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Apologetics for America
I'm a big fan of the United States. It's a big country. It's a safe country. The people are wealthy, kind, industrious, and have done more than their fair share of upholding the Pax Americana under which the majority of the world prospers, including those who would tear it down.
I would go so far as to say that I'd be significantly happier if I had been so lucky as to have been born in a counterfactual universe where my parents had emigrated there, even keeping all my myriad flaws like ADHD and depression.
It's a country that holds multitudes, and has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying:
And then achieving the minor miracle of making the vast majority of them upstanding proud Americans regardless of caste and creed.
(To such an extent that it has lost the memetic immune system needed to assimilate some of the people who meet that criteria but are resilient to anything but force)
It is gorgeous. Even after the visiting the UK, a nation that even in its sclerosed and ailing state is significantly better than India, I found myself grossly disappointed at how small and dull the place was, compared to what I've seen of the States.
I count myself lucky to still have the memories of when I visited as a toddler, some of my earliest, a period I enjoyed so much that I came back home speaking English with an American accent when I hadn't even been conversant in the language when I left.
I stare at the reels and pictures posted on Insta by my friends studying there with ill-concealed envy. It looks so huge, so clean, so vibrant, so picturesque and unspoiled. Still a land where someone with innate talent, having landed with but a penny to his name, can ennoble himself through hard work, or at the very least his descendants.
If it were not for the fact that I'm currently ineligible to give the USMLE today, for no fault of my own, I'd bid adieu to my current aspirations for practising and settling in the UK. The latter is still better than India, but do you really need me to tell you how low a bar that is to beat?
I'm about as pro-American as it gets without driving a pickup truck with the stars-and-stripes hanging off it!
The people eat great food. They live in huge houses that appear outright intimidating to the rest of us. They can afford to waste gigaliters of water on a modestly appealing perennial grass and mostly not begrudge the expense.
They can travel visa free to most of the world, and act the fool there (can, not necessarily do, the worst I can say about most American tourists I've met is that they were rather underinformed about where they'd ended up), content in the knowledge that none but utter pariah states would dare raise a hand at them out of fear of Uncle Sam.
They earn salaries that make us all look like paupers. The median wage for a doctor in the US is $250k, fresh out of residency, whereas a senior consultant in the UK might be content to make half that. Indian doctors can only weep, especially lowly ones like me. Even my father, so talented in his surgical field that he'd be nationally famous if he was more fluent in English (instead just being regionally famous), makes only $50k PA at the very peak of his career, after a life of suffering and hustling so his sons would have to suffer and hustle just a bit less.
Even that seemingly colossal sum of money does not achieve the QOL a naive purchasing power calculation would suggest. Even billionaires here must be content to have their money only buy quick trips with their windows rolled up from only upper class enclave to the next.
The world, somewhat more multipolar than it once was, still wobbles unsteadily if you try and make it rotate around an axis not centered on America.
I'd give a lot to be there. I really would.
That is why it so severely vexes me that my girlfriend, a smart, intelligent and hard working woman who makes for an enviable partner to have at my side, holds a view of it so jaundiced you don't know whether to cry or laugh.
Like many Americans, she has had her perception of the States clouded by sheer propaganda that is more interested in cherrypicking out all of America's real problems, and when even all the real ones no longer suffice, concoct ones out of half-truths and whole-cloth to terrorize a broken primate brain that only notices the bad and becomes inured to the good, such that it no longer bears a resemblance to how fucking good they have it.
She stares at me like I'm mad when I tell her I've always wanted to live there, and the few warts on the face of the nation can't hide its timeless beauty.
She believes that abortion has been banned. When I protest otherwise and say that it's only a few states putting restrictions on it, and even then, just a few, she shakes in existential terror at the idea that there's a seething crowd coming for the rights of women, eager to snatch them all away. She thinks racism is a serious concern for hardworking and talented immigrants who speak fluent English, whereas you could put me in a room with a Confederate flag and I'd find a way to end up drinking beers and shooting AR-15s before dawn.
Did I mention she's terrified of gun violence, even if she could live a dozen lives in parallel and not get shot?
She categorically refuses to follow me if I wistfully make plans to find some route to make it there, be it fighting tooth and nail with my med school and the ECFMG to give me the right to at least try my luck, so that I can show them I meet even their high standards.
I'm at the point that I am seriously debating abandoning clinical medicine as a career, to upskill myself in medical ML, so that I have an easier route to the States that isn't gated behind a professional licensing exam I'm not allowed to give. I am still young. I am allowed to dream.
She's rather be middle class in the UK, unable to afford air-conditioning, living in a tiny house, watching our salaries erode into nothingness, and then, if Sunak successfully makes doctors into a thin wrapper for GPT-5, potentially resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, or worse, come back to India with our tails between our legs where we'd have to settle for working shit jobs with longer hours and worse pay.
She's scared of paying the medical bills, when the kind of comprehensive coverage that two professionals making 500k together buys care beyond the dreams of the NHS. Perhaps not value for money, but value.
I criticize America all the time, but only because I love it. I want to gorge myself on cheeseburgers with ridiculous portion sizes, because even if I die fat, I die happy.
I cherish what the Founding Fathers built, a shining city built on a hill of negentropy and abundance, rising out of a swamp wherein dwell the majority of us, only a generation or two removed from near-Malthusian conditions. I would die to keep the barbarians away from the gates, if only because I want to cross them myself, as an esteemed guest if nothing else, hopefully to be one of their own.
I set out to write a post somewhat glorifying (fairly) America, and to invite others to submit arguments that would let my girlfriend see reason. It would seem I've inadvertently done all the heavy lifting, if not for the fact that I've marshaled all these arguments before her and still found them wanting.
I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the two of us are moral mutants who can never reconcile our preferences. I prefer to think that she's wrong about her fears, or weighs the wrong facts too heavily and the right ones not at all.
Help me convince her. I will find it hard to live with myself if I fail.
Oh, and Happy Fourth of July to you all, ye sons and daughters living several decades in the future, hailing from the nation from whose physical and mental toil most of the good things in the world come.
Wait, is it a bit late for that? Um, I blame timezones, pernicious and insidious things that they are.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
Seeing this post on /r/slatestarcodex was.... depressing.
The self-hatred and navel-gazing I'm used to. The willful denial of reality and expansion of minor issues into world-ending reasons that America Sucks is just exhausting.
My Fourth of July party had a temporary above-ground pool and waterslide, bottomless coolers of beers ranging from water-adjacent to palate punchers, a $250 wagyu brisket and ribs and two types of wings and hamburgers, insanely hot sun and frigid A/C, a veritable rainbow of white/indian/mexican people from all over the country.
And still it felt like celebrating the country was verboten, and that I was the only one doing it. Because limitless abortion isn't available everywhere? Because we didn't just pass out billions of dollars for shitty degrees? Because for a brief moment, we tried to say that counting skin color tokens in higher education wasn't the right thing to do here?
Especially in our generation, it feels like we're still atoning for the jingoistic blindness that led us into Iraq and Afghanistan or something. I can't help but feel like I'm surrounded by children who are guilty of not being smarter and more honest about America's downsides (and there are many!) in the past, and so feel compelled to sacrifice their own happiness for it.
I was mildly shocked at how negative the reception was when I first made it, even though it has stabilized at a much higher figure, looking at the ratio of upvotes to down suggests that while almost a thousand people have engaged with it, only ~70% upvoted, which was still enough to drag it to the top kicking and screaming. It was closer to 60 before people already saw it was popular and were more open minded.
Probably the most polarizing thing I've written, for all that I didn't set out to be.
If people want to call me jingoistic for saying that even subtracting the myriad sins of America from its good qualities still results in their cup running over, I can't help them. At least the majority appreciate it, narrow enough as it is.
I loathe my own country, but by god I have much more reason to!
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That's a poem by Emma Lazarus, and it's written on one of several plaques on the statue of liberty because she helped raise money for it's construction.
It was never adopted as any sort of national promise.
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I dunno. I've visited America a couple of times (three months as an exchange student in Oregon, one week in New York), and what struck me, in the end, was that these places where much like any other place I visited; nice to see, many exciting sights, but not someone where I'd want to live if I had the choice...
...not that, objectively speaking, they were somehow worse than Finland, but simply for the reason that this is the only place where I can function in Finnish language and in accordance with the rules of the Finnish culture, and transmit them to the next generation, the ensuring of which is indeed the sole reason for this country to exist as an independent country. If I somehow had to leave this country, America would surely be one of the main choices, but in that regard the whole "anyone can be an American" assimilatory spiel is a negative, not a positive.
If you want to live in Finnish culture using the Finnish language, you need to be a Finn in Finland. America is definitely not for you. We may have a culture, but it's not a national culture in the old sense of being tied to a language, place, and people.
I'm glad there are Finns in Finland who want to preserve the Finnish language and culture and resist global premium mediocre.
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I work in Czech Republic ina place that has younger workers, and listening to them I get the impression that there's no way any local culture is going to be preserved. Internet and memes it spreads will just simply erase all distinctions, maybe more slowly than some of the forced nationalism practices back in 19th century, but surely.
Looking at generic youtube page for Czechs is profoundly depressing.
Do the Canadians, who have had the full firehose of English culture not have a distinctive culture? Certainly they do.
It isn't the same culture as the 19th century, but it never was going to be.
Generally, a distinctive culture is going to survive in pockets and subculture, specific to Czechia they've rapidly began to grow a major presence in American gunculture and guntube.
...
yeah, we've had internet. global media companies, cheap travel since 19th century.
Nothing has changed.
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‘Canadians’ don’t have any distinct culture outside of Quebec (where the ‘culture’ is LARPing as French who are more French than the French) and smaller towns and rural areas of Anglophone Canada that still preserve the more traditional Anglo and Irish cultures that settled the regions of Canada, with some local flavor. That too will disappear eventually, just as distinct Scandinavian-American and Anglo-American customs are slowly vanishing today.
I was just in a rural Francophone area that really did feel like it had its own culture/community... a few years ago. This trip, literally everyone I talked to, regardless of where they were on the political spectrum, brought up, on their own, some version of, "...man, there has been a lot of immigration recently. It's changed things."
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I don't doubt that there's a lot of American/universal culture and memes flying (and Finns certainly punch above their weight in the online meme game , through 4chan and other such forums), but I'm talking more about deeper cultural things like styles of interpersonal communication, things like Finns not looking each other in the eyes when talking or keeping an expectional distance etc. which are much harder to both get rid of (even if one would want to do it) and to convey through surface-level online communication or in an international business environment etc.
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Realistically I suspect it has everything to do with the contrast, or with where you're coming from?
