Is America Really That Bad?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Cannizzaro@feddit.ch⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

Been seeing a lot about how the government passes shitty laws, lot of mass shootings and expensive asf health care. I come from a developing nation and we were always told how America is great and whatnot. Are all states is America bad ?

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kava@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
America is a country with over 300 million people and it’s bigger than Western Europe. There’s going to be a lot of variance. Someone growing up wealthy in San Fransisco is going to live in a different America than someone growing up with a single waitress mother in Louisiana.

The average homicide rate in the US is 5 per 100,000. The town of Boca Raton, FL has a homicide rate of 1 (less than half of the European average of 2.5) and Baltimore / St Louis / New Orleans can sometimes reach 30+ on bad years (worse than some Brazilian and Mexican cities).

When you ask about the shitty laws, we have to remember that the US is almost like 50 different countries in one. Every single state you will have a different experience as well. In Illinois school districts kids in elementary school may take home school laptops free of charge. In Panhandle Florida the kids aren’t getting that.

In Florida you can go to a one of the many kava bars or smoke shops and purchase a kilogram of kratom. If you drive through Louisiana with that kratom you can get charged with a felony comparable to being caught with heroin.

Do you get what I’m saying? There are many different Americas - even in the same geographical area. In SE Florida there are a wild mix of different ethnicities and cultures. There are Haitians, Jews, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, Vietnamese, Jamaicans…

You can live in the same city but have a totally different experience. The Brazilians may hang out with mainly other Brazilians and go to the Brazilian restaraunts / clubs / grocery stores and not ever go to the Jewish deli that all the Jews love as a staple of the town. It’s like you walk around the same area and depending on the cultural lens you put on, you experience a different reality.

HAVING SAID ALL THAT

I think America is a good country to live in. Why? Because it’s better than the vast majority of the world. You earn more money. You are safer. You have more opportunities and there’s better infrastructure, healthcare, etc than in vast majority of the world.

Yes, there are serious problems. Wealth inequality is splitting the country in two. Healthcare is expensive. There’s an opioid epidemic. We have high rates of gun violence. Etc etc

But having come from a relatively well-off third world country, I’ve seen the difference in QOL first hand and it’s massive. America is a good place to live.

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- Hyperreality@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  US is almost like 50 different countries in one.
  
  While this is obviously true, it's important to note that the US certainly isn't unique in this regard. Non-Americans often underestimate how diverse the US is. Americans often underestimate how diverse even seemingly homogenous European countries are, especially when diversity isn't immediately visible.
  
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  - kava@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Of course variance in terms of culture, demographics, and industry in even small countries can be massive. My home city in Southern Brazil of almost 1 milliom population has less than 1% black population. Last time I visited for 2 weeks I didn’t see a single black person. This surprises some people because of the perception of Brazil and the fact they imported more slaves than any other country in the America’s.
    
    So yes, I’m not claiming US is uniquely diverse. It’s just unusually large so it has large amounts of diversity due to geographic distance and total population + historic & current immigration.
    
    However what I was trying to say by 50 different countries is that the laws can vary wildly from state to state. It is something that isn’t common in other countries. Of course there are other counties with strong federated systems where the provincial-level governments have strong autonomy (Germany and Switzerland come to mind) I think these types of countries are uncommon.
    
    For example in Brazil no state regulates specific substances. That’s a power for the federal government. So if you buy a substance that’s legal in one state, you can safely bring it anywhere in Brazil. However in US this is not the case. I have the example of kratom, but Marijuana is another one.
    
    This is what I was trying to say by 50 different countries. They aren’t actually countries but in some ways they have just as much if not more autonomy than countries, besides of course foreign policy decisions. But look at California for example. It’s economy is bigger than most countries in the world.
    
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- Bigs@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  This, y'all. One of the things I think a lot of younger travelers fail to realize is that the US is not a meme. It's huge and full of people with thoughts, hopes, regrets etc. just like everyone else.
  
  Maybe there are better places to live or visit, but the US is pretty easy and most folks I've met are genuinely nice when they realize you might need help.
  
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  - MutilationWave@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Although I agree with most of your comment, saying your safety won’t be a concern when dealing with the police is flat out wrong.
    
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  - Bigs@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Edit: try to avoid police and if you encounter them play that foreign visitor thing up or make your English really bad. A lot of them are former soldiers that served in the middle east. They default to a pretty aggressive demeanor because that's what we did to them. Your safety won't be a concern, but they can waste lot of your time.
    
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- pancakes@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I think the main thing is that people often hear bad things about the US because they’re comparing it to other developed countries. Like I wouldn’t want to live there because I live in a different developed country, but I would take living in the US over a good 80% of other countries.
  
