I've gone into what I like about America in a few places on this site:
>>157167>>489240So with these previous posts in mind, I agree with only
a few of OP's claims:
Firstly, the nature. I agree that the territory which now comprises the states of the United States, particularly on the North American continent, is incredibly beautiful and bountiful.
Secondly, I agree, loosely, with "I like most people here." I think that the American people are kinder hearted oftentimes than they come across as, and are less intolerant than people make them out to be. It's mostly the American state which punishes & discourages these positive qualities for its own ends.
These two points aside, I disagree with everything else you've written. The United States is the richest country on earth and our infrastructure is crumbling. We spend so much on war, and yet we have major cities which struggle to do maintenance on their water infrastructure. Our transit system is a total laughing stock, poisoned by perpetual corrupt political moves to privatize things which only work as
public services.Our "innovation culture" is also a joke - most of the "innovation" for the past 40 years has been in patent rentseeking, as well as other "innovations" to charge as much as possible for things which are not actually scarce. US tax money built the internet, and then the gov't decided to put private companies in charge of it, and those corporations have persistently "innovated" at sabotage and suing the regulators for the corporate "right" to throttle access. Public money built Tesla - and then Tesla "innovated" by installing software in its vehicles which artificially limited the charge capacity of the batteries so that they could sell the same model of car with that software turned off for higher prices. The US consistently "innovates" at taking things which were impressive, making them crap, and then charging
extra for versions of the same product without the modifications which made them crap. It's embarrassing. There was a time when the US produced impressive works, but we're currently in the time dominated by finance capital.
We're the richest country on earth, and what remains of our "social safety net" is another joke. Clinton scrapped welfare in the '90s - the system the US has had since that time has been woefully inadequate. I don't think there's a single other country on earth even approaching the US's GDP which has such a meager benefits system. Israel, who Americans pay billions of dollars to every year, has free healthcare. Even Iran's healthcare system averages out better than the US's does, and the US has been
sanctioning Iran for decades!
The US home ownership rate falls below most of the world, and the US homelessness rate has been rising, reaching record highs in major cities. Extreme poverty has risen, and wages have not kept up with cost of living, and although the American state still rakes in tons of cash and corporate profits are soaring, "the American "social safety net" is much weaker than it was 40 years ago.
The weather is fine.
The US has the world's highest prison population and a higher crime rate than such countries as: Albania, Australia, Barbados, Egypt, Italy, Greece, Ireland, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Lebanon, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, Sudan, Canada, China, Iraq, Tunisia, Panama, Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Serbia, Thailand, Cuba, Poland, Portugal, Uzbekistan, Czechia, Georgia, Croatia, Bahrain, Armenia, Ghana, Zambia, and more! The US's rate of killings by police is abnormally high for a country as wealthy as the US is.
The quiet is a lie. ;P
Work is nice. America is a great place to pay an arm and a leg trying to get skilled and then get completely shafted when you try to enter the job market. America barely teaches competence, let alone mastery.
The products can be good, it depends on what it is. The US is still pretty good at jams, grains, salad dressings, and confectionery.
>It's good to be a consumer in the U.S. because businesses generally make sure the consumer is satisfied. Plus there's a wide variety of products that can be purchased at a price much cheaper than the rest of the world. Apple products, quality furniture, cars, etc.. are all much cheaper in the U.S. Developing countries tack on outrageous import taxes to everything.I really disagree with this.
Big American businesses have absolutely gotten used to having little to no competition, and they're constantly fucking people over. Especially in "tech" - it's completely Kafkaesque the kind of loops and dead-ends Zuckerberg & Co. make people go through. That's just one example, but it's a really clear one, and it's part of a broader market which regularly replaces customer service with non-functioning robot voices in order to save money. It's incredibly, disgustingly bad and anti-human.
Apple products are overpriced crap in general.
The best, cheapest electric vehicles in the world are currently being made in China and the US has had a 100% tariff on those since May of last year. It's actually
much cheaper to get those cars in most countries than it is in the US, and keep in mind that many countries also have better social welfare programs than the US which lower the cost of living for most people by covering parts of that cost that the US gov't does not, and many countries also have a lower cost of living in general.
I'm not saying that the US is the
only country in the world to have these hellish neoliberal conditions for the average person, but the US is absolutely an "innovator" in this field.
>Real estate value. Some people may disagree with this but I still find U.S. real estate to be amongst the best values in the world. The subprime thing was due to scams in the financial sector but per sqf U.S. real estate is hard to beat. There are some markets where things are pretty overpriced but the amount of land and the quality of the houses you get is better than most countries in the world.Real estate
in general is a scam. ;P
The reason that there are lots of festering blocks in cities which are simultaneously neglected and expensive is because real estate is treated as a speculative asset. This isn't just a US problem, but it's pretty shameful that the US
has this problem. They really committed one of the biggest genocides in history and then were like "ok, now you get to rent your home from both the government and a private bank
for your entire life!" Mortgages are a scam, corporate landlords are a scam; the US has tons of very valuable land, yes. And it would have even more if it got rid of the parasites who buy it up to gamble on it.
>Social mobility. It's still pretty easy to map out a path to middle class if you're a poor immigrant who has some motivation and ability to learn. It's probably not better than let's say Sweden but it's pretty good when compared with the rest of the world.There is no middle class in the US. See picrel. Notice that sharp jump up after the long decline. The vast majority of Americans are workers, and the closest thing to an American "middle class" would just be low-level capitalists, maybe high-paid middle managers, and both of those professions actually have higher median pay than the average American. Most Americans are workers, will be workers, and will have pretty bad conditions as workers considering the amount of wealth workers produce in the US.