I've never understood the magic hold that America seems to have over the minds of many, but then, I'm from Australia. Every time I've visited America, my reaction has been that it's a perfectly nice place and the people are friendly if exhausting, but the whole place is just... slightly dirtier than Australia. Everything is just a little bit poorer, or a little bit more garish, or a little bit, well, scuzzier.
But then, both Australia and Finland have a higher HDI than America. Of course it isn't going to have that magic for us. While there's immense regional variation within America and while personal taste counts for a whole lot, it's hard to point to objective metrics where these countries do worse than America.
There are bits and pieces of culture you can argue - there are things about America I envy! - but as a complete package, it is pretty clearly a close judgement call that's going to be a matter of taste.
HDI is a meaningless number. It combines the America I live in with the part of America that lives in third world squalor and violence. I don't live there, and they barely affect me. The meaningful comparison is the America a mottizen lives in, compared to the Australia a mottizen lives in.
Those two places are almost identical. Australia may be the only country more culturally egalitarian than America. The Australian cultural values of loyalty and fairness may be my favorite memeplex on earth, and I think the culture encourages a sense of decency, unpretentiousness, and integrity that is sadly missing from my country. We are, as you say, a bit garish and a bit shallow and flighty besides.
There's only one problem with Australia, and that's the tall poppy syndrome. For the median Australian, that's not a problem. For the dreamers, it is.
If you want to be average, Australia is unquestionably the better place.
If you want to be a surgeon, the two are equal. If you want to be a good surgeon, America may have more opportunities. If you want to be the absolute best surgeon on the planet in your subspecialty, you're moving to America. Substitute nearly anything you want for surgeon, from actor to programmer, and you'll get the same result.
When little Australian kids dream of being astronauts, they know they only way they'll ever do so is to train in America to fly on an American spaceship, launched from America.
Most Australians, of course, will never become astronauts. Most Australians (and perhaps most Americans!) would be happier in Australia. But if you want to dream, your dreams will be in America and of America.
It’s simply a myth that a big chunk of the population living in squalor and violence “doesn’t affect you”. Yes, living in a nice New England suburb with a Danish-level homicide rate is different to living in St Louis, but you’re kidding if you don’t think St Louis being the same country as you doesn’t have a big impact. Redistributive taxes, internal migration, government policy around everything from education to healthcare, college admissions, entertainment and media, all of these things are impacted by the sim of the population, which includes the ‘third world’ parts.
A wealthy Parisian, too, can say that what happens in the squalor of the banlieues “doesn’t affect him”. It still does, and it affects him more each year.
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I'm not sure how much any of that is attributable to culture? Yes, if you want to be world-class in something you probably need to move to America, but that's because America has a much larger population and a lot more of the world's wealth flows through America. It's just location. It's no different to the way that, for instance, talented and ambitious New Zealanders tend to move to Australia - not because Australian culture is better than (or even very different from) New Zealander culture, but just because it's bigger. There are more people, more jobs, more network effects.
I think it's probably true that a particular image of or sense of ambition is more prized in American culture - though I also experience this in part as Americans tending to come off as selfish or arrogant more frequently than Australians. One of the most shocking things I noticed in America was the near-total absence of self-deprecation. If an Australian says "I'm the best!", there will always be some sort of self-deprecating smile afterwards, or gentle laughter at one's self, or something to undercut it. You can't let that judgement actually stand, and if you try to let it stand, you're an arse and you deserve everything you're going to get. An American, however, will say "I'm the best!" and genuinely mean it. No matter how absurd or obviously false it is - they tend to get wrapped up in their illusions more.
Does that make them more successful? I doubt it. The British self-deprecate in the same way Australians do, in contrast to that weird brand of earnest selfishness the Americans have, and yet it didn't stop the British building the largest empire in history and creating the international framework that the Americans later inherited. There is still a large and visible cultural gap between Empire/Commonwealth Anglos and American Anglos, but framing that in terms of the Americans just being better at achieving things seems wrong to me.
And on the purely subjective level - yes, America has massive diversity, and you can't treat it all the same. I understand. But it's also, well, true, that every American city I've been to, even the famous centres of commerce and technology and progress, has struck me as, well, a bit nastier than its Australian equivalent. It's possible that it is just an artifact of where I've been. I'm told that the Midwest is actually much nicer than the big coastal cities I've visited, and maybe that's true.
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I've got good news and bad news for you, my Indian friend.
The good news: You're already an American, at least in spirit. You understand this country, and thus you've assimilated. This is a boundless country, a place with no limits. An average sperglord from nowhere can become a millionaire, and having done so, lose it all on one night at the poker table. Having done that, you can hop in your car, head out over the horizon, and start again. Here bankruptcy is no shame, everyone wants to give you a second chance, and you call your boss by his first name.
This is a place where you can be born to a high school girl and a unicycle performer, be raised by that woman and her refugee second husband, get a first job at McDonalds, and become the richest man on the planet and start your own space program.
America is an egalitarian place, with little patience for the social distinctions of your native India and your adopted England. The status hierarchies that dominated life in what Jared Diamond memorably calls "the world before yesterday" are disdained here. America doesn't care about yesterday, and America doesn't care about who you are.
Silvio Berlusconi used to say that Italians would say "He used to be nothing but a singer on a cruise ship, and now he thinks he can be Prime Minister" as a way to mock him - but Americans would say the same exact thing, only as praise. You, a gregarious, funny, open-hearted brown man who loves AR-15s and America? We will love you here, and rednecks will fawn over you like a lost puppy.
The bad news: Your girlfriend is already an American as well, at least in spirit. She understands this country, and thus she's assimilated.
The angriest Americans are not, as you might suspect, the Africans. Whenever the African American asks for redress of his grievances, he does so not as an African, but as an American. He does not care that he was taken from Africa, and his demands revolve around the fulfilment of his rights as an American.
The angriest Americans are white women of a certain middling sort, elevated enough to feel superior to the egalitarian masses, but not quite high enough to escape them. To them, America is hell.
They are angry at America for that same reason you love it. They are angry that it is a place of chaos without social distinction, a place where you could lose a life of savings on the poker table, and where the markers of social position provide less insulation against the market.
This segment of America dominates our community and communication industries, for obvious reasons, and it is this segment of America that has assimilated your girlfriend. For better or for worse, they are as American as we are.
So where should you go from here? You are an American already in spirit, and we want to see you here. I have a dream that sons of former slaves, sons of former slaveowners, and gregarious Indian bros shall all bro out together at the gun range.
Your MD will get you into this country, just not as a doctor. You seem charismatic, and your ability to write clearly is exceptional even for our little community. There are plenty of finance and biotech companies that would gladly hire you. Exceptional communication skills and an MD are a rare combination, and a little brown guy tech job nepotism can't hurt.
As to your girlfriend, you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into. So long as she sees this as a difference between the two of you, the harder you try to convince her of your point, the more she will be convinced that this is something you disagree on.
First, I'd back off. Validate her by validating her complaints. Agree with her that there are things and places about America that are terrible. Tell her that you'd love to visit America, perhaps for an extend period, and that you want to see the parts of America that everyone loves (generally speaking, the national parks).
By validating her concerns, and having provided the social proof of "the parts of America that everyone loves", you have built a relationship around the issue. Now, take the playfully oppositional view. Every time she expresses a Basic White Chick opinion about America, tease her, and tell her she's the one that sounds like an American now. Playfully object to it from a traditional Indian point of view, with a comical bobs-and-vagene intonation. Now you've set up a dichotomy in her mind of the high status first world American vs the low status third worlder.
Now that you've validated her feelings, provided a social context, and then subtly set up your point of view as high status, bring her to western National Park America. Get out of the cities as fast as possible, as they have all the problems she complains about - violence, inequality, greed, etc. Take a road trip. While the parks themselves are surrounded by high-priced tourist traps, rural America five miles away from the park gate is full of the stereotypical gregarious and generous Americans. Interact with them as much as possible. After a month-long road trip seeing everything between the Olympics to the Grand Canyon, she'll love it.
Thank you, this is a very thoughtful comment to make.
Part of the reason I even bothered posting in places where there are plenty of Americans (well, is there much where they aren't the majority? Vk or Bilibili maybe) is that my girl has internalized the kind of self-critique that many Americans themselves succumb to. They take the good for granted, and find only some satisfaction in signal boosting the BAD. Arguments that work against them would work on her.
If you have anything to add regarding the opportunities in Finance and Biotech you mentioned, I'd be very open to hear them. I have considered applying for Pharma roles in the UK, but they're already getting heated as the locals realize that they're strictly superior to normal medicine, at least in terms of pay and WLB.
(Shame she sees everything I write these days, my opsec is utterly compromised haha)
I am intent on dragging her there on a vacation, a close friend of mine getting married in the next year or two is sufficient pretext. Hopefully I have enough money to really see the sights, but I'm shameless enough to lean on the Bank of Mom and Dad if needed to make the most of it!
And indeed, you're right that I'm born an American at heart. Now onto the far harder task of signaling that with the rest of me.
First, the easy part: There are plenty of resources for American doctors who no longer want to practice medicine. Drop Out Club is the big one. An American doctor who no longer wants to practice medicine and an Indian doctor who may not practice medicine are likely to be searching for the same jobs.
Your MD or MBBS comes with two signals: knowledge of medicine, and general aptitude and work ethic. How close do you want to stay to clinical medicine, and how willing are you to take on additional degrees? The most direct paths out here would be management in a health care organization. The next step out would be working for a health insurance company, medical informatics, or a biotech company. Further out would be an investment, consulting, or accounting firm covering a one of those companies. The last step out would be a bottom rung analyst at such a firm. You can find a (likely unpleasant) first job in America, and then move up, or you can lateral out of medicine in the UK, and then jump over the the US. Lateraling into a US firm, and then getting a transfer, is probably the best move.
There are Americans born all over the world, they just need to come home.
Now the hard part: Your girl hasn't internalized any self-critique, because it's not self-critique.
America is based on the idea that we are all equal, even the proles. America loves proles, and proles love America - so much so that most of our electoral campaigns are full of PMC and upper class strivers pretending to be proles. Generational millionaires drive pickup trucks because they are pretending to be contractors and cowboys. They drive them to Home Depot, and often change their own oil. I love it.
Unfortunately, if you want to reject proles, you must reject America, as the two have fused into one. There's no place in our cultural mythology for a cultural upper class.
If you're a certain sort of social climbing young woman, there's a ladder to climb in England, there's a ladder to climb in India, but you cannot climb within American culture, so you must reject it. AWFL Anti-Americanism is a way of signalling that you're not one of the proles with their yards and their trucks, because there's no way to be an American without also being a prole.