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- Devi@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  You have more opportunities and there’s better infrastructure, healthcare, etc than in vast majority of the world.
  
  Umm....
  
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  - kava@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Think of most of the world. We’re talking Africa, India, China, Ukraine, Russia, Middle East, South America, etc.
    
    Obviously Europe has a one-up on healthcare and infrastructure and probably China has a one-up on infrastructure… but generally speaking it is still a 1st world country.
    
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Zarxrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It varies from person to person and place to place. But generally, I would say that America is a pretty good place, but not perfect and has a lot of room for improvement.

Yes, healthcare is expensive, but we have some government programs to provide cheaper care for certain groups, like the very poor, the elderly, and veterans.

Violence varies from place to place, but I feel like I live in a safe area, and I have never seen or heard a gun fired at someone in a public place.

A lot of the bad laws typically involve disenfranchising certain minority groups. I am lucky enough to not be affected by most of this, and a lot of people are fighting back against it by trying to vote in better politicians.

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- sibe@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  I have never seen or heard a gun fired at someone in a public place
  
  Feels weird you have to specify “at someone” and “in a public place”. I’ve never heard a gun fired outside of firing ranges (EU)
  
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  - Alenalda@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Live in a suburban area. Several of my neighbors have 5+ acres of land. One of them has a makeshift range, so I hear someone shooting all the time, sometimes for hours on end day after day. I’m not thrilled by it.
    
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  - WorldWideLem@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    This would cover things like hunting and/or target practice at a home or private property, so not entirely that weird.
    
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  - TheHottub@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    American here. Lived in California most of my life just outside LA in suburbs. Ventura as well. Lived in Tennessee for 2 years and Idaho 2. I’ve seen people open carry a few times. I own a gun and I’ve never seen or heard a gun fired outside of a gun range. I’m 40 btw. It’s not that bad here. It’s big and there are a lot of people so the news has tons of opportunities to present the worst of humanity which makes up a small percentage.
    
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Lemmylefty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
America is harder to live in the poorer you are, and it’s on a steeper scale than in other industrialized nations because there are fewer and less robust social services, especially health and child care, and declines in union membership have paired with a rapid increase in wealth inequality that is forcing the shrinking middle class downward and stomping on the poor even harder.

You can live a comfortable life (for now…) if you are firmly middle class and up. Your higher salary than your counterparts in Europe is eaten away at by higher costs, and you deal with risks that they don’t in the form of transportation being car dominated (more accidents and less walking exercise) easy access to guns (the most dangerous being the one in your own home, to you) and less strict food safety laws. Compared to those in Eastern Europe, however, your likelihood of suffering from a foreign attack is drastically lower, not that it was ever very high to begin with.

One thing that Americans take pride in (and rightly, mind you) and full advantage of is our First Amendment right to not have our speech be curtailed, so a large amount of the bitching about America, and especially in English, is Americans bitching about America(ns). So there’s a cultural element to it that may or may not exceed the truth.

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- Subtlysubtle@sffa.community ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I would also add that the capitalist class loves to promote the idea if America as the greatest nation on earth because that storyline benefits them. They’ve already won the game and are benefiting from our current system. They don’t want it to change.
  
  If we admit we have shortcomings–large gap in wealth inequality, lack of accessible and affordible health services, piss poor public transportation, unaffordable child care paired with living costs so large 2 incomes are required, poor school funding, pervasive gun violence, and Policing that emphasizes violence, just to name a few-- then we are also acknowedging that we have to change things. Why would those who greatly benefit from our current system want change?
  
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- kersploosh@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  a large amount of the bitching about America, and especially in English, is Americans bitching about America(ns).
  
  Absolutely.
  
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  - OptimusPhillip@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    J.J. McCullough did a really good video about this fact, I’d definitely recommend it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCVQKD3jH2M&ab_channe…
    
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- 30mag@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  less strict food safety laws
  
  I mean, you can’t even make cheese with raw milk in America, but other than that
  
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mojo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
No, despite what always online Europeans who have never visited will like to tell you. We’re just very big and very vocal, so you hear about us all the time. Bad news spread faster then good news. Are you going to be reading news about how good our tap water is, our public restrooms always available, boring stuff like that? Probably not! But that’s stuff you’ll notice if you do actually visit.

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- partyparrot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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  - imaqtpie@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    How many other countries have you been to?
    
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- justinw@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Our tap water is in crisis. What hasn’t been privatized is either being operated with outdated technology, or being polluted, and EPA protections are being weakened by the Supreme Court.
  
  And, in most of America there aren’t freely available public restrooms. They are all located in businesses that will outright deny you access, or force you to make a purchase. Their policies allow them to discriminate against the unhoused, and the disabled.
  
