Having owned a couple European houses they’re horrible to alter and mediocre on energy. I miss nice adaptable wood structures. Bizarrely Europeans seem to think their cinderblock homes are nicer…
I've never wanted to adapt a house that significantly. But yeah, I much prefer the cinderblock homes and miss them. Something about the wood and drywall houses just feels incredibly cheap, and I don't like the aesthetic (de gustibus et coloribus..)
Houses change over time. A house could have been build in 1920 without a toilet or central heating. Then over time it got a fireplace on the second floor, an indoor toilet, indoor bathroom, then central heating with gas, extra insulation, a couple decades later double paned windows, hybrid heating with a heat pump, then full electric heating, underfloor heating, solar panels, home battery.
Houses change a lot over time, it is nice to be adaptable and not need to carve out stone and concrete every time you add a feature to a home.
The most beautiful homes I have been inside in Europe were wooden cabins in Sweden. The exposed wood ceiling beams, the unpainted wooden panels everywhere, the little details. I never had that with stone or brick buildings. Mainly because they got plastered and painted over, you almost never see the raw materials on the inside.
It's not the unavailability of trees. European countries have wisely decides that cities built of wooden houses are prone to massive fires. USians haven't learned that lesson and the Los Angeles fire isn't going to be the last one.
A yes, the wise Europeans like the Dutch who have homes in Amsterdam that are sinking into the ground due to rotting wooden beams sinking in swamp ground and homes in Groningen with cracks all over due to the earthquakes that came with pumping gas out of the ground.
Or the dozens of structures in Italy that came crashing down, like the various bridges over the past twenty years (250 bridge collapse events in Italy between January 2000 and July 2025).
Yes us Europeans are indeed superior and we never pick the wrong building material ever.
> To each their own I guess. I’ll happily move walls, add or remove a bathroom, add windows, etc.
A sign of the restlesness. Once you find a house to settle in, why would you need to change it ? European houses are typically versatile, US houses aren't due to having closets (which make a room's layout very inflexible) as well as electrical outlets being mandated exactly in the middle of the wall precisely where one would like to place furniture. US building codes are beyond stupid.
> Terrible carbon footprint for concrete too.
Carbon footprint is not that important. I want comfort. More specifically: if you are somewhat wealthy (in the top 10% of incomes, like most of the people here), in the continental Europe you can nowadays easily buy an apartment in a Passivhaus (or almost if renovated) building, with underfloor heating throughout the place, supplied by a geothermal heat pump, with triple-glazed windows and external covers that give you the utmost quietness even when there's traffic just outside. You can't get that in the US because even if you were willing to pay, there exist only a handful of construction companies that know how to build that, and they're all booked for years.
> I know modern structures are better but I also don’t entirely trust block in an earthquake. Obviously less of a concern in most (not all!) of Europe.
You can take a look at Japan. Modern buildings can withstand earthquakes. The issue in the US is that developers are allowed to just build without a civil engineer or architect designing the building. I wouldn't trust that either.
I'm an Irish artist, living in Ireland. I'm very far from a rich kid. Like most Irish artists, I make some of my living from my "artistic" work, and some from what others here might call "real work". Sometimes there's not a clear division between the two, and anyway the ratio of one to the other changes every year.
Because of the cost of living here, particularly in Dublin, there is no way that the Basic Income would provide me with anything like what most people here would consider a decent standard of living. (It would currently leave me with about €200 left over every month, after I pay just my rent. That's before any bills or groceries or anything.)
Plenty of people find a way to continue to make art that other people value, even if the cost of living continues to spiral ever upwards. This payment is simply a buffer to make making art a little easier, for a fraction of the many people who contribute to the social, cultural, and intellectual life of this country. For some it pays their rent or mortgage, for some it pays for childcare so they have time to work, for some it facilitates research or purchase of materials, for some it allows them a workspace outside their home.
It's not perfect, as no public arts funding is perfect but, to me, the kind of cheap cynicism displayed in this comment comes from a place of deep ignorance and bitterness.
Working artists, spouses, and semi-retirees are relatively common.
‘2,000 creative workers’ would make this quite competitive, even if it’s only 20k USD/year that could easily enable people to be artists who wouldn’t make a career of it on their own.
Many people who are artists can’t afford to stay artists.
Pulling a 80 hour workweeks at 24, supporting yourself while doing something else is not sustainable. Similarly someone supporting themselves as an artist + a kid is suddenly a very different situation.
Exactly. A sketchbook and pencils cost next to nothing. But being able to take that and turn it into an oil painting on a giant canvas costs real money.