That's why this is the hard part. You asked for "arguments that worked against them", but there are none, because you can't reason people out of something they didn't reason themselves into. For the educated millennial female, this is fundamentally a social and emotional response, and only social and emotional stimuli will move her.
If you're lucky, your girlfriend is a reasonably logical person who just isn't aware of the subtext behind basic white girl liberalism. Once you point this out to her, everything will start making sense. AWFLs are magnifying the (real and serious) problems with America not because they want to solve them, but because they're social climbers. If your girlfriend isn't a reasonably logical person, and like an AWFL is driven by the need for status and belonging, I wish you luck in the wars to come.
I find concrete advice tailored to my circumstances very helpful, and I'm grateful that you offered it.
The main reason I am in all this rush is because of my timelines till transformative AI. I think my median is about 5 years till.
This makes spending more than 2 or 3 years doing a degree something I am uncomfortable with, unless they payoff is astronomical. A PhD seems to be entirely off the cards.
I would personally like to do a degree, I feel like I missed out on a fun college or uni experience, and god knows I'm going to be studying my ass off anyway with no end of exams in sight. But my rational brain tells me this is an indulgence I can ill afford.
I have no strong issue with staying in clinical medicine, but only if the salaries are good, and by the time they're merely mediocre in the UK, it'll largely be too late.
As it seems, I'll probably be spending one year at the minimum working in the UK, I've done the hard part, and I just need to save up money.
My dad owns a hospital. It's a very small one, don't get your hopes up that I have fuck you money. It's more like fuck me money haha.
I don't want to stay in India if I can help it, which is why I never considered doing a hospital management course or staying here and running it.
If you say its an option in the States, I can look into it, but I feel like it's not something I have any real aptitude for. I certainly see how hard my dad works to keep it going, and it scares me.
I have considered moving laterally into Pharma in the UK. It's all the rage with the pissed off locals, but I think my Indian degree is a mild handicap since they're looking for people with regulatory knowledge and field experience in the UK itself. Not impossible, but I'd need to spend a few years working there to build up my credentials I think.
The idea of going into consulting scares me, because if you thought doctors are mildly at risk from AI, the overpaid consultants of a different sort at McKinsey have seen nothing yet.
I don't think my girl has ladder climbing tendencies that I've seen, beyond a desire to escape the genteel poverty she was born into.
Other than that, I broadly agree with your points and think they're good advice. I hope that if I can drag her there on vacation, simply looking around will knock her out of a funk that mere verbal argumentation can't.
Meeting nice Americans , enjoying the lovely weather, seeing the sheer wealth and happiness they have, those are far more like to.
Thank you for taking time out of your day to help me! I'll mull over what you said, especially that Drop Out Club you mentioned.
At least in America PhD is merely a scam for foreigners who want a visa or Americans who don't understand time value of money. I was thinking more of a professional degree - executive MBA in the health field, a partially-remote data science or bioinformatics MA/MS. That leads to banking/consulting in the medical sector.
McKinsey consultants have nothing to fear from AI, because their job isn't to provide solutions. If you wanted to fix your problems, you could simply ask your employees how to improve. Managers hire a McKinsey consultant to give you social cover to refine and then do what they wanted to do in the first place. They are a priestly caste, not a service provider.
Non-MBB consultants might take a hit from AI, but even that's a good job as a springboard. You use your MBBS to get into the UK, you use your time in the UK to find some 1 year, possibly half-remote MBA/Masters, use that to get into banking/consulting, use that to get a transfer to the US office, use that to find out where you want to go in the future, which could be something different. It's the crazy American in me talking here - always be evolving, always be seeking, and swing from your vine to whatever better vine is swinging by.
If AI is your thing, there's probably someone hiring in medical AI.
Then tell her the real truth about AWFLs and social climbing. Watch her normie feed, and point out every time someone says something disparaging about America. See if there's a hidden class climbing motive to it. There almost always is. 99% of the time it's some AWFL trying to show how they're more caring/educated than their prole background, or complaining that their life is so hard because they're underappreciated by the proles. I've managed to pop plenty of rational but agreeable women out of the basic white chick liberalism memeplex simply by pointing out the status posturing underlying so much of it.
This isn't to say that America doesn't have problems. Be honest with her, America has problems, some of America's problems can be solved, and some of America's problems can be solved by (honest) liberals. But AWFL liberalism isn't about solving America's problems, America's problems, or even America. It's about the social status of AWFLs.
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Out of curiosity - why are you ineligible to take the USMLE exams? I'm assuming you graduated from a decent medical school in India, and after having done that you could take Step 1 and 2. After that you could apply for a US residency. Unfortunately, I can't help you there, being a lowly medical student.
https://www.themotte.org/post/565/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/117227?context=8#context
My med school was below average, I was horrendously depressed and couldn't convince my parents to get me treated for ADHD when I gave the NEET exam necessary to get in. As the name suggests, if you don't have any AA to help you, you need to make yourself a NEET studying 24/7 to get in.
If I'd known that it would lead to all of this, I'd have never joined, gone to the other place I qualified for, or just dropped a year and tried again.
So I can't sit for the USMLE, but all hope is not lost since the ECFMG told me they can retroactively certify us if the college can prove that their quality of education at the time met ECFMG standards.
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I've got a similar view of America as you, and my wife has a similar one to your girlfriend's. But since we have about a tenth of your prospective incomes, I have significantly less ammunition for arguments.
Good luck!
I know so many American men with views similar to you who have American girlfriends who have similar views as your girlfriends. The internet and the gender equality paradox have created gender-segregated media bubbles that reinforce totally different worldviews. America is an enormous country of extremes, and each side keeps getting fed extreme events reinforcing their own worldview.
I blame insta and tiktok, both largely the domain of women. The latter is banned here, but my god the same shit makes it onto the reels. Outrage bait and skewed viewpoints for miles.
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I understand, and I wouldn't be so full throated in my desire if I was likely making less than 100k, because at that point some things I dismiss as inconveniences become something more debilitating. Good luck, and I hope you figure something out!
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I thought I'd already spent enough time replying to people and I woke up to see 25 notifications. Jesus people, I'll try and see them all!
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I vacillated about whether or not to reply to this, but I think it would be almost cowardly not to. It’s a moment where the rubber of my ideology meets the road of actual interpersonal relations with a real human being.
I hope that you are unsuccessful in your attempts to make it to America. I wish that you’d been unsuccessful in making it to the UK, and barring some future event forcing you to go back to India entirely, I hope you’re stuck in the UK in perpetuity and find it less and less to your liking.
This has little-to-nothing to do with you personally. Every interaction I’ve had with you has suggested that you’re a genial, intelligent, and interesting guy, and I have no doubt that you and I could get along swimmingly in person. Still, you’re just one individual, and I’ve got an entire country - an entire civilization, really - to worry about rescuing. Your individual quest for self-actualization - which, sorry to say it, strikes me as overwhelmingly acquisitive and materialistic - doesn’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things.
If the demographic/cultural situation in America were different, I would be very happy to have you in my country, and even in my city specifically. Individual immigrants, when coming here in small and selective numbers, can be a wonderful addition to the social fabric. However, we live in a country with a sprawling racial spoils system, and in which highly-educated Indians such as yourself are being imported en masse to create a new synthetic overclass more compliant to the regime.
“But Hoffmeister, I won’t be compliant to the regime! I’m not like the other Indians!” Well, first off, I’m not actually convinced that this is true; your paean to America, much like that of so many other smart and materialistic immigrants before you, seems centered around how many opportunities it provides you to obtain large amount of material wealth and an obnoxiously large house. Am I to believe that you would represent a genuine ally in the struggle of people like me to take back our country, once doing so presents a significant opportunity obstacle to your ability to obtain wealth and status?
And even if you will be, it definitely doesn’t sound like your girlfriend will. No, she’ll fit right in with the class of vindictive America-hating South Asians who play the progressive politics game expertly in order to bolster their own status at the expense of shredding the sociocultural fabric of this country. And moreover, your children will almost undoubtedly do the same. I know plenty of second-generation Indian-Americans, and a lot of them have parents who are every bit as over-the-top enamored of the “American Dream” as you are, yet they’re happily joining the America Is Systemically Racist grift so that they can get ahead. And a lot of them actually believe in it! Indian-Americans are either the highest-income or second-highest-income (the numbers on Jewish-Americans are hard to nail down) ethnic group in America, the American government is doing everything in its power to bring them here and to set them up for success; and yet these ungrateful scumbags still want to lecture me about all of the evils my ancestors released on the world. And I don’t believe that you yourself have the genuine ideological foundation needed to prevent your children from becoming that way.
Now, assuming that you are dead-set on coming to the States and want to scope out cities to live in, someone below recommended San Diego and I would strongly second that recommendation. Since I’ve lived here my whole life I can’t help but fixate on all of the negatives, especially since it’s gotten so much worse upon particular metrics like homelessness and general disorder, but it stills blows pretty much every similarly-sized American city out of the water on nearly every other metric, and the weather is famously incredible. Come visit La Jolla if you want to see how wealthy people live here, and go to North Park for bars and restaurants. If your goal of emigrating here is successful, you could do worse than living here, and I’d rather you end up in a city that’s already so racially-diverse that it’s unsalvageable from a white-identitarian perspective, rather than that you end up in a city that hasn’t yet lost the demographic battle.
I hate to break it to you, but you can't take back the country because the call is coming from inside the house.
The whitest cities in America, like Portland and Seattle, are the wokest. It's the whites that voted for Chesa Boudin, and the Chinese that voted to recall him. The whites voted for De Blasio, the minorities voted for Eric Adams.
The HR department is far whiter than the factory floor.
Replacing the American PMC with Indians would be an improvement.
First off, even if I took seriously your contention that Indians will be less politically destructive than white PMC progressives, you’re still missing the heart of my argument, which is that white Americans are entitled to determine the political future of this country because we are direct descendants of the people who founded this nation, while Indians are not. White progressives are my people - when you insult them, you insult my mother, my sister, and nearly every person socially important to me. For all of the negative things I say about them, I am profoundly invested in their future and the eventual reconciliation of political tribes in this country, because they are my flesh and blood. That’s something they have which an Indian, no matter how congenial he may be as an individual, will never be able to lay claim to.
You should take my contention seriously, as I'm taking yours seriously.
The Indian PMC recites woke slogans not because they believe them at heart, but because they see it as the way up in America. That makes the Indian a practical man I can work with, unlike the emotionally-driven American PMC. I would rather work with or for the Indian.
