[lisper]

The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals. 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-(

[refurb]

That's just your human brain succumbing to its recency bias. As someone who has been around for way too many decades, it was like this in the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's.

And corruption is way down from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt).

And your "save the world from fascism" happened at the same time most of the US was segregated.

[Lammy]

Go back to the ‘50s and ‘60s and you can actually see things change. California voters put the brakes on infrastructure projects starting in the late 1950s, for example, like the 1959 anti-freeway San Francisco Supervisors vote. It all made sense to me once I learned about the Second Great Migration, a topic that strangely wasn’t taught to me at all by American public school curriculum.

[mikem170]

>Go back to the ‘50s and ‘60s and you can actually see things change.

The time just after World War II was kind of an economic anomaly for the U.S. Our population of about 4% of the world generated something like 50% of the worlds GDP, most other industrial economies were still rebuilding.

It might not be accurate to consider that period as a baseline for purposes of economic comparison.

[Lammy]

I'm making a population comparison, not explicitly an economic one.

[heavyset_go]

And inequality is up since the 70's, as are housing, health care and cost of living expenses, while wages have remained stagnant for nearly 50 years.

[refurb]

Sure, you can cherry pick certain statistics for any period. That doesn’t tell you anything.

My point was, the US is not falling apart. Or if it is, it’s always been falling apart.

The current situation is not unique.

[heavyset_go]

> Sure, you can cherry pick certain statistics for any period. That doesn’t tell you anything.

I'm curious what this is supposed to tell you, then:

> And corruption is way down from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt).

[refurb]

That was a counterpoint to the OPs concern about corruption today in an attempt to convey that it’s not all that different now, not to argue it’s better now.

[scarface74]

Has any other President - Republican or Democrat - actively tried to make it less effective? Why are we pretending that the current administration is normal?

This isn’t a difference on the margins about whether you believe in supply side or demand side economics.

If you look back on Presidents or politicians on either side of the aisle. We have never seen anything like this during my lifetime (born in 74).

I didn’t agree with all of the policies or proposed policies of Republican or Democratic candidates on either side. But it was more like seeing your favorite sports team win or lose. I didn’t feel like they would or did do long term harm to the country (except for the deficit).

I would say the same about any of the other candidates in 2016. If they had won it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.

[jessaustin]

The orange one has done his share of awful things (like every president), but if this virus hadn't appeared we would very much still be in the "sports team" situation.

We will certainly destroy ourselves by other means before "the deficit" affects us in the least. It never stopped us from buying more weaponry; now that there is obviously something else on which to spend money suddenly we should worry about it?

[scarface74]

No we wouldn’t and by pretending anything Trump has done even pre-Covid is both trying to see “both sides” not to get flagged by HN and to say that all Republicans are just as malicious, corrupt and incompetent as his administration has been and is a lazy argument. I went out of my way not to paint all Republicans since 1980 with the same brush.

Before Trump, a Republican administration supported both the Voting Rights Act - didn’t try to disenfranchise minorities - and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Both Republicans and Democratic Presidents supported the EITC.

Bush didn’t demonize Muslims after 9/11 he went out of his way not to.

No I didn’t agree with all of their policies, but I didn’t feel that they went out of their way to target “others”. They showed a level of decency and poise that you don’t see now.

I still don’t see how this is coming off partisan.

To act as if any other President of either party in modern history has done the same things that he has said and done is a severe case of “whataboutism”.

[clarkmoody]

WTF happened in 1971?

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

[dexen]

A sharp change in labor supply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chart_of_foreign_born_in_...

due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...

[bhupy]

Who cares about inequality — poverty is down: https://www.nber.org/papers/w26532. The difference between the rich and the poor is less important than making sure that the poor are rich enough.

Real median income is up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

Tax revenues as a %age of GDP are mostly flat: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

US median disposable income is about the 3rd highest on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

[heavyset_go]

And yet 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck[1], and 40% don't have the money to cover a $400 emergency expense[2]. For our riches, we have the highest population of people without health insurance in the first world, and the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical expenses.

Inequality drives cost of living up. Normal people in the US are competing with the richest people domestically and internationally for housing. While normal people need housing to shelter themselves, the rich, especially the rich outside of the US, see housing as a means to store value.