  I am an American, but I’m not going into I get into the broader discussion here, just had to respond to your two points, as they don’t seem grounded in reality.
  
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  - mojo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You just walk into a starbucks or a gas station. They’re all in businesses, but saying you have to make a purchase is straight up false.
    
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- Widowmaker_Best_Girl@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Thank you for the actual sane take. I swear people on Lemmy are actually worse than Redditors when it comes to shitting on America. It is extremely obnoxious.
  
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  - mojo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Well it’s a much larger EU crowd on here so yeah
    
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  - applejacks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    yea, finding out that lemmy is actually more insufferable than reddit in a lot of aspects.
    
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  - bingbong@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Blame the tankies
    
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  - SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    As an American, they are usually right.
    
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- stergro@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  A good way to get an impression about real america as an outsider is to follow smaller hobbyist YouTubers from middle sized towns. One guy from Michigan I follow has a remarkable boring life that’s completely different from every American stereotype.
  
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- justinw@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Furthermore, what part of the country are you living in that leads you to believe we are less racist than other countries!? Our racism has defined our country ever since it was created.
  
  Seriously, I am curious what part of the country you live in? It is sheltered from most American realities
  
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  - mojo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    If you think I’m denying racism, you read that comment incredibly wrong. I’m saying in comparison to other coutnries.
    
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  - HeavyTwenty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I look asian. I experienced more racism traveling through Europe for 6 weeks than I have living 15 years in the US (primarily Atlanta and Jacksonville). Most of the time it came from drunk assholes.
    
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- pascal@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  As an European, I was tempted to downvote you. But not because your very valid points but because you started your whole speech by stating defensively that only people who never been to the US tell bad stuff about America, that’s unfair.
  
  I have relatives in the US and I’ve been there for several occasions. Except the midwest and Texas, I’ve been in most of the States and, it’s true, America is like 50 different countries.
  
  But on average, what I can say is that I love interacting with Americans, speaking with them it’s like talking with some old friends, even in NYC (known by other Americans for being very un-american) I found friendlier people than in my home country. Kind of ironic that the only bad chats with Americans happened online.
  
  I’ll skip about the tap water, it’s probably excellent, but to me born and raised in Switzerland, it always tasted like bleach, probably because of the added fluorine, I don’t know. It’s still better than tap water in UK, Turkey and half Europe and by far safer than most of Asia and Africa.
  
  Finally, visiting America as a tourist is great, and I dreamed of living there as a child, but as an adult, I feel safer and more taken care in Europe, both from a healthcare point and from labour safety. But I live in a privileged country, if I lived anywhere else in the world, I would still chase the “American dream”.
  
  What really saddens me about America, while the people are great, the nature is amazing and the spaces are immense, is that is governed by corporations and bribes and make shows like House of Cards a documentary.
  
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- kurap1ka@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Was there, several times, all corners. Sorry to tell you, but your tap water smells like chlorine.
  
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  - Gold_Tea@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I’ve lived in several states and visited over 20. LA has the worst tap water, but most places are pretty good. Larger cities tend to taste worse than medium cities and rural places.
    
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  - mojo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    no it doesn’t lol
    
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  - EhList@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That isn’t true everywhere but absolutely is true in some locales.
    
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  - qjkxbmwvz@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Grew up on rural well water. Tastes great, a bit hard. Now I drink Hetch Hetchy’s finest. Tastes pretty good. (My grandma’s water was another story.)
    
    We have one federal government, yes, but painting all of the US with the same brush is naive at best.
    
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  - pascal@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Same, I’m used to Swiss tap water (I know, sounds like cheating) and the water in America always smells like bleach. You have to get used to it, it’s probably because of the added fluorine. It’s still safe to drink. Can’t say the same in other countries around the world. Even in Germany and Italy, that’s Europe, you should avoid drinking from the tap.
    
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- ZombieTheZombieCat@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There’s a lot of Americans who aren’t having a great time here. I don’t think negative commentary about the US is one hundred percent Europeans’ fault. Nor is it just that we’re “vocal” about things, which is really a positive since it’s the only way to create change anyway.
  
  For example. I just saw a local news story that cops in a major SoCal city are arresting/citing/fining people for just…being homeless. They want them to go to shelters, but they admittedly don’t create enough shelter space. So it just becomes illegal for certain people to exist. The city gets pissy and aggressive about homelessness being a problem, when they’re the ones who created it and are the ones who refuse to fix it. Sure, give a homeless person a record so that it’s even harder for them to get jobs and approved for an apartment, and then fine them knowing they can’t pay it, resulting in doubling late fees that put them in debt. Sounds they really care about fixing the issue, great fucking job. But think about that - it’s against the law, it’s a crime, to not have a mortgage or rent payment. I’ve been hassled by cops for sitting in my own car in a grocery store parking lot. There is no public space. You have to buy something to be allowed to exist outside of a park, and in coastal places like SoCal, you have to pay to be in those too. And yes this was in one city, but it’s applicable to almost every major city in the US, even if there’s some variations in local laws. It’s just an example of how disposable human beings are here. The minute we don’t have labor to sell, the minute we stop consuming, we’re thrown the fuck away. And that’s not just an economic issue, it’s a cultural issue as well.
  
