"At the other end of the scale are Australia, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and South Korea, with spending on pensions below 4% of GDP, albeit for different reasons."
Singapore started earlier with national pension schemes - the caning laws and extreme policing aside, the financials of Singapore and support for the population through jobs and life is worth a serious look.
Australia has the 1907 Harvester case that set minimum wage to be indexed at a level which would supposedly allow an unskilled labourer to support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them. By the 1920s it applied to over half of the Australian workforce. It became known as the ‘basic wage’.
That's been tweaked since, but it still carries weight in wage setting and goes a long way to explaining a lack of tipping culture in Australia.
"In 2020, Chromebooks outsold Apple Macs for the first time by taking market share from laptops running Microsoft Windows. This rise is attributed to the platform's success in the education market.[79][80][81]"
Hmm.
This is interesting. Searches give you different numbers.
But it looks like the number of Chromebooks sold each year is comparable, but probably lower than the number of Macs.
They've become the browser-centric portal for the education market which is the only thing a lot of people need/want. (I probably prefer that to defaulting to tablets/smartphones.)
At the same time, as far as I can tell, Chromebooks are pretty much all K-12 focused devices at this point. Which is fine. But I'd potentially buy something higher-end if it were available. But it isn't.
Lenovo doesn't have any current Thinkpad Chromebooks, but they had at least a few models in the past. Those qualified for at least pretty nice, depending on which CPU you optioned. If you picked a Chromebook model that used mainstream CPUs (ex Intel Core), chances were good that they'd have a SKU with a higher tier cpu (i5/i7), even if the case and the screen were nothing special. The atom and arm based ones didn't really have a high tier cpu to consider.
Of course, having found and incubated a useful niche, Google has canceled Chrome OS, so Chromebook offerings are going to be trickier to find.
I buy and re-image old chromebooks to use for terminals for paperwork at a few places I volunteer, they're like $50 and easy to reimage... and nice for doing paperwork.
On top of that many things that are 'not urgent' you have to pay for yourself.
I have recently paid over 20K for back surgery. Prior to the back surgery I could barely walk. This was deemed 'not urgent' and had I would have had to have waited at least 18 months for surgery via Medicare.
I also have private health cover.
So, it's important for non-Australians to understand, our health system is far from a panacea where taxes pay for everything.
Currently 778 K Australians are waiting for 'elective surgery' .
"While private passenger vehicles contribute 90% of the mileage in the U.S. transportation sector, their emissions share is only 58%. The remaining emissions come from public transit (27%) and other modes including airplanes (13%)."
Diving in, that research is less against public transport in general, more about how the US is just not very good at it:
Our measure of environmental performance is a transit agency's average carbon dioxide emissions per passenger-mile or vehicle-mile.
During the period of analysis, the sector's carbon dioxide emissions declined by 12.8%, while vehicle-miles travelled increased by 7.1% and passenger-miles increased by 10.5%.
Thus, the emissions intensity of public transit has shrunk since 2002 using both measures.
Yet, compared with public transit emissions in the United Kingdom and Germany, we document that the U.S. bus fleets had the highest carbon emissions per mile and the smallest efficiency progress.
ie. US public transport was inefficient and polluting to begin with, and while it improved somewhat when a prior administration finally applied some funding to the task, US public transport stills woefully lags in comparison about the glone.
It's been a pretty successful program to reduce the amount of support retirees need.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia
From :
https://www.aman-alliance.org/Home/ContentDetail/97783#
"At the other end of the scale are Australia, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and South Korea, with spending on pensions below 4% of GDP, albeit for different reasons."