[treprinum]

Why would anyone outside some desperate eastern European countries want to join? EU is going down hard, since 2008 no meaningful GDP growth, flat salaries, no tech companies propelling growth, old population, all the while US and Chinese GDP is exploding. The only thing EU has is regulation and high taxes, everything else is deteriorating quickly and the rate of decline is accelerating. Barcelona, previously a jewel of Europe, now has as many homeless as LA in some areas.

[throwaway2037]

    > Barcelona, previously a jewel of Europe, now has as many homeless as LA in some areas.

Hmm, I doubt it, but let me spend 7 seconds to Google about it.

Ok, I just Googled: "Barcelona homelessness"

    > In December 2023, Fundació Arrels, an organization that helps the homeless, reported that 1,384 people were living on the streets in Barcelona, the highest number ever recorded.

Then I Googled: "los angeles homelessness"

    > The 2024 count estimated that the homeless population in Los Angeles County declined by 2.2% to 45,252.

[mercutio2]

Living on the streets is one very visible form of homelessness; your numbers are apples to oranges.

LA is also an order of magnitude bigger than Barcelona, so absolute numbers (even if carefully only tracking people sleeping rough) are a weird point of comparison.

[mads]

So Barcelona homelessness is going up and Los Angeles homelessness is going down? The only reasonable conclusion must be that the homeless are relocating from Los Angeles to Barcelona. It is only a question of time then.

[treprinum]

So you cherry pick one real-world observation, try to refute it and it makes the rest wonderland? EU is doing super great because you just scentifically proved that Barcelona can't be as bad as LA?

[lostlogin]

So EU homelessness is as bad as the US in some places, but the EU needs to be more like the US?

[treprinum]

No, but EU with all its social agenda is now imploding at unusual places that were once considered great places to live, inflation is doing its thing. In the US tech is considered the most important engine of the economy, EU wasted over a decade and lost its only competitive company that led one large sub-field of tech (Nokia). Pretending nothing is going on won't help the EU, sooner or later this will be apparent everywhere (with a chance a hot war with Russia collapses it quicker).