zlacker

>>dtagam+(OP)
The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, 700 crane operator mishaps in a month, 700+ food poising by a chain in a month. The also imagine you believe there's no problem.

This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.

>>DeonPe+ek
To be fair you are comparing an adversarial job with a cooperative one. A crane operator won't feel unsafe, or confronted by someone he calls hostile. This is no excuse whatsoever for the multitude of outraging problems in the system, but the comparison isn't straightforward.

>>devcpp+3n
So just compare It to police officers in other Western countries...

>>camill+Pt
There's a dead comment in reply to this. I disagree with it as strongly as anything I've seen on HN. I think it racist. I don't think it should be hidden. It highlights a mentality that needs to be known about and considered including any possible sensible response to it.

Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country"

To what extent do these, not uncommon - even here, sets of beliefs contribute to the problems of violence in policing? Not something that seems to me like a good idea to pretend does not exist or is minor or fringe.

>>harry8+IC
> Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country"

Can you explain why you feel that's terribly unfair? I don't know why somebody would pick Brazil specifically, but you might easily say "compare the US to countries with a similar income inequality". Take the gini coefficient for simplicity [1] and compare the US to Côte d'Ivoire, Argentina, Haiti, and Malaysia or Mexico, Madagascar, El Salvador, and Rwanda, depending on whether you take the CIA's numbers or the World Bank's. If you look at the list, you'll see that the European countries are closer together and in a different area of the list, the US isn't in their group.

Wouldn't that be a better indicator for "similar countries" than average internet speed or NATO membership status?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

>>luckyl+NK
The rationale for Brazil was explicitly the same one in the dead comment.

But yeah, that's pretty radical what you're saying too. Maybe it's fair that you should only compare the richest nation on earth with much poorer developing nations with a short track record of democracy. Not sure I'd agree.

>>harry8+7M
> Not sure I'd agree.

Why? Income inequality is correlated with crime rate, why wouldn't you use that to find comparable countries? Seems useful to me, similarly to comparing diabetes rates in countries with similar levels of obesity, not based on average hair color or amount of trees per square mile.

> the richest nation on earth

You'll need to define what "richest" means, I guess. The highest GDP? Largest military spending? Does that mean a lot to somebody that is poor in the US? Would that person possibly be better off in a European country with public health insurance, a vast social safety net, high welfare etc, even though it's not "the richest country on earth" by your standards?

>>luckyl+EN
The USA can /afford/ to be better. Comparison with other wealthy nations seems to me to be the right benchmark.

I mean the richest nation on earth bar none. The amount of wealth in the nation. Literally that. The USA cannot plead poverty as an excuse for why anything is worse there than any other nation. Do you see it now?

>>harry8+011
Put like that, I agree. If the US fundamentally changed their culture towards being less individualist and more collectivist, a lot of things would change with it.

I don't think US-citizens by and large want that change bad enough to accept restrictions upon their freedoms and an end to low taxes, European-level wealth redistribution does not seem to be popular in the US. I suppose they'd like the result without doing it. Unfortunately that's like wanting to be great at tennis without wanting to put in the training: understandable, but not happening.

>>luckyl+m21
I'm not suggesting there is one and only one solution to any given problem at all. That's the scoreboard. How does the USA do compared to other rich countries with long established democracies. My read on it is most americans want to be first on that scoreboard. Badly want it. Most americans can't and don't believe how badly they're going in certain benchmarks. These are the benchmarks. This is the story. Americans can fix it, of this I have no doubt. I'm sure that it can be fixed without embracing socialism in /any/ way if that's how americans choose to go. All they need to do is say "Here is the scoreboard - let's get fixed. Let's try something and if that doesn't work let's try something else and not rest until we get it done in a way that works with our views as Americans and preserves all the stuff we hold dear."

I have no doubt that American can-do and talent will get it done.

None.

Just decide what it is, what the scoreboard looks like and get it done as Americans the American way.