>In fairness to Americans, the country is enormous and Philadelphia will look very different to New England or Montana.
That's the thing though, there are desolate shitholes right across the country. Montana is blighted by terrible rural poverty and stupendous rates of meth addiction, as is most of the midwest. Oakland has some of the worst hoods in the country, despite being smack in the middle of the ultra-wealthy bay area. America is just willing to let people fall much further than any other developed country.
>It's also worth keeping in mind that once you get into wages and cost of living disparities you might become very cross.
Some parts of America have very high wages for highly skilled jobs, but they invariably have commensurately high rents and taxes. The federal minimum wage is a mere $7.25 (£5.24) an hour.
America looks to have a low cost of living on the surface, but there's a huge burden of costs that you don't see from the outside - massive student debts (real debts, not our pretend graduate tax), the crippling cost of healthcare and the invisible burden of living without a safety net. There's not a lot of value in earning $130k or $300k if you still lie awake at night worrying about what might happen if you get caught up in the next round of layoffs or get some bad news from the doctor.
For the vast majority of Americans, the American dream is just that. It's a great country for the rich, but most people aren't and never will be rich. It's a bait-and-switch con, but it's hard to admit that you've been conned.
We're sort of inured to it, we're sort of blind to it, but we shouldn't lose our sense of shock that America is a country where the plot of Breaking Bad makes sense. Ordinary Americans with middle-class jobs live in constant fear of destitution; it's not all that surprising that they're completely fucking mental.
As you say, if you fall in America, you fall deep.
Simply put, our higher taxes in Britain go towards ensuring that when something bad happens to you, it isn't the end of the world. You can be in and out of hospital with cancer for a year and barely work at all during that time, and it won't mean you will end up on the street with medical bankruptcy.
Also though, Americans aren't good at saving money for bad times. Their consumer culture is focused on spending money and ostentatious displays of prosperity to show that you can keep up with your neighbours and be part of the middle-class dream. A lot of them then live beyond their actual means and come crashing down when they get laid off and their house and cars get repossessed. Not many people keep savings to hold them over when they are jobless. A lot of them will then just start piling up credit card debt and make it much worse for themselves that way.
If you tell all that to Americans, they may even say you have a point, but that's where it will end. The way their system and their culture functions, i.e. badly by our standards, is just so engrained that it's impossible for one person to fight it.
America at its core is a country that is run by the super rich to suit their interests, and everybody else just has to scrape out a living as best they can, and if you fail, well, better you than them.
>our higher taxes in Britain go towards ensuring that when something bad happens to you, it isn't the end of the world
Our taxes are only slightly higher as a percentage of GDP, and they collect more tax per person than us because of their higher GDP. Part of the problem is the federal government spunking a fortune on pointless wars and corporate backhanders, but the bigger problem is the local/state/federal split in taxation. The responsibility for funding public services is generally devolved to the lowest possible level, which massively exacerbates inequality in a vicious cycle of decline - poor areas have a smaller tax base, so they have worse services and have to charge higher taxes, so anyone with the means moves out to somewhere with lower taxes and better services.
>The responsibility for funding public services is generally devolved to the lowest possible level, which massively exacerbates inequality in a vicious cycle of decline - poor areas have a smaller tax base, so they have worse services and have to charge higher taxes, so anyone with the means moves out to somewhere with lower taxes and better services.
In the U.S., around half of the funding for public K-12 schools comes from the local community and the taxes it receives from its citizens. Which means that poorer communities will lack in the quality of their equipment and their academic standards. These children will then despite their best efforts score poorly on their SATs, which are a nationally standardised and don't make concessions to you having gone to a piss poor local high school. Which then means that fewer pupils from that poorer community will go on to become higher earners than the people around them, and thus leave their family's poverty behind.