Writing a few songs on a guitar from Facebook marketplace is cheap. Turning that into a live show is expensive and time consuming.
Writing some Irish language poems on your lunchbreaks is cheap. Doing public readings as an unknown poet is not.
> Writing some Irish language poems on your lunchbreaks is cheap. Doing public readings as an unknown poet is not.
How is doing public reading of poetry not cheap?
I have friends who do standup comedy and they just show up at open mic nights and it doesn’t cost them anything. One is good enough that now the venues are paying him a little bit.
The frustrating thing about this program is that it is not possible to avail of this unless you are ALREADY an artist. So if you gave up art because you had bills and kids and needed to support yourself or a family, you're SOL.
The only person I know getting this money was already semi-retired after selling their house in London and retiring to the Irish countryside, and basically just noodles around on the guitar now and then.
Id commented on reddit a few weeks back that this type of scheme sounds great - but ends up being taken up by middle/upper classes as a bit of pocket money, and doesnt widen the pool or access to arts
The UK has this with lottery funding for athletes - it started really positive - but is now a lottery funded gap year for private school kids
We're not objectively deciding what is art and what isn't, up front. Who decides what counts? Who's to say an AI generated self-published vomit novels on Amazon aren't as valid as anything else.
I don't find your comment particularly insightful. These aren't good questions but I'll attempt to answer in good faith.
>Who decides what counts?
Clearly for this scheme the people approving the applicants and those setting the criteria for those reviewing the portfolios.
A better line of questioning might be who decided on these people and what makes them qualified to judge but you'll find yourself going down a 'Who guards the guardians' conundrum.
Your comment reminds me of when some member of the audience challenged film critic Robert Ebert on who made him the 'boss' to decide which films were good and which were bad.
He simply answered with the name of the owner of the building since he authorised the production of his film review show.
If a system is based on a userbase pulling the ladder from under them in order to make sure only they can benefit from it, then it's not a good or fair system from the get go.
Maybe the issue is with the definition of the profession of artist, that's it's too vague and fluid allowing anyone to claim to be one without much hassle.
But then if you have a strict definition of the artist profession, everyone will rush to conform to the bare minimum of that in order to score those benefits.
So maybe then the core issue is with the welfare state that unfairly picks winners and losers instead of being "universal".
Artist have exited way before the welfare state has. They were poor and had patrons who supported them if they loved their work. So then why do we need the state to subsidize this now? Do we have proof this leads to higher quality art?
Is that even possible? Someone has to pay for it. If I'm rich and I get $40,000 a year from UBI, but my direct or indirect taxes go up by $60,000 in order to fund the program, am I really receiving UBI? At some point UBI has to involve transfers between income or wealth levels. The particulars of how the program is funded determines how progressive or regressive the policy is in net.
The whole point is that paying everyone a fixed $X amount regardless of anything else is extremely easy to manage, so you can drop all the bureaucracy that builds up around welfare. But, yes, in practice it also acts as a progressive income tax of sorts even with an otherwise flat tax rate (which allows for further simplification) because delta between UBI check and taxes is going to gradually decrease as income rises and eventually becomes negative.
That said even with just personal income tax it's viable. I once crunched the numbers on what it'd take to have everyone in US receive the current federal min wage as UBI payment, assuming a flat surface tax (i.e. relying solely on that UBI check to make it progressive), and it was somewhere in the ballpark of 50%.
Of course, you can get there much easier if you go for the sacred cows such as capital gains. Raising that to the same level as regular income alone would bring a lot of tax revenue.
We could also start taxing AI, since it is (or at least positioned by those deploying it) the immediate cause why so many people are going to find themselves out of jobs.
> The frustrating thing about this program is that it is not possible to avail of this unless you are ALREADY an artist.
Frankly we don’t know the selection criteria for the program this year. It will be only released in April.
But we know the selection criteria for the pilot program, and for that this was not true.
> So if you gave up art because you had bills and kids and needed to support yourself or a family, you're SOL.
Again we don’t know the full program’s eligibility criteria yet. Under the pilot program there were two separate streams. Those who were recently trained, and those who were “practicing artist”.
Your hypothetical “artist who gave up art” might fall into the “recently trained” stream and thus be eligible.
Or if they gave up on art a long ago (more than 5 years), there are ways they can get back to it. They can start practicing their art on the side again, produce a portfolio of work and thus become eligible again. They don’t need to be full time artist for this.
