traveling open your eyes to how terrible the US is in many ways?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I was recently in Japan and felt the same way.

Yes! So clean and quiet, even in Tokyo.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Recently went to Taiwan, where they rank higher on the freedom index than even the US. It's amazing how things function when everyone obeys the law and it is clean everywhere. Never worried about crimes and guns anywhere. Public transport? Amazing. Regional railways that took over one hour long cost a grand total of about $2.80 FOR TWO TICKETS. Amazing when infrastructure is not built around cars and catering to car culture. Food, much higher quality. Next stop was in Thailand, where one in our party got sick. Went to the hospital and was seen immediately. Got checked out by the attending physician, took a stool sample to determine if there was an infection, and had the results in less than one hour. All of this without using insurance cost a grand whopping total of $83. Imagine how terrible it'd be in the US. Probably at least over $2000 for the same treatment and it'd take triple the amount of time. Even Thailand is so much safer with respect to gun violence and crime. Traveling really opens your eyes to how terrible the US has gotten. I honestly think we are borderline 2nd world. We aren't really that free, healthcare is unaffordable, zero guaranteed vacations, high cost of living, toxic food, terrible infrastructure, severely obese population, and out of control crime and gun problems.

Went to Denmark in September and had same impression. US has become a dump after letting millions of new immigrants in

We should focus on helping our own citizens first.

But both parties are in collusion to bring in cheap labor, and the middle class gets screwed. Housing more expensive , health care explodes

We need to stop all immigration now

OP is sitting around thinking of an excuse to use to tell us that we need immigrants and how our country is so bad because we have not let in more. If he were so concerned about schools and infrastructure he would acknowledge that increasing our population by 100+ over the last few decades was a poor idea. Also lots of immigration is a hamper to collectivism and social cohesion, which he loves. But he won't admit that. This is why he has been silent for a few minutes, he doesn't know what to say.

I think it’s worthwhile to talk about immigration but how is reduced immigration going to build bridges faster and improve the quality of education?

DP. By freezing up resources that are being diverted to people who should not be here in the first place. Honestly, it’s elementary.

Building isn’t a money issue though. We spend more than other countries and build less. And while I’m not saying immigration policy is great, it’s clear to most people with eyes that immigrant labor makes up a huge percentage of the workforce.

Trying again to respond. This censorship is ridiculous; it’s not like I’m using slurs.
I do think it is primarily a resource issue, based on how I’ve seen the illegal population in my area hoover up resources in the public school system. Also, it’s not the illegal border crossers who are out there building bridges. The visa folks aren’t out there building bridges either.

illegal immigrants do a vast amount of the manual labor in the US … that’s not to say we don’t need immigration reforms or border controls but the idea that they are nothing but an economic drain is a canard. Most come here to work - other than schools for their kids, they don’t get any social support benefits. This is another area where the parties ought to be working together (and on the DL the republicans know it to be true when those stalwart dairy farmers in Iowa tell them they cannot survive if all their labor is deported.)

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Taiwan is under constant threat of attack and has mandatory military service. They tried to reduce the time but had to extend it again because of the increased threats from China.

Thailand also has a conscription process. You are required to either volunteer or enter a draft lottery.

By the way, Thailand is also a monarchy where you cannot speak badly of the royal family or you can be imprisoned for up to 15 years.

Ah yes, so much freedom in the US where residents can't even go to the grocery stores, church, or school without being shot. So much freedom loving Americans that have exported Democracy with bombs and deaths squads in Iraq to Afghanistan to Vietnam to Chile to Indonesia and to virtually all of Central America. So much freedom in America where their Gestapo, aka the police, routinely execute citizens in the streets without due process and confiscate private property via civil forfeiture. So much freedom in the US a single billionaire bought the 2024 election. So much freedom in the US women have zero reproductive rights and cent even have time off after having children. So much freedom in the US food corporations write the laws for safety and Americans eat foods containing chemicals banned virtually everywhere else in the world.

