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The UK isn't thriving - 18% inflation, low salaries (except in the money laundering industry), bad and very expensive housing, no infrastructure investment, etc.

> no infrastructure investment

I think one could say anything about UK these days, but lack of infrastructure investment? Seriously? UK compared to the US, it's like 50 years of difference. And I'd argue it's still ahead of most of the old EU, too.

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Get a license for what? I don't really understand the relationship between bureaucracy and buying a book... You can buy anything you like from anywhere in the world, pay your duty online, and have it delivered to your door. I did it a couple of times with DHL, Royal Mail, and never had any issues.

Indeed, as if the Elizabeth line hadn't just opened up this year!

It took them a while, and tons of money, but they made it happen. Which is more than most of the US can say.

UK doesn't have 18% inflation, that is just a projection from Citigroup [0] (if gas prices continue to grow it will probably get there, like the rest of Europe). Inflation is at 10.1%.

I'm not sure why you say 'low salaries'. Adjusted by cost of living, salaries are not that low [1]. Median (removes those salaries from 'money laundering industries') salary in London is almost £39.7k [2]. Adjust that by cost of living, and it is higher than median income in San Francisco or NYC [3].

Infrastructure is miles better than the US. Public transport, while expensive, works quite well. The US has virtually no public transport whatsoever.

Housing and renting is expensive in every major city, it is not a problem exclusive to the UK.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/22/uk-inflatio...

[1] https://neilkakkar.com/salary-calculator-by-city.html

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/416139/full-time-annual-...

[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...

Edit: format

It's really not a great point to use London, by far and wide the only and biggest exception the rest of the market in the UK, to compare salaries for tech workers. You can earn quite a lot more adjusted for conversion and taxes pretty much anywhere in the US if you compare to someone living outside London. And even then, London rents (never mind houses) are ridiculously expensive.

>bad and very expensive housing

Are you kidding? London has the highest quality apartment buildings in Europe. Well designed new builds with good services are abundant. This stuff hardly even exists in countries like France, Germany or Spain.

> their healthcare system is cheap but kills millions every year due to medical negligence.

This is a problem money can solve though. If you have the money, you can get pretty good medical care in India. "cheap but kills millions" isn't really a problem faced by most people who have the money to afford it.

> The US healthcare system - for all its flaws - has some of the best outcomes provided you have enough money to access it.

> Exactly. You need the money in the US to just be able to afford healthcare here. There are millions of people who don't have insurance (private, medicare), or have expensive deductibles to make healthcare out of reach for some.

No this is not true, you can’t be denied medical treatment in the US even if you don’t have the ability to pay it.

Emergency medical treatment, right?

Yes, but if you “look like you can pay” you can get much more than that.

Right. Anything beyond that nobody is obligated to provide. However, if you're in that level of dire straits there's almost always a way to get it covered. In most states, anyway.

Yes, you can be denied treatment. ERs are just obligated to stabilize patients no matter their ability to pay. Nobody who needs it is getting an insulin supply or chemotherapy without the ability to pay for it.

Healthcare in India also has one very negative aspect which is that more than half of the doctors have qualified due to some form of caste based affirmative action. More than 50% seats in Indian Medical colleges are reserved for "lower castes." It's much easier for a less hard working/bright student to get into the college if he belongs to the lower caste which reduces the quality of doctors so much that a lot of people refuse to get treated by doctors who have lower caste surnames. Atleast in America you are guaranteed you have mostly competent folks treating you, hard to do that in India without doing background checks on the caste of the doctor as well.

How is this any different from saying you would avoid a black/Hispanic/minority doctor in the United States? The US also has affirmative action for medical schools. If anything this problem would be worse in the US, since it's harder to determine race by name here.

Your comment reads as thinly veiled casteism/racism.

I wouldn't even call it veiled.

You can go with doctors with Jewish/Asian last names - that way you chance to hit affirmative action doctor are pretty minimal.

PS I personally never thought about it that way and it’s probably silly to filter like that for routine care but may make sense for high risk surgeries when you can’t do due diligence other way.

And the racist shows up.

The qualifying exams for MBBS degree is the same for everyone. A huge percentage of medical seats are literally purchased by wealthy parents for their kids. Yet the concern is always about low caste physicians, not nepotistic physicians.

The exam is the same, but the scores required vary by a large margin based on if you are in a reserved category or open category.

I'm not saying that someone with a lower exam score cannot be a better doctor than someone with a higher score, but I would assume there would be a strong correlation

I am not talking about the entrance exam. I am talking about the final exam you need to pass to graduate. It is the same for everyone.

Once again, most of the students who qualify in the entrance exam with a lower score are the middle-high income class, donations and payments based upper caste students.

In all my years in India, not once has anyone complained about the upper caste doctors who have literally purchased a seat in medical school, including yourself. Their only concern is caste. The racism is very loud and very clear.

You would be a fool to go to any doctor who has a degree from a random private university in India. So you only go to doctors from reputed govt. colleges like say Maulana Azad or AIIMS where you can't just buy the degree. But here the issue is reservation which is as bad of a problem. So vetting out quota doctors is required here if you want proper treatment. You are saying they all qualify the passing exams on the university? But is there no difference in someone getting barely passing marks to other student getting distinction? I have heard professors giving grace marks to SC/ST students just because they fear being slapped with draconian caste discrimination cases if they fail the undeserving student. If you look at the topmost doctors they are all of unreserved category, now this is not some "racism" but in reality it shows that merit wins in the long run.

90%+ of Americans have health insurance of one form or another

Having health insurance and getting any real benefit from it are two different things.

Yes, and insurance doesn't always cover every single medical bill. Therefore a lot of people experience extraordinary amounts of medical debt.

> The US healthcare system - for all its flaws - has some of the best outcomes provided you have enough money to access it.