In the past 15 years, the largest growing population of homeless people are entire families, and the most common reasons for homelessness are lack of affordable housing, insufficient income, or loss of income.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2019/01/11/live-pa...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-em...

[api]

From what I have both seen and read, housing costs are the #1 cause of this. They have exploded in the last 25 years.

The thing that blows my mind is that the COVID recession shows no sign of slowing down house price growth, though it has tempered rents in expensive markets.

If housing still rises even now, something is totally insane.

[nemo44x]

Interest rates have crumbled over that same period. As interest rates go down, housing prices go up. The problem becomes the down payment goes up making it difficult for a lot of people to get the initial equity.

People often forget that mortgages are essentially bonds. When you get a mortgage you are essentially selling the bond. As interest rates fall the bond gets more expensive which means the price of homes rises since servicing the bond gets less expensive in terms of interest. But the principal goes up which means you’re building equity more quickly. So this is good - if you can get to the down payment part.

And interest rates can still get lower. However there are large parts of the country where homes are relatively inexpensive. But they’re cheap for a reason - not many people want to live there.

[jandrewrogers]

Yet the Federal Reserve study whence the "$400 emergency expense" claim was sourced states that 75% of adults are doing okay financially or living comfortably. The question about a $400 expense was about how people would pay for an unexpected $400 expense, not if they could pay for it. Only 12% could not pay for a $400 expense. The news media always tries to paint a dire narrative.

Per the US government, the median household in the US has $1000/month left over after all ordinary expenses. At the 78%, this is around $3500/month. As this strongly suggests, the statistics you are referring to do not actually assert what is often claimed of them. The underlying studies paint a more consistent, and less dire, picture.

[bhupy]

> 40% don't have the money to cover a $400 emergency expense

This is an often cited statistic that's been essentially debunked for being flawed and misleading[1][2].

> And yet 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck

Again, not a particularly useful statistic because 1. real consumption per capita has been increasing[3], and 2. the US has the 2nd highest household consumption[4] in the world.

"Living paycheck to paycheck" includes people that are destitute, but also people that just consume more than they should, and also people that are unable to save money due to increasing housing costs (not due to inequality, but due to zoning regulations). Of those who claim to be living "paycheck to paycheck", you don't know which are destitute.

> For our riches, we have the highest population of people without health insurance in the first world, and the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical expenses.

Sure, this has nothing to do with inequality. If you gave everyone health insurance in America today, inequality would hardly change. And inequality is NOT the root cause of America's healthcare system, the root cause is a series of policies passed in the 20th century that resulted in 1) healthcare being tied to employment, 2) a lack of any form of price transparency, 3) supply constraints on medical professionals that have resulted in the highest PPP adjusted salaries for medical practitioners in the developed world.

> Inequality drives cost of living up. Normal people in the US are competing with the richest people domestically and internationally for housing. While normal people need housing to shelter themselves, the rich, especially the rich outside of the US, see housing as a means to store value.

We’ve always had mega-rich families. The new phenomenon we’re seeing now is not that "normal people" are competing with the super-rich, it's that they are competing with the upper-middle class. Where I live (Brooklyn), The rents aren’t driven up because I’m in a bidding war with Jeff Bezos; they’re driven up because I’m in a bidding war with other high earning millennial white collar workers. The “middle class” worker doesn’t stand a chance in our neighborhood.

Also the cost of living isn't up uniformly across the US, it's only up in most big cities where the root cause is attributable almost entirely to poor zoning regulations, not "inequality". You can see the salary one must earn to purchase the median house in every city[5] and outside SF/NY/Seattle, it's around the median household income.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...

[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/it-true-40-americans-cant-handle-4...

[3] https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=A794RX0Q048SBEA

[4] https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-...

[5] https://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home-buying-25-c...

[triceratops]

The richest have the loudest voices. Inequality distorts government plans, priorities, and how laws are written.

[bhupy]

That’s just not true, in practice, though. Laws are written by legislators who ultimately need to win the confidence of their constituents. No amount of money will install a representative who cannot win a democratic election.

