I am happy to anounce that later this month (May 23rd) I will be organizing the first Steem meetup in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg!

Moreover, we'll be graced by special guest @roxane, "l'égérie de la communauté francophone"!

About Luxembourg

A few words about Luxembourg: very small country (~2500 km², smaller than Rhode Island) with about 600 000 inhabitants (growing fast). It's nested between France, Belgium and Germany.

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It has a very dynamic economy and sports the second highest "GDP per capita" in the world (at purchasing power parity).

While Luxembourg is indeed prosperous, that statistic shouldn't make you imagine that everything is gold-plated here. The little secret of the country is that it has about 400 000 jobs but only 270 000 people in working age ! The other 130 000 jobs are filled by commuters from neighbouring France, Belgium and Germany. Which means that 130 000 extra people contribute to the "domestic product" but do not appear in the "per capita" denominator. This gives a serious boost to the statistic.

Of course to put things in balance, we do have quite a bit of these on the streets

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and also a few of these ...

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And, just in case you wonder, no, these weren't paid for in crypto ...
Note in these pictures that the Lambo was quietly parked next to a few regular Renaults and the Bugatti Veyron is humbly queuing among low-end cars. That is not something exceptional: unlike other rich places such as London or US cities there is significantly less segregation by wealth. Wealthy people live alongside regular folks; one benefit is that there are almost no poor people.

To give people around the world a perspective, start by reading this post which I've resteemed, by @cryptosharon from Venezuela. In it she says:

Here, I can live with 20-40 USD a month in a sort of comfortable way, including rent, food, internet, transportation and small random expenses.

And she continues with:

But in any other country, I would need between 300 and 600 USD a month just to live with slight comfort.

Now consider the following: the minimum monthly salary (gross) in Luxembourg is €2400 (about 3000 USD gross). That is the minimum (for people with at least high-school education). If you have finished high-school and you find work (which is not that hard in a country where there are more jobs than people), you cannot make less than that. On top of it, the social transfers are so extensive, they would make the country look properly "communist" to the eyes of a typical American ("lots of" taxes, "lots of" welfare)

How does Luxembourg pull it off? As I've explained in more detail in an older post it has the scarcest and, I trust, the most precious resource that any country could have, a smart and honest political class (in the same league with Scandinav countries)

The purpose of this short presentation was to entice some people to come over for the meetup. People from London for instance have very good and very cheap connections: a return flight is about £100 (from London City Airport) and there are about 5-6 flights per day. Saarbrücken, Karlsruhe and Trier are also pretty close by car.

Luxembourg has an extremely cosmopolitan population and focuses its education on teaching foreign languages. As a consequence, people having grown and attended school here speak at least four languages (French, German, English and the local Luxembourgish). In practice, because of historical strong immigration, a high number speak a fifth language (Portugese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Greek, etc.)

The recently arrived though usually only speak their mother tongue and English which is why the meetup will likely be in English (and partly at least in French)

The meetup

We'll be talking about

1. The steem blockchain
2. The blogging /vlogging apps (Steemit, Busy, DTube, DLive, etc.)
3. Utopian.io (because a majority of the audience is likely to have an IT background.

The meetup will happen next to this historic building in the picture below which has symbolic status: it has been for almost a century the headquarters of a major steel producer Arbed, which then got into an alliance with the biggest French steel producer (Usinor) and Spanish steel producer (Aceralia) to form Arcelor. The latter was bought by Mittal Steel about 15 years ago and recently the building, considered impractical for the needs of a modern company, has been sold.

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Precise venue is 10-12 rue Heinrich Heine, 1720 Luxembourg, for those who plan to input it in their GPS (there's a cheap underground parking nearby). Start is at 19h00 (but you can come earlier, there will be someone to welcome you).

And have I mentioned that @roxane and @oroger are my special guests? They will be coming from Bruxelles, Belgium. I would be very happy to have more steemians, from the Lorraine region (Metz) for instance, I don't know if there are many on Steemit.

If people want to fly in from Romania they would also be most welcome (I am thinking for instance of @dragosroua)

And especially from neighbouring Germany, I hope @alexvan can help me bring some here (Aachen is not too far away)!

If you enjoy my posts, why not optimize your own rewards and benefit from my pledge as explained in this post:

1. Help Yourself! (steemit for dummies) (in short)
   and in more detail in this post:
2. Best way to Grow on Steemit
   aussi qu'en français dans cet article :
3. Communauté d'intérêts sur Steemit