Two observations with complaining about America's infrastructure:

1. America is huge. Comparing it to places in Europe is like comparing it to New Hampshire.

2. American has imported tons of people who are incapable of sustaining a high standard of living on their own. It only takes a few percent shift in GDP/person to change how much infrastructure you can build and maintain unless you are truly willing to let all the folks with less than a high school education and no special job skills live in favelas.

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runarberg 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I really should not engage with the bigotry you demonstrated in your point two, but I will still offer you a rebuttal.

Iceland (part of Europe) is the size of Florida with 2/3 the population of Wyoming. 20% of Iceland’s population are 1st generation immigrants. Neither of those facts prevents Iceland from filling in, upgrading, and maintaining their infrastructure. The two week power blackout which GP’s friend experienced is unheard of in Iceland. And every population center, no matter how remote and low population (we are talking fewer then 100) still gets broadband internet via traditional infrastructure.

I also want to note that I did not compare America with Europe, you did that. And it is a determent to your argument (as if your racism didn’t do that already).

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wang_li 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Acknowledging the existence of people without educations is not bigotry. For example, can you explain why remote tribes in the amazon rainforest don't all have space programs? I think it's because the lack the societal and individual development to have the productive capacity to do such a thing. Why do you think they don't? It's economic reality that if there is only a limited number of people who can do a thing, the amount of that thing is going to be limited. And when you abstract that through culture and modern life, the way you say that is GDP per capita.

You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states, affected tens of millions of people and cause $78 billion dollars in damage. It was a major event like nothing that has ever happened in Iceland. That level of event in Iceland would remove it as a going concern.

To respond to your add, yes I brought up Europe because outside of Europe there are like 3 countries that even have comparable infrastructure to the US. If you say "America has a terrible track record with infrastructure." Then the implication is that there is somewhere that does better. And my argument is that selectively you can probably find places but nothing as large as the US or with as many people who can't contribute to it's maintenance. (Did you know that in the US more than 50% of households are not net tax payers? All of the American infrastructure burden is carried by less than half of the households.) Your example of Iceland has 13000 KM of roads, of which 7,300 KM are paved. How is that some comparison?

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runarberg 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> Acknowledging the existence of people without educations is not bigotry.

It is. Education has been an excuse for discrimination for a long time. When you describe a whole demographic as being uneducated you are applying exactly the kind of rhetoric which white Rhodesians used to excuse their discrimination[1].

> You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states.

A Volcano erupted in the town of Grindavík, the main line which connected the town to it’s power plant, went under lava. The town was out of power for a maximum of 7 days.[2]

But in any case, 2 week long blackouts are extremely common in the USA regardless of the severity of the natural disaster. When I first moved to the Seattle area in 2016 a common snow storm caused a blackout which lasted for 2 weeks in some areas outside of Seattle. The reason for the length of the blackouts in the USA is simply due to the quality and maintenance of the infrastructure and any lack of action plans to fix them when they break.

1: https://youtu.be/SLmD23UpLOo?si=hnyOlxPqDmWwQfRp&t=1299

2: https://www.ruv.is/frettir/innlent/2024-06-05-koma-rafmagni-...

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wang_li 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Comparing a volcanic eruption, a totally stationary event with predictable flows, that affected 3500 people in a town, where most of the residents have since left because of the problems living there, to a class 4 hurricane that crossed over six states, hundreds of miles, and affected millions of people, is dumb.

I've lived in the Seattle area since 2007. There has not been any power outage that affected 3000+ homes that has lasted longer than a day.

Additionally, Seattle area does not have common snow storms. It has extremely infrequent snow storms and thus has no reason to have lots of cold weather equipment. What we do have is frequent wind storms and lots and lots of trees (orders of magnitude more trees than all of Iceland, for example) and the wind often knocks trees into power lines and those are fixed in less than a day. In terms of neglect, that's not a problem. The longest outage I've ever had in the suburbs is 18 hours.

The real reason for the long duration blackouts is not failure to maintain infrastructure, it's because of natural disasters that damage and destroy entire swaths of infrastructure in a single event over thousands of sq km.

That someone, somewhere once used some accusation about a trait of populations as a form of discrimination does not mean that every recognition of that trait in a different population is also discrimination. Like, we can look at a person and say "oh, he never finished high school" that doesn't mean we're irrationally discriminating against him. You discriminate on exactly this basis every single day. You don't have people who don't know driving/cooking/medicine/engineering/automobile repair/etc. provide those services to you. I guess you're a bigot.

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runarberg 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> Comparing a volcanic eruption, [...], to a class 4 hurricane [...], is dumb.

I agree. One can judge America’s lousy infrastructure and lack of action plan on its own merits. There is no reason to bring Europe into this. All I am saying is, America’s sparse population, nor the education level of immigrants is not an excuse.

	▲	mensetmanusman 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure an overall C in 2025, including a D+ for roads and a D for transit. The EU invested about 9% more relative to GDP, while the U.S. invested more dollars per resident because its economy is much richer. American infrastructure is bad, the boomers in charge have no idea how to get anything done anymore, with California being the case study of nimbyism.

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marsmaps 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

these are such classic american thought-terminating cliches. "we have more land and more people than anywhere else" "our population contains too many migrants who aren't as smart as americans used to be" etc etc. the different states and territories that make up the USA all have analogous counterpart countries whether you're comparing climate, population in the absolute, population density, GDP, or any other metric you care to name. many of the comparable countries will have a worse standard of infrastructure than that US state, but there will always be several which perform better, usually utilising fewer resources.

the thing all american states have in common is their american ideology, their american political economy, and their population of americans. it just so happens that these are almost always found, coincidentally or not, alongside extremely outdated and poorly-maintained infrastructure, and a class of ultra-rich parasites hoarding many of the resources. drawing connections between any of these phenomena is left as an exercise to the reader