We’ve seen this play out time and time again.

Jeff Bezos’ own district in Washington State is represented by a socialist.

Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing than Donald Trump, and still lost.

In the 2020 Democratic Primaries, Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion (!!) on his campaign, and won just 9.4% of the popular vote (1.38% of pledged delegates).

Tom Steyer (a no-name billionaire), spent $343 million on his election, and won a humiliating 0.38% of the popular vote (0% of pledged delegates). Interestingly, you would think he would have at least 1/3 of Bloomberg's vote, which suggests that the vast majority of the variance in Bloomberg's vote share can be attributed to his existing name recognition as a famous businessman/politician. No amount of money was enough to make their core message resonate with ordinary voters.

Bernie Sanders spent $195 million on his election, having spent less than Bloomberg + Steyer and while having handily beaten both.

Joe Biden spent $105 million on his campaign, less than Bernie, and still beat him by 3 million votes.

Elizabeth Warren spent $121.31 million on her campaign, and also handily beat Bloomberg + Steyer while having spent far less than them, while losing to Biden while having spent more than him.

Those are just the anecdotes (of which there are many more). Decades of research[1] suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research in the last century found[2] that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear[3]. Even the studies[4] that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money actually causes wins.

In fact, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to change their vote because they liked your ad.

Yes, money helps you broadcast your message. If your message resonates, you can even win elections (what a concept). But money alone isn't persuasive.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2605401

[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002764203260415

[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138764?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...

[4] http://www.sas.rochester.edu/psc/clarke/214/Gerber98.pdf

[triceratops]

I didn't say anything about election funding. Having money to hire lobbyists lets people influence legislation to their benefit.[1] Big businesses can demand larger tax breaks by playing cities off each other.[2] These are just two ways in which more money translates into more influence.

1. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/0...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_HQ2#Criticism_and_oppos...

[marcinzm]

And the murder rate is half of what it was in the 80s. A number of cities no longer look like third world war zones. Etc.

[rtx]

Inequality is a fake parameter. Economy is not a zero sum game.

[ed25519FUUU]

Healthcare costs are up, but you don’t have to worry about dying from a scraped knee.

This is by far the greatest era to be alive. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.

[heavyset_go]

> Healthcare costs are up, but you don’t have to worry about dying from a scraped knee.

As an American, you just need to worry about dying from incredibly common and treatable diseases like cancer, heart disease or diabetes due to lack of treatment. If you show up to an emergency room without insurance or ability to pay and expect chemo or a supply of insulin or blood pressure medication, you're out of luck.

My grandfather who fought in foxholes in South Pacific jungles didn't have to worry about dying from a scraped knee, either.

[nradov]

The US is at or near the top for cancer 5 year survival rates.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cancer-su...

[heavyset_go]

> The US is at or near the top for cancer 5 year survival rates.

That doesn't mean anything for someone with cancer and no health insurance. If they show up to a emergency room expecting top tier cancer treatment some people in the US can afford, they are not going to get it, while they would in other first world countries. This is what my post was addressing.

Ironically, cancer survival rates are almost the only metric[1] by which the US medical system outranks other nations. When it comes to quality of care, health outcomes, mortality rates, etc they are almost all universally worse in the US than other first world nations[1].

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...

[nashalo_nighly]

Which is mostly due to lead time bias and overdoagnosis.

[floren]

> My grandfather who fought in foxholes in South Pacific jungles didn't have to worry about dying from a scraped knee, either.

I mean he literally had to worry about dying of gangrene from a scraped knee in the tropics, but I get your drift.

[seanmcdirmid]

Much of, not most. Jim Crow South was never a majority of the country, and racism in the north was much more implicit, segregation was never formal.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Segregation was rarely government mandated in the north during that time period, but it was often formal; many sports teams, property covenants, and unions prohibited black membership.

[fpgaminer]

> And your "save the world from fascism" happened at the same time most of the US was segregated.

Not only that, eugenics and Darwanism were popular in the U.S. at the time. Hell, we still forcibly sterilize people in the U.S. to this day.

[chrisseaton]

> The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals.