And now, for the heart of your argument. You have stated it clearly, and it is satisfying to reach the core of a disagreement.
I don't think your sister or your mother sees me as "my people". Progressives who look like me have treated me far worse than proles who don't. To quote Muhammad Ali, "I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong, no Viet Cong ever called me nigger".
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True, but as a practical matter, they vociferously oppose everything you say you believe in, and are actively working against it. They don’t feel any warm bonds of kinship, they see you as public enemy number 1, a demographic to be either cowed into silence or destroyed. At least good immigrants are not actively working against the values of the country and aren’t working to marginalize and disempower people like you.
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Look, I'm not mad at you for making this statement. I've received frankly overwhelming support from kind souls who have offered me their time and a place to stay should I ever need to crash at their place. Given that most of it was over DMs, I'll respect their privacy and not name them.
Unfortunately, neither their sheer kindness, nor your opposition makes any meaningful difference when it comes to me settling down in the US.
My girlfriend would probably vote Dem if she could, and so might I, to the extent that your accursed two party system means that I have no other way to vent my dissatisfaction with both sides. I make no promises about what my kids might do, but they're likely to be coastal born, so the odds are obvious.
Since we're all so powerless, oh well, you're entitled to your opinion.
The only actors that matter are me, the State Department and the ECFMG.
I've been there and even have a handful of memories of it. I'll certainly consider the recommendation should I be in a position to utilize it!
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I guess the problem is who are we taking the country back for?
The people most responsible for making America great in the first place are some of the wokest people on the planet. The backbone of the country, the people whose grandparents went to a mainline protestant church, are cheering on their own extinction.
White southerners and ruralites? While I appreciate their contributions in keeping our nation freer than most during Covid, and for their willingness to serve as cannon fodder during our many wars, they were not the ones who made America great.
The problem is not with foreigners, IMO. It is that the best and strongest of our people, my people, are so thoroughly corrupted with woke ideology that there's not much worth saving.
Clearly the woke people you are talking about are not the people who made America great, because they weren't born. So you must mean said grandparents, who weren't woke. These are not the same people.... stop making Hlynka have a point. No matter how many "Son also rises" type studies the left can gin up, America is the land of "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations". Furthermore, failsons are known everywhere. People are not their parents.
I don't understand what a conservative America is supposed to look like.
Who are the backbone of this theoretical new nation? White evangelicals? Based Hispanics/Indians/African immigrants? Because that's not "taking our country back". That's moving in a new and different direction that will be a lot lower trust, lower IQ, and more racially balkanized than what we had in the past. Brazil is probably the best modern comparison.
I don't have any answers here either. I suppose I'd rather have Brazil than whatever we get if we let progressives run things for another 30 years, but there really is no going back. The golden age is dead. Immigration didn't kill it either. The rot came from within.
Edit: The comment below from Hoffmeister25 partially answers my question
I think this is a noble goal. With much lower immigration for a few decades (like we had from roughly 1920-1970) we could create a strong, singular culture. But first we need to fix our elite. Assimilation in the current context just means taking conservative immigrants and making them into wokists.
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Ya know, props for honesty and consistency and all that, but I'm confused - weren't you arguing a while ago that Chinese and other East Asians should be considered honorary whites? Is the difference here simply that Indians have lower average IQs? Because in the US East Asians certainly do work the racial spoils grift as hard as Indians do.
If it's just about IQ, wouldn't @self_made_human's demonstrably much higher IQ make him an exception? I mean, I get that you are not literally advocating we use IQ tests as an immigration qualification, but "We should welcome ethnic groups or not based on their average IQ" is a strange sort of white nationalism (as I've said before, I think you're going to have a hard time getting your fellow travelers to join you in welcoming Jews and Chinese and Koreans), and "We should welcome ethnic groups or not based on how progressive they turn once they hit our shores" would exclude pretty much all of them (including Canadians and Europeans), and "We should welcome individuals or not based on how much they align with my politics" is, frankly, as purely self-interested and devoid of higher principles as you accuse self_made_human of being.
Third San Diego, though. Almost a perfect city (aside from, y'know, all the homeless, etc.).
I know this is almost certainly true, but it's still nice that people notice haha.
Now, if only I wasn't a 99.999th percentile wordcel and only like 75th as a shape rotator. I know which team makes more money!
We're on themotte. Most who bother to interact with comparatively longform text are higher IQ than average, and people here obviously like thinking about ideas.
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What math courses have you completed, and how did the last few feel?
Hmm.. I was perfectly fine at math till 10th grade, where I fell off harshly.
I blame this on my (at the time undiagnosed) ADHD, since my eyes would glaze over.
I also severely fucked myself by not paying attention during early trigonometry lessons, something my tutors failed to address.
I think in a world where I was taking Ritalin at the time, I'd have done much better.
I do like math much more now that I'm not forced to study it, I watch channels like 3Blue1Brown on the regular, and I occasionally use GPT-4 to teach myself statistics.
I am under the impression that the tenets of ML aren't that complicated, and while I have no natural affinity for it, when my happiness is at stake I can pop pills and grind. I have to do that for medicine as is!
Edit: The Indian math curriculum is far more rigorous than the US one is, without going into things like AP courses. While my calculus is only middling and my trig terrible (beyond the very basics), I googled the 12th grade US maths curriculum and I think I have most of it handled.
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Yes, and if you recall, in the same post I explicitly named high-caste Indians as another group that could be easily slotted into the Castilian Futurist white-enough coalition in due time. India is, after all, one of the most important historical power centers of the Proto-Indo-European civilization, and Hinduism (especially the Vedic texts) contains a great degree of continuity with the religious and cultural outlook of that civilization.
The problem is that Western countries are not ready for a massive influx of Asian/Indian immigrants right now. We are far too culturally insecure, self-hating, weak, and committed to our own self-destruction. As it stands right now, Asians and Indians represent, as I said, a rapidly-expanding synthetic overclass, who are eager to obtain influence and positional goods by embracing anti-white identity politics. These are people of high human capital and good breeding, who can easily be inculcated into a resentful, vindictive, predatory ascendant elite at precisely the moment when white people are the most prey-like they’ve been in centuries.
If this were a confident civilization with a strong sense of pride and continuity with its past, high-quality immigrants who were eager to assimilate into that civilization would be an asset. And by assimilation, I’m talking about, among other things, marrying into the families who have ancestral ties to the founding of this nation, such that the children and especially grandchildren of these couplings would be visually near-indistinguishable from the historical population of the country, and would feel a genuine blood connection to the ancestral stock that built this nation. This could, in time, create a truly glorious race, syncretizing the best of the Asian world while remaining firmly rooted in, and continuous with, the greatest civilization of the last millennium. (It could even allow our civilization to reintegrate parts of its deep heritage - the forgotten Proto-Indo-European past I mentioned - that could prepare it for the spiritual conflicts of the 21st century.)
Does that describe the OP? No, it doesn’t seem like it. His girlfriend is Indian, their kids will be unmistakably Indian, and as I said, they will be acculturated into the social stratum that will not only allow them but strongly encourage them to wear their Indian-ness as a badge of weaponized otherness. Again, this is nothing against the OP as an individual. I don’t doubt his sincere appreciation for the aspects of this country that appeal to scrappy high-IQ outsiders, and that is, whether I like it or not, an important part of what America has always been. I simply think that this is not a good time to be inviting people like the OP into the West. We need a moratorium to figure out a lot of really complicated shit first, including dealing with the teeming hordes of immigrants that are already here, before we’ll be ready to talk about letting in more of them. In the meantime, I strongly encourage the OP to learn how to love and cherish India, and to try and make that country better; it certainly has a lot going for it, and it could really be incredibly if people like the OP were willing to stay and try to make it so.
Unfortunately it is hard for a minority of well-intentioned smart people to make a dent in an overall mediocrity. The Soviet Union had a huge number of extremely smart people including absolute geniuses of math and science and engineering, yet it was a backwards authoritarian shithole. Even modern Russia (despite a lot of brain drain these past 30 years) still has a lot of smart people, yet it is a shithole.
For the individual, the strategy of moving to a place that is already not a shithole usually makes a lot more sense than staying in a shithole and trying to improve it.
I've already given an entire year of my life, of my own volition, to working as an intern in a far larger and more active government hospital in lieu of my original, rural one.
It was just about the worst year of my life, I was working insane hours and not even getting paid for it (unlike those who stuck to wherever their med school was).
The worst of it was that I realized that if I went through the insane grind needed to get into a decent postgraduate specialization program, I could look forward to a similar lifestyle for another 3 or 4 years. If I hadn't already harbored aspirations of jumping ship, that alone would have made me.
If you want to read it, it's here. Probably one of the best things I've written.
If anybody tries to force me to go through that again, I'd punch them.
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God bless you for reminding me of my genuine love for my country as I daily watch endless efforts to destroy it and render it unrecognizable by the left. Should you ever make it to this country, I would be happy to take you shooting.
Thank you, I've already had a few people reach out to me, and I won't say no to more kind souls who offer! I'd hate to exhaust the patience of any one of them, since I do know ammo prices have shot up stratospherically of late.
Eh it’s not so bad. I’ve got a decent stockpile still. I live pretty close to a large concentration of Indian migrants, so it’s not impossible you’ll end up near here.
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I don't think you can. You have your dream of the USA and it's apparent she has her dream of the UK. You don't want to go to the UK and she doesn't want to go to the USA. Unless you both can find a compromise (maybe Germany or Singapore or who knows where), I think this is a deal-breaking situation and I'm sorry to hear it.
It sounds like if you two can't find a solution, both of you will be stuck in India and hating it?
Oh no, worst reasonable case is both of us being stuck in the UK and me hating it (I suspect she might too, but that's not a given).
Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate it. There are other countries we could try for in the Commonwealth if I solve the same USMLE problem. It's all linked.
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America is better for the middle class (and for doctors), but I’d rather be rich in London than be rich anywhere else in the world (and so, seemingly, would quite a lot of people). Your view of the states isn’t wrong, but it’s not really right either. Even on your theoretical $500k joint income, you might find you’d be less wealthy than you imagine, I’ll put it that way.
And Brits aren’t “too poor” to afford air conditioning, it just hasn’t been hot enough for more than 10-15 years in the summer to warrant it. A/C is cheap to install in the brick terraces in which most average Brits live; average citizens of many much poorer southern European countries have it. It’s just not a huge thing here yet. If you live in a very expensive $10m listed townhouse in central London it’s harder to install (although still completely possible, many people I know have it), but you wouldn’t live in one of those for a while.