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sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
wtfhappenedin1971.com

tl;dr It used to be a hell of a lot better.

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- metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  As Kochevnik81 wrote 10 months ago:
  
  I just wanted to speak a bit towards that website. I think that specifically what it is trying to argue (with extremely varying degrees of good arguments) is that all these social and economic changes can be traced back to the United States ending gold convertibility in 1971. I say the arguments are of extremely varying degrees because as has been pointed out here, some things like crime are trends that stretched back into the 1960s, some things like deregulation more properly start around the 1980s, and even something like inflation is complicated by the fact that it was already rising in the 1960s, and was drastically impacted by things like the 1973 and 1979 Oil Shocks.
  
  The decision on August 15, 1971 is often referred to in this context as removing the US dollar from the gold standard, and that’s true to a certain extent, but a very specific one. It was the end of the Bretton Woods system, which had been established in 1944, with 44 countries among the Allied powers being the original participants. This system essentially created a network of fixed exchange rates between currencies, with member currencies pegged to the dollar and allowed a 1% variation from those pegs. The US dollar in turn was pegged to $35 per gold ounce. At the time the US owned something like 80% of the world’s gold reserves (today it’s a little over 25%).
  
  The mechanics of this system meant that other countries essentially were tying their monetary policies to US monetary policy (as well as exchange rate policy obviously, which often meant that US exports were privileged over other countries’). The very long and short is that domestic US government spending plus the high costs of the Vietnam War meant that the US massively increased the supply of dollars in this fixed system, which meant that for other countries, the US dollar was overvalued compared to its fixed price in gold. Since US dollars were convertible to gold, these other countries decided to cash out, meaning that the US gold reserves decreased basically by half in the decade leading up to 1971. This just wasn’t sustainable - there were runs on the dollar as foreign exchange markets expected that eventually it would have to be devalued against gold.
  
  This all meant that after two days of meeting with Treasury Secretary John Connally and Budget Director George Schultz (but noticeably not Secretary of State William Rogers nor Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger), President Richard Nixon ordered a sweeping “New Economic Policy” on August 15, 1971, stating:
  
  ““We must create more and better jobs; we must stop the rise in the cost of living [note: the domestic annual inflation rate had already risen from under 2% in the early 1960s to almost 6% in the late 1960s]; we must protect the dollar from the attacks of international money speculators.””
  
  To this effect, Nixon requested tax cuts, ordered a 90-day price and wage freeze, a 10% tariff on imports (which was to encourage US trading partners to revalue their own currencies to the favor of US exports), and a suspension on the convertibility of US dollars to gold. The impact was an international shock, but a group of G-10 countries agreed to new fixed exchange rates against a devalued dollar ($38 to the gold ounce) in the December 1971 Smithsonian Agreement. Speculators in forex markets however kept trying to push foreign currencies up to their upper limits against the dollar, and the US unilaterally devalued the dollar in February 1973 to $42 to the gold ounce. By later in the year, the major world currencies had moved to floating exchange rates, ie rates set by forex markets and not by pegs, and in October the (unrelated, but massively important) oil shock hit.
  
  So what 1971 meant: it was the end of US dollar convertability to gold, ie the US “temporarily” suspended payments of gold to other countries that wanted to exchange their dollars for it. What it didn’t mean: it wasn’t the end of the gold standard for private US citizens, which had effectively ended in 1933 (and for good measure, the exchange of silver for US silver certificates had ended in the 1960s). It also wasn’t really the end of the pegged rates of the Bretton Woods system, which hobbled on for almost two more years. It also wasn’t the cause of inflation, which had been rising in the 1960s, and would be massively influenced by the 1970s energy crisis, which sadly needs less explaining in 2022 than it would have just a few years ago.
  
  It also really doesn’t have much to do with social factors like rising crime rates, or female participation in the workforce. And it deceptively doesn’t really have anything to do with trends like the US trade deficit or increases in income disparity, where the changes more obviously happen around 1980.
  