Americans have been saying this about their own country for decades. Many people see the worst in their own. And if anything I think the outlook was more pessimistic than now in the 80s, and even more than that in the 70s.

Realistically, for all its faults, the US is still where I'd aspire to live for best opportunity and quality of life if I couldn't live in my home country for some reason.

[vmception]

> if I couldn't live in my home country for some reason.

Which is why America is populated by extremes.

Almost everyone here was either kicked out of or lacked consensus with the prevailing, fairly benign version of whatever was practiced where they came from.

[moojd]

It's a manifestation of our inner American Exceptionalism. We only have the ability to see our country as "exceptionally good" or "exceptionally bad"

[vmception]

Starting? Either that was an attempt to not bruise the egos of patriots, or you just haven't been paying attention.

Here is how these conversations go:

Someone will make comparisons to the worst countries in the world to rationalize why America is number 1 in a race nobody even entered into. Instead of comparing it to 21st century developed nations. Rinse, repeat.

Follow by:

Could those developed countries have made those advances without the US subsidizing and helping de-risk the cost of their defense? Shrug

Does it makes sense for the US to allocate budget towards said defense while its domestic infrastructure flails? Shrug

Does the structure of the US contribute to this separation of foreign policy and domestic policy? With the broke states responsible for and failing at handling their own affairs, with the well funded Federal Government maintaining consensus by not getting into state affairs, forcing it to use its budget abroad on pet projects? Shrug

Does an actual budget really matter when the world has an infinite demand for dollars meaning that the US really could fund any domestic project and its external hegemony? Shrug

Are those developed countries' taxes really that high in comparison to what everyone in the US pays for anyway? Which country specifically? In many cases where high populations of Americans actually live, no it is very equivalent and Americans get the short end of the stick. Shrug.

[lisper]

> Starting?

Fixed.

[Ericson2314]

Amen

[jazzyjackson]

People like to dismiss this by pointing to the shiny parts of America, but every city in the world has good and bad neighborhoods. The surprising thing about corrupt countries is the wealth inequality -- the political class is full of grifters who pocket the contracting fees and the citizens who are supposed to be recipients of government services are wondering why the highway has been under construction for the last 5 years. Or the bullet train in California. Billions of dollars are disappearing with barely a track bed to show for it. I'll quote this NYT piece.

"“Approximately two dozen other countries have found H.S.R. feasible, including Uzbekistan,” she said, referring to high-speed rail. “And there is no reason it can’t be done here.”"

The government collects and spends trillions of dollars, and most of that is wealth transfer to contractors, much less value reaches the ground, where much of the country is dotted with emptied out farm towns and improvised shelters. If you don't believe America looks the way some see it, take a cross country train, you go through everybody's back yard that way.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-28/californ...

[DuskStar]

Funnily enough, the biggest obstacle to HSR in the US is all the restrictions we've put in place to protect people from corrupt or otherwise authoritarian officials. Uzbekistan doesn't have to worry about environmental impact reports or people complaining that the rail line will hurt their property values...

[blhack]

I would highly encourage you to reassess where you are getting your information about the world if you genuinely believe this.

I’m seeing this sentiment expressed more and more, and it seriously concerns me. If you look at the data, almost any data which compares the US to other countries, you’ll see that the US is at or near the top.

This isn’t blind patriotism. Seriously if you are feeling like the US is becoming a “3rd world country” see if you can quantify it in some way. What is deteriorating, and how does that compare to other places in the world?

[lisper]

> I would highly encourage you to reassess where you are getting your information about the world if you genuinely believe this.

I have traveled extensively throughout the world and my assessment was based on my personal experience. But...

> If you look at the data, almost any data which compares the US to other countries, you’ll see that the US is at or near the top.

Not so.

The U.S. is a peer to Serbia in infant mortality [1]. It is behind India and Lithuania in terms political freedom and civil liberties (as rated by freedomhouse [2] [3]) and a peer to Chile in terms of economic freedom [4] and government corruption [5]. The U.S. ranks 38th in math and 24th in science education.

And an anecdotal but IMHO significant data point: I have lived in the U.S. for fifty years. I have NEVER had a piece of U.S. mail go missing, until this year, when I have had THREE checks vanish into the cosmic void. (The fact that paper checks are even still a thing here is a testament to how far behind we have fallen.)