America is a great place, and average people have more material wealth in the US than pretty much anywhere else in the world, but they don’t seem (in my experience) much happier or more satisfied than their British or European peers. You have bought into the dream that the reality might or might not live up to. I will stay in ‘declining’ Britain for as long as the next Labour government don’t go full retard (I have low expectations, don’t worry). We shall see how long that takes, if it happens.
What’s your specialty? You can make a few hundred thousand a year as a consultant in London, provided you’re in something in-demand for private work. I wouldn’t expect a life of poverty as a British doctor.
Window air conditioning units can be had used for $50 here in America, or new for $250. I wonder how much they cost Brits.
Similar prices, as I said cost isn’t a bottleneck, it’s more that the average person might not use them more than 5-10 times a year. It is usually cold at night, and most offices and other indoor workplaces (stores, warehouses), as well as movie theaters, malls, gyms etc have A/C. For now, most Brits accept a handful of unpleasant evenings in the summer, over time I imagine that may change.
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This is true, but I have found that 1G immigrants have a far superior mindset in terms of appreciating what an average american has when they have it.
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I'm perplexed as to why you'd consider that a small amount of time to be baking in >30° C temperatures. You'd hope they'd learn by now.
Even the poorest Indians have ceiling fans, if they have a house for it, and I haven't seen this amenity at all in the UK in the dozen or so odd houses I visited.
I've regularly heard horror stories from my UK peers about how hot and suffocating NHS hospitals get in the summer, with many of them still not having air-conditioning (at least operational units), and once again without the small comfort of a fan. Indian doctors would riot, and we already are inured to far worse.
I'd rather cry in a limo than weep in a bus. I don't expect the US to outright cure all that ails me, but I'd be exceptionally surprised if it didn't make a dent. I hope you have a rough idea of how hard it is to indulge in the hobbies I'm interested in or find the kind of people I want to meet here.
I'm what would be called a Junior Doctor in the UK, at CT1 level. I have yet to specialize, but I might apply for Core Psychiatry Training in the UK if I can make the cutoff this year. I India, that makes me a GP, not that that's what I normally do. I'm usually working as an RMO, a nominally transitional role before one specializes, though I know poor bastards who get stuck there for decades.
If I do go for the USMLE, I'd certainly at least try to go for Psychiatry there too, albeit the snooty buggers don't recognize the credentials of anyone who didn't do their residency there even if they're a fully qualified UK shrink, or just done with the CCT.
We’re almost halfway through July (and the hot months in Britain are June/July/August) and we’ve had one or two days where it’s been uncomfortably hot, by which I mean 30 or 31 Celsius. There’s usually maybe three or four really bad days in summer where it gets up to 35-38 for an hour or two, but even then it drops back to 20-25 at night at the most.
In parts of the US that have similar climates to the UK there are also many people who don’t have air conditioning, even wealthier ones in old houses. Only now after last year’s horrific heatwave and fires are many people in the Pacific Northwest who didn’t previously had it getting it, and the UK obviously never has stuff like that happen.
It’s cultural, rather than financial, given how ubiquitous A/C is in second-world countries where disposable incomes are 1/5th or less of what they are in Britain. Conversely in even wealthier countries than the US that only occasionally have hot days, like Switzerland or Luxembourg for example, air conditioning is still not the norm. I have a ceiling fan (that I didn’t install) in London, although if I run it on the highest setting my upstairs neighbors complain, but I think it’s because there isn’t a dampener as in better ceiling fans.
I see. If it's only a few days, I can probably grit my teeth and bear with it. I've had to attend a non-ac school in the summer where the temperature hit 50°C, and not wet bulb either.
I've certainly never heard an Indian complain about their fan's vibrations disturbing anyone upstairs, but we like our houses sturdy. One downside of otherwise spacious American homes is how paper-thin the walls are, especially in apartments. My neighbors could be fucking and organizing BDSM parties next door and I wouldn't hear it.
What did you mean by this? If you’re interested in rationalist/TheMotte type hobbies you’ll find more people into them in London than in almost any US city other than San Francisco and New York (and even then it’ll be close). Outside of London the ratios will be similar to the US beyond those cities.
If you’re specifically into shooting Britain has an extensive shooting subculture, I walk past a few gun stores on my way to work every day where you can get your $20,000 shotgun customized with your family crest or whatever. I probably attend three shooting weekends a year and even if you run in other circles, clay pigeon shooting is pretty cheap,
there’s a huge hunting scene, many of my coworkers have outdoor hobbies like fishing or survivalist type stuff. The only thing you can’t get here are handguns.
When you were in London, where did you stay? There is something deeply depressing about a certain kind of middling urban British high street littered with kebab shops, fried chicken, betting stores and nail salons under a grey cloudy sky in the middle of the ‘dark’ season (November-March). But - yes, even with the NHS - on two doctors’ salaries, particularly those of two ambitious doctors, you really don’t have to worry about that being your life. There is great natural and cultural beauty here.
Fair point. I still crave the kind of close-knit community of rat adjacent people the Bay Area can claim.
I'm a gun nerd, and I primarily prefer the kind of tacticool shit you can get in the US. AR-15s, AR-10s, all the Picatinny rails, AN/PEQs and the like. Shotguns don't appeal to me in the least, the majority are too drab and boring, not to mention they're largely obsolete. I don't want guns for something as utilitarian as home defense, which is about all they're good for, but I still prefer the more modern stuff. Call it an artifact of playing more first person shooters than I care to name, and like 3.5k hours in Arma 3.
To help convey the point, since despite your general knowledge being excellent, you're unlikely to be familiar with this topic, it's akin to telling a guy crazy into pimping out his car with all the cool mods that he should be content to drive the tiny little toys the Japanese are fond of, since they suffice for getting you from A to B and have 4 wheels on them.
I'm not even that big on hunting, though I wouldn't say no to trying, and even there the kind of game you can bag in the US is far more interesting than the odd fox or pheasant. Shooting wild hogs with wildly overpowered guns from the side of a chopper? Hell fucking yeah.
My Airbnb was in Dagenham/Ilford, hardly the most bedazzling part of London. I still did tour the city, and while I liked it, I find myself merely fond of it rather than head over heels. I could just as easily live in Manchester, the only other city I visited, and I don't think there are any others that measure up to even the latter. Could well be wrong, but the UK is dotted with cities that have had the life blood drained from them to London.
I'd be far happier there if I made the kind of money you presumably do, but that's clearly not on the cards while living there, and if it is, it's because I'm overestimating how much you're worth.
Further, I don't know how closely you follow the affairs of the local doctors, but as someone who has kept a finger on their pulse for years, they're mad. Hopping, fuming mad. Years of pay erosion, no, decades, mid-level scope creep, rotational training, MDTs treating doctors like they're on the same rung of the ladder as nurses and pharmacists, terrible EMRs (most deaneries can't afford EPIC), London locum caps, the government responding to their demands in industrial action with an offered "pay raise" that's below inflation, it's all added up to make even the mild and timid locals, long content to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the ideals of the NHS, have enough.
Even an IMG like me is an assault on their value, since we're far more likely to accept shit pay and working conditions, though they don't really hate us as much as they should if they were looking out for their own self interest. No wonder the exodus to the other parts of the Commonwealth, once a trickle, is now a tsunami.
Even the paltry pay raise that comes with seniority is eaten up by inflation.
Maintaining my current standard of living, as accustomed as I am to a father making a 99.99th percentile income, is hard. You have to run just to stay in place.
Is it still better than India? Of course! I merely see it as a transitional time till fairer pastures unless I literally can't do better.
Not a doctor, but as somebody who did a lot of dating in the last year or so in UMC circles in Australia,, I was pretty flabbergasted by both the sheer amount of UK medicos that'd relocated down here + the conditions they reported financially & work-wise. These were caring, type-A, intelligent women and largely just decided post COVID years that they no longer had any interest in continuing to engage with the system in the UK.
I'd like to call myself one of them soon enough, if I can (barring the type A personality or being a woman, both seem rather intractable haha)
The majority who remain in the UK are simply grumbling through the CCT program, or have personal ties and family that makes it hard to move. While I have those myself, after I'm already committed to leaving the matter, that's moot.
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I think most of that is legal in the UK, at least some variants of the AR-15 are I believe. Bolt action and semi-automatic rifles are legal. There might actually be some guns that are illegal in the US (or perhaps in certain states) but legal in the UK, at least so I was told by my friend who shoots regularly. It really is mainly just handguns that are prohibited.
My condolences, yeah that’s exactly what I’m talking about. These are some of the worst places in London, especially Dagenham. Two doctors on £70,000 a year have a household income of £140,000 (this is indeed 99th percentile for the UK), you can definitely live in a much, much nicer part of London (depending on how many kids you have, obviously). As I understand it, junior doctors whose “official” pay is only £35-40k actually make much more than that because of extra shifts and bonuses and locum stuff etc etc. I know many junior doctors aged 27-30 and they live in fairly nice places, travel a lot, that kind of thing. They all complain wildly, as you note, and yet they don’t actually seem as poor as they constantly declare themselves to be.
Also, you’re an ambitious guy and want to go into psych. My Harley Street psychiatrist charges £790 for a 45 minute consultation. He can’t be much older than forty. I very much doubt he’s a poor man.
I meet more people into that stuff out here than I ever did or do in NYC. London is home to Deepmind, home to StabilityAI, Meta has a pretty big team here, there are a lot of AI policy/lobby/think tank people around. The “kind of people” who are into this stuff a relatively common, at least. There are a ton of collaborations with doctors, I know a young ophthalmologist (maybe 35) working with Deepmind on using AI to find evidence of diseases in people’s retinas or something. The NHS is actually very open to AI research (as you joke), which actually could be an opportunity for you.
I looked it up, and the only legal AR-15s in the UK are chambered in .22lr, a glorified airgun. To reuse the previous framing, it's like offering the same car nut something that looks like a Lambo and has the engine of a 1993 Camry in it.
I mean, better than nothing, sure, but doesn't scratch the same itch.
(Bolt-actions fall into the same category as shotguns IMO, largely obsolete, I like the kind of guns you see after the 2000s, with all the drip, but that's just me, I'm sure there are people who treat them with more reverence)
Honestly I didn't dislike the place. I have a distant aunt and uncle who live in London, and by God they made it sound like you couldn't leave the house after nightfall. It seemed like a sleepy neighborhood to me, with plenty of expensive cars and no obvious security measures. The closest thing to being unsafe was when I was the tall dark dude in a hoodie walking home and mildly scared a young white couple entering their home.
I wouldn't be opposed to living there, but UK houses (that I can afford) are still tiny for my taste.