  Also, just to draw out the 1973 Oil Shock a little more - a lot of the trends around economic stagnation, price inflation, and falls in productivity really are from this, not the 1971-1973 forex devaluations, although as mentioned the strain and collapse of Bretton Woods meant that US exports were less competitive than they had been previously. But the post 1945 world economy had been predicated on being fueled by cheap oil, and this pretty much ended overnight in October 1973: even when adjusted for inflation, the price essentially immediately tripled that month, and then doubled again in 1979. The fact that the economies of the postwar industrial world had been built around this cheap oil essentially meant that without major changes, industrial economies were vastly more expensive in their output (ie, productivity massively suffered), and many of the changes to make industries competitive meant long term moves towards things like automation or relocating to countries with cheaper input costs, which hurt industrial areas in North America and Western Europe (the Eastern Bloc, with its fossil fuel subsidies to its heavy industries, avoided this until the 1990s, when it hit even faster and harder).
  
  " I know the gold standard is not generally regarded as a good thing among mainstream economists,"
  
  I just want to be clear here that no serious economist considers a gold standard a good thing. This is one of the few areas where there is near universal agreement among economists. The opinion of economists on the gold standard is effectively the equivalent of biologists’ opinions on intelligent design.
  
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  - sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Hey, thanks for the post. Interesting. I didn’t even realize that the website was anti-going off the gold standard. I just really focused on the increasing wealth inequality and that bummed me out.
    
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  - 30mag@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    They explain exactly what the site was created for, though the post was not present 10 months ago. I’m not sure if I know enough about economics to understand whether they believe what Kochevnik81 was guessing they believe, that the getting off the good standard was bad for the economy.
    
    wtf1971.com/…/reader-qa-why-did-you-create-wtfhap…
    
    What drove you to create the site? What has been the most surprising outcome?
    
    The inspiration for creating the website was born out of pragmatism. That is to say, the data was collected with the a priori assumption that abandoning the Bretton Woods agreement lent an unprecedented and unaccountable agency to nation states (particularly the United States thanks to the US dollar’s position as a global reserve currency) in their ability to expand money and credit.
    
    The Austrian position upon which our a priori assumptions are based is as follows:
    
    That expansion of money and credit sends artificial signals to the market which breed malinvestment leading to an ultimate deflationary credit & money contraction when the malinvestment liquidates(Austrian business cycle theory).
    
    Nation States (and particularly the United States) have an unfair advantage over capital markets in their ability to unilaterally capture seigniorage through the issue of new currency while simultaneously debasing the real value of their debt and liabilities as the nominal supply of money increases.
    
    Point 2 leads to a top down redistribution of productive capital accumulated by private industry to the public sector which is often redirected to frivolous and/or unprofitable ventures.
    
    The pragmatic usefulness of the website (for me personally) was merely having the data all in one place where I could simply refer a person to the data to quickly and easily demonstrate the many downstream effects of fiscal and monetary expansion (as based on the Austrian positions I outlined above).
    
    The idea to turn it into a meme rather than a financial blog (or something of that kind) was born out of a desire to foster a reaction of socratic self discovery in the viewer. It is far more important to me that the viewer walk away with the right question rather than with what I believe is the right answer…What the F*** happened in 1971?
    
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- Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I have never had just pure data make me sad so quickly.
  
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- winston@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Jeez… What did happen? The Nixon Shock / Bretton Woods?
  
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  - cmbabul@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Nixon knocked over a few support pillars and then Regan came in with a wrecking ball and finished the job
    
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MossBear@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yes and no. More than half the country is wanting to move in the direction of other modern nations. The trouble is we have the electoral college which was instituted as a compromise for slave holding states at the foundation of our country and which gives conservatives outsized power which has resulted in a long-term deadlock.

It’s likely that as demographics shift over the next decade, this deadlock will be broken and we’ll probably enter a period of rapid progress, but that’s only if we make it that long. With the degree to which Republicans are either brainwashed or willfully ignoring reality for the sake of trying to gain power, it remains to be seen whether we can.

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- ThrowThrowThrewaway7@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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  - MossBear@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Good insight. Washington was correct it seems.
    
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- lazyslacker@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I disagree that it was just “slave holding states”. This is obvious to us, maybe, but when presenting the issue to non Americans I think it’s important to be accurate on this. It was meant to give states (slave holding or not) with lower populations a larger voice. It still does that. Our system of government was never meant to be a pure democracy. The president wouldn’t have to care about the priorities of smaller population states at all without the electoral college. They would just have to trust that he’ll keep them in mind.
  
  With all that said though, with how homogenous the county is culturally and with communication and travel barriers between states and between the state and federal governments pretty much non existent, at this point I think it has outlived its usefulness and should be abolished. Also the difference between the most and least populated states are, percentage wise way bigger than they were when the county was founded. Also, if my voice as a populated state dweller is smaller because of this system, it feels less like the president is “my” president because I had less of a say in picking him. At the end of the day the president is everyone’s president equally so the election of the president should be a purely democratic process.
  
