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by umanwizard 795 days ago
If by "the rest of the world" you mean a cherry-picked selection of the most advanced countries, then yes, the US is behind on internet access (and everything else).

It never makes sense to me when people say how the US ranks last among developed countries on a bunch of metrics. Of course, that just means the US is indeed... less developed than those countries. If it's not fair to compare the US to Somalia, it's not fair to compare it to Sweden either. It just is what it is, somewhere between the two development extremes.
1 comments
mynameisvlad 795 days ago
How, exactly, are you supposed to compare if not to other countries? There’s no bar for “this is what a developed country’s internet should look like” so the only way to compare is to do it against other countries roughly in the same range as the US.

It’s also entirely factual to say that in comparison to other developed countries, the US lags in internet.

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umanwizard 795 days ago
If the US is significantly behind developed countries in practically every category, why do you consider it a developed country? What does “developed” mean?

> other countries roughly in the same range as the US.

The same range of what variable? How do you measure/define this?

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mynameisvlad 795 days ago
There are several definitions for what makes a country “developed” and the US is solidly in all of them.

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

I’m not sure how you can possibly argue that the US is not “developed”.

> The same range of what variable? How do you measure/define this?

Feel free to take any of those lists and compare the US to countries around them in those lists. The countries might differ slightly, but the notion of what is a “developed” country has been firmly established for a long time now.

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umanwizard 795 days ago
> I’m not sure how you can possibly argue that the US is not “developed”.

The U.S. is considered developed only because it’s extremely rich. However, the general state of its infrastructure, education, governance, media, etc. is more typical of a developing country in many ways.

That’s my point: all these lists of things the U.S. is worse at than every developed country are collectively what it means to be developed, more so in my mind than just being rich.

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trimethylpurine 794 days ago
only because it’s extremely rich

Wtf!? Yes!

Now I'm curious what you thought developed means.

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trimethylpurine 795 days ago
You compare cities, since you need to include average income.
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