Ask HN: Is it just me or does the US look really broken?

[crystalarchives]

I never read the frontpage of Hacker News, only news.ycombinator.com/best in order to save time.

However, I've been finding it more and more depressing lately. Is it just me, or does it seem like America is getting worse and worse?

I'm a US citizen currently in Shanghai and it's been almost a year since I've been home so I don't know how bad it is on the ground, but from the news it looks horrible and only going downhill...

From the TSA http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/fngfo/why_i_stopped_travelling_to_the_us_and_i_largely/

To the VC world http://www.pehub.com/96111/its-not-a-bubble-people-its-a-pyramid-scheme/

To the government shutting down sites http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mistake-110216/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak)

To IP laws http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2011021108493059

To academia http://blog.devicerandom.org/2011/02/18/getting-a-life/

More importantly, there doesn't seem to be anyone doing anything about these issues. Khan Academy and the Nissan Leaf seem to be the only positive posts. Just wondering what other people think.

[GHFigs]

Hacker News and submission-driven news sites in general are a way of bringing a constant stream of exceptional things to your attention. They are not a good cross-section of what's going on the world because almost everything that's going on isn't exceptional. Millions of Americans felt love yesterday. That's not Hacker News.

If you're actually getting depressed by this (and you wouldn't be the first) then you need to stop and take stock of the real world through your real senses and think about how much of your life you want to burn up on things that don't actually involve you or that you can't or won't do anything about. You have to ask yourself how many of those things you actually care about personally vs. how many are just sensory input you're just reacting to because it's been put in front of you. If you care, you can do something. If you don't, you can turn off the input.

[notahacker]

For perspective, here's the most popular recent articles on China: http://searchyc.com/china?sort=by_points Companies pulling out, being blocked, hacking, plagiarism, human rights violations, book banning, even making T-shirts there seems to be a bad idea due to rising labour costs and a shortage of yarn... positives: a pretty cool but unworkable giant tram concept

Doubt things are going too badly for you in Shanghai though?

[crystalarchives]

Things in Shanghai aren't anywhere near as good as my memory of the States, but I'm concerned that either 1) my memory isn't serving me correctly and/or 2) the US has deteriorated since I left.

[mattdeboard]

Reading content on user-submitted-news websites can be very similar to looking at the world through poo-colored glasses.

[sabj]

I think that a large part of your reaction may be that since you are away from home, you only have exposure to the more sensational / noteworthy news, which will tend to not reflect great things about what's going on.

I also found that when I was in China for a while in 2009, the 12 hour time different made America feel very, very far away, and things seemed even stranger and weirder as a result - but maybe that was just me. It made things seem feel out of touch not only by distance, but time as well.

These caveats aside, there are plenty of awful things going on in the USA right now, and huge systemic problems which are unfortunately not being approached in serious fashions. This being said, it's level of 'broken-ness' is probably not particularly greater than it was, say, last year, or the year before.

[olegious]

As cliche as it may sound, the key to America's success is the "American Dream." As long as the dream is alive, the US will be OK. My parents immigrated in 1992 with 2 small kids, little to no English and no money. Fast forward to today- they own a business, 3 homes, have put both kids through undergrad (I've gone on to complete a masters) and have achieved a fairly comfortable upper middle class lifestyle.

Why am I telling you this? As long as "the little guy" believes that if you're intelligent and willing to work hard, you can achieve great things in America (in many places around the world this is not always the case), this country has a future. I for one, believe in the American dream and am willing to work hard to live it and preserve it for generations to come.

[va_coder]

I just took a walk on a sunny day to the bookstore to browse the magazine rack, stopped by the coffee shop to get a Latte and bought a cupcake at the new bakeshop.

Things are pretty awesome in the U.S. of A as far as I'm concerned.

Oh and last year I attended John Stewart's Restore Sanity gathering at the mall (and I wasn't shot at!)

[watmough]

You may not have been shot, but beyond a few 100's of thousands of people being a bit happier, absolutely nothing was accomplished. Nada. Zip. Zero.

Last year, 2010, 3 million homes received a note that they were in some stage of foreclosure. 1 million homes were repossessed by lenders.

Granted all those homes may not be occupied, but most likely were. Think about what a million families actually look like... homeless, in motels, in cars, at in-laws.

US citizens need to start addressing some of these issues.

[va_coder]

I rent. There's no shame in renting. Most people whose home was repossed aren't homeless - they went back to renting.

I didn't buy a house because I educated myself about the 3X rule. You should only buy a house that is worth 3X your income.

Did Wall Street screw a lot of vulnerable people? Yes. But people like Elizabeth Warren, who leads the new Consumer Protection Bureau are making substantive improvements to the system.

[atgm]

I live in Japan and have the same problem, to some extent. News coming out of America is largely negative. But then again, news in general is largely negative -- negative sells. It's not just how we rate things, but also what people choose to report.

When I want to sigh and get depressed about America, I look at the news that I see about Japan and that reminds me that people only really want to report/read about the worst/weirdest of a country, really. Japan isn't all herbivorous otaku, whale killers, and child molesters. America isn't all idiocracy, TSA gropers, and embezzlers.

Another way to look at it is that every single American startup post or Ask HN you see here is a positive post -- these are people trying to live the American dream and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Idealized? Maybe. But it's certainly not negative.

[bpodgursky]

News in the US will always be somewhat sensationalist and only expose the problems, but this is a good thing--there are a lot of regimes out there where things look bright and shiny on the surface, but only because the problems are hidden and media is suppressed.

I'm not saying that everything on that list isn't a problem, but at least they're getting attention and people are looking at them. We still have a free (if somewhat immature) media, and we shouldn't forget that there's a huge selection bias in what makes it to the news.

[proexploit]

Bad things get all the publicity. If something is going well and people are content, it's just "normal" and no one is going to write articles about it. Slightly bad things are enough to get news attention. You'll always see more negative news than positive.

[tshtf]

If HN were around 20, 30, or even 100 years ago, there would probably be a similar proportion of these stories. Perhaps things are getting worse, but I doubt the rate of change is changing.

[crystalarchives]

Great suggestions guys, thanks for putting things in perspective and glad to hear fellow Americans are still loving it in the motherland.

[Mz]

I don't check "best" very often. I also don't spend much time on the front page. I check "comments" and "new" and "ask" a lot more. I stopped watching the News years ago. It's mostly sex and violence -- ie "eye candy"/sensationalism of some sort. I think part of your problem is that you hang out on "best". "Popular" stuff is often sensationalistic in the worst possible way.