Same experience as yours when I visited Norway a few years back, 50 year old people were at ease with English. I guess the Norwegian media only get you so far ha ha.

To contrast, in France, French-speaking Belgium, Italy, Spain, (I dont’ know about French-speaking Switzerland), even young people would have issues speaking English. You can clearly see the divide here:

https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-epi-site/reports/2023/ef-epi-2023-english.pdf

Portugal is the exception, I don’t know why.

Oh do they? Never heard about that. Guess I’ve learnt something new. I wonder if it would be different for us, given how fewer big companies the EU has compared to the US.

Yes, for instance their equivalent of VAT is state-based, some of them having 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_States

Delaware is indeed kind of similar to Ireland: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/092515/4-reasons-why-delaware-considered-tax-shelter.asp

Both are listed as tax heavens on that page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#Lists

Well, they can make their own common language if they want, that would still reduce the number of Finno-Urgic languages by 50% ha ha (not sure about the language group name, my memory is blurry)

Meanwhile many of the young generations are quite proficient with English.

Probably more in Germanic languages countries than Romance countries (don’t know about Slavic). Proximity to the language and lack of dubbing helps. I come from a Romance language speaking country, half of my friends don’t know how to properly speak English (let’s say enough to be able to work in English)

I think one of the more urgent reforms that could help the EU prosper would be a common fiscal policy. We have the same tarifs on goods coming from abroad and most of us share the same currency, but countries are still offering varying tax rates. I think having an EU wide tax policy would help spreading the European branches of foreign companies more evenly. Though I reckon not everyone would like this (wink wink, Ireland).

It’s interesting because every US state has a different fiscal policy (Delaware being the well-known tax heaven for companies for instance), and it doesn’t seem to hinder them too much.

Oh yeah, definitely. I had a Romanian colleague who moved to Western Europe to give it a try. He went back to Romania after a few months, and when he explained me the way he was living there, I couldn’t but understand.

Definitely, it’s nice! I feel like there could be some similar initiatives across family languages

• Interlingua for Romance languages
• another one for Germanic languages
• another one for Slavic languages

That would reduce the language burden at a European level, and still kind of preserve the local culture and language? Seems more balanced than having English as the one lingua franca

There is free trade, yes, but we still speak different languages and moving to work between countries is still not as easy as moving between US states.

The language is a big one. English seems to become the lingua franca, but the proficiency level among the population differs a lot from one area to the other, and also brings the question of the local culture and heritage.

I was thinking the other day that just even a language such as Interlingua (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua), that can be easily learned for all speakers of Romance languages, would help a lot in collaborating between populations of neighboring countries. On the other side of the spectrum, languages like Latvian might go extinct due to the massive emigration: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.NETM?locations=LV

Definitely true, but valid on both sides of the Atlantic, there were a few articles on !personalfinance@lemmy.ml about cars and houses becoming unaffordable in the US

I consider it as a glorified Imgur. If you want to upload the images to catbox.moe or anything else and share the link, feel free, I would update the post!

You are on Lemmy.world, the count is off due to 18.5 version.

On https://feddit.de/c/europe it shows 2,26k users per week.

This one has been closed, see the pinned post.

There is !reddit@lemmy.ml if you don’t like the LW one

Thank you for your valuable insight

Don’t worry, South Europe countries shouldn’t be that far behind

Interesting split. In my case, the biggest issue is the cost of living, including the housing crisis, so I guess “economic turmoil”?

Doesn’t that happen when instances defederate too? You discuss something on Lemm.ee, hexbear users comment, but LW users don’t see what they are saying, while lemm.ee users do

The map isn’t from me unfortunately, and I couldn’t find a source

I haven’t found that many, that’s surprising

Maybe they are afraid

Yeah, I wouldn’t be too attached to the specific animal version for each, this is more symbolic than anything else