You hate this country to the core, to your core. Why do you expect us to engage with you and your contempt?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I often travel and think the opposite- we have it great in America. Central and South America are riddled with poverty, corruption, drugs. I feel unsafe as a woman in the Middle East and India (also riddled with extreme poverty and is unsanitary). Even in Europe, my kids point to laundry hanging across alleys and small apartments and comment how poor those people must be. Nope, middle class Europeans live in small apartments and don’t enjoy many of the day-to-day conveniences we have. They pay dearly for their safety net such as healthcare though high taxes and will complain about the long waits and inefficiencies in their healthcare system. I’d never want to live in communist China or in Russia under Putin. Does anyone think there is anyplace in Africa that has the comforts and safety we have here?

We certainly have our problems, but there are few, if any, places that don’t. I’ll take our issues any day over the issues of any place I’ve visited.

That's how i feel too. And I lived abroad for a few years. I tried it. Not for me. Part of it is, of course, that it's easier to live someplace where I am comfortable with the culture, which I am here.

If the Trump administration starts persecuting people for their political beliefs and firing federal government employees as a punishment for them, then my family may need to leave, but I would hate to have to move. This is my country. We can fix things. It would really help if a certain party hadn't decided to be persistently obstructionist for the majority of my life. Maybe some day we can actually work towards a better nation. I must say, that Biden's and the Congress' infrastructure bill has really helped.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:US is an undeveloped S hole of backwater rednecks with very low education.

Tens of thousands of their people die per year from guns and go bankrupt for epipens. What a laughably bad society.

Nobel Prizes in 2024:

Physics: American and a Brit
Chemistry: 2 Americans, 1 Brit
Medicine: 2 Americans
Economics: 1 Turk, 1 Brit, 1 American (all from MIT)

At least one American won every Nobel prize this last year for prizes in science and innovation (I left out literature and peace).

Yes, there are many Americans with poor education, but we also have some of the most brilliant people in the world. Look at technology -- the majority of software and devices you use every day are from American companies. Which country can match that?

How long will that last though?

And we need people who can design and build roads, not just Nobel Prize winners.

Yes. Um, we have plenty of transportation engineers. Not really an area we're behind in.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Yes. I started noticing back in the 1990s that many US cities were 10x more dangerous than any European city. Hearing how others in South America and Caribbean view the US made me realize how silly we look. How we muck things up with the car-centric culture, the lack of accessible health care and child svd elder care, the expense to educate…and now, increasingly, with the huge increase in guns

New York City in the late 90s was magical - clean and safe - and I found it better run than London and Paris at the time by far. Of course, things have changed. Cities don’t stay stagnant as administrators change.

NYC in the 90s was magical? There were more than a 1000 murders a years for the first half of the decade and even in the latter half annual murder rates were more than today.

This absolutely feels like a visiting at the right time of your life or preferring the rhetoric of tough on crime over actual data.

I lived there, wasn’t a visitor but you’re right I should have specified mid/late 90s (true also for early 00’s). As a woman I could wander the streets any time of night and not worry, the city was clean, cops everywhere. This was the Guiliani and Bloomberg era. If you lived there then vs later or now, you’d know what I was talking about.

I lived there from 1997 to 1998. It was indeed pretty great.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I think the British know how you feel. They were once the most developed country and London was an incredible city. Over time, the pace of growth in London slowed while elsewhere it increased. By the time I visited London for the first time in the late 90s, London felt like a relic, preserved for historians. Yes, it was still a bustling city, but it didn’t feel modern like Singapore or Tokyo. In 30 years, the US will start to feel like a historical artifact to be preserved rather than leading the world into the future.

I visited London for the first time since 2000 this summer and honestly think it has changed for the better. It’s a vibrant, beautiful place with a lot of great energy - definitely didn’t feel like a city stuck in time to me.