---

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/infant-mo...

[2] https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores?sort...

[3] https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores?sort...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_...

[5] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-rank

[6] https://parentology.com/stem-education-statistics-2019-how-t...

[tripletao]

Amusingly, the Freedom House analysis breaks out India and Indian Kashmir separately. If the USA could move its worst behavior into a separate line item, then it would probably do better too. Your corruption index puts the UAE, a federation of absolute monarchies, ahead of the United States. Hong Kong scores at the top of your economic freedom index, even as billionaires disappear from its streets because they displeased Beijing.

Rankings that use a metric complicated enough to give the compiler heavy discretion on the order (like your 2-5) are compiled by people promoting certain ideals. Major powers rarely score at the top, regardless of whether they "deserve" to, because that defeats the political purpose--if you're trying to promote X, then telling the world's most powerful country that they're also the most X has little benefit, just encouragement for them to get complacent and backslide.

In objective rankings, the USA's health care system is indefensible, unless you're both wealthy and in genuine need of unusually high-tech care; but that infant mortality is still just 1.3x Canada's. The American education system seems to be well above average; per your link the USA ranked 8/48 and 11/48 for science and math respectively, out of 48 countries that themselves are mostly well above the global average.

It's reasonable to hold the USA to a higher standard than other countries, given its outsize influence and resources. Indeed, the impulse among both Americans and others to criticize America's real faults, sometimes in hyperbolic terms, is probably one of the major forces pushing to correct them. Anyone who net believes the American standard of living--especially for rich Americans, but for poor Americans too--isn't spectacularly above the global average is dangerously mistaken, though.

[riantogo]

Any data shows US near the top? Are you sure you looked at data at all?

Here is data from top sources referenced in the wiki:

Education: ranked 40 of 72 in mathematics, 25 of 72 in science, 24 of 72 in reading

Health: ranking 42nd among 224 nations

Standard of living: ranked 25 out of 151 countries for 2018

Politics: ranked 45 out of 180 countries

Peace: ranked 121 out of 162 countries

Economics: ranked 17 out of 178 economies

Reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_th...

(You might be able to pick slightly better ranking based on your choice of source, but yeah, we are no where near the top. If you filter for developed economies we are near the bottom or have already slipped through the floor)

[refurb]

I always find these subjective rankings by “think tanks” as pretty entertaining (I’m excluding the objective ones like life expectancy).

Regardless if you lean left or right, there is an implicit bias to a lower ranking. Why? Because it means “we need to enact my policy”.

If you dare come out and say “everything is fine” nobody is going to vote for you.

[bleepblorp]

With specific regard to electrical infrastructure, World Bank data ranks the US in 25 place globally. Notably, the US is behind Canada (which faces very similar geographic and climactic issues with its infrastructure), the UK, France, and Japan. The only major developed democracies to score worse are Germany, Italy, and Australia.

Source: https://govdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/heb130a3c?countr...

[guerrilla]

> This isn’t blind patriotism.

Maybe it's just ignorance then. Quality of life in Northern Europe is far better than it ever was in California, which in retrospect looks like a joke.

[refurb]

What is quality of life? Sounds pretty subjective. One person may rank weather at the top, so Northern Europe sucks. Another may rank parental leave at the top, so the US sucks.

Probably the most objective way is to measure how people vote with their feet.

[nemo44x]

I think it’s an interesting point. The USA always gets compared to Europe, especially Western Europe with this so called “Quality of Life” statistic. However there are far more Western Europeans moving to the USA than the other way.

I don’t know, my siblings and I do better than our parents who put time in to raise us. We didn’t have much except each other. We weren’t without but we never had a vacation or went out to eat. Went to public schools, etc. But my parents respected each other and sacrificed a bit to raise us. I’d say my family has moved from working class into middle class and upper middle class for some of us.

Our quality of life seems pretty nice. It’s weird because when I moved to nyc many of the people that complained a lot were from well to do families and they clearly weren’t doing better. They were being recycled downwards and they seemed to resent successful people because of it. They make a lot of noise but my friends back home, many of which are doing better than their folks, don’t go on social media talking about.