Barking was a little more exciting, I kept an eye out for the apparent plague of phone snatchers, but no luck. Other than a lot of places selling jerk chicken, it was largely inoffensive to me.
All of those represent additional work on top of the ~48h work week. I just applied for an ER job in India for a few months, because I know that ER locums are quite lucrative and I want to go prepared, even if I hate it. Even then, locums are drying up as more people bow out of training and perma-locum. Add in London rate caps that are a blatantly cartel-like action by a monopsony employer. Not all doctors locum, and if I have a reasonable assessment of the circles you run in, you're likely meeting the more driven/successful lot.
I intend to use my ADHD as a convenient excuse to work LTFT and then locum on top, but that has a mild risk of pissing off the ARCP examiners. I don't think simply locum-maxxing is an option, because my Skilled Workers visa needs a sponsor.
By all means I'm not saying that it's the worst possible life, it clearly beats India, but I need to make money, fast. That, or citizenship in a First World country, and while the UK is straight forward in that you just need to stick around for 6 years (5+1 for the whole rigmarole), that's about past my median timeline for AGI. In an ideal world I would qualify for an investor visa somewhere that can take care of its citizens after they're economically obsolete.
I am deeply lazy, and if you want me to work more than I absolutely have to, you'd best offer me a motivating salary. Can't complain if the free market doesn't share the same high assessment of my worth, but the NHS is the very opposite.
GPT-4 is a better doctor than I am. The UK government knows that's true for most doctors, and is already using it as a cudgel to scare them. The fact that they're not terrified and rioting is a sign of their ignorance, not the government's. Shame this had to be the one place where the government was remotely farsighted. It'll happen everywhere of course, but later in the US where doctors have more leverage to raise hell.
You then have the potential for robotics to improve (and it has), or simply the trained monkeys like ACPs who can do procedures at the behest of Dr. House LLM.
Even if not literally all doctors are useless, a mere 90% of them being superannuated and then fighting for the remaining positions will make life hard if nothing else.
To end up in that position would take 7 years minimum, same issue. I can still be hopeful, but betting my future on it? Not the same IMO. In fact I expect opportunities like that to be entirely gone before I get a good thing going.
At least in ML I get in on the thing that's going to eat the world, assuming I can cut it.
So, in order of preference:
I fix the ECFMG issue and go to the US, or at least Australia, New Zealand or Canada. Subjectively 80% chance of me being happy.
Upskill myself into a related but different line of work. 60%?
Stay in the UK and make the most of it. Like 40 at best.
Return to India, where at least my dad owns a hospital. It's a small hospital, but it's still something. Just highly at risk from the rest of the country catching fire. Man the odds are bad.
Can you disagree on timelines and implications? Certainly, I'm no expert, just a very scared person trying to sell beachfront properly as the tides get higher. I consider myself lucky to at least know it's coming, and make the trivial preparations I can.
Hmm, that's a cause for hope!
TL,DR: UK not great not terrible.
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Why? Not doubting, just curious. You didn't really explain your claim.
Incredible climate (almost never too hot or too cold, very few days are below 40 or above 80 degrees) if mediocre weather (although if you're wealthy you can use the vastly more generous UK vacation time head south a few times over the most depressing November-February period).
Incredible greenery in Central London with huge urban 'royal' parks that are immensely well-kept like Regents and Hyde Park, and unlike most cities so many streets are tree-lined with tall trees that have been there for a hundred years, often with beautifully kept garden squares kept for residents.
Local government in wealthy neighborhoods are flush with cash because of the UK's system of local government funding (largely property taxes from businesses, which aren't redistributed, so single streets in Westminster or Kensington generate more tax revenue than entire poor counties in the North of the UK) and generally not overrun with wokeness like city councils in big US cities, so the streets are usually very clean, swept every day, very little garbage piles up, no awful smells like NYC or Paris.
Very few homeless people and those there are are the quaint kind of Kurdish migrant family or military veteran wino/addict rather than fentanyl monsters like in San Francisco, so you can walk around even at night with very little risk.
Few towering skyscraper canyons like Manhattan outside two specific neighborhoods, extensive beautiful old architecture, gorgeous white stucco Georgian houses with very high ceilings to live in.
Many of the best restaurants and bars in the world of every imaginable cuisine.
Many of the world's best private schools, the best symphony orchestras, one of the top-2 best arts and culture scenes in the world next to NYC (and depending on your tastes possibly the best), great gyms and spas, really every possible service someone wealthy could want because of the density of wealth.
Generally excellent and clean subway system not beset by the homeless or other criminal elements that connects wealthy residential neighborhoods with the London's business districts in the City and Canary Wharf quickly and with trains every one or two minutes during commuting times.
Very safe in wealthy residential neighborhoods at night, low property crime rate by standards of US urban core, extremely little violent crime (typically about 100 homicides a year in a city of 10 million, compared to 435 even in NYC, which is very safe by US standards and which has a slightly smaller population).
Excellent connections to continental europe by plane and train, a wide diversity of popular professions, and a generally functioning and ordered administration by the standards of major western cities.
Note, the above is at least partially restricted to the neighborhoods real estate agents would call 'prime central London' (Chelsea, Kensington, Mayfair, Marylebone, Notting Hill/Holland Park, Belgravia, a few other places close to the above, and then some inner suburbs like Hampstead Village and St John's Wood).
I largely agree, London seemed quite nice in my experience. I wouldn't have nearly the same qualms about living there if I could also keep the analogous US salary. Unfortunately that's not really feasible as far as I know.
My girlfriend really wants to settle there, whereas I look at our bedraggled finances and find Manchester is just rich enough for my blood.
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It's worth pointing out that this isn't just a non-American thing, either. I grew up in the South, where air conditioning is a precondition of living a tolerable life, and you would have to be desperately poor not to have central air. When I later moved to a college town in the Upper Midwest, it took me a while to figure out that window mounted air conditioning units wasn't a sign of dire poverty where I had moved to; rather, the summers were mild enough that people often would only want air conditioning for a few weeks every year, and if they lived in older, well-built houses, the pain and cost of upgrading to central air wasn't mostly worth the trouble for them, and a few window mounted units were fine. This was all counterbalanced by the much more drastic (and expensive in time and attention) measures they would have to take to mitigate absolutely brutal winters, of course.
Central air conditioning is a rarety in India, and I haven't seen any but the very upper class opt for it in their homes. We usually just air-condition the rooms we spend the most time with and grit through the rest.
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Of course, in actually cold areas, you don’t need to take punitive special measures to keep the houses warm, since all housing is constructed to keep the warmth in as a matter of course.
Here's Finland compared to Wisconsin (where I lived): https://www.crownscience.org/places/finland/wisconsin-us
And Finland compared to Minnesota: https://www.crownscience.org/places/finland/minnesota-us
And Finland compared to North Dakota: https://www.crownscience.org/places/finland/north-dakota-us
In general, the Upper Midwest is physically far from any large bodies of water (i.e. oceans) that would moderate its temperature, and the plains up north through Canada don't have any significant mountains to dampen artic winds. It's a legitimately cold part of the world, at least for how populated it is (Minneapolis metro area is something like 3.7 million people).
There's a reason that historically Wisconsin and Minnesota had a disproportionate amount of early immigration from Sweden and Norway.
OK, I stand corrected.
How did you not know that the midwest is next to... Canada.
Because it's still to the south of Canada. Finland is on the same latitude as Alaska, and even knowing the Gulf Stream warming effect etc., my automatic assumption for all of the 48 states (and Hawaii, of course) is that they're automatically warmer than Finland.
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I always used to think the Mid West had to be the geographical center of America. I mean, that's what the name most suggests to me, before I first checked a map.
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Large parts of the upper Midwest get actually brutally cold in the winter- the dakotas in particular.
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There is a lot of paper wealth in the US but if you want to buy back a comparable quality of life to a middle class European (i.e., live in a safe, walkable, clean city with good public transit and little crime or disorderly behavior) a lot of it evaporates pretty fast, so the differential ends up being less than it looks on paper. I could be wrong but my sense is that there's just about one city in the US that meets those specifications and it's Boston (very expensive).
If you can compromise on one or more of those factors (safe, walkable, clean), then yeah you can make and save some money here at the cost of potentially living the "American lifestyle" (commuting and driving everywhere with all the cost, time-sinks, and social alienation that entails), which may or may not be a problem for you. NYC is I guess decently safe in a statistical sense and walkable, but not clean. A lot of others are safe and clean but not walkable, and there are cities that are walkable but not particularly safe.
I'm seriously considering leaving the US for London for this reason.
I'm largely indifferent to the walkability of a city. While all cities in India are nominally walkable, I'd much rather not. I certainly didn't enjoy trekking all over London all that much!
Nor is public transit a concern because I value the freedom that a car provides. They're pretty much a must even in the UK except for those crazy ER docs who bike everywhere.
With those constraints relaxed, most US cities seem fine to me as long as I stay away from the inner city ghettos.
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If you define quality of life as dense walkable urban living then I live a wretched life indeed. If you define quality of life similarly, but also forgive a 20 minute commute to work and 3 to 5ish minute drive to shops, then I live a great life. My American suburbanite cup overflows.
I went kayaking last weekend. I put my kayak on the roof rack of my big SUV. I built a new AR recently and I'll go shooting when I get some time. The guns and stuff will go in the back of my big SUV. I built a long set of retaining walls on big side yard. I made a stepped double retaining wall with a waist high middle section that is a very long garden. Too many strawberries are coming in recently. I'm a few minutes walk from a very large and clean park. I walk there or somewhere else in my neighborhood every day with my kid. Good thing I don't live in a dense urban core and instead can have high quality of life in so many ways in my big suburban house, really nice clean neighborhood and car.
Just for fun: let's define high "quality of life" for men as including satisfying sex with women. Then point out that gay guys lack high "quality of life". No matter how good their sex lives are they don't include women in this arbitrary and narrow definition.
Why wouldn't you be able to walk to a park in a dense urban area? Or go kayaking or shooting (presumably at a range, not in your backyard)? Gardening is a bit more difficult, depending on how dense the city is exactly. On the other hand, in an urban area, you could be 3 minutes away from shops without even needing to drive.
I have driven into the local major urban center and walked around. It's okay. There are crazy drug addicted homeless people, shit on the ground, rents are ruinously high for tiny apartments that don't include storage space for kayaks or workbenches, half the schools are crap, etc. But some of the parks are not open drug markets and I indeed could walk around them with a little kid. But the parks near my suburban home have 0.0% homeless person poop on the ground and are also nice, so instead I'll walk to them. If you and I walked through one park then the other the differences would be clear.