Agree. And I love that they support theater! Lots of beautiful buildings and museums and the food has improved as well.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Recently went to Taiwan, where they rank higher on the freedom index than even the US. It's amazing how things function when everyone obeys the law and it is clean everywhere. Never worried about crimes and guns anywhere. Public transport? Amazing. Regional railways that took over one hour long cost a grand total of about $2.80 FOR TWO TICKETS. Amazing when infrastructure is not built around cars and catering to car culture. Food, much higher quality. Next stop was in Thailand, where one in our party got sick. Went to the hospital and was seen immediately. Got checked out by the attending physician, took a stool sample to determine if there was an infection, and had the results in less than one hour. All of this without using insurance cost a grand whopping total of $83. Imagine how terrible it'd be in the US. Probably at least over $2000 for the same treatment and it'd take triple the amount of time. Even Thailand is so much safer with respect to gun violence and crime. Traveling really opens your eyes to how terrible the US has gotten. I honestly think we are borderline 2nd world. We aren't really that free, healthcare is unaffordable, zero guaranteed vacations, high cost of living, toxic food, terrible infrastructure, severely obese population, and out of control crime and gun problems.

Went to Denmark in September and had same impression. US has become a dump after letting millions of new immigrants in

We should focus on helping our own citizens first.

But both parties are in collusion to bring in cheap labor, and the middle class gets screwed. Housing more expensive , health care explodes

We need to stop all immigration now

Nope, not the immigrants fault.

And the issue is not a "both sides" one at all. Only one side killed their own immigration bill and it wasn't the dems.

As usual, the globalists at DCUM completely ignored HR2
H.R. 2 includes a laundry list of essential immigration reforms long fought for by immigration experts;

* Plugging loopholes in the asylum system that are currently being exploited by economic migrants by raising the bar for “credible fear” claims and denying entry to aliens claiming asylum at the border who have passed through a safe third country on their way to the United States and failed to apply in that safe country;

* Blocking the administration from continuing its catch-and-release policy by making most illegal aliens ineligible for parole or release from custody other than to be returned to their home country or to a contiguous country to await the adjudication of their asylum claim there (Remain in Mexico);.

* Preventing family units who cross the border illegally from being released into the United States by requiring family units apprehended at the border to be detained, protecting them from exploitation and victimization by the cartels and traffickers;

* Reining in the breathtaking and illegal abuse of parole that this administration has been using to create its own immigration system outside of the confines of the Immigration and Nationality Act; and

* Installing teeth into efforts to deter visa overstays.

Perhaps most importantly, the bill would require employers to check the legal status of new hires through the free, easy-to-use E-Verify system. By making it much harder for illegal aliens to find jobs, the reform would deter would-be migrants from ever journeying to the United States.

and yet Democrats have shown they are not serious about controlling immigration, and it seems that increasing immigration is a policy choice by Democrats/DCUM.

[Anonymous]

New Zealand is pretty amazing.

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Anonymous wrote:Definitely not. I live in Germany, and I have to laugh when so many Americans fantasize about moving to Europe and talk about it like some kind of utopia. It's insanely naive. Every place has its problems and issues

The problem in the US is not that we have problems. It is our obstinate refusal to solve any of them while new problems continue to crop up. While many of these problems are sort of relegated to the poorest people in our country, they are increasingly “trickling up” to the middle class.

People are routinely dying from a lack of healthcare or going bankrupt from medical problems. This should have been resolved ages ago, and is simply not such a crisis in other countries.

Same with gun violence. Yes, there are a multitude of tertiary issues related to gun violence but the main issue is simply guns.

And now, we have a huge mentally ill homeless population suffering in our cities and it’s only growing. The massive rural broadband program hasn’t connected a single house to the internet.

And I think the worst part is that people seem so lonely and unhappy.

Why do we tolerate this?

When I go to my parents’ home country, it just isn’t so miserable. I’m staying in a middle class neighborhood, not a luxury hotel. I have been here often over the last 2 decades: People are grinning and bearing it. No one is shot in the street. If I need medicine I can just walk into the pharmacy and buy it for $2. People are out past 8pm having fun. People are just enjoying being with other people more.

Something is just broken at home. I really feel like I get a break abroad, from the horrible political news and violence and apocalyptic weather events. I have not felt this way before.