> The only person I know getting this money
In the pilot program they randomly selected 2000 participants from those who where eligible. So to get the money in the pilot program you both needed to be eligible, have applied for it, and be lucky enough in the lottery.
Because of this lottery whoever is getting it today is not representative of who is all eligible for it.
Additionally i would argue that in every such programm there will be people that abuse the system. Just because gp knows one such person, does not mean that everybody will be doing that.
The article also mentions that overall the program had a positive impact.
There is generally a heavy bias to focusing on abuse instead of outcomes. Who cares that there are some false positives if there is a net benefit, it's just noise.
A general reason to focus on abuse instead of immediately visible outcomes: if the abuse is not dealt with properly, then that may lead to the abuse becoming increasingly widespread and blatant, which will affect future outcomes.
That is a fairly common argument, but I have yet to see any evidence to support it. In Germany, we are having a similar discussion about the Bürgergeld, i.e. unemployment benefit, which is about people abusing the Bürgergeld to the detriment of taxpayers. However, there is no actual data that show that there are a significant number of people who abuse unemployment benefits in any systematic way.
The money that the state loses through tax evasion or the exploitation of tax loopholes is much higher than the money that the state loses through unjustified claims for unemployment benefits. Nevertheless, there are constant calls to further reduce unemployment benefits or make it harder to get and the argument is always something like: There is a thing that is good and benefits people but is abused by a minority, thus we should abolish the good thing.
You can argue that nobody is systematically abusing the system but numbers go up. To those paying the taxes to support these benefits that sort of growth looks like abuse.
> You can argue that nobody is systematically abusing the system but numbers go up.
> To those paying the taxes to support these benefits that sort of growth looks like abuse.
Yes, but for 'tax payers' everything looks like abuse until they benefit from the services for which they pay taxes. The favorite hobby of people whose identity is shaped by being a taxpayer is to complain about paying taxes.
This. I've never met anyone in any setting that complained about receiving too much money.
If you ask pensioners if they should get higher pensions, they'll say YES. If you ask students if they should get more subsidies, they'll say YES. If you ask unemployed people if they should raise unemployment benefits, they'll say YES. If you ask people on minimum wage if they should raise the minimum wage, they'll say YES.
Everyone is quick to be very generous when it's from other peoples' money without accounting for the second order effects of those decisions, which is especially a big problem of the extended welfare state, since everyone pays taxes and so then everyone wants more and more subsidies so they can feel they're getting their money's worth out of the system, or else they feel cheated.
I'm pretty sure I'm on record here on HN complaining about receiving covid relief checks that I don't need, and that I would much rather that money went to people who were actually struggling.
Personally, I want people on the high end of earnings (such as myself) to be taxed more so that a basic income scheme like this can be available for anybody who wants it. Charge me an extra $300/month and give it to some random 24 year old so that he can smoke weed and play his guitar. He'll get more use out of it than I will.
One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.
> One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.
Wow! You’re optimistic!
The data shows that having at least one patent on welfare is a strong predictor that a child will grow up to spend their life on welfare. Having both parents on welfare almost guarantees it.
Having single young men on welfare is one of the worst things a society can do for young men. They’d be much better off spending four years in compulsory service and learning to be useful.
The idea is to give people enough of a safety net that they don't starve to death. But really, it's kinda crap to live in a shared apartment with a bunch of broke college students, living off giant bags of potatoes. Most of us have done that, and now that we can afford not to, we don't.
I'm sure there will be plenty of people with low enough ambition that they'll just stay there, subsisting. But I don't doubt they'd be doing that in their mom's basement without basic income, so I imagine that society will survive just fine.
The extent of "anybody" is the detail that contains the devil.
Anybody who? Citizen? Asylum seeker? A person who obtained asylum or other forms of protection? A 'tolerated' person who was not deported? (Duldung in Germany.)
Europe is already politically ablaze, and one of the factors of this blaze is "too many foreigners from the Third World as recipients of welfare". If you introduce any basic income scheme that doesn't totally exclude non-citizens, you can expect the people smuggling gangs of Libya and Turkey to advertise it tomorrow as a next pull factor for their business.
Illegal mass unskilled migration to EU, only for them to leech off welfare and be an overall net negative to society and the state's coffers, is intentional by calculated design.
Here's how it works: You take 1000 Euros in taxes from a productive German/West-EU citizen, and then redistribute that to 5 migrants giving them 200 Euro each, so you lose one angry voter but you gain 5 happy new ones.
The government is using your tax money to buy and replace your votes, this way the mainstream politicians cemented in the status quo parties, can keep making your life miserable with no accountability or repercussions for them and their careers, because your votes now become irrelevant.