There is, again, no real incentive though for those who would have the power to fix the system and provide equal or similar standards of school education for all the country's children. Because from about the upper middle class upwards, it's almost a given that people send their kids to private schools. They will then tell you that they are doing it because there is too much violence, gangs and drugs at public schools. But when you say what if they paid just a part of the exorbitant sums that they have to pay through the nose for their kids' private education into the public system so that public schools could do better, they'll probably say they don't want to bankroll other people's education.
And that's the thing about America. On the one hand, Americans pride themselves in charity and like to tell you they've helped out at the local soup kitchen or that they donate 100 dollars every Christmas to Unicef, but they don't want the government to take their money to improve living conditions on a systemic level for the poor in their country.
Which then means that America perpetually only cures the symptoms, but not the underlying problem. It's the same with all those gated communities. The rich move there to be among themselves and not only keep paupers out but also crime and violence. Which is fair enough, but it doesn't occur to them that part of the real, underlying reason why they feel compelled to move to a place like that is that there is such a lack of funding for basic public services in many communities, which directly exacerbates crime and poverty.
The idea of a gated community is symbolic of America's entire deal, in a nutshell.
It's the greatest and most prosperous nation in the world, so long as you're only looking at San Francisco and ignore all the poverty and destitution in a place like Detroit. It's so ingrained that it's instinctual, automatic- America simply ignores its poor. They don't count. In a real sense, they're not part of America.
They see their poor basically the same way we see gypos.
Tech workers in the SFBA travel to work on chartered buses with blacked-out windows, because they might go mad if they had to see San Francisco or sit next to a poor person. The streets are littered with human shit, because SF has a huge homeless population and no public toilets; it doesn't occur to anyone complaining about the shit that it'd go away if they provided affordable housing and/or public toilets. The tech companies are "solving" their side of the problem by building their own company towns.
Yeah, but there were almost certainly people in Victorian Poorhouses who argued for the virtues of the honest factory owners who created the wealth of modern society.
Apologies. I actually meant Chestnut Street / Walnut Street in what is roughly the city centre. I can't check for sure because according to google the bank I was working for hasn't existed since 2012 (!) but from checking the distance from Chinatown to the nearest Five Guys I must have been within a stone's throw of the city hall.
It was inner city but gentrified inner city, at least then. Sort of felt like an episode of Friends or something. In comparison Miami at midnight felt like Blade Runner.
>Tech workers in the SFBA travel to work on chartered buses with blacked-out windows, because they might go mad if they had to see San Francisco or sit next to a poor person.
Good lord do you get all of your opinions fed to you by Breitbart. They should rig your knee up to the national grid and use the jerking resolve the green energy problem.
They have nice buses because the companies pay for them and they have them because the companies are 40 miles away from the city. Do you just hurl abuse at mega buses and national express for being too nice compared to your local bus? America clearly has infrastructure problems based on their complete cluster fuckery of civil institutions but sneering at people for getting on a coach is really a new low in bucket crabery.
The buses, like gated communities, represent a very pure manifestation of antisocial corporate behaviour. The tech industry could fix all of the SFBA's problems if they paid even a fraction of the tax they should really be paying. They could address the underlying problem of human suffering rather than finding ever more elaborate ways to conceal it. Their indifference to their fellow citizens is deserving of criticism; the fact that it is the status quo does not make it morally justifiable.
We have created a system in which multinational corporations can act with impunity and use the resources of the state without contributing to their upkeep. That system is not just, natural or inevitable and another world is possible, but only if we demand it. America is an extreme outlier, but they serve as a cautionary tale to European nations whose politics have been veering towards populism and in some cases overt fascism.
You can't really compare the American system to Europe it is fresh fruit vs rotting vegetables. There is more than enough money in the American public system to pay for this stuff already it is just embezzled and sucked away from these areas as a matter of policy.
He's not sneering at them, you fucking clown, he's just pointing out hat they have he wool quite snugly pulled over their eyes, much like a lot of middle class America.
>>31298 >He's not sneering at them
...what they said
>because they might go mad if they had to see San Francisco or sit next to a poor person
So you take this statement at face value to be true, and the motivation for why these people are on a shuttle bus is because they hate sitting next to poor people.