If you're going to use the qualifier "provided you have enough money to access it", then Indian healthcare is equivalent or better depending on the illness.

> I have to rain on your parade but there are many aspects of life in India that money cannot solve. I am no fan of the USA either but the "gun culture" thing is a strawman that doesn't affect daily life in the cities. It is certainly a problem but not a problem that many make it out to be. Be careful with the healthcare argument too. India's legal and police systems are a joke and their healthcare system is cheap but kills millions every year due to medical negligence. The US healthcare system - for all its flaws - has some of the best outcomes provided you have enough money to access it.

I think its interesting that you manage to both minimize the impact of firearms in the US and ding the healthcare system of India in the same comment.

I have to disagree with both. Guns are a constant threat, even in the bluest of cities since there are Red States just a few hours of drive away (if you're not already a Blue City in a Red State which is extremely common). The threat of school shooting is very real. Kids have to go through bs "active shooter drills"... this is not the sign of a healthy society.

Indian healthcare system certainly has flaws but it manages to provide basic healthcare to all citizens. There are lots of fantastic doctors trained every year in India.

The legal and police systems, I buy that argument. The mainstream media, totally under the control of the authoritarian right wing Government. Modi. Those are legit criticisms.

> I have to disagree with both. Guns are a constant threat, even in the bluest of cities since there are Red States just a few hours of drive away (if you're not already a Blue City in a Red State which is extremely common). The threat of school shooting is very real. Kids have to go through bs "active shooter drills"... this is not the sign of a healthy society.

Sorry you are buying far too much into the news. I suspect more people are burned alive in housefires from shoddy construction in India, than die in the US to guns.

If you’re gonna wildly speculate then by all means go ahead and make up the most wildest shit imaginable.

It’s actually surprisingly close in absolute numbers. About 20k not-self inflicted gun deaths in the us, and 17k deaths by fire in India. Ofc per capita gun deaths>>fires.

The non-self inflicted is huge though, most gun deaths are suicides.

Correct - though the US doesn’t have a dramatically higher suicide rate compared to countries with vastly lower gun related homicide rates. So excluding non self inflicted rates may provide the more relevant metric for this analysis.

Yep - many people see the "gun deaths" number and assume all of those are crimes (well, technically suicide is a crime where the victim and the perpetrator are the same).

In addition, a hunge chunk of the actual gun deaths are related to drug and drug trafficing.

If you don't deal/buy drugs, and you don't drive through the inner city projects where turf wars are a thing, you can cross that off your list.

I feel very safe from gun violence in the US.

Once you factor those out, I think you are MUCH more likely to be killed by a vehicle than anything else.

And even if you don't, it's about even.

Too late to edit - I meant to write "excluding self inflicted rates", not "excluding non self inflicted rates", though I don't get the impression there was any misunderstanding.

Indias population is X (maybe 7) times more than USA

> I suspect more people are burned alive in housefires from shoddy construction in India, than die in the US to guns

ChEcKmAtE!

The threat of a school shooting is real everywhere, I don’t think the news does justice to showcase how often gun violence could have been avoided if the individuals in the kids life payed attention.

> even in the bluest of cities

Are you telling me there is ACTUALLY gun violence in Chicago, Detroit, and New York? Well, knock me down with a feather!

BTW Someone needs to tell India to get a handle on their vehicle death culture. It is a constant threat. Children are being absolutely slaughtered in the streets by these assault vehicles and the numbers are only rising.

> even in the bluest of cities since there are Red States just a few hours of drive away

I remember reading somewhere that the statistics and likelihood of innocents being shot were more closely tied to "blue" and gun-free cities and states.

Is that not the case?

That makes sense. Gun control is an all or nothing thing. You can't ban guns in some states and let other states run amok with them. People and guns can move easily across state borders.

> The US healthcare system - for all its flaws - has some of the best outcomes provided you have enough money to access it.

You're kidding, right? Vast majority of Americans have poor outcomes despite being insured. Let's not even talk about the uninsured that are constantly kicked to the curb as soon as they're stable. Medical debt is a big issue in the US regardless of your insurance status. Medical bankruptcy is a thing. People have to choose between food and life saving drugs like insulin which are cheap and easily available pretty much everywhere in the world. Do you want me to go on?

I don't know how stable the USA would be if all billion Indian people came to North America and Europe.

Who said anything about that? Besides Viktor Orban.

A million immigrants are let into the US every year.

If you look at persons obtaining permanent resident status as a proportion of total population, it peaked in 1900-1910 and has been fairly stable since the 1990's: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/109xdKq3U7ISifgyjlQLL...

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...

The U.S has stability? Mmm not really.

It has been stable since I have been here? In fact all the issues that make the most $$$, gun violence, abortion, race relations, these are not a problem at the macro level. If anything it should be commended that our media and leadership has the luxury to complain about these “issues” that affect less then 5% of the population.

Stable for who, and how do you define stability? For you it feels stable, for some factory worker it's not great. But I was getting more at American politics - that feel to me like they've reached rock bottom (at least compared to the last 2-3 decades). Eventually a crippled political system will bring down the economy. It's very possible all things considered, and relative to Europe (or China, India, whatever), the U.S is doing good. But that's not gonna matter much to the average American citizen. There's no way Americans won't feel the political and economic mayhem that's coming the coming decade or two.

Bro good luck on the upcoming Hindu-Muslim civil war, and then subsequent South Indian secession movement.

PS: I know what you're going to tell me, that I don't know what I am talking about, but believe me, I do.

Surely a man would say that abortion is not a problem at the macro level and only impact 5% of the population.

Doesn't impact you so of course you don't care, but it does impact a lot more than 5%. Same for race relations, lots of people having to spend their life being put all kind of barriers in front of them.