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Comment by speakspokespok | Hacker News Reader

I just spent the last 4 years living in a series of countries that Americans would call ‘3rd world’. Places where proper funding of infrastructure, let alone inspections are so far below US metrics of adequate, they’d legitimately scare you.

Bridges and overpasses that exist until they break and the people die. People call out to God for justice! But all that infra is then rebuilt the same way if it’s rebuilt / when it’s rebuilt.

Something something American tech people have forgotten just how amazing the US is because they don’t realize how good it is. They take too much for granted. They have the safety to be snarky on the internet.

Get a passport and go for a walk.

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"Things are worse elsewhere" is not a valid reason to endure a poor standard of living here when we absolutely do not have to.

So its okay that bridges in US fall, even when being inspected dozen of times and being urged for repairs every time, because other countries have it worse?

Why not compare to country where bridges dont fall at all?

> Why not compare...

On the engineering side - you learn far more from analyzing failures than from analyzing successes.

On the social side - there's nothing mysterious about how the US bureaucracy failed here. Briefly contrasting that with Utopialand (where the society & government are different, and bridges never fall) can work as journalism. Or as a rebuttal to "failures will always happen" doomsayers. But the utility is pretty limited. The US isn't a tech company, where you might fire up the troops by talking about how your competition is delivering obviously-better results on metric X.

> On the engineering side - you learn far more from analyzing failures than from analyzing successes.

This is just sophistry. You won't learn how this collapse could have been prevented, or how to prevent others like it, by studying countries where infrastructure is worse. You're already doing better than those places, and still it's not enough.

Also, I'm pretty sure engineering schools study both failures and successes. It is incredible to me that someone would honestly believe studying bridges that have not fallen is useless.

Does the NTSB agree with you, and write lengthy investigative reports about most of the bridges which are successes?

Another engineering quip: "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands. But it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."

This viewpoint is funny, because if you go to many places in Eastern Europe that Americans likely consider "behind", the infrastructure is far, far superior to anything in the US. In my experience, pretty much every developed country has better infrastructure than the US.

Eastern Europe is pretty much by definition not "third world". Third world would be Africa, maybe the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

There's a wide range of circumstances there, which makes sense since "third world" was a political designation, not an economic one.

If you're going to use the political definition of "third world", then you need to include Switzerland. I'm sure that's not the type of country the OP was referring to. These days, almost everyone who uses this term is using it in the economic sense, since the Cold War has been over for decades.

Do you also complain when people use the term "decimated" and they aren't talking about killing 1 of every 10 soldiers?

Sure but my point was more that if you grab your passport and go for a walk, most places are going to have better infrastructure - even the “second world” countries like the Balkans.

No need for the condescension. Many of the people here don't even live in the US anyway.

You can also get a passport and go somewhere better. And the US is richer then those places. So take a walk and think about how to actually systematically improve infrastructure management.

> how amazing the US is because they don’t realize how good it is.

And then there's a political commentator who calls the United States (and the United Kingdom) a Fourth World -- and that's not a positive thing. https://archive.is/UIr49

How America Collapsed and Became a Fourth World Country

How America (and Britain) Became Failed States

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