Argentina definitely has its disadvantages, but there are advantages too. Healthcare access is universal. University education is free and open to everyone, and although most of the universities are not that great (and none are R1), there are two world-class universities. It's illegal to arrest people for using or having recreational drugs—not generally my thing, but it wasn't Breonna Taylor's thing either, and in the US the laws give the police free rein to loot houses and kill people with the excuse of looking for recreational drugs. The homeless people here are afraid of other homeless people, not the cops like in the US, and actually there is vastly less homelessness because of less rigorous enforcement of building permits. We have the best ice cream in the world, the best empanadas in the world, and the best thieves in the world. Public transit here is better than any of the numerous places I lived in the US, almost as good as in New York. There are single blocks of Buenos Aires with more bookstores than most entire cities in the US. Raising kids is a reasonable thing to do in Argentina; in the US the shittiest people harass you if you breastfeed in public.

The biggest advantage, though, is that when the covid pandemic hit, the people in the US went totally nuts, saying that the government is controlled by a secret Satanic cabal of pedophiles who sacrifice children to drink their blood, that masks cause covid, that the vaccines are fatal, and all kinds of nonsense like that. Europe doesn't seem to be coping that much better. Here in Argentina, meh, it's just another crisis. It's shitty but not as bad as the crisis in the 70s when military dictators overthrew the democratic government, outlawed playing cards, and started rounding up their political opposition and dropping them out of airplanes. I literally don't know anyone who got raped because of covid, much less murdered.

But yeah credit card transactions can take a minute or two, the economy sucks, and ordering things from overseas is difficult and risky.

It's been pretty helpful in gaining perspective on the bullshit I grew up with in the US.