Seems like a collection of websites that were manually submitted by their creators. Scaruffi has been online for decades, I doubt that person would be interested in submitting to a website directory.
That's not the point, but even if it was, you could also say something like going from Kiryas Joel to New York City is as big of a "shock" as going from Idaho to Australia, even though these two places are in the same state and 30km away. Yeah the U.S is big and varied, but that doesn't mean that the political and societal structures are approximately the same as the EU.
It's probably because before the United States existed, they were separate states. Then they became a confederacy (twice). There's also the open ended clause where Texas thinks they can secede if they want to.
> It's probably because before the United States existed, they were separate states.
The same is true of Canada's provinces and Australia's states – before (con)federation, they were separate British colonies. The big difference between Australia/Canada and the US, is the American colonies rebelled first, and then federated after they had won their independence. The Australian and Canadian colonies federated (with the approval of London) into "dominions", which were more than mere colonies but rather semi-independent parts of the British Empire. (London's power over the dominions gradually declined over the decades to the point that it recognised them as fully independent countries, although neither Canada nor Australia was fully independent at the moment of their respective federations.)
(Australians call it "Federation" and Canadians call it "Confederation" but it is the same thing. Canadian confederation never produced a Confederation in the sense that the American Articles of Confederation or the Confederate States of America were.)
Also, even before the now-independent American colonies formed themselves into a federation, they already viewed themselves as a distinct nation. There was never really any point that New Yorkers (for instance) viewed themselves as New Yorkers rather than Americans or British or British North Americans. American states never functioned as national identities. (Even cases like independent Vermont and independent Texas, they saw largely themselves as Americans waiting to be allowed into the United States, there was never really any independent Texan nationalism or Vermont nationalism.) Prior to the American revolution, there was no difference between Americans and English-speaking Canadians – they all saw themselves as British North Americans. It was only after the American revolution that English-speaking Canadians stopped identifying with the label "American" and began to identify it with the other country to the south instead. The American revolution was really the formative event which split Anglophone Canada and the United States into separate national identities.
> There's also the open ended clause where Texas thinks they can secede if they want to.
Texas tried to secede as part of the Confederacy, and the attempt was crushed. Whatever rights of secession some Texans claim exist on paper certainly don't exist in practice.
Random acts of philanthropy like this are just that -- random and benefiting a very small number of random people. While there is no problem with that per se, people should have access to a decent life through fair, well defined systems rather than having to depend on some arbitrary system of lottery.
What's good for some people is often bad for some other people. Win-win scenarios are very rare.
As a thought experiment, if you gave half the population 1 million dollars, then that would drive house prices through the roof and the unlucky half of the population would be enslaved to the lucky half paying high rents. The lives of the unlucky half would be absolutely ruined. There is no good there. It's zero-sum but in a way it's worse because it was 100% luck and those who worked hard were punished.
To have real equality, you need equality of opportunity. Equality of outcomes is not equality; otherwise it's not equal if someone sacrifices less and gets more rewards; they are privileged, they are fortunate.
Just a heads up, the info about visa free travel to Belarus is not correct. You can enter Belarus as an EU citizen visa free in 3 specific ways, and this only lasts for up to 5 days depending on how you entered. Otherwise you will need a visa to travel to Belarus.
