What problems do you think people in the United States have that people in Mexico don't? Of this list you gave, most of them seem to apply to people in Mexico.

And so on. What kind/level of issues to put up with - I suppose that varies from person to person

Your unexamined prior is that this is a bad and unsustainable thing. It was always thus.

> People always seem to be stressed.

They really aren't. Americans are extremely happy and relaxed compared to where I'm from.

> We don’t even need to start on healthcare and housing and college tuition.

I think we do. Healthcare in the US has more red tape and expense than would be optimal, but the actual outcomes are still good. Keep in mind some caveats:

- US healthcare spend drives a ton of medical innovation that then benefits the rest of the world

- North America is going through a Fentanyl crisis that's cutting life expectancies

> Then there is gun violence. Women’s rights are going away slowly too.

This is a problem but not with the economy.

Relative wealth gap in developing countries dwarfs that of the developed ones.

Source: Personal observation.

In absolute terms though just look at pictures of e.g. rural Russia va Moscow.

tl;dr as of 2021 Gini coefficents, Brazil is the worst and Japan is best large nation... (there's tons of nuance missing here, but that's the basics)

There is a violent crime problem in specific neighborhoods of specific cities, largely tied to gangs and the drug trade. But there is zero empirical data to suggest that it is more of a nationwide problem than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.

The majority of gun deaths in this country (60-80 percent jurisdiction-dependent) are people committing suicide, often middle-aged men. Beyond that, the average gun murder is a young man with a criminal record killing another young man with a criminal record using an illegally-possessed handgun.

How about all the mass shootings that we read about, happening every few weeks or even more frequently, sometimes back-to-back, on average, in the US? That's not violent crime? Of course it is.

>a fraction of what it was 30 years ago

And statistics don't paint the full picture, not by a long chalk, unless all you are is a bean counter. What about the personal and family and friends' trauma of all the victims and their circles? We can dismiss that as negligible, right? /s

Check these:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...

There were so many that I got tired of scrolling.

JFC.

I can't imagine more of a hell than being forced to live a life wrapped up in bubble wrap so someone else is convinced I'm "safe."

Goodbye, you aren't worth my time.

And I notice that you "cleverly" and "bravely" avoided replying to my point about the tens of thousands of deaths and crippling happening from drunk driving accidents, while drowning in self-pity.

>Goodbye, you aren't worth my time.

I already said goodbye to you earlier, before you did :). I only replied again now, in order to rebut the points in your last comment above.

You are not worth anyone's time.

If you are from the US, and feeling defensive about my comment, and/or if you want to treat your people's deaths and crippling as just statistics, it's your call, shrug, and maybe also your death or crippling by gun violence some day, again, statistically, you know.

Yes, we absolutely mourn those who are still affected by it, and we do what we can to prevent additional deaths.

But the idea that we should not be happy about our progress is absurd.

Should we re-enact Prohibition, given that there are orders of magnitude more people who've been victimized by alcohol than firearms? No, that's absurd. You regulate the problem through hard, data-driven analysis, not waving the bloody shirt. Be that violent crime or addiction.