You know some work places in the UK have their own shuttle buses for companies outside of towns right, do you think they just hate poor people? What if instead of a tech company it was a mine or the power plant would it then still be because the workers might go mad next to poor people.
The statement is an absurd premise of someone who has overstretched the motivation for why things exist because they want to make a ridiculous point. San Francisco already had an established mass transit system, they use trams it works fine and is extensive as long as you don't want to travel to a company campus 40 miles away, so I assume both of you have no real knowledge of San Francisco or it's needs as a city.
>>31295 It's not Breitbart who wanted the tech wanker expresses to fuck off though, it was mostly vaguely lefty community activists. Actually read the wiki article.
(their protests got basically what I'd have wanted: make them pay for using public bus stops, rather than swanning around like they own the place and screwing up traffic flows like they were doing pre-protest.)
>>31299 >What if instead of a tech company it was a mine or the power plant would it then still be because the workers might go mad next to poor people.
There is a material difference between shuttling people out to the middle of nowhere and shuttling them right into the middle of another urban area. Google HQ isn't in some desolate enterprise zone or condemned tract of land that necessitates a commuter shuttle, there's a neighborhood of single floor houses within walking distance.
>>31301 >You've never been to Mountain View have you?
I must confess I haven't - have the devious little tech wankers gone and copied in some satellite photos of Ravenscraig to hide how shabby their neighborhood is?
>You are more than welcome to try cross the highway
Oh good, for a moment I was worried that the Bayshore Freeway overpass was for Google employees only and that you had to swipe your employee card at the Charleston Rd. Traffic lights.
> but I warn you, American drivers have no concept of stopping for pedestrians.
Americans have no real concept of driving as such either. They're some of the worst drivers in the world that I've seen. I guess it has to do with the fact that your driving licence can be had for a song in the U.S. and driver's education is minimal at best.
One more thought on the way Amercian rich people like to be segregated from the rest - it's quite possible to occasionally see famous people on public transport in places like London. People like Jarvis Cocker or Cliff Richard have been spotted regularly mixing with everybody else on a Tube train. That would never happen in the U.S.. Even the most unremarkable C-list celebrity would never get on a New York subway or a tram in San Francisco.
Then again, it's probably also because Americans on public transport are an absolute piss boiling annoyance. We went to London in the Before times in the summer of 2019, which is usually a time when droves of Murrikins come to visit, and there was a group of four of them about fifteen feet away from us on a Tube train. They were being loud and shouty and tried to engage random strangers in small talk, and seemed quite unaware that most of them were looking the other way with a hint of subdued embarrassment.
>>31304 One strange thing I found about driving in America is the massive difference state-to-state.
People in Alabama tended to leave a decent distance, and when I was talking they'd stop to let me jaywalk. However, no concept of maintaining a constant speed and some of the deathtraps with bits hanging off and missing windows, etc rolling around made me a bit uncomfortable.
In California, they are all cunts. Nobody ever lets anyone else in, all driving bumper-to-bumper and slamming on to rubberneck at even the mildest of traffic stops on the side of the highway.
When I asked why californian people drive like that, the answer was always "well I want to get there first", but never processing the fact that if everyone wants to get there first, nobody is getting there in any reasonable amount of time.
>and some of the deathtraps with bits hanging off and missing windows
Americans don't have MOT like we do. Some states require annual or bi-annual inspection, and a few of them actually have quite good standards of roadworthiness, but cars in a state where there is no mandatory inspection can be in absolutely appalling condition. It's one more reason why you see so many bad accidents there.
>>31305 >When I asked why californian people drive like that, the answer was always "well I want to get there first", but never processing the fact that if everyone wants to get there first, nobody is getting there in any reasonable amount of time.
There is something symbolically appropriate about this response coming from the state that gave the world both Nixon and Reagan.