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  - Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You’re missing another important piece. The “winner-take-all” system per state wasn’t intended that way. It was supposed to be proportionate to the votes cast, e.g., you take 50% of Ohio, you get 50% of Ohio’s EC. Unfortunately, states realized “winner-take-all” gets them more attention, and of course once one state does it, you pretty much have to go for it as well.
    
    One of the founders wanted to fix that but died before they could see it through (I think Madison).
    
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Jackthelad@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This is why Trump should get elected so he can Make America Great Again, right guys?

But in all seriousness, I imagine it’s a case of that America is nowhere near as good as some Americans make it out to be, but it’s also not as terrible as the media make it out to be either. You can probably apply this to most of the Western World, really.

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- meco03211@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  A lot of the ones that make it out to be greater than it is are just wishfully thinking. They imagine a place where they don’t need to make any changes while everything else must conform to their ideals and bend for them. They imagine trump is the answer to this. They typically have the simplest of beliefs and solutions that would fail even the slightest scrutiny.
  
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- WarmSoda@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The US is also extremely huge geographically. Towns are different from each other, and states and just general locations can be different from each other. There is no one place you can say “is America”. Hell, you can have a peaceful family friendly neighborhood, and the next street over could be a drugs and violence.
  
  I agree the media absolutely makes it seem worse than it is. Especially with all the 24/7 news and fear mongering to grab attention.
  
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- Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I have very mixed feelings about Trump. Obviously, he really isn’t good for any country, so I hope he doesn’t get re-elected. Just throw him in the jail already. Unfortunately, I can’t deny the fact that on some sick and twisted schadenfreude way I also enjoyed watching the first four seasons of the Shitshow. Oh, what a rollercoaster that was.
  
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donuts@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The US healthcare system is actually even worse than people think. Employers use it to hold power over us all, and even if you have insurance the prices of everything are extremely inflated (my dad went in for back surgery and the total was $47k usd, but get this, one of the items was a single bag of saline solution----$270!), and many people including myself can't afford health insurance at all so I'm 1 accident or illness away from total financial ruin.

I genuinely love America and the place where I live. There is a lot to like and there are many places where life is much harder, but the US health system is one of those things that is embarrassingly bad and honestly just scary.

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- Aviandelight@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  That’s because American health insurance is not really insurance it’s a discount plan. Any of you remember being forced to sell those overpriced coupon books as fundraisers in school? That’s what American health insurance is. It’s a shitty discount plan/coupon book that you are forced into buying from your employer and the plan itself makes sure you pay as much out of pocket as they can legally get away with.
  
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  - j4k3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    At least the coupon book is for products with real prices. Healthcare is a total scam with prices based on who is paying. The entire system is corrupt from top to bottom. The US problem is extreme systemic corruption. It is not individual corruption outside of the billionaire supreme court judges level, it is corporate sponsored corruption on a much larger scale.
    
    The USA has a tenth of the laws and protections of any other western country. We have had nearly 50 years of a political denial of service attack from a right wing campaign of misdirection and distraction politics. No one can institute reasonable laws and protections when they are constantly battling whatever stupid inflammatory nonsense the hits the congressional floor. This is why the nonsense keeps happening. It is because it controls the conversation. The only purpose is to keep as many loopholes as possible open for the parasitic worthless billionaires that are funding it. The only fix is to force out the billionaires. The only way to accrue billions of dollars is by exploitation and criminal activity. There are no exceptions to this rule. Every billionaire is a criminal evading prosecution.
    
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HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Really depends who you are.

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- Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  And where you are.
  
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  - tst123@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    This is what Europeans don’t understand. US is so large it is essentially 50 different countries all with their own governments and laws. Your American experience will differ greatly depending on what city and state you visit.
    
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TheEntity@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Not an American here, so please correct me if my take is completely wrong. My understanding is that while the highs are possibly higher than in a lot of places, the lows are also much lower and possibly easier to reach. You could be doing perfectly fine one day, and then you get hit by a hospital bill ruining your life. It's surely a great place to be a billionaire or even just plainly well off. Except far too many people aren't and they would fare much better elsewhere.

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- taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’ll jump in and clarify a point as an American, the states vary greatly and the healthcare issue, while undeniably more expensive, general doesn’t leave you destitute if you’re in a blue state. California pushes for universal coverage and if you’re poor enough (which isn’t actual that poor) you can get insurance pretty cheaply, covering those crazy bills. Plus emergency rooms here can be paid by state under some circumstances.
  
  For instance, my wife’s labor and subsequent baby hospitalization for jaundice cost us 200 for two trips and several nights stay, but the bill was 30k. Emplorers of a certain size (iirc 15 full time) are also compelled by law to cover insurance.
  
