Germany. Better education, better attitude, more open-minded, less harassment for being weird/nonstandard, median level of critical thinking ability, healthier food, better transport, more cultural things to do/see, better solutions to the growing underclass problem you described elsewhere.

There are tons of hacker-mindset people here (it's something in the water, I swear), and while there are lots of annoying hoops to jump through in the entrepreneurial arena, the general quality of life is vastly improved over the US in almost every meaningful day-to-day way. Economically the differences have already been done to death.

The US is coasting, and I believe it will implode financially within our lifetimes.

I'm also using SFBA, NY, Boston, Seattle as exemplars of the US. I'd rather live in London than New Mexico, but there are parts of the UK worse than New Mexico, too. (amazingly. I didn't know this until living in the UK.)

US universities are stronger than German universities, at least in commercialization, graduate studies, etc. K-12 could go either way; Baltimore public schools are worse than what I assume are the worst German schools, but Palo Alto, Stuy, etc. might be better (at least I don't know of anything comparable in Germany).

Great films, worth watching.

You can see Wasp, which won an Oscar for best short film, here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aJjj8v3xVs

Trailer for Fish Tank, featuring Michael Fassbender: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg1yMOdjyp0

Oddly we also seem to be developing one of the better tech hubs outside of London in Newcastle, so the rise of technology could see things improve.

Given the European financial crisis, this seems misplaced. Not to say that there will not be a financial collapse, but only if there is one it will be world-wide and the US will not be the worst off of the Western nations.

The contenders are: China, India (a unified Europe -but age is a problem). Russia is borderline has tremendous resources, but lacks the population and suffers from a paternalistic state (very tsarist in modern clothes).

Plus, Germany depends on foreign demand. When the world economy tanks, German economy tanks because there isn't enough internal consumption to pick up the slack --just as in Japan.

Better education - Kind of, although most of the top universities are still in the US.

Better attitude - Nope, not in my opinion

More open-minded - Nope, not in my opinion

Less harassment for being weird/nonstandard - Nope, not in my opinion

Healthier food - Yes, I agree on that

Better transport - Yes

More cultural things to do/see - Always depends on the area and there's enough to see in the SF Bay Area

Better solutions to the growing underclass problem - I only partially agree here. There's a reason why the Euro is on the decline in the last couple of months. Europe has many problems still to solve. Of course, the US also has many problems, that's why I partially agree.

As an Australian who has travelled the world extensively, spent a great deal of time in the USA, and currently lives in Canada, I strongly disagree with this statement.

It should also be noted that in most quality of life indexes, cities in the US rank far below many of those in Europe, Canada, and Australia - that is one such meaningful metric in my mind when declaring the "superiority" of a country (which I think is a pretty absurd notion anyway)*

* http://www.mercer.com/press-releases/quality-of-living-repor...

Having personally lived in two of the most recently top-ranked cities (Vancouver and now Melbourne) I'd say the indexes are mostly bogus.

Evidently something as important to quality of life as the weather isn't much of a factor given that it rains for most of the year in Vancouver. I haven't look up where SoCal ranks, but personally I much preferred living there to Vancouver for the climate alone.

And house prices in Australia are so absurdly expensive that I can't even consider buying (although I'm quite happy renting).

It's a cliche, but if you're really ambitious the US really is the land of opportunity. E.g., Elon Musk studied in Canada after leaving South Africa, but it's in the US where he started PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX.

The science says that social mobility is much higher in other countries like Denmark than in the US:

> Several studies have been made comparing social mobility between developed countries. One such study (“Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults?")[5][15][16] found that of nine developed countries, the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility with about half of the advantages of having a parent with a high income passed on to the next generation. The four countries with the lowest "intergenerational income elasticity", i.e. the highest social mobility, were Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada with less than 20% of advantages of having a high income parent passed on to their children.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...

Yes, because he did study in the US, at the University of Pennsylvania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Early_life). Granted he had a scholarship, but people like Elon Musk tend to get scholarships. For regular Americans state schools are affordable w/ government loans.

> The science says that social mobility is much higher in other countries like Denmark than in the US

No offence to Denmark but I can't imagine that many immigrants chose to immigrate there instead of the US because of social mobility scores.

By definition most immigrants are ambitious, or at least willing to risk leaving their country of birth for the possibility of greater opportunities elsewhere.

Countries with a high immigrant population in the preceding generation score very high - just because the first wave of immigrants probably did relatively badly compared to the average population, so if their kids do average that looks like high mobility

That's something as an outsider living here in since around last December I've noticed. Your government is quite broken. But it somehow still works. (Paradox, I know!) For instance, the healthcare bill that was recently passed largely solves the textbook problem of information asymmetry in the health insurance market. It almost didn't pass, but it did. Same seems about the immigration laws - although they are yet to be "fixed". It's a country where, ironically, a "professional news organization" like Fox News exists at the same time with with a "comedy" show like the Colbert Report.

> Unless something major changes, the American focus on consumption will eventually erode our influence around the globe.