I've been to state parks and BLM land countless times across decades. 0% of the people using them got there by bus or light rail. It is a very anti-walkable-city sort of activity. You need significant personal storage space such as a garage and you need a personal vehicle to access these spaces. There's no rental shops for kayaks or bikes and no bus stops on the mountain side or BLM desert land or lake, etc.
Indeed I don't shoot in my suburban backyard. I'm imagining a "walkable urban space" shooter trying to bring a couple rifle cases and a range bag on a bus out to an outdoor shooting range. I don't suppose that is realistically possible. To within round off error that's not viable. Load it in your personal car and drive to the range or you can't do it.
My very suburban dad activities are not expensive. I'm dishing out single digit thousand dollars for these things. But it absolutely requires a moderate amount of storage space and a personal vehicle. Given that I might as well live on the moon from the point of view of a walkable city advocate.
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On good days, it'll be packed with other people using the park.
Unfortunately many cities tend to be bad about even letting residents have guns, let along shoot them anywhere. And where are you going to kayak in the concrete jungle?
Sure, 3 minutes away from 3 shops; all the rest are just as far as in the suburbs except it's a public transit journey instead of driving.
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Note that the only other human you have mentioned in your description of your quality of life is your child. The rest of it is all stuff. SUVs, guns, fences. If that’s what you care about, American suburbs have a lot to offer you. For people who want to experience natural and spontaneous human connection (that you don’t have to fight against the environment of huge yards and parking lots to obtain), they don’t, and most of the cities don’t either.
This says a lot more about your social poverty than about suburbs.
I have plenty of human connection. I live with my wife and kids. My parents are an hour away, my grandparents were two hours away from new house. I spend time with my friends, and once I finish moving, I'll spend time with old friends from high school again. My kids have birthdays and play dates and lessons. My life is full of my family, my friends, and my family's friends.
Yes, we visit most of them by car, and we drive by a lot of yards and parking lots to do so.
You might be so lonely that having an addict grunt a "fuck you" at you while you step around him counts as the social highlight of your life. You might survive on the thin gruel of the incidental pleasantries and perfunctory forced interactions caused by congestion. My social calendar is full enough, thank you.
I’m not sure what you’re objecting to in the statement you quoted. There’s nothing spontaneous about having to drive for an hour to see people, so it sounds like you’re agreeing rather than disagreeing, you just don’t mind it. If you’re okay with that, that’s fine. I’m not. But I’m not agitating for some sort of political change that would require you to live differently. I’m trying to figure out what I can do to live the kind of life I want to live.
My parents are an hour away. My grandparents are two hours away. My sister, on the other hand, is about ten minutes by onewheel, and a high school friend of mine is even closer, depending on how the light is timed today. My kids go to a local school, so the eldest can go see some of his friends under his own steam. We attend church only for Christmas and Easter, and only sparingly in those cases, but were we to do so more often, we would known even more people in our current neighborhood of three car garages.
You're the one with crushing isolation and boredom. I'm the one in the suburbs with the rich social fabric.
Maybe the problem isn't the cars and the yards and the strip malls. Maybe it's you.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, I’m pretty easy to get along with. I just don’t like driving or long travel times so I tend to choose to avoid it, and don’t have many opportunities to meet people that don’t require that.
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It is a luxury to be able to avoid spontaneous human connection, to only have it when you specifically want it and shut it out otherwise. Americans are so rich that this luxury is available to most.
Public transport is a great example. It's true you won't get stabbed or robbed on the bus in most of Europe (though with all the migration this is starting to change in places). But there's still the teenagers with the obnoxious music, the people yelling at their cell phones, the loud and messy eaters, the couples all but having sex, the other couples fighting, the screaming little children, the occasional beggar. And the people who won't take showers, and of course the fat guy who insists on sitting next to you even though there's an empty bench available. It's a lot of spontaneous human connection, and all of it negative.
And if you can afford a car you can avoid it all. What you're really buying is isolation, and it's worth quite a lot. (Well, that, speed, and reliability.)
There are times when you need it, of course, especially when you still need to establish yourself and need to get into contact with a lot of people to find openings. Americans have college campuses, which of course have their own problems. Europeans tend to just use the city as a whole for that purpose. But once you've established yourself, mostly the negatives remain, especially since should you need something you can draw on your existing circle. The commenter above has a wife and a kid. What does he need to find out in the wild, another wife?
Europe has its suburbs too. They don't always look like American ones because people can't afford McMansions (rowhouses and apartments are more common), but they serve the same purpose. To be far enough away from it all to offer its denizens some isolation.
The places that are most well designed to further spontaneous interaction with relatively normal and stable people like Boston or NYC are some of the most exorbitantly expensive places in the whole country. So clearly there is much more demand for that sort of lifestyle than there is supply of housing to accommodate it, which suggests that’s a luxury too.
Community and making new friends. Or are you supposed to just be done with that once you have a wife and kids?
In America, this is what churches are for (not so much Catholic churches, which haven't adapted as thoroughly to the situation).
It is true that as America has become less religious, the social organizations have not kept up, and so there's a void that can't quite be filled by meetups. But that's also true in dense cities.
Catholic churches have plenty of opportunities for making friends, assuming one is either an established adult or a teen(their young/emerging adult ministries/groups are near uniformly terrible, and this is probably fallout from the broken dating market because the organizers do not want to be responsible for such things). They are, however, opt-in, not parts of the default experience. Almost every parish has a knights of Columbus council and a men's group, a woman's... something(could be called a bible study, could be called a spirituality group, who knows), and multiple clubs nominally dedicated to charitable activities but realistically mostly for socializing. They simply are not default parts of the experience for a weekly attendee and must be specifically sought out.
Fair enough, I had pretty superficial interactions, and didn't try all that hard.
A family member and also a good friend went to Catholic school for years and grew up Catholic, and also reported not having anything social to do, to the point of going to Evangelic youth group/LDS family events. It's likely this varies a lot by region/predominant culture.
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That's not just stuff: they are activities we do enabled by having a garage and a yard and a car. We are biking through trails and kayaking and gardening in a huge garden bed we built ourself. The kayaking is usually with another family or two and hanging out on the beach with similarly aged kids. It is social if we choose to make it social and just me or my family if we choose not to invite other families. I'm in good company loading bikes or boats onto an SUV and driving off somewhere.
I've spent a few months total living in major urban areas. I didn't much experience natural spontaneous human interaction. Every day I was surrounded with a new group of total strangers that don't much interact with you. It was more "alone in a crowd" than meaningful or friendly human interaction. But maybe that's just my personality or attitude as a suburbanite.
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You’re completely correct. There are exactly two places in the US where as a wealthy upper-middle class person you can live in a largely safe, urban, dense, walkable neighborhood in a major city with tons of culture, great food, art and civilization around you, excellent transport and not have to drive and they are a thin band of lower Manhattan and those gorgeous big old houses in Back Bay.
What about the white areas of Chicago's North Side? Or downtown Philly?
There are some OK streets on the near north side, but to be truly easily walkable into the Loop you need to live in the part that's almost all big apartment buildings without much character, IMHO. It's close, I wouldn't say it's bad, but it's not amazing and it doesn't feel as dense with good stuff as the above, at least in my opinion. I have a lot of time for Chicago, but it's pretty spread out and has in many cases a certain 'worse version of midtown new york' feeling.
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Yeah, I'm getting to the point where I just can't stand the crushing boredom and isolation anymore even though my tech salary would take a big hit to emigrate. The stuff you listed is table stakes for living in any number of European capitals so it makes my current approach (tough it out in US HCOL to make more money but spend a lot of it on rent and cars and be miserable) feel like I'm getting scammed. Maybe I'll try it for a year and see how it goes.
Where in the US do you live?
Also ask yourself, how many American tech workers are scrambling to move to Europe, and how many European tech workers are scrambling to move to the US.
In all honesty youd have to be a fucking idiot to leave the US as a tech worker when all the programmers of the world froth at their mouths thinking of the salaries you can make.
My only other option right now without getting another job would be to move to New York City and that’s off the table for me because of the filth and disorder. So it’s either suburbs, London, or new job.
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Didn't Adam Mosseri and a bunch of the other very senior Meta guys all move to London because they preferred it so much to San Francisco and NYC where they have other engineering bases? Iirc quite a few senior Google people moved to London too. As long as they can keep their US salaries tech workers very much like London in my experience.
Obviously UK pay is much lower than the US. But the previous user acknowledged this in their first post.
Thats the whole point, would they move without the same pay?
And Im not talking about seniors at Google or Meta who earn like professional athlete's. Would the average mid level programmee trade off 150k for 75k? To move from San Francisco to... London?
Im telling OP whatever he thinks hes going to get in London is probably worth much less than that sweet American salary. Hes moving out of America not Argentina.
After making a certain level of income, you should be able to just buy solutions to most problems. And on the surface OP should be able to do that.
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I don't think he's a tech worker. Tech workers (well, the type who might consider moving to London) don't sweat the cost of cars; if they don't care much for cars and don't live in NYC they buy a grocery-getter or two and don't worry about cost. If they like cars they likely buy a Tesla and still don't worry about cost.
I’m a SWE making big tech rates. But I am early in my career, have a huge amount of student debt from bad decisions I made in the past, am paying a lot of rent, and kind of hate working and want to retire fast. So it’s not actually over my budget or anything but it doesn’t feel good because I’d rather invest that money to get out of the system faster than spend it on something that feels like a waste. That said the high rent is definitely more of a burden than the car expense.
Yeah, your worry about car cost is ideological, not logical. Were you to move somewhere where you could easily get by without a car, you'd find the difference in living expenses (and/or loss of salary) were greater than the cost of the car.
That seems plausible - too much demand for housing in safe, clean, walkable areas and not enough supply so the rent is through the roof.
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Not everyone wants to walk everywhere. Americans are rich and can drive, and driving is a strictly superior means of transit for distances over a mile or so. That’s a set of priorities that most Americans don’t have and it doesn’t seem like our Indian friend does either, not on the sense of ‘I prioritize other things over walkability’ but in the sense of ‘I literally don’t care about walkability at all’.
I'm lazy, and I don't like walking for one.
In the UK, I found the public transit perfectly unobjectionable, but I was walking around more than I ever needed to in my entire life. I'd rather drive.
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Strictly superior to what? Walking? Sure, but that's because long-distance walking can be tiring, not because driving itself better than other modes of non-walking transit. To safe and well-kept public transportation of the kind that exists in, say, Switzerland? If your destination is along a rail route then that seems false, because you can sit and do what you want to do instead of having to keep your attention on the road, and you don't need to find a parking space, you just get off the train. If it's not then that's an argument for better rail coverage.