  There’s also some safety net for free food, unemployment payments, welfare, and even transportation subsidies, although even good government here is like playing hard mode in a sim, so it’s not always as effective as a country like Finland. Some people simply don’t get aid and end up homeless, etc. Still miles above an underdeveloped country though.
  
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scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
America is 50 different countries in one. There are really two whine different Americas. Several of the states are world class nations unto themselves. It’s the 3rd most populous nation in the world and the richest. It invites a lot of immigration to fend off declining birth rates and doesn’t have a cultural taboo about it like Japan.

It lacks a lot of modern supports for its very lowest classes. New immigrants cannot expect to get baseline healthcare, food assistance, or housing. And it has a generous helping of religious nuttery which brings about scattered laws against gays, a generalized attack on women (though nothing like a lot of the developing nations are still stuck in).

That’s the long and short of it. If you want to go into business and have a relatively free hand, it’s still one of the best places to be. If you have nothing and are looking for a compassionate nation that will keep you from dying of poverty, keep looking.

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- Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  America is HUGE. California alone is the size of Italy.
  
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- 30mag@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  There are really two whine different Americas.
  
  I think autocorrect did something there…
  
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- Set_secret@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  you forgot about the batshit crazy gun (lack of) regulations. and the highest gun deaths on the planet. but apart from that seems pretty accurate.
  
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SeaJ@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Depends on what you are comparing it to. Overall it is great. There are some serious systemic issues though that I don’t really see getting resolved.

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BigNote@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
For most people most of the time it’s a perfectly fine quality of life. That said, it’s a huge country with tons of variation so if you’re looking for bad qualities, there are always plenty of examples to point to.

What pisses me off is that we are nowhere near as good as we could be and as we claim to be. There are some very powerful and objectively evil forces in this country.

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Sanctus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Its a philanthropists playground. Just dont get caught being poor.

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jjjalljs@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It has many things that are bad or disappointing.

Health care is a mess.

It’s very car centric outside of maybe New York City.

There’s a lot of racism. There are probably still sundown towns. You should go read the new Jim Crow.

The police are dangerous and often useless.

One of the two major political parties doesn’t believe in government, and tried to overthrow the government. They’re still considered legitimate.

The day to day life in most places is fine though. You almost certainly have power and clean drinking water. With at least one notable exception, on water, but not enough people cared to fix that promptly.

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- DeusHircus@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Your comment lacks a bit of experience/awareness about what’s out there. The US is huge, you’re going to find different experiences in different places. Your statement about New York being the only mass transit city in all of US is not true. My vacations to Seattle and Washington DC I had no car, went all over the city by bus and train, easily.
  
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ferralcat@monyet.cc ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
As an American who left, it looks batshit insane to me. Everything is crazy expensive and they’re passing restrictive laws that, if passed anywhere in Asia or Africa, would be run as “look at these backwards shitty country” news stories.

I’ve got a trans kid. We’re not returning any time soon. It seems unsafe for them to exist in the us for the foreseeable future.

But I’ve got us friends who feel the opposite. We visited a friend in Bainbridge a few years ago who really couldn’t comprehend why everyone wouldn’t want to live on their island.

Asia (here) isn’t really any more unsafe. I visited India recently and it felt less safe, but everyone I know there also said it wasn’t really. It depends on areas as well, and much of it (everywhere) is just media depictions and racism telling your brain to panic.

The real advantage of the us is just cash. You can make a lot more money there. They’re rich. Money is good. It makes life easier. Its also expensive there. To save at any income level, you have to be thrifty.

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nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I moved from America to a developing country, and what pisses me off the most is how the false images of what America is influences countries like this.

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RBWells@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
When I was a teenager, yes. Visited England and their idea of a “bad neighborhood” confused me, my city at home was rough. Their rough areas were just normal places, not scary at all.

But crime dropped here, like everywhere. It is nicer now, despite the two steps backwards we have taken lately.

We do still have violent people, we do still have a prison-industrial complex, armed police, homeless people and way too many guns, but even here in Florida my trans kid is accepted at school, my older kids got a good education (though the last did not make it out before the attack on education) and most people are nice to each other. Inside the cities it’s nice enough, feels modern and city like. Lots of jobs, easy to find a job here.

Health care? Yes, it’s shit here compared to a lot of places. If you are rich you can get really good care (and pay a lot for it), if not you just try to stay healthy and hope you don’t need anything expensive. Insurance, if you have it, does cover preventative care visits and usually stuff like blood pressure meds or antibiotics are cheap, vaccines too, and birth control usually covered as well. But any actual sickness or bad injury can bankrupt you.

