You just argued why you should be the country in the title but then somehow came to the wrong conclusion

I just have realistic expectations what I can achieve in this calm Sunday evening.

Your first paragraph signals US is the default.

I discovered today that stripe is half based in Ireland. It would add valuable context to say which of its two countries this story refers to, since it involves country specific pension setups.

Regrettably, due to USA's brand of capitalism, these days, the word pension means it's probably not a USA thing.

There are pros and cons to defined benefit (i.e. pension in US speak) and defined contribution (e.g. 401-k) plans. Among other things, defined benefit plans--when they were more common--were mostly oriented around people staying at the same company for a decade or more. Usually if you just stayed for 2-3 years you got nothing or almost nothing.

There is almost no value to paying someone else to manage your retirement funds when you can do the same thing they do for 0.03% to 0.08% expense ratios with a target date retirement fund from vanguard/Schwab/fidelity or mix and match the various broad market stock/bond funds.

There often seems to be an implicit assumption that the money funding defined benefit contributions came from a magic money tree somewhere (or at least did so until it turned out that the tree wasn't producing enough).

I know in the years that I was earning into a deferred benefit plan, I barely gave it a passing thought. And, had you asked me if I would prefer cash or for the equivalent to be funneled into some opaque benefits system that would hopefully pay out someday, I'm pretty sure what I would have chosen.

Are some people better with defined benefits? Almost certainly. But at some point you're being pretty paternalistic to say you should much less must take that option.

There was a time where it was expected, and then it was taken away. Now, we are all slaves to the broader market with no guarantees, where once we had guarantees.

And coincidentally, wealth inequality is unrivaled in modern times.

Nothing is keeping you from putting some portion of your salary into long-term low-risk bonds or even into annuities of various types. Your total compensation is presumably the same (given tax effects) so you're basically saying that you'd rather an employer handle some portion of your savings for you than handling it yourself. And there have certainly been defined-benefit failures and reductions of various kinds so there were pretty much never any guarantees.

Again, you seem to be assuming that there was some special pool of money that went into defined benefits that got pulled back. Which isn't true. Companies pay what they need to hire including benefits packages.

Except back then pensions were tied to the company you worked for, and were guaranteed. 401k funds are not guaranteed.

Assuming the company existed, and was not corrupt in handling all that money. But there is a lot of volatility in a company existing for 50+ years in the future, and there is a lot of corruption.

Hence the tightening of DB pension funding and investment rules (PPA 2006), culminating in non taxpayer funded DB pensions being untenable expensive.

401k funds are as guaranteed as any defined benefit pension. They both get invested into SP500 index funds, and they both get bailed out just the same by the federal government. If the stock market tanks, the DB pension is going down just like any 401k.

A 401k is not a pension! The nitpick about how much the manager shows how much you've been fooled. Elsewhere, a pension is a government guaranteed faucet of money for retirement.

Depends on the locality. In the UK, they refer to something similar to 401k as a pension also. The long form would be “defined benefit pension” or “defined contribution pension”.

In the former, you are promised (defined) how much you will get in your retirement, in the latter, you are promised how much will be contributed to your retirement savings (but not how much you will get).

> The nitpick about how much the manager shows how much you've been fooled.

I do not know what this is referring to.

>Elsewhere, a pension is a government guaranteed faucet of money for retirement.

The US has that too, called social security.

* * *

“Default” and “status quo” aren’t the same.

Also, this publication is from the Business Post, which is based in Dublin (domain being “businesspost.ie” is clear about this point, and it’s already next to the title). That seems enough of a hint to me that this news might have Irish components.

Why shouldn’t one assume that? Default is USA on an English-language tech forum.

because we're better than that. I'm saying this from inside the USA, mind you. It cheapens our interactions here to be the same bland boringness of big box stores and strip malls of America. do you fly to Vegas or Boston or New York, just to visit their Best Buy? There's interesting things within - there's many an article about the intricacies of 401ks - but to hear from outside about a totally different system and how it works?

I'm here for interesting and "default USA", isn't

I doubt most people think that way. There are so many english speaking countries that make up what an average tech forum is nevermind english speakers from non english speaking countries.

Now a German tech forum it's easy to identify with one country

>Now a German tech forum it's easy to identify with one country

Sounds like you’d be disrespecting Austrians, and Austrian and German diaspora all over the world by u/michpoch’s logic.

Things I haven't considered and that's fair. I take back my German comment.

It’d be clear by the .de domain.

you know what is funny? English has become the de-facto world language, and then we go an learn it in school in order to survive in this global world.

And then when happens? American cultural imperialism uses this fact to subjugate the world under its "default culture umbrella". You know what, stop holding on to the English language as if it gives you a free pass to choose what cultures and countries are important.

American people will tend to post American centric views and news and that is FINE! So by default, most posts will be about the USA, leave the posts alone that are not

The guy you responded is just a troll, not worth arguing back.

Most Americans, at least here, do not act like this.

Subjugation by cultural imperialism lmao. No one is making you watch our tv shows or read our books or wear our clothes. I’m always amused at the casual anti-Americanism of other Westerners. It’s usually not logical at all, just pure resentment.

We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines*. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* (and also because of the trollish username - those aren't allowed here - see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...)

Please don't perpetuate nationalistic flamewar on HN. It just makes everything worse.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one:

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

The default assumption on this USA based site run by a USA based company is "USA" unless otherwise stated.

Then it should be news.ycombinator.us

.com is an global domain.

“[.com] was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense … and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com

That hardly seems relevant? Literally all TLDs are ultimately under US jurisdiction, given that the ICANN is under US jurisdiction.

US government built it, a US company runs it, and US law applies to it.

It’s silly to complain that US companies and US-focused sites shouldn’t use it.

>US government built it, a US company runs it, and US law applies to it.

All also true of .ie and .fr and .eu and whatever other TLDs you might want to choose.

>It’s silly to complain that US companies and US-focused sites shouldn’t use it.

Nobody complained about that.

The news is really specific to Ireland due to Irish tax laws.

Why shouldn't this very relevant context be in the title?

Stripe is doing it despite not having to. Where it's happening is irrelevant.