Comment by runarberg
21 hours ago
An awful lot Elon’s products seem uniquely capable in extreme niche cases primarily caused by America‘s horrendous track record of maintaining, upgrading, and filling in traditional infrastructure.
21 hours ago
An awful lot Elon’s products seem uniquely capable in extreme niche cases primarily caused by America‘s horrendous track record of maintaining, upgrading, and filling in traditional infrastructure.
Two observations with complaining about America's infrastructure:
1. America is huge. Comparing it to places in Europe is like comparing it to New Hampshire.
2. American has imported tons of people who are incapable of sustaining a high standard of living on their own. It only takes a few percent shift in GDP/person to change how much infrastructure you can build and maintain unless you are truly willing to let all the folks with less than a high school education and no special job skills live in favelas.
I really should not engage with the bigotry you demonstrated in your point two, but I will still offer you a rebuttal.
Iceland (part of Europe) is the size of Florida with 2/3 the population of Wyoming. 20% of Iceland’s population are 1st generation immigrants. Neither of those facts prevents Iceland from filling in, upgrading, and maintaining their infrastructure. The two week power blackout which GP’s friend experienced is unheard of in Iceland. And every population center, no matter how remote and low population (we are talking fewer then 100) still gets broadband internet via traditional infrastructure.
I also want to note that I did not compare America with Europe, you did that. And it is a determent to your argument (as if your racism didn’t do that already).
Acknowledging the existence of people without educations is not bigotry. For example, can you explain why remote tribes in the amazon rainforest don't all have space programs? I think it's because the lack the societal and individual development to have the productive capacity to do such a thing. Why do you think they don't? It's economic reality that if there is only a limited number of people who can do a thing, the amount of that thing is going to be limited. And when you abstract that through culture and modern life, the way you say that is GDP per capita.
You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states, affected tens of millions of people and cause $78 billion dollars in damage. It was a major event like nothing that has ever happened in Iceland. That level of event in Iceland would remove it as a going concern.
To respond to your add, yes I brought up Europe because outside of Europe there are like 3 countries that even have comparable infrastructure to the US. If you say "America has a terrible track record with infrastructure." Then the implication is that there is somewhere that does better. And my argument is that selectively you can probably find places but nothing as large as the US or with as many people who can't contribute to it's maintenance. (Did you know that in the US more than 50% of households are not net tax payers? All of the American infrastructure burden is carried by less than half of the households.) Your example of Iceland has 13000 KM of roads, of which 7,300 KM are paved. How is that some comparison?
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these are such classic american thought-terminating cliches. "we have more land and more people than anywhere else" "our population contains too many migrants who aren't as smart as americans used to be" etc etc. the different states and territories that make up the USA all have analogous counterpart countries whether you're comparing climate, population in the absolute, population density, GDP, or any other metric you care to name. many of the comparable countries will have a worse standard of infrastructure than that US state, but there will always be several which perform better, usually utilising fewer resources.
the thing all american states have in common is their american ideology, their american political economy, and their population of americans. it just so happens that these are almost always found, coincidentally or not, alongside extremely outdated and poorly-maintained infrastructure, and a class of ultra-rich parasites hoarding many of the resources. drawing connections between any of these phenomena is left as an exercise to the reader