Seriously? The quote you're responding to divides Americans up into "the poorest" and everyone else. By definition, most Americans are not "the poorest." I'm not assuming anything.

This comment tree is very frustrating. People don't seem to understand the idea of metrics, or "objectively," toss out sophomoric "America bad" nonsense like, "you don't get paid vacation" (almost everyone does), "you go bankrupt if you get cancer" (almost nobody does), "you work more than other rich countries" (we don't), and act like any correction is a equivalent to saying we're the best.

There are real criticisms to be made about the US. There are ways in which the US is behind other wealthy nations and we shouldn't be. But it is very much not "basically a third-world country masquerading as a first-world one...."

Should we do better? Absolutely. Are we a third-world country based on the listed metrics? No.

There are plenty of things that are actually wrong with this place without making up stuff like Americans working more and having worse job security than first-world countries.

530,000 medical bankruptcies per year, in a country of 350 million. That number is too high, but the average American does not go through this.

Please understand the difference between saying "everything is great" and "it's not great, but it's not as bad as you say it is." I'm saying the latter, in response to comments incorrectly stating that the average American experience is that major medical issues result in bankruptcy.

EU life expectancy was 81.7 in 2024. Two years makes one of them OK and the other not? What do we call a place like Hungary which is quite a bit below the US here? Or maybe it's OK because they don't spend as much?

I also said for most Americans. Bad life expectancy is concentrated in the poorest Americans. Which is not a good thing to say about this country, but it does mean that most Americans live longer.

Again, I'm not a defender of our system. But the average American gets decent care and is not bankrupted by major illness.

I can't find any info about paid vacation by country. Everyone wants to talk about legislated minimums, which doesn't tell the whole story. The US legal minimum is zero, but the average is definitely not zero. The top country by that metric is Iran, and some other countries near the top of the list include Cambodia, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Overall it appears to correlate very poorly with first-worldness.

Worked hours per year, the US is at around the same level as countries such as Italy, Australia, and Ireland, and substantially lower than places like Greece, Poland, and Taiwan.

Job security also appears to be on the same level as peers. According to https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/oecd-countries-by-job-se..., the US is a bit worse than Denmark and New Zealand, and a bit better than Ireland and Finland.

I'm not seeing it.

The thing is, most Americans do have good jobs (or are in families with one), and do have decent health care. Should people with shit jobs have shit health care? No, and it's very unfortunate that this is how things work. But that doesn't mean we all face bankruptcy for major medical issues. The number of people who do face that should be zero and it isn't, but it's also not the norm.

The US system sucks in a lot of ways, but it works OK for most Americans. If you're very poor, you'll have Medicaid and it'll cost you nothing. If you're an average middle class person, you'll have decent health insurance and your costs will be affordable. There's a slice of people in the middle who don't qualify for medicaid but don't have decent health insurance, and they're going to have serious financial trouble. But most Americans aren't in that situation.

There's a tendency to look at the worst situations and assume it applies to everyone. How we treat the least fortunate is extremely important and I won't defend the US here, but there's a pretty big gulf between a significant minority who can face massive financial burdens from medical care, and "it's basically a third-world country...."

The average American has decent health insurance. Our system can be painful and I'm not advocate for it, but the average American is not going bankrupt due to medical issues.

Things don’t look great for the poorest Americans, but the average American isn’t living a life that’s even remotely third world.

But thinking more, things are different today. Wealth is international on a qualitatively different level than it was a hundred years ago. If you’re the richest of the rich in revolutionary Russia a century ago, you'll probably lose all of your wealth if not your life. If you’re very lucky you might end up in exile, struggling to survive.

Now imagine something similar happening today in the home country of people like Zuck and Musk. It’s unlikely there would be any threat to their life. They might lose a chunk of their wealth, but they’re sufficiently diversified that they’ll still be among the wealthiest people in the world no matter what happens.

This is just not true, and you seem to agree with that.

Yes, CO2 is problematic because of the sheer volume. The sheer volume means that dilution does not solve the problem.

Leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration. Which means that dilution does not solve the problem.