Totally disagree. The American personality is a go getter, problem solving one and if anything we are overly optimistic about our ability to change things particularly when utilizing the government. PP had it right, you’re entitled to your opinions but I don’t believe your take on things is widely viewed.

our infrastructure development is demonstrably behind other peer nations, as is our education and health care system. this is objective fact not feeling. In a healthy political climate we could work together to solve this but American individualism has turned into toxic culture wars. ironically not individualism at all but banding together to tribally reject whatever the other guys do.

I don’t agree with this either. You can’t compare our infrastructure in such a huge country with that of something dense like Western European countries. We do have a very good interstate highway system and our air travel is probably the best. Our rail is less developed, sure, but there are reasons for that.

our cities should be just as good as European cities.

Ah, so now I think we have come to an agreement. You aren’t comparing America as a whole to other nations as a whole, just our cities. Unfortunately, you have to look who is running American cities to place the blame for that. We used to have shining examples of well run, clean cities until wackos took over (looking at you, San Francisco).

No we are not in agreement because you’re still trying to make what is the common national good into a partisan political issue.

Ma’am this is the politics board. If you want politics kept out of this discussion, head to travel.

lol well this went full circle we’re so dang polarized that any discussion of infrastructure has to end up in politics

Anyway I think we need a 3rd party of true pragmatists.

I think it’s fair to ask where all our infrastructure spending went that was supposed to address the very issues you deem problematic in comparison to other nations. It’s not as if we haven’t passed bills to spend more in categories like bridges. So where did all the money go? You can’t answer questions like that without delving into politics because politics is how our taxpayer funds are allocated. It’s like you want to keep this entire thread some pie in the sky America vs. the world discussion rather than asking real questions about WHY we haven’t made progress (despite billions spent).

OK let’s talk about it. I’d welcome that. The Biden infrastructure bill (which was bipartisan BTW) hasn’t had that much time to be implemented but I’m sure there’s something you can post here. Also my fear is that merely throwing money at projects isn’t enough for real reform needed to make this all happen more quickly - and of course we need to improve education which is the backbone of development.

$1.2 trillion in spending is the definition of throwing money at projects and we should have seen more progress by now.

I mean that’s exactly what I am saying - even with money American development is far far too slow

You said Biden hasn’t had much time to show improvements. I said we should have seen progress by now. No, we aren’t saying the same things at all.

I’m saying it was a bipartisan bill and we’re not showing results because it’s an American problem that we cannot build quickly. What are you saying?

Give me a break on the bipartisan. 19 senators don’t make something bipartisan, it was a Democrat bill that threw nearly two trillion dollars at the very problem you are lamenting with extremely limited results. If you don’t like the way our infrastructure is handled, then consider who you are voting for and their effectiveness on the very issues you claim are so important to you.

All you do here is tell us what to think and what not to say or say in response to you. No, we do not need to give you a break we can say what we want. This is not China.

I think you are confused because there are multiple posters here responding. I haven’t been telling you what to do. Give me a break is a common phrase.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I think the British know how you feel. They were once the most developed country and London was an incredible city. Over time, the pace of growth in London slowed while elsewhere it increased. By the time I visited London for the first time in the late 90s, London felt like a relic, preserved for historians. Yes, it was still a bustling city, but it didn’t feel modern like Singapore or Tokyo. In 30 years, the US will start to feel like a historical artifact to be preserved rather than leading the world into the future.

I visited London for the first time since 2000 this summer and honestly think it has changed for the better. It’s a vibrant, beautiful place with a lot of great energy - definitely didn’t feel like a city stuck in time to me.

Agree. And I love that they support theater! Lots of beautiful buildings and museums and the food has improved as well.

The food was the biggest improvement I saw in the past 20 years!

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Taiwan is under constant threat of attack and has mandatory military service. They tried to reduce the time but had to extend it again because of the increased threats from China.

Thailand also has a conscription process. You are required to either volunteer or enter a draft lottery.