That's a quote from the original article. I don't quite see how consumption is wrong. Especially, since from what I see, consumption here in the US is based on the idea of buying things that solve problems. That give people the incentive to invent tools to solve problems. Trust me there are a lot of countries where they don't like to spend money at all (consume). There are everyday problems there that aren't solved because tools invented for them will not be bought. Your quality of life is stagnant if "buy only bare minimum" is the model you want to follow.

That being said, your point about under consumption and unwillingness to improve life by buying better basics to solve problems is something new to me.

Are you talking about Germany?

I think it's much like picking a car. You can argue the pros/cons all day and night but it just boils down to what you personally prefer and what evidence you feel justifies your decision. Declaring a country is better than any other because it has more money, weapons, CCTV cameras, mountains, lakes just seems silly, no?

(I'm discounting countries savaged by war, famine etc because I'd say by most accounts but not necessarily all, they wouldn't be better)

Sure, it's subjective, but humans are generally a lot alike. As with anything, "better" (with the exclusion of "strictly better") is a valuation that 'the typical human will prefer option X', taking into account the trade-offs of option X vs. typical attitudes towards those trade-offs.

This is why it is so easy to exclude, as you did, countries ravaged by war et al., because the typical human does not appreciate war and famine enough that few things will make up for it.

You can sort subjective preferences to get an objective rating.

A fair example being how fucked all the bitcoin startups are going to be once the market is big enough for FinCEN to care about... or e-gold if you want a historical one.

The US is fine and dandy... if you don't mind not having privacy, and keep your "world-changing" ideas within the lines of what the military-industrial complex sees as acceptable.

The key IMO to all of this is separating out software development from server operations from financially backing a currency from applications of the system from auditors from users. Banks suck at software development; developers suck at finance. By separating the concerns, you can do regulatory arbitrage as well as focus on your strengths. (this isn't my idea; I think Ian Grigg of Systemics came up with it in the early 1990s, if not earlier). Fully separate arms-length entities, different people, not the e-gold "offshore, really" approach. You could create a fully anonymous bearer blinded token infrastructure as software, and then have servers for it, where some of the currencies were entirely non-financial and thus non-regulated (distributed locking mechanism for distributed software systems, resource allocation, anti-spam credibility systems, game currencies), and others which were financial currencies issued by real, established financial institutions with KYC (a dollar currency, shares, futures, ...). Same software, so the developers have no legal risks themselves.

Luxembourg also works, if you have $3-5mm or so to meet the requirements to issue (at least, that's what it would have cost in the late 1990s when I last looked; you need some connections, but they come with having money and hiring people from the industry). Switzerland and possibly Liechtenstein may work. I'd skip dodgy ee or south pacific places (e.g. Vanuatu, Narau) since correspondent banking relationships would be trivial to sever.

If you were totally focused on gambling ("gaming"), some crown colonies (IoM, Gibraltar) might work, or Panama.

You could do it in the USA if you met KYC and also treated it as a commodities trading system, regulated under CFTC. You can become a CFTC exchange (like Chicago) for $5-10mm. I'd probably actually do the operations for that in Chicago just to be totally known to all the local regulators, although NYC or SF would also be possible.

The thing I absolutely wouldn't do is try to run a payment system which is at all anonymous in the US, and if I did a payment system in the US, it would meet all KYC and MTB requirements. That puts your capitalization required at a few million dollars more than otherwise, but it's not a big deal.

We already have a PayPal.

(Or have you unsubbed from cypherpunks?)

The idea is to use the same infrastructure for that, for non-financial mass-market anonymous stuff, and then if anyone wants to run it, for anonymous financial stuff.

End user retail purchasing on the Internet (which is what PayPal largely does now), and user to user small value transfer ($1-3k) which is also paypal, is kind of uninteresting in general. Credit cards are fine for purchasing, and user to user payments are a pretty niche thing.

I think that statement is more a state of mind rather than based in fact, which it is often proclaimed to be. I'm sure plenty of Americans would fight me to death to try and prove it though.

US foreign policy is a bit too interventionist for my taste, but I'd prefer it to pure pacifism. A better-armed UK or France is probably a reasonable compromise for that. However, most US foreign interventions (except Iraq) aren't that horrible for most citizens (and even Iraq wasn't that much worse than Iraq 1991-2003 or 1980-1988) of the foreign countries, certainly compared to invasions and occupations by other countries.

You say this without any qualifications, when what you seem to mean is "superior for starting a tech business". That's a pretty major qualification to leave out.

It's obvious that most of the computer revolution was driven by the US. The dotcom boom was enabled by the very large American stock markets, and would not have been quite so possible elsewhere. That's undeniable, and I think the world is thankful to the leading lights in the US behind the innovations we enjoy today.

I went to the US as an undergrad hoping to experience the promises of its culture and energy. I learnt a lot from my time there, but in fact my opinion of the US moderated somewhat. Previously I thought it was the land of opportunity, creativity and liberty; after, I realised it also had deep problems with the way things ran (healthcare system, inequality and social distrust, deadlocked government). (I never lived on the West Coast - only visited.)

After returning to Asia from the US, I thought I'd prefer living in Canada, for easy access to the American market as well the Canadian healthcare system.