[thatfrenchguy]

> However there are far more Western Europeans moving to the USA than the other way

Yeah, you have a “engineer” bias: people move to the US when they make top 10% income because it’s the only way your life is better than in a Western European country. You don’t see Europeans making median wage in the US because that would be quite stupid.

My parents combined make maybe 15-20% of my income in the US, they still go on more vacation than me, don’t have to worry about figuring out how healthcare work (yup gotta make sure you don’t go to a out of network hospital by accident otherwise hello 300000$ debt), and sent their kids to university for almost free.

[nemo44x]

So if you want to strive and achieve excellence, come to America.

If you want to go on vacation more, live in Western Europe.

What are the long term effects of this?

[guerrilla]

> What is quality of life? Sounds pretty subjective.

I guess it would sound like that if you don't know anything about it and don't bother to look into it and don't realize people, including the OECD, thoroughly study it. [1][2] Furthermore, it's pretty idiotic to ignore subjectivity since it's the only thing that really matters in the end. If people in Europe rate their life better then Americans do then clearly Europeans are better off.

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

[2]. https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org

[grecy]

The US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, child poverty, child health and safety, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, rate of obesity, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse, rate of prescription drug use, incarceration rate, rate of assaults, rate of homicides, income inequality, wealth inequality, and economic mobility.

also Maternity/Paternity Leave, Paid Sick Time, and Paid Vacation

In many of those areas (incarceration rate, rate of homicides) the US is doing vastly worse than other OECD countries.

Explore the data yourself - https://data.oecd.org/

[cobookman]

You do realize that most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black of some sort in the same time period.

1 rolling black out every 20 years isn't all that crazy. Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?

[the_mitsuhiko]

> You do realize that most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black of some sort in the same time period.

Do you have some numbers for that? The only load shedding I remember in Europe was done through turning off large consumers and they would typically do this on their side.

[mpweiher]

> most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black out

Name one?

I've never experienced (or heard) of one in Germany, for example, during my lifetime.

And of course it's not "rolling blackout", but "rolling blackouts", plural.

[baskire]

Here’s two examples of power grid failures in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-blackout-raises-questions-over-...

[morelisp]

The size (not always duration) of outage in your second link would be considered routine in many American cities. To take SF as an example:

- 2020, well, here you go

- 2018/2019 should also need no overview, CA is probably the worst power situation in OECD countries in the 21st century

- 2017, 88k without power https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/04/21/power-outage-sh...

- 2016, 23k https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/10/14/pge-power-outag...

- 2015, 45k https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/06/08/thousands-of-ba...

I'm only picking the first Google result for each year. I could keep going but I hope the point is made: Berlin got a blackout once in a decade like most American cities get multiple times a year. It reacted comparatively slowly because it's so infrequent there was no recovery plan. The political impact of the outage was huge, the country's attitude was that everything is collapsing - and by "collapsing", they mean "like America is all the time."

[tripletao]

> Berlin got a blackout once in a decade like most American cities get multiple times a year.

The Berlin power outage linked above was over thirty hours, and the SF outages you linked were a few hours. To bury that in "(not always duration)" seems misleading to me. That said, the 2019 power cuts were indeed approaching third-world duration and frequency, to the point that homeowners who could afford it applied the usual third-world workarounds (gas generators, etc.). That was mostly outside the biggest cities, but huge numbers of people were affected.

And how did we get from SF to "most American cities"? California's grid reliability is notoriously and distinctively bad, and a huge political topic here too (though with little progress after many years). The World Bank[1] puts the overall USA's quality of electricity supply solidly in the middle of high-income countries though, slightly ahead of Germany.

We also seem to be mixing load shedding (i.e., the utility realizes they can't safely supply all their customers and therefore deliberately cuts power to some) with accidental outages. They look the same to the customer, but perhaps imply different kinds of bad planning by the utility.

1. https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/ha7db856d?country...

[morelisp]

> We also seem to be mixing load shedding... with accidental outages.

Not 'we'; I'm well-aware of the difference but the person I was responding to gave examples of accidental outages.

