• Sims@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    No offense to the citizens, but USA is a failed Capitalist experiment. Nothing really works optimally, or even close to it. Everything is backwards, wasteful, unjust, non-free, anti-democratic, and in general several hundred years behind more mature nations…

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Europe had an advantage on designing walkable cities by building them when there wasn’t another option.

      Much of the US was settled by cars and air conditioning.

      • arymandias@feddit.de
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        6 months ago

        To quote Not Just Bikes: “the USA wasn’t built for cars, it was destroyed for cars”

        Most cities in the US were walkable and public transport oriented, but in the fifties all livable neighborhoods and city centers were bulldozed to make place for parking lots and arterial roads.

        • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Yes and no. Lots of the smaller towns were already fairly spread out because they were agriculturally-based towns, so the property sizes were huge. But many of the big, old cities still have excellent public transit.

          About 20 years ars ago I flew to New England on a trip and was able to get between and around everywhere I needed within Baltimore, DC, and Pittsburg using trains and public transit, very very easily.

          In Texas that simply isn’t possible because most of the cities here are so spread out. The Texas Triangle is an urban population center with the population of New York City, but spread over 60,000 square miles instead of 300.

    • nifty@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Disagree, the U.S. does a lot of things right which quietly go unnoticed because the failures are fun to point out (“haha Richie rich state is failing loool”). All countries have their issues, and the U.S. desperately needs market socialism.

      But please give me an example of any other top GDP country in the world where immigrants can become elected officials (not president) at the federal level. Russia? China? India? All of the other examples in top GDP earners are inherently xenophobic.

      • spechter@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        Isn’t the british premier a first generation descendant?

        Over here in Germany, one federal minister is of Turkish origin.

        The current president of Romania is part of a German minority.

        Granted, the examples all have a lower GDP than India and China overall, but those are three examples that come to mind without even googling.

        • nifty@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          You’re right, and Germany is actually higher than India. I don’t recall why I worded my original post that way, I think I was thinking of countries tankies admire and which also have strong GDP.

          Regardless yes, you’re right that there are other strong GDP democracies besides the U.S. where immigrants can become politicians at the federal level.