So I’ve tried Mastodon, Pixelfed and didn’t like them. Mastodon is nice if you wanna ”tweet”, but that’s not for me. Pixelfed was dead.
I quit Meta because of tech bro fascism, and hated Twitter even before it was X because, let’s face it - nobody has ever changed their opinion on anything because of a Twitter conversation (I know I’m exaggerating, to get my point across). I was in Reddit for a few weeks, and the conversations there seem mostly friendly and constructive, but I decided I don’t want to have anything to do with social media corporations. Besides, I noticed I could scroll endlessly. And that’s not good for me.
Lemmy seems nice. There are still some topics I’m interested in that don’t have active communities, and I’m still learning on how to have my feed from multiple instances. But still, this is the way to go for me.
Against algorithms, against fascism, for free internet. Thanks for coming to my boring Ted talk and have a nice day.
Let’s see. Belgium has 0,26 gini income inequality. (EU 0,29). We have great hospitals. Uz Leuven and UZ Gent being world top class hospitals. When my wife will give birth, it will cost us 300 euros. Median income in the country is 3800 euros gross. Which comes to about 2600 euros net.
Schooling is tax paid. There are like no private schools here because who would want to fund that (there’s one in Brussels, would cost 500k euros to have your kid schooled there till age 18, while public schools get funding from taxes). Higher eduction costs like 1 month wage to fund a bachelor’s degree tuition wise.
Median net wealth per adult is 250k euros. Puts us alongside Australia, Luxembourg and Iceland.
We have unions, personally I’m with ABVV, which is the socialist variant. They help with certain stuff. Went there when I was unemployed for 3 months.
There’s unemployment benefits for 2 years. Only the first year is good income. Not really necessary to be longer than 1 year imo.
Quite some sick leave. Medical bankruptcy isn’t a thing here. There’s a maximum invoice per household per year. Which is a pretty low sum. Depends on income level too. Can easily be as low as 500 euros per year.
Maternity leave is decent, my wife is on maternity leave starting 1 august until 1 February.
Child benefits exist. My wife will get 250 euros from that every month I think. At birth she gets 1250 euros too. And we get a free stroller and car seat. Quite good quality too.
There’s an issue with the amount of daycares. Just no space. But starting age 3, the kid will just go to school. Which is properly funded.
Public transport… there’s rails everywhere. 80% of trains are for commuting in Europe. Belgium is no exception. I don’t have a car, there’s no need for it.
They are building bike lanes alongside the train rails for car free commutes.
It’s very tax friendly to lease an e bike with your company. It uses the taxes on your end of the year bonus. Basically turns a 1500 euros net bonus into a 4500 euros bonus. Allows people to lease a premium quality e bike for commute and buy it after 3 years for 15% of original value.
There’s always investment in social housing.
We’ve got quite a lot of immigrants. Immigrating is really easy. My wife basically went from Indonesia to Belgium with a tourist EU visum. We married and then she never had to leave. Since I have housing and a job.
Psychologist costs 11 euros per session, psychologist gets 85 euros for it.
Trans people can get sex change surgeries and hormones funded by tax money.
One of the earliest countries to allow gay marriage.
47% of EU electricity was generated with renewables in 2024.
Government funded the purchase of electric cars quite a bit until now. Same with solar panels.
Buying a house costs 3% tax if it’s your only house that you will live in. Otherwise it’s 12%.
There’s a lot of funding to teach immigrants Dutch.
Cleaning is the stereotype job for immigrants that don’t speak Dutch, since that job is funded 2/3rd with tax money. The client pays 10 euros per hour and the cleaner earns 13,64 euros per hour. + Free e bike. Can get this job without speaking Dutch, because there’s just such a high demand.
We have a lot of doctors per capita.
Walkable cities like Ghent, Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp, … All cities are walkable.
High social mobility. A lot can be achieved within 1 generation.
It’s a pretty nice country. But my wife does call it boring as fuck 🤷🏻♂️