The US has considerably more of both than Europe, especially Germany (SAIDI measured in hours vs. 15-20 minutes), regardless of what investment-focused metrics the World Bank is giving.

[mpweiher]

> how did we get from SF to "most American cities"

2020

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/08/07/blacko...

https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2020/08/12/chicago-black...

https://www.nola.com/news/article_a64debc0-c3dc-11ea-8d5a-57...

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/11/detroit...

https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/07...

...

2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_blackout_of_July_201...

https://eu.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/07/22/dt...

https://www.rt.com/usa/385646-blackouts-hit-la-ny-sf/

etc.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/detroit-hit-by-major-power-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977

Note that the Berlin blackout affected 30000 people and was caused by a construction company cutting through a cable. All of these affected many more (Chicago: 800K), occur rather frequently and seem to be caused by regular phenomena like weather.

One major reason is that so much of power-distribution is above-ground, on these poles you see everywhere. Storms will knock these over or have falling trees take them down.

>We also seem to be mixing load shedding ... with accidental outages.

Yes. The claim was that "most 1st world countries" experience rolling blackouts. That's not true.

[dmode]

I don’t know what you are comparing. A power outage due to an accident, affecting a limited population is very different than blackouts. Such emergency outages happen every day

[morelisp]

> I don’t know what you are comparing

I'm comparing what the parent asked to compare, even though it's not load shedding.

> Such emergency outages happen every day

In America. Not Germany. Like, yes, literally some level of outage occurs daily, but it's an order of magnitude difference.

US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37652

Germany: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/Companies/S...

[mpweiher]

The subject and question was specifically rolling blackouts and neither of those were rolling blackouts, so no, try again.

Of course failures happen, for example when I was living in Mountain View we had a blackout because a squirrel committed suicide by chewing through a high voltage cable. Or when I was living in Detroit, we were without power and heating for 3 days due to an ice storm. It was a pretty large (and long) outage, and we had freezing temperatures inside the house. Generators were sold out for 500 miles.

Ahh found it: 1985, 370K customers affected

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_in_Michigan

Rolling blackouts are planned power outages because of insufficient capacity.

And note that these rolling blackouts are happening again and again.

[khuey]

I don't know about most but it's certainly not unheard of in places with similar climates. https://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/rolling-bla...

[vondur]

This is more specific to California, not the US as a whole.

[morelisp]

> Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?

I don't know, California, how about you start by spending the billions you need to make sure people just baseline don't burn to death, and then we'll see what delivery reliability looks like?

[rlanday]

Didn’t PG&E also have to shut off a bunch of people’s power last summer to try to avoid burning down any more cities? I recall there was talk about this happening for an entire decade. So really at this point it seems like summer blackouts might be happening every summer in California for the foreseeable future.

[lostlogin]

> 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-(

It was mainly Russia who did that. The US effort may well have saved Europe from Communism though.

[ghufran_syed]

The Russians may have had a little help:

"Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war," Soviet General Georgy Zhukov said after the end of WWII.

"We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."

https://www.rbth.com/defence/2016/03/14/lend-lease-how-ameri...

[refurb]

Russia saved the world from fascism and replaced it with another authoritative system. Not sure I’d call that “saved”.

[reddog]

Ask your friends from the Czech Republic or Hungary or Lithuania about how they were “saved” by Russia.

[encom]

Thanks for that, btw.

[api]

The USSR saved the world from the Nazis and then the US saved the world from the USSR. I like that.

Now who will save the world from the lawless international corporatist panopticon birthed from America? Aliens?

History seems like "she swallowed a spider to eat the fly..."

[bhupy]

s/US/California.

The US is decentralized (especially as it relates to electricity). Most of the rest of the Union is doing just fine.

[TedShiller]

The Indian reservation part is true. Most Americans have never set foot in one. If you want to see what it's like, I recommend driving through the South Dakota reservations. But be prepared for a shock of sadness. They feel like different countries entirely.

It has been great to see the support in recent months for equality among all races in the US. But I wish we would also see more explicit support for Native Americans, for their suffering and their genocide. They are a group that has been exploited, victimized, and stolen from as much as any other group in America.

