Originally Posted by EarthQuake

Iceland and the US both have SERIOUS problems. I think its pretty safe to say that the size of country the US is, and the massive amount of diversity make our problems much harder to deal with. I'm not saying we dont have problems, or that our problems aren't terrible, its just foolish to say "be like iceland, flip the switch and turn ur country into the greatest".

No one was saying that. Someone opined that Iceland might be having a financial apocalypse. That is not the case. It is bad "for us" but we already started very well off, and even our big dip doesn't put us near as bad in percentage as the US (for unemployment). So if you're American, and that's the system you know, we're half the unemployment using the same statistics.

Look, you want to ignore the fact that your unemployment has risen over 400%, we want to ignore the fact that its been sort of crappy here for a long time. Again, both countries have serious issues.

Doesn't every country have serious issues?

Originally Posted by EarthQuake

Look, you want to ignore the fact that your unemployment has risen over 400%, we want to ignore the fact that its been sort of crappy here for a long time. Again, both countries have serious issues.

Being only concerned with the relative rise in unemployment is a little myopic. For arguments sake, say Iceland was an employment utopia prior to the collapse, and had 0 folks unemployed. Further suppose that the crisis caused one person to lose his/her job. Would you then say that the unemployment rate has risen INFINITELY?

For a country that is the supposed posterchild of hubris and collapse, having a U6 < 10% is pretty fucking impressive, in my opinion. Especially, as Poop noted, given the disparity in the way the two countries treat their unemployed citizens.