By the way, Thailand is also a monarchy where you cannot speak badly of the royal family or you can be imprisoned for up to 15 years.

Ah yes, so much freedom in the US where residents can't even go to the grocery stores, church, or school without being shot. So much freedom loving Americans that have exported Democracy with bombs and deaths squads in Iraq to Afghanistan to Vietnam to Chile to Indonesia and to virtually all of Central America. So much freedom in America where their Gestapo, aka the police, routinely execute citizens in the streets without due process and confiscate private property via civil forfeiture. So much freedom in the US a single billionaire bought the 2024 election. So much freedom in the US women have zero reproductive rights and cent even have time off after having children. So much freedom in the US food corporations write the laws for safety and Americans eat foods containing chemicals banned virtually everywhere else in the world.

You hate this country to the core, to your core. Why do you expect us to engage with you and your contempt?

Why do you think that trying to make our country better is the same as “hate”? You sound…confused.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:No it’s the opposite.

Americans have a unique sense of optimism and ambition that is rarely seen in other countries.

This is a very outdated view and reinforces tbe OPs point.

Many of us disagree with you and don’t believe it is an outdated view. Opinions, opinions.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:US is an undeveloped S hole of backwater rednecks with very low education.

Tens of thousands of their people die per year from guns and go bankrupt for epipens. What a laughably bad society.

Nobel Prizes in 2024:

Physics: American and a Brit
Chemistry: 2 Americans, 1 Brit
Medicine: 2 Americans
Economics: 1 Turk, 1 Brit, 1 American (all from MIT)

At least one American won every Nobel prize this last year for prizes in science and innovation (I left out literature and peace).

Yes, there are many Americans with poor education, but we also have some of the most brilliant people in the world. Look at technology -- the majority of software and devices you use every day are from American companies. Which country can match that?

How long will that last though?

And we need people who can design and build roads, not just Nobel Prize winners.

Yes. Um, we have plenty of transportation engineers. Not really an area we're behind in.

For every engineer, you need 20 ditch diggers, brick layers, and concrete pours. A nation full of engineers is worthless Without the labor to implement it.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Recently went to Taiwan, where they rank higher on the freedom index than even the US. It's amazing how things function when everyone obeys the law and it is clean everywhere. Never worried about crimes and guns anywhere. Public transport? Amazing. Regional railways that took over one hour long cost a grand total of about $2.80 FOR TWO TICKETS. Amazing when infrastructure is not built around cars and catering to car culture. Food, much higher quality. Next stop was in Thailand, where one in our party got sick. Went to the hospital and was seen immediately. Got checked out by the attending physician, took a stool sample to determine if there was an infection, and had the results in less than one hour. All of this without using insurance cost a grand whopping total of $83. Imagine how terrible it'd be in the US. Probably at least over $2000 for the same treatment and it'd take triple the amount of time. Even Thailand is so much safer with respect to gun violence and crime. Traveling really opens your eyes to how terrible the US has gotten. I honestly think we are borderline 2nd world. We aren't really that free, healthcare is unaffordable, zero guaranteed vacations, high cost of living, toxic food, terrible infrastructure, severely obese population, and out of control crime and gun problems.

Went to Denmark in September and had same impression. US has become a dump after letting millions of new immigrants in

We should focus on helping our own citizens first.

But both parties are in collusion to bring in cheap labor, and the middle class gets screwed. Housing more expensive , health care explodes

We need to stop all immigration now

OP is sitting around thinking of an excuse to use to tell us that we need immigrants and how our country is so bad because we have not let in more. If he were so concerned about schools and infrastructure he would acknowledge that increasing our population by 100+ over the last few decades was a poor idea. Also lots of immigration is a hamper to collectivism and social cohesion, which he loves. But he won't admit that. This is why he has been silent for a few minutes, he doesn't know what to say.

I think it’s worthwhile to talk about immigration but how is reduced immigration going to build bridges faster and improve the quality of education?

Less diversion of funds to English language education, assisted housing and medical expenses among a zillion other reasons.