[trizic]

Maybe it just isn't possible with such a large population. On the other hand, US gives you the opportunity to become filthy rich and it probably helps that you have such a large population to use to your advantage (whether it be labor or customers).

[dmode]

Indian reservations are truly in horrific condition. I have spent many days in Navajo nation during my time in Arizona and it reminds of developing countries

[jrobn]

America as an ideal has failed and anyone who wants to come here should think twice.

Every country has their problems, but years of neglect and backwards thinking on social, civic, and cultural “brick work” has led to this.

The civil rights movement was never carried through. The Cold War mentality of military spending on the ever present “boggieman” wasted tens of trillions of dollars of GDP. The vilification of taxes, civic and social programs while also the decades long trend of funneling money to the top. The dirty politics of special interests, limited access, lobbying and un-checked money in politics. The widening wealth gap in both fiscal and quality of living. The gutting and simplification of the educational system to focus on math and sciences instead of raising well-rounded emotionally intelligent young humans. The belief that shoehorning everyone into a college education and the crippling debt that comes with it. The complete lack of national infrastructural investment since the 1950s.

All of this leads to disillusionment. Especially when generations have grown up being fed this believe of “not in america”. Disillusionment leads to desperation, leads to anger, and hate, and scapegoating, to fake “christian” mega churches were people are scamed out of not only their money but the last tatters of their divinity.

Technology like the internet mixed with stunted critical thinking skills, emotional intelligence, and compassion form into a deadly cocktail that breeds and spreads conspiracy theories and delusions fed to us by our enemies directly into our living rooms, on cable television, on our computers, and into our cellphones. Very little of it vetted or touched by anyone. To be shared and re-shared on Facebook in fear to our friends.

And all of this wasted human potential at the cost of the only thing we all share. The Earth.

Donald Trump isn’t the problem. He’s a symptom.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The issue here isn't that the California power grid has deteriorated, but that there's an extraordinary heat wave. I don't think it's fair to tie this into a grand decline narrative.

[Majromax]

A robust infrastructure should be able to handle surge loads. This isn't an extraordinary heat wave after some other natural disaster has directly damaged the power grid; it's that the grid as designed and built can't handle this load.

It's hardly conclusive for a "grand decline" narrative, of course, since this is just one anecdote for an entire society.

[khuey]

Do we really need to pay for an electric grid that can handle a once every 20 year load?

[cableshaft]

Thanks to climate change, this is probably not going to continue to be a 1 in 20 year load. Expect this to be more and more frequent over the coming years. Might be an every year and/or multiple times a year thing within the next decade or two.

I've read some predictions that suggest these heat waves becoming a regular thing could happen within the next five years, but I'm sticking with more conservative predictions.

[AngryData]

Do you really need to pay for house wiring that can handle a once every 20 year load? Pretty sure you would change your tune when the wiring melts in one of your walls.

[khuey]

This is why houses have circuit breakers, which are functionally identical to the load shedding we had last night ...

[pwarner]

That's the real question. Even 1 in 10 year load, do you build for it or just live with it? It's just a $ decision.

[manquer]

Grid yes , maybe not the power plants themselves. Typically in robust networks you have good interconnects to neighbours you can purchase power from .

Also robust grid which enables selling back to the grid would have helped, such extreme hot weather goes in hand with solar generation

[khuey]

The problem is not lack of grid capacity. California is capable of importing upwards of 11 GW[0] but there was only around 8 GW[1] available yesterday because it's hot in neighboring states like Oregon too.

The load shedding occurred around 8-10pm after the sun has gone down (but while it's still quite hot) so more solar wouldn't help much.

[0] http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx and select 9/13/2019 [1] Same as above but select 8/14/2020.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I think you're misunderstanding how power grids work. There's no way to stockpile large supplies of power like you can with food and water; to first order, all electricity that's produced today has to be consumed today. So it's an impossible task to have enough capacity available for arbitrary demand surges. It's not just a matter of shoveling coal in the furnaces twice as fast or drawing down the local power reservoirs.

[TMWNN]

I would hate for vmception and lisper to learn about the European heat wave of 2003, which killed 30,000-70,000 https://www.vox.com/world/2019/6/26/18744518/heat-wave-2019-... .