I do think it’s a land of opportunity, but the odds are not great, if that makes sense? Certainly one can ‘make it’ here - think of Bill Clinton becoming president - I don’t think that kind of social mobility is everywhere, it’s a little less sticky here, more rising and falling going on than most places.

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dandroid@dandroid.app ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s not, but people love to be outraged and will find any reason to be. We have extremely comprehensive media coverage, so anything that can possibly go wrong will definitely be covered in the media, whereas in other countries, you just don’t hear about most bad things happening. The media will always twist anything and everything to be as polarizing as possible, as that generates clicks/views. Most of the time when you see things on the internet that make you rage (including here on lemmy), if you look into it deeper, there quite a bit of nuance, and you can see where they were coming from when they did such a thing. But to many people who are perpetually online, they don’t care about nuance. Everything is black and white to many people on the internet. Either it makes you happy or it makes you rage, and there is no in-between.

Things that actually do suck:

The mass shootings are absolutely awful and should be taken more seriously.

Healthcare is expensive if you don’t have insurance. But most people have decent enough insurance that it isn’t a huge deal. For example, my insurance plan has a $2000 out of pocket maximum, so no matter what happens, the most I can ever pay per year is $2000 for my entire family. Plus, most people rarely see a doctor, so it isn’t something that affects their daily lives. Kind of an “out of mind” type of thing.

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Furbag@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Nothing is ever so black-and-white when it comes to talking about the state of the USA right now. Yes, we are still comparitavely well-off when stacked against developing nations, but we have unique problems that are a real sore spot for many that aren’t getting any better and nobody is addressing them, letting the wounds fester.

For example, we have a lot of poverty. Sure, our lowest of the low class probably still enjoy a lifestyle better than that of someone from a remote village in some far away corner of the world, but the promise of prosperity is not equally accessible and the idealized “middle class” is vanishing rapidly. Homelessness is a crisis in basically every large city, especially in the warmer parts of the country, and inflation is still not under control which means the cost of living is going to be unsustainable for a lot of people very soon.

If you put politics aside, things really aren’t as bad as they could be, but that doesn’t stop people from voicing their concerns that things aren’t as good as they could be either.

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Anamnesis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Some states are better than others. Washington is a better state than Alabama. New York is better than Florida. California is better than Texas. There’s a trend here: the states where the ruling party institutes at least European social democracy-lite are the best to live in.

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applejacks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yes and no.

We do have mass shootings, but we also live in a country in 330 million, but every mass shooting makes national news, so it seems far worse than it is. Also, most mass shootings are gang violence that get lumped in with what we normally consider “random mass shootings” to pump up the numbers and scare people.

Healthcare could definitely be better, but 67% of Americans are satisfied with their insurance. I would still much prefer a universal healthcare system.

Overall, America definitely has its ups and downs, but a lot of the “AMERICA BAD” rhetoric is just a reddit meme where they get rewarded for trashing it.

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Ilflish@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Consider it a teenage country. It has growing pains and likes to think it knows better. It’s hard to look at it knowing the luxuries other countries have and still believe the rhetoric that is suggested in a lot of media glfron earlier in life

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Skullgrid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

I come from a developing nation and we were always told how America is great and whatnot.

It’s called soft power. Hollywood and US military and fiscal aid makes it seem that the US is friendly to your country and a prosperous land of freedom, when it’s anything but.

Soft power is also why people think of Korea and Japan as more favourable and less conservative than countries with similar views on women, LGBT rights , etc that do not have the same level of soft power due to cultural and technological exports .

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Dude123@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Worker rights kinda suck and it can be difficult to form communities due to being more spread out and car centric.

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YaaAsantewaa@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
No, but because it’s the 4th largest country by landmass of course you’re going to have more craziness, it’s par for the course.

It’s a lot safer then it used to be though, it just seems bad because we don’t censor things here compared to other countries, so everyone sees the good and the bad as opposed to just the good

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isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It depends. I’m a Canadian who frequently crosses the border.

The cities close by the border seem perfectly cromulent, everyone’s super nice and accepting. The gas is definitely cheaper, and there is a wider variety of products on offer than in Canada.

There are certainly areas of the US that I’d want to avoid (Florida comes to mind, I would get hate-murdered the very millisecond I stepped there), but the good areas are good. Like someone else said, just don’t get caught being poor or with medical issues.

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Ibaudia@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It depends on who you are, really.

If you’re a poor, black woman living in Louisiana where the only work you can find is at a chemical plant, your life is going to fucking suck.

If you’re upper-middle class living in a city, you’re probably going to have a pretty good life.

There are some systems that are just awful by developed standards though. Education, medicine, policing, and politics come to mind. They’re not likely to change, so you just have to cope with them. Basically just don’t ever get sick or interact with the police. You’ll probably die if you do either.

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