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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

Just wondering, why is there no data for the USA?

[edit: also, Russia, most of Europe, Australia, and many other regions. Maybe I’m missing something on mobile?]

You're not missing anything; those countries are completely white on the map. "Limited access to streets" is kind of a euphemism for what we used to call "third-world slums" which aren't really a problem in developed countries so those countries probably get a lot less study.

I saw an interesting paper a while back about computing the minimum number of shacks to tear down that would allow putting in new streets/utilities to provide access to every structure. It's a very different mindset from urban planning in the developed world.

I looked at the city where I used to live in Brazil and most of it is red. It doesn't make sense. It's a pretty normal city not unlike a first world one. I'm not sure what they're really measuring there.

There is. You have to zoom in on a region. I zoomed in on Portland, OR and found areas of light pink.

I'm more curious why the Sahara is considered a neighborhood with limited street access, but the sparsely populated Oregon High Desert (SE Oregon) is not.

Nomad people consider all sand their roads, and since their home moves with them the acceess is pretty neat?

There's quite a bit of red on Puerto Rico!

After 2 devastating hurricanes in less than a decade their infrastructure is pretty poor. I visited 1 year ago, before the last hurricane, and most roads were good but they still had downed trees and destroyed buildings everywhere. (Countryside and San Juan, their city).

they are most likely purposely being left off the map since theyd probably show up red in some areas just like ukraine and belarus which would imply the west has these 'slum issues' wich would be kind off ridiculous. this would not support their case.

Considering the lack of red in both El Salvador and Russia, it seems pretty clear that the countries colored in are simply those the researchers chose to study. Nobody believes El Salvador has no slums and nobody is trying to make Russia look good. Exactly one impacted region is depicted in North Korea, in the Kaesong region -- it's easy to see why from the map.

i dont have an explanation for excluding those. except russia. a huge piece of red there would be a very easy giveaway something is wrong. however the authors can do a specific thing for a specific reason and still leave out some other places. the idea to leave out the us, the eu, brittain, norway, iceland, australia, new zealand, japan, etc in addition to those you mentioned can't be counted as mere coincidence. that's deliberate. the fact that the method is very flawed is painfully obvious from other things as well. those large very red swathes of lands in Niger and mauretania are a stretch of sahara, not some massive slum. i hope the authors will not be discouraged by their failure. next time i will hope they will include the west and not paint the desert/tundra/etc red.

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