Whenever someone mentions Nixon I feel compelled to mention that he originally ran on a four day work week, and on balance, was overall to the left of Obama or Biden.
It's insane how far the Overton window has shifted.
He was a crook and his body should have been burnt in a trash bin, but otherlad is still right; compared to the total reptilians that have been in office since Clinton he was practically a gift from god.
The thing is we'll never never actually learn the true extent of their crimes unless they're so heinously inept that even their original backers hang them out to dry (as happened with Nixon).
>The thing is we'll never never actually learn the true extent of their crimes unless they're so heinously inept that even their original backers hang them out to dry (as happened with Nixon).
I was going to say just think of the Iran-Contra affair, but Wikipedia says that Reagan was not directly involved in it, or at least successfully maintained that he was not aware of the full scale of the operation. But if you read through it, the whole thing sounds fishy even now, especially given that former Vice President and successor to Reagan, George Bush senior, pretty much pardoned most of the people who were directly involved in it, possibly to preempt investigations against him about his role in the scandal.
One could argue that the whole Epstein affair is pretty incontrovertible evidence of fuckery at the core of the whole human project, but whatever. Nobody cares. Throw my carcass in a ditch. Everything is fucked beyond repair.
>>31313 Or Saville and his links to the good and the great here. It's rotten to the core. Which imo is one of the reasons people don't care, because if we had to truly confront the absolute shithousery that underpins and holds the whole stinking circus together I think people would lose their minds.
The thing about Saville was that people knew he was a carpet-bagger as far back as the 70s. His nickname at the BBC, behind closed doors and under people's breath, was Jim'll Fuck It. Some were asking questions even back then, but Beeb executives always shrugged them off in an "oh, you know what he's like" kind of way. Saville was one of their most popular presenters, and they weren't going to jeopardise that just because he had had his hand up a few skirts.
The shift in attitudes towards child sexual abuse has been a good thing in the last 25 years or so in that respect, because it instilled in people a way of thinking that, no, this is not ok, we can't have a TV presenter groping 14-year-old audience members on TOTP. And it made it easier to uncover and expose systemic child abuse, because victims and witnesses alike are no longer up against a wall of silence that stemmed from the fact that you just didn't talk about those things openly in the 70s, 80s, and much of the 90s.
>>31315 Well indeed, it's good that it isn't so commonly accepted or brushed away. I don't think that means it doesn't still go on behind the closed doors of the "good and the great" though.
I guess part (or at least one) of the things I find so odd about the whole Jim'll situation is his obvious connections to our benevolent overlords be they the top politicians of the day or our beloved royal family. It seems obvious to me he was quite literally a "fixer" in the most blunt use of the term. Hiding in plain site and all that.
>>31326 >one of the relatively sane people of the movement
Nobody who continues to believe Trump won the election is "relatively sane" compared to anyone other than possibly Charles Bronson.
Rush Limbaugh was talking shite himself for much of his career. He was one of the key media personalities who paved the way for Trumpism long before Trump was elected. Just listen to some of his tirades on youtube.
Hang on, I thought the whole interracial couples in advertising was just a paranoid delusion - but Biden is talking about it and mentioning it as something that will get him into trouble.
https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1361872783379222531
Joe Biden has always been kind of the uncrowned king of legendary gaffes. It's almost odd that he hasn't had any noteworthy ones in the last couple of months.
>Though there has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud, Republicans nationally have made election law changes a priority this year.
>Overall, lawmakers in 33 states have proposed more than 165 bills that would restrict voting, according to an updated analysis of election bills by the Brennan Center for Justice. That's more than four times as many bills of this kind that had been introduced at this point last year.
>Meanwhile, Democrats responded on Wednesday by criticizing the commission as a coordinated effort of "voter suppression."
>"Republicans are using the lies they told about election integrity to launch a coordinated effort to roll back voting rights nationwide," said Jessica Post, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, in a news release.
As predictable as this was, the mind still boggles.
