> It's level of isolation (both in terms of distance to the next large city and hospitability of the land in between) is similar to Las Vegas. Salt Lake City isn't too far off either. America is huge.

Right. The issue isn't so much that "America lets people die because they don't pay." It's that "America gives people the freedom to live in the middle of fucking nowhere, including where a state or local government can't reasonably commit to offering reliable emergency services."

Except, in the link scenario. Stop trying to twist it. Every other country has communities that live so far from anyone that they're in trouble if they have a heart attack. But you know what? They still have something. House burning down? The local volunteer fire fighters will help you out. Not, we'll come out and put out your neighbours fire and stop and the fence line. And ignore you and refuse any offer of money to help you.

The issue is the US can't get it's shit together. And they can't get their shit together because Americans accept it. They just think "That's they're problem".

The US operates on a fundamentally different scale from most other countries. It's so big and diverse (in terms of both people and biomes) that the only effective way to organize is heavily federated. Fire laws in California are very different from in Tennessee. There are a few ways to accurately paint Americans in broad strokes, but not many.

I'd encourage you to travel around America a bit. Foreigners are often shocked by how nice and helpful people are here. Americans are by far the most financially charitable people in the world [1] but can be famously neighborly in many more ways than that.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charita...

America has the largest amount of recorded donations to their rather stretched legal definition of a "charity". This says a lot more about the American tax code than it does about American generosity. I'd encourage you to travel around the world a bit.

Lmfao. I’d encourage you to really look inward and understand why you’re trying to gatekeeper the definition of charity.

What pray tell makes a legitimate charity and why did you get to decide?

The linked scenario was controversial because this one small town of 2,500 chose to not help (vs. the standard proactive of other towns that do help). I'd love to use a town of 2,500's actions to define the morality of your country...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Fulton,_Tennessee#%22Pay...

>Every other country has communities that live so far from anyone that they're in trouble if they have a heart attack. But you know what? They still have something. House burning down? The local volunteer fire fighters will help you out.

You are revealing your lack of knowledge about the American wilderness simply by stating this. The US is so vast that there are massive swaths of land that you could not get a fire truck to the scene in half a day. It is difficult to imagine such a place if you have spent your life living in a heavily urbanized European country with no actual wilderness (I've seen what Germans and French call 'wilderness' and it is actually a medium-sized park)

Haha my country literally has people living on islands in the middle of a sea. We still hook them up.

>On the specific point of unincorporated land, I think you're vastly underestimating how physically large the US is.

So is Russia, they don't have these problems. The US is vast so we can't have basic stuff.

And most of the US population is next to each other with large areas of nothing.

>>So is Russia, they don't have these problems.

Really, Russia doesn't have any similar problems? You want to rethink that by any chance? because now you are making yourself sound quite ignorant.

Haha. No. Just because you dislike Russia and you think Russia is completely incompetent doesn't remove the fact they don't have problems of people phoning up for a fire department and not getting help.

"America is HUUUGE" comes up everytime someone says anything at all. Too many guns? America is huge. Urban sprawl? America is huge. No trains? America is huge. The US is #4 in terms of total area, behind russia, canada and china, and closely followed by brazil and australia. If the others manage at least some of this stuff, one would imagine that the US can do it at least as well.

Do you have any familiarity with those countries and where people live?

Do you really think that metrics on quality of life in Krasnoyarsk Krai or Northwest Territories are drastically better than Wyoming?

I wont even get started on what life is like in Xinjiang.

EDIT: Also, you're saying that Australia, Canada, Russia and Brazil have good train infrastructure? And getting even more pedantic, you're a fan of the trains west of Chengdu?

The trains in Xinjiang compare very favourably with those in the US. The media paints a very one-sided picture of what life is like there; not to defend the CCP's awful actions, but if the way certain communities in St Louis get treated were reported the same way...

>Xinjiang compare very favourably with those in the US

https://www.chinahighlights.com/china-trains/urumqi-lanzhou-...

LOL, keep spreading that propaganda comrade!

All I was saying was that the easiest argument to shut down a discussion is to invoke the fact that "America is huge". Nothing can be done, bc it's huge, end of story.

You’re giving China credit for being huge while talking about what goes on in 1/3 of its land area.

The US is populated end to end

So what's your point? A comparable part of the US railway network is what, Chicago to Denver: 10% less distance, 33% slower even over that shorter distance (much the same as the non-high-speed trains in Xianjing), 1/4 as frequent (and that's only if we ignore that Xianjing also has the slower trains) - and significantly less punctual IME (to say nothing of nicer to ride).

My point is that over that distance, any train is impractical?

Like sure China has fast trains in a small area, but west of Chengdu, they don’t, so saying “China is a country nearly as large as the US with a robust train network” is a red herring.

The US is much more spread out than China or Russia, even if land areas are of similar scale.

This supports the original point that it’s hard for large countries to have robust train networks, which was the idea that was being challenged.

Did you not read the whole thread?

> My point is that over that distance, any train is impractical?

It is practical though. Those 21 trains a day to/from Urumqi aren't running empty; I'm sure part of the motivation was national pride (as with most megaprojects anywhere), but those high speed lines were built primarily because they're useful.

> Like sure China has fast trains in a small area, but west of Chengdu, they don’t

And yet, as per your own link and my response, train service west of Chengdu is still significantly better than in the US. The US being big and spread out is just an excuse.

You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

You've unfortunately been posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments in other places too. Would you please stop? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we eventually have to ban accounts that do it.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html