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Comment by buzzert | Hacker News Reader

With respect to your lived experiences, as a fan of the US I would just like to say that it is a country of 330m+ whose physical presence spans a majority of a major continent, so I would encourage you not to generalize us based on what you saw in Columbus. That would be like me visiting Paris (a city I particularly did not enjoy) and generalizing all of Europe!

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What of this is not true for the rest of the country then? I haven't visited at all but what the comment above you mentioned (basically the woes of limited social mobility, bad employment terms including tying healthcare to it if you're not rich, insane incarceration, etc.) is the kind of stats and stories I'm familiar with. The country does some things well also, as the commenter above also said, but it's not a place either of us would recommend most people to live after having known EU life. If there is even 10% of the 'major continent' that is not as described (besides Canada), I'm genuinely curious to know of it

> I haven't visited at all

> it's not a place [I] would recommend most people to live

Your recommendation (or lack thereof) carries little weight, then.

But to actually answer your question, there are many places in the US (urban, suburban, and rural) where fear of violent crime is not a major factor in the day-to-day life of most people. I don't know anyone who has been a victim of violent crime, and it does not feature prominently in conversations. In fact, the highly touristic areas in Europe seem to have more crime than anywhere I've personally been in the US, but I know better than to judge the entire continent by those outliers. I probably worry about as much about gang violence in south-side Chicago as you do about Romanian sex traffickers, or pickpockets in the 1st arrondissement of Paris.

Right, exactly! I personally felt much less safe in Paris than anywhere in the US (including Chicago and Oakland), which is not to say "I'm right and you're wrong", it's just entirely subjective and often the result of having not traveled extensively enough or lack of understanding.

I'm not particularly street smart having grown up in a tiny village in England.

But I too have felt no more threatened in numerous US urban and suburban cities than I have in many places in Europe - and the UK...

It's not without its problems but if it was _that_ bad I wouldn't have stayed...

Thanks for the answer. Though I can't say that I expected most people to fear being violently killed on a daily basis indeed, murder is something the person above mentioned so that technically is an answer to my question about which bit is not ubiquitous for the country

Fair enough, I only provided a counterexample to a part of the argument. I think a lot of the social criticism in that comment is more accurate, e.g. the stuff about health care and education quality. In a lot of America it seems like the only solution to those things is "don't be poor".

10%?!? That's not grounded in reality - only ignorance, maybe prejudice.

I'm not sure what you're responding to. I'm asking whether there is any bit of the place that is worth differentiating from what was said above, not having a prejudice about any which 10%

There are countless resources you can use to solve your extreme ignorance of the US. Asking people in a HN thread probably isn’t the most effective.

Easy to say "you're extremely ignorant" without even mentioning what of the data I saw is wrong, let alone provide a correction. Also makes it hard to know where to even start to either update my understanding or find that you're wrong and I'm wasting my time, whichever case it may be

>whose physical presence spans a majority of a major continent,

I take your point, but this part isn't true. Canada is a little larger, and then there is also Mexico which is about 1/2 the size, so US is roughly 2/5ths of North America.

uS is over 9m sq kms, Mexico is under 2.

Canada is larger than the US but if the US extended its northern border 50 miles Canada wouldn’t have any population left.

Oh you’re right about relative size of Mexico - my memory had a units error (km vs mi). Still, it’s not even as big as Canada so the statement wasn’t close to right…. It’s a bit under 9/20

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