Another aspect is, it's simply not "done" in my home country (and I assume most other countries) to publicly label yourself as "the best". That's something I noticed among some Americans, and I can't agree with it. Where I'm from, there's always something to learn from someone else, and someone to build better relationships with. Calling yourself "the greatest nation on Earth" or the like smacks of arrogance, even if it could be argued to be true for some value of "greatest". Arrogance is, I suspect, why much anti-American sentiment exists.

If you go to Africa, >90% of the people love the US, and would consider the US by far the best country in the world. We were never a colonial power there (well, basically), and have done huge amounts of good for them. The exceptions are a few people in Angola (who may feel we betrayed them), Libya (most of whom are now dead), Somalia (well, whatever, I'll accept that), and Egypt (where pan-Arab anti-US sentiments over Israel, also largely due to the cold war, predominate over Africa).

Countries like France, Australia, etc. might dislike the US due to arrogance, but that's more like relatives fighting -- the US and France have a lot in common, and are ultimately allies, and aligned on most issues. It's not open opposition.

The big areas which have substantial anti-US sentiment are Islamic or Arab countries (largely due effects of US+Israel and US v USSR, and US actions to secure oil), and Central/South America (where we were colonialists, and where the drug war is causing huge problems). Venezuela is the only new anti-US place there (Cuba is a legacy of communism), and that's mostly due to us being allied with the previous regime and with Chavez's populism -- basically the same as US+Shah leading to US v Iran now).

I don't defy USA has a great contemporary culture but it's just one side of it. Another side is what you so easily dismiss - the history and traditions. Culture in the sense we're discussing is not something you can associate with one person. It's a collective term that basically describes the full range of learned human behavior patterns, which of course includes the baggage accumulated over the years (in some cases thousands of years) of history. Which USA doesn't have in the same degree as most of other countries, simply because it is a relatively young country.

Maybe I put too much stress on the traditional side of culture but coming myself from culturally very uniform background I always thought about USA as a multi-culture nation. Hence my surprise at pixie's statement. Shared media, history and education are basically common traits of every country (except for the ones that changed borders recently). Unity of values and the perception of the surrounding world may really be unique to America, though I'm not sure if putting Black people from Boston and immigrants from Asia and Mexico in the same bag as Rednecks from Florida is not an overgeneralization.

What you describe as a part of culture I see as a proof of multi-culturality. Can multi-culturality be a part of culture? I guess it depends on the definition. But I would argue that American culture is not uniform (of course many aspects are but I think most historically rich countries are much more uniform in that matter).

I admit it's kind of remarkable how everyone is religious in America. A bit less if you look at the crime rate (what happened to Thou shalt not kill?) but still. However I still stand by my previous statement - all the things you mention are not characteristic only to America. Maybe you can't appreciate it because it's a foreign culture to you but culture of many countries is just as uniform as American and often richer thanks to the hundreds of years of history. And wealth is hardly an American-only thing. As I mentioned, all these points together apply to Japan as well and many of them (not necessarily all at once) to other countries as well.

Haven't seen a supermarket the same way since.

But if you look at population, production volume, China would look like the center, with the rest of the world as fringe exotic life on its borders.

Center of population is somewhere near Afghanistan I think, but that's kind of a silly measure (like "the average person is 50% male").

US manufacturing production was #1 from 1895-2010. China is #1 now, but the US numbers are far more certain than China. If you look at total industrial base, the US is far above China (wealth vs. income, basically). I think Japan and a bunch of European nations actually would beat China on that metric.

The funny thing is calculating it at high resolution would require classified data (the best measures of the exact shape of the earth are classified; they are used in ICBM flight path calculations, and deviation from an oblate spheroid is significant when you want to put something on a tennis court from the other side of the world. The exact distribution of mass (some concentrations of heavier materials) and magnetism (for MAD detection of submarines) are similar.

To be fair, most of the places you lived in that 15 years sucked really hard, even just objectively. The good non-US places are way better than the states in almost every measurable aspect.

Raising money in Germany or the UK is a huge pain. Purchasing things is a pain. Hiring and firing. Finding people who actually understand startups.

What on earth would make you qualify the situation like that?

-- all right, ive read it I think the final paragraph gets it right: gov pending was at an all time high in that decade. And it sounds like, most of the supposed risks no longer apply, because of the Euro.

But you are correct in that Holland isnt the best place for a startup.

Basically, once you discover natural resources (in the case of NL, natural gas), it crowds out all other activity. You can earn a great return from exploiting the resource, so the best people, best capital, etc. goes into that.

With floating exchange rates, you get currency inflation, but you can have the same problems even with fixed exchange rates or common currency.

A bigger problem is the general "resource curse". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

I remember talking to people who said "at least we (Afghans) don't have oil, then we'd really be screwed."

Americans are in favour of a person being extraordinary, the dutch are not. We cherish "acting normal". One of the most used expressions is "act normal, and you'll already be weird enough"

Generally speaking, this is not a bad thing. The amount of attention whores and drama queens is much lower than the states. But for truly remarkable people, this does not make their perfect habitat. Theyll need thick skins.

Strongly disagree on this one here, after 4 years in Australia. Better public transport, better health care, better wages, less political bullshit, better immigration policy.