She Came to the US to Study with Only $300 – Now She’s a NASA Director

You’re right everything is relative, but I think US media often gives off the impression of South/Latin America as a completely poverty-stricken landmass that people can’t wait to escape from so they come by foot or boat from Honduras or Cuba or Venezuela or Ecuador or Nicaragua or something.

Also, I know people who own large properties in Colombia and a friend of mine owns a 500 cattle ranch in Bolivia (called La Pradera)... These folks are very well off, even by international and US standards. There is significant wealth in South America if you look in the right places.

And many parts of Colombia are very metropolitan and modern, which has come as a surprise to people I know in the US/Europe.

Some random things I remember about Colombia:

* Cycling is big there. There are more bike lanes than pretty much anywhere else in Latin America. The practice of closing streets on a particular day for community cycling originated there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciclov%C3%ADa); in pre-pandemic San Francisco you might have encountered this as "Sunday Streets". It was mainly inspired by Colombia. Colombia has also had an increasing number of competitors in the Tour de France, including the 2019 overall winner, Egan Bernal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egan_Bernal).

* It's very, very mountainous. People in the U.S. might know Peru (and maybe Bolivia) as Andean countries, but there are four countries in the Andean Community (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andean_Community) (which is primarily a trade bloc rather than a geographic designation), and the mountain range continues along the entirety of the west side of South America. Most of Colombia's population lives near the mountains, although the biggest cities are primarily centered in valleys, sometimes stretching far up into the hills. There are dramatic views all over the place. Three cities have aerial tramways (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aerial_tramways#_Colom...) either for commuters or tourists. I also heard that, as in other mountainous regions elsewhere in the world, the major cities have maintained significantly different cuisines and dialects because of how much effort it took to travel between regions, even when they were pretty close by as the crow flies.

* There are lots of public parks in the big cities, and they get a lot of use, even long into the evening. It probably helps a lot that it's quite warm in Colombia, but I also felt that this was a cultural thing. I was impressed at how much safer I felt in parks in Colombia at night than I would in urban parks in the U.S., probably in a Jane Jacobs "eyes on the street" sense.

* There are well-attended tech meetups and conferences. :-)

* "El Dorado" was originally a person, not a city, although it's not clear if the person really existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Dorado).

* They make delicious things with corn (really, probably true of anywhere in or adjacent to Central America).

* Medellín (unlike other cities in Colombia) has a large, effective metro system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medell%C3%ADn_Metro).

Edit: A striking thing I forgot to mention is the calle/carrera system, where most cities make enormous use of numbered streets and avenues, to a much greater extent than ever I've seen anywhere else. Imagine if every city were like Manhattan, but with a numbered grid imposed over much larger parts of the city, even parts that weren't visually part of the main numbered grid. Colombian city streets are overwhelmingly numbered rather than named, and the Manhattan-style "5th at 40th" references are the norm.

I meant she had little money, not the country – $300 to be precise according to the article. Bad grammar on my part including spelling.

Furthermore, your 1.24m figure is over-inflated, as CA has high state/local sales/income taxes. And don't forget San Franciso transfer taxes on real estate (around $50k-100k due at close)! Texas has no state or local income taxes, aside from property taxes.

Not to mention that if you have kids, you don't really have the luxury of waiting that long. You can put them into a better school district for cheaper, or you can even send your kid to top-tier well-known private schools for $25k/year rather than $60k/year. Even in-state college tuition at UT, a nationally renowned public university on par with UCLA and UC Berkeley, is only $5k/year, versus near $20k in CA.

I live in Los Angeles now, but I grew up in Dallas. Obviously I'm choosing to stay in California for a reason, but I'm not ignorant as to why someone would move from CA to TX.

Also good health insurance, paid parental leave (in the US!), job security, a known and transparent progression path...honesty I’ll take lower uncertainty for slightly lower pay because it saves me money over time.

And while there are some who are fair-minded, many are not. So such a person is in a lose-lose situation. Those with bias will discriminate against them -- and "fair minded individuals" will use take their poor relative performance to inform their prior. Try to compensate for that, and those fair minded individuals use that, too, against them.

So "fair-mindedness" leads us to perpetuate discrimination. Which doesn't seem very fair.