser extent DE are all much worse.

The worst parts of Patriot Act were undone in 2015, and the "F" in FISA stands for "Foreign". Europe continues to push policies like Chat Control and attempt to backdoor/ban E2E encryption for domestic surveillance.

The present day and trajectory in Europe is far far more grim than in the US.

> but so far they are proposals

That is false. They are not proposals, they are being actively discussed in trilogues which is way way past proposal stage.

Chat control V2 trilogue negotiation was last week and it included mass scanning of messages and private data. Thankfully the EU parliament rejected the idea but every 6 months like clockwork it comes back. The next trilogue is in November.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-trilogue-u...

If this was passed, it would force every single cloud provider and e2e chat provider to keep, filter and pass on your private information to Europol and other security agencies.

> Generally speaking, the EU has some quite strong privacy protections relative to the US.

Please, like what? GDPR?

Privacy in certain domains is better protected than others.

> the freedom of punching that asshole in the face, metaphorically speaking.

This is not at all a freedom in the US. “The right to swing your fist ends at someone else’s nose.” You don’t get to harm someone else just for being “an asshole”. You can be an asshole back but you don’t get to violate their rights.

Depends on how you define 'fun'. If making fun is something like 'he should be killed', yes, you could end up in jail. Good

In the US you just get thrown in immigration detention for a few weeks instead.

on the other hand europe doesnt have roving gangs of masked gunmen violently abducting people based on ethnicity (at least not not in the last 80 years....)

?

As an American living in Europe, it's generally Europeans who have a distorted perception. Most Americans know the bill of rights and the 1st/4th/5th amendments. Many Americans will know of the Patriot Act/NSA/Snowden revelations.

The same is not true of Europeans and they generally believe their rights are much stronger than they are. Most Brits are not aware of the true nature of the Investigatory Powers Act. Most Frenchmen are not aware of Article L851-3.

Well, the GP is describing, what soon might be.

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That is the genius of Kai Lentit

> The order of amendments is just the order in which the constitution has been amended. It's meaningless to talk about "first amendments" in other countries.

Also, at least here in Brazil, the way the constitution is amended is by patching it. For instance, our constitutional amendment number 115 (https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/emendas/e...) patches article 5 of the constitution to add protection of personal data as a right. But we wouldn't talk about "amendment 115", we would instead talk about "article 5 item LXXIX of the constitution"; that is, what matters is the patched text, not the law that patched it.

I don't know about other countries, but it wouldn't surprise me if they take a similar approach.

> "Talk about the actual laws and rights described therein."

Freedom of speech.

> "Look at the actual practice."

The UK does not have that? The situation in the UK is very obtuse. It is confused.

Perhaps if there is no decisive counterargument, it is a valid opinion?

Freedom from enforcement?

Doesn't that make it even less free?

The US is biased to favor the top half of society. Hence why there is a lot of vocal poorer people and a lot of low profile wealthier people (I'm not including the 1% or even the 5% in this).

When you are in the 75%ish of the US, it's very easy to make a case that life in the US is better. But we don't really talk about that because it's pretty taboo when poorer people are struggling much more than they would in Europe.

I'm biased as well, being American. I think I'd much rather be middle class in Europe than the USA as well. Middle class in the US is a constant feeling of the ladder dissolving just beneath you.

I don't think you realize the situation of the US middle class.

High education costs. High healthcare costs. One serious disease or accident can bankrupt you. Buying a house usually means a 30 years loans at 7% so after 10 years you still have 85% of capital left to pay off.

Salaries are higher but everything is more expensive, so in purchasing power parity it's basically the same.

Do you realize the variety of breakfast cereals you are giving up?

I'd much rather the people of every continent have the combined technology advancements of three major powers vs two.

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Europeans are crazy arrogant and racist but it is the soft kind lacking self awareness.

Every person I have ever spoken to who is not white has told me they experienced more prejudice and racism in Europe than America. (at least the ones who have actual been somewhere in Europe)

America still has areas of hard bigotry but most places are wildly diverse and accepting. The favored EU countries everyone holds up are so white and homogeneous it is comical.

This is not dunking on Europe or any specific country but comparing America to some Scandinavia country rich in oil is an apple to oj situation just like comparing America to China or Saudi would be.

I guess you didn't read the thread :)

> Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans.

I wonder if this is actually true. I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's (at least on HN). This conversation seems quite asymmetric from my perspective.

> Maybe you're just bitter?

This comes off as psychological projection.

This is Euro cope.

No one thinks this outside the 5 minutes someone in Europe reads an article about how France says they will send troops to Ukraine.

But the troops never will come.

Show me the HDI of the US vs each country in Europe, including all the poor ones.

Edit - never mind, I'll do it, HDI in order:

Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, UK, US, Slovenia, Austria, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Portugal, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Bosnia, Moldova, Ukraine

To put that into context, Moldova is on par with Ecuador, Tonga and Dominican Republic.

The US is a country of roughly 340 million people with an HDI above Austria.

Demographics.

Trends become the future. If European stagnation continues, those advantages will vanish by the time we're old.

I'm frustrated, not bitter. Americans are acutely aware of falling behind China, and rightly concerned about it. Europe is falling behind Alabama, Mexico, and Brazil, and arrogant about it.

Edit: y'all are supposed to be our moral allies in creating a utopian future with prosperity and world peace. Instead the most likely outcomes seem to be that you'll fade to irrelevancy and rather than compromising between America's vision and Europe's vision, we'll compromise between China's vision and America's vision. We liked your vision more than China's.

Well, the Scandinavian and Sicilian do share one currency and one immigration policy and one set of regulations - which are the things that we generally look at when we analyze economies.

There is tech, but oil as well.

It's both tech and shale oil that saved the US from the decline predicted at the end of last century.

A 'bubble bursting', if that happens, doesn't make the tech sector go to zero. Apple doesn't suddenly stop making iPhones. It would take a hell of a lot more than that for the US economy to fall to European levels.

Gemini says (20 years growth): - USA: 51% total, 27% without tech. - EU: 25% total, 21% without tech. - China: 345% total, 205% without tech.

Judging by rank is a bad metric anyway. Why should ST, Infineon, NXP, Arm (UK, not EU), Airbus, Safran, etc. be considered irrelevant because they are not in the top 70 or 100?

The EU accounts for 14% of global GDP, so accounting for 16% of top 100 in market cap isn't terrible (if we're weighing each in the top 100 equally).

> I think you picked the cutoff (70) so that the numbers look worse than they are.

Reminds me of a point I heard about sports statistics. If a given team is reported as having "won 4 out of their last 7 matches", there are good odds that they also won 4 out of their last 8 matches. Also pretty good odds that their seventh-last match was a win, otherwise the stat would be 4 out of 6. (It could also go the reverse direction if the goal is to make it look worse than it is.)

Those are the aspects most relevant to HN, though.