And for good measure, in case the citizens vote for the so called "extremist" parties that promise to counter this obvious scam, you just slander them as nazis/$-FOBES/Putin-supporters with no proof, and form a 'cordon sanitaire' around them to take away their democratic representation, or just ban those parties altogether from elections so you can rule undisputed while masquerading as democracy.
“ One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.”
In Ireland their best chance of having their own place is emigration or waiting for their parents to die.
> Personally, I want people on the high end of earnings (such as myself) to be taxed more so that a basic income scheme like this can be available for anybody who wants it. Charge me an extra $300/month and give it to some random 24 year old so that he can smoke weed and play his guitar. He'll get more use out of it than I will.
You know you CAN donate money to the government any time you want, right? Do you do that? Practice what you preach, don't hide behind "oh if only the government made me do it."
> One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.
This is the critical problem you and others like you make: assuming that everyone is a reasonable, honest, ambitious person just like you are. Many people -- not all, but a big enough proportion to be a problem -- aren't. And when we make it possible to actually make "do drugs and play videogames all day" a viable lifestyle, there's loads of people who will take the government up on the offer. And remember, they can vote themselves UBI raises.
> You know you CAN donate money to the government any time you want, right? Do you do that? Practice what you preach, don't hide behind "oh if only the government made me do it."
You know we can also advocate for higher taxes, given that it's astronomically more meaningful for everyone to give ten cents than for me to give a few dollars, right? Or did you think this was an insightful, valuable addition to the discussion that no one has ever suggested before? Is this the comment section of a local newspaper? Good god.
> there's loads of people who will take the government up on the offer.
Prove it. How many are loads? What, specifically, do you think UBI actually amounts to?
> You know we can also advocate for higher taxes, given that it's astronomically more meaningful for everyone to give ten cents than for me to give a few dollars, right?
And you can ALSO voluntarily pay more in taxes while doing so. It's called leading by example. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates get called out on this and they do the same thing; "oh I'm just one person, my extra tax money is but a drop in the ocean, so why bother." If you and everyone else saying "tax me harder" actually put up, it might amount to something! And at least it would make people respect your position a bit more.
> Prove it. How many are loads?
Well let's see, anyone who's lived their entire life on welfare (we have families of multiple generations who have done so at this point) would qualify. So would all the homeless people more content to live on the street and do drugs than go to rehab.
> What, specifically, do you think UBI actually amounts to?
Enough for people with low ambition to live on! And their vote counts just as much as the productive members of society paying for them.
> And you can ALSO voluntarily pay more in taxes while doing so.
You're just repeating the same fundamentally silly thing I argued against like saying it louder will make it somehow less childish and silly. Did you have an actual point here, or do you think "people's respect" has any slight value in the context of the discussion?
> Well let's see, anyone who's lived their entire life on welfare (we have families of multiple generations who have done so at this point) would qualify. So would all the homeless people more content to live on the street and do drugs than go to rehab.
So you have no actual clue, but you think hand-wavy bullshit that feels good will suffice for numbers. Fantastic. I'm glad you have such strong opinions on things you clearly know absolutely nothing about.
> Enough for people with low ambition to live on! And their vote counts just as much as the productive members of society paying for them.
Is "low ambition" angry-posting on social media? Do you think vibe-coding React bullshit, or whatever, is "productive"? Do you think engineers at Meta, busily finding new ways to make teen girls depressed are "productive"? Or is this just more stuff you have convinced yourself is true because it makes you somehow "better" than other people?
Becoming a working artist requires sacrifice and commitment.
Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll podcast) often talks about the practicalities of producing art.
In 1970's a (starving) artist worked part-time job (eg waiter), enabling them to focus on their craft most of the week.
Today, typical artist has to hustle, juggling 3 jobs, and can only focus once per week on their one day off work.
Further, "entry level" jobs are unpaid / underpaid. Such as internships at a museum or newspaper. Ditto teaching positions.
Consequently, only affluent persons are able to break into the creative disciplines (production of culture). Trust funds, nepotism, and other lottery winners.
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I, for one, enthusiastically support heavily subsidizing both creative and caring work. All those "not-for-profit" gigs and unpaid labor. They're the grease that keeps society working. Despite not being tabulated in someone's payroll accounting system.
They were aware of the problem and they covered it up, rather than try to show better ways of living. It’s unintentional propaganda for the crappy ways we build our cities. It’s worse than if they’d just show things how they really are.
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