If you're talking about non-urban locations where there isn't enough demand for infrastructure to build sufficient rail coverage, then sure, driving is a fine option for that.
That really only works if everywhere you want to go is right next to the track. If it's not then you have to transfer to bus which takes forever. I guess if you can do serious work on public transportation then you could argue it's saving time but I hate balancing a laptop on my knees and working on a tiny screen so I'll usually just listen to a podcast, which I could do just as easily in a car.
I just got back from London on vacation and we ended up Ubering everywhere instead of taking the tube, it took about 1/3 of the time and the cost difference was marginal since you'd have to buy two tickets. It would only get worse if you're bringing a kid since now you have to drag a stroller on to a crowded subway car and find a spot to sit them down.
Being driven in an uber isn’t comparable to driving. You don’t have to actually drive, or endure the stress and uncertainty of having to find parking in the middle of London.
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A fellow, non-American mega Patriot like me. Love to see it. There are dozens of us! Your post is written much better than mine, but I feel the same.
Logistics
Your girlfriend is.. American. You realize how massive of a jackpot this is for an aspiring immigrant. You literally got the easiest path to immigration handed to you on a silver platter.
I propose a change in strategy. Don't convince her to live in America.
Put a ring on it. (Worst comes to worst you secured something valuable)
Convince her that getting US experience will be paramount to your career in "medical ML".
Leave her wherever she is "temporarily" and start your career in the US. This will be hard, but your eyes are on the prize. Keep in mind, you are extremely passionate about "medical ML" and your state of being and happiness depends on it.
"Dear girlfriend, I am making far too much money in the US now, we would have to be idiots to not settle here." She might become a "Dear ex" in this process, I wouldn't put that past the realm of impossibility.
Alternatively, do realize that you are already one of the lucky ones. The UK is still a gazillion times better than India. It's no America, but a large part of that is in your head. You don't really need air conditioning in the UK, You don't NEED a 7 bedroom McMansion, and it's still a million times closer to America along the reasons you like America and dislike India. The UK is not a bad place to live, all things considered, in many cases, it's actually better than the US. You get walkable cities, proximity to Europe, and potentially better social life (just go to your local pub, man (you won't find those is Suburban New Jersey, lol). Also in my experience, brits are a lot easier to get along with because they actually understand sarcasm and banter, and Americans can be sincere to a fault, don't underestimate the importance of this as an immigrant, trust me on this, no amount of freedom of speech might be worth having no friends), travel visa-free to most places, etc. Don't ruin this one.
Additionally, As someone who has many relatives who are US citizens. You need to think long-term. And by that, I mean on the span of decades. If you didn't catch my drift yet... I'm talking about Canada. It's not America. You still probably won't be able to practice medicine. But it's quite similar culturally, and it's similar enough to the UK in ways that you might be able to sell this idea to your loved one. If you live in Toronto, NYC is just a 10-hour road trip away. And if you bootstrap that "medical ML" thing hard enough, you can work for a US firm and make it there significantly easier (TN VISA) than anywhere else, it won't be easy, but easier. Worst comes to worst, you'll at least have the land of the free in your backyard, and you'll be closer to it.
Why I'm a Patriot
I was fortunate enough to visit the US as an adult just a few years ago, my experience is still fresh in my mind and I haven't gone through any ideological shifts.
I'm a libertarian and I already went to the US primed with the notion that, "This is THE place in the world that aligns closest to my values, or at the very least, I am to find people who are, more than anywhere else". I don't mean this lightly, I think the First Amendment is one of the all-time greatest ideas ever. If I ever came across the reincarnations of the founding fathers, I would bow down and touch their feet.
Being there in the flesh only reignited my love/admiration for the place.
Everywhere I went, I saw "For Hire" signs, I don't think Americans realize how much of an aberration those stupid lazily printed-out A4 papers hung hastily to the windows with an unevenly cut piece of cello tape are to the eyes of a foreigner. What do you mean I can just get a job?? All I have to do to.. not starve is just walk in here and show up? I found myself asking over and over again, how can people live in "poverty" is this country, it makes no sense! Not minding that "minimum wage" workers here were making more real money than entry-level engineers make in my country.
http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
I just felt that if one truly wanted it, they could make something of themselves there. The infrastructure and network to make that happen were in place (relative lack of nepotism, relative lack of credentialism, ability to change fields, general abundance that allows employers "to take a chance" on risky candidates, relative presence of meritocracy). You would just have to.. work hard. But people work hard everywhere for nothing at all! Working hard is far from the worst thing one can do in life. And I work in tech. I make decent money. More than a significant portion of people my age. But still, it's nothing compared to my fellow US tech workers. I weep when I see the salaries they make out of college! I work 12 hours a day and on weekends. Just let me into the US, and I will take yer jobs!
There were the people. People would just strike up conversations in the grocery store line commenting on my choice of energy drink, etc. While I walked past them in the suburbs they would yell "Hello!". While I was checking out computer parts at micro-centre, Other random shoppers would come and talk to me about what I was buying and why, what games I play, etc. And those "racist" people in the south, those ladies still called me "sweetie" and asked how I was doing, a brown guy. This was a very different America than the one I read about on Reddit.
The sheer abundance doesn't even need to be talked about. For all the "trashy" people that frequent Walmart, they still have access to a helluva lot more things than most "Elite" people anywhere else for that matter.
But all those things are just icing on the cake. The cake is that you can really make something of yourself there. This is 100x worth its weight in gold more than anything else. All my relatives who went there really did go there with pennies to their names. They bootstrapped themselves into 6 figure salaries living in McMansions from flipping burgers and having to eat leftover scraps at their fast-food jobs. The point isn't that there is an easy path, the point is that there is a path at all to begin with.
I finally remembered to re-read your comment and give it the attention it clearly deserves, not that I'm any less sleep deprived now than I was when I first saw it haha.
I appreciate that you shared your experiences, it largely confirms what I myself expected from years of hearing about the place, but independent confirmation is always great to have.
While I'm not a card carrying Libertarian, I'd describe myself as a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies, and there are few enough of the both of us that I see no need to nitpick!
I personally find a tendency for governments to stay out of the affairs of consenting adults refreshing, and in this day and age that's practically reactionary to espouse.
All excellent points. I do however want to state that it's not just the relatively lower salaries that make me scared of the UK, it's the fact that the government has explicitly committed itself to replacing doctors with automation from above and
trained monkeysmidlevels like PAs and NPs below, and even I as an IMG (international medical graduate) represent an assault on the value of the local doctors, though at least on the latter they're usually too nice to complain.Junior doctors in the UK need a 40% payraise to restore pay to the level it was at in 2008, and when they just about had enough and went on strike this year, the government offered a 5% payraise when inflation was 10%.
Given how foreign doctors are treated as a means as an end for propping up the failing NHS, the moment we're obsolete it won't end well.
The minimum thing that would grant me a sense of security is citizenship, and it would take 6 years. That's already more than my median timeline to transformative AI.
US doctors take better care of their own, and if I can't become a citizen of the UK in time for it to matter, I'd rather have spent my time doing my residency in the States.
If this wasn't a serious concern, I would have fewer qualms about trying to establish myself there. All the real moneymaking opportunities for UK doctors like locums or switching to pharma are either drying up or will be packed with people realizing this sooner rather than later.
I'm sure you understand why my timelines suggest that planning decades ahead is a little foolhardy for me, for the above reasons.
I see the next ten to twenty years either going very well or very poorly for most of us, but I'm very sure that what almost certainly won't happen is the "business as usual" that most forecasting implies.
I don't think I'd be outright miserable in the UK, far from it, but it will still be tight, and it's a risk I'm afraid of taking.
At the least, I think I'd find myself consumed with angst over the road not taken, and while the UK is a well maintained thoroughfare compared to an India dirt trail, the US is a 12 lane superhighway. I feel like I owe it to myself to at least try, even if success or happiness isn't guaranteed.
I deeply appreciate British humor, they have the sort of dry, understated wit that matches my own. The funniest friends I have are British, and they give me cramps from laughing on the regular!
I don't see myself as being unable to find plenty of people I'd get along with in the States, especially since that's where so many of us Mottizens are from.
Either way, thanks for sharing your own story, and I do hope you get to take a jerb or two if you can. US programmers won't even notice that rounding error in their outcomes that represents, and it would make a world of difference for you.
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great post. But just a quick correction. In the US, it is letter sized paper, not A4.
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I just woke up and am still reading through the 25 new comments this got, but I do need to clear this up, my girlfriend is not American!!
I now understand why you and someone else got confused, likely because I used the phrase "like many Americans" in my essay, but I thought not saying "like many other Americans" would make it clear she wasn't one.
I'll get back to the rest of your comment, but I do hope it wasn't load bearing on this.
Ahh shiet, yeah it was load bearing for some of it. Maybe the first 20%.
I was wondering why no one else is hooking onto that crucial detail, guess sleep deprivation is catching upto me.
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I've been lurking since this was the SlateStarCodex subreddit, but this post finally pulled me out of the cave.
I am a native-born American, and can honestly say I haven't gone more than a month in my adult life without being wildly, joyously grateful for it. Everything you said it true, its wonderful here. I've driven across the continent twice, lived on both coasts and the Great Plains, and visited much of the rest. There's enormous variety in culture and geography (well, maybe not compared to India) and whatever you're looking for, we've got it somewhere. My wife has lived abroad in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and shares my feelings: this is the greatest country on Earth. If you can live here, you'd be crazy to live anywhere else. I enjoy our visits to Europe, I love our European friends, but when I'm there I'm reminded how much I love my home.
It's not so much that we're rich (though that is pretty great!). For me, it's a more intangible sense of freedom and possibility. You can do things here. You really can build yourself up from nothing. It's not propaganda, I know people who have done it. A former colleague grew up in a mountain village in the Himalayas, studied in the US, got a PhD, post-doc-ed at Harvard, founded a company, it went under, and worked his way into managing a major government R&D program. A college buddy grew up on in an isolated island fishing village in Alaska. Last I saw him he was rising star in a BigLaw firm. This all might sound naive to many, but I'm middle aged with a family and mortgage and have seen my share of troubles and dashed dreams: I'm no naif. I spent 15 years starting from age 12 working towards what I thought was a dream career and I failed. But all it took to pivot to something new (and better!) was some hustle in getting my resume into the right hands. A friend in France has spent the last several years trying to change careers, between less demanding and (in the US) less credentialed fields than mine, and keeps getting stalled out and delayed by bureaucratic requirements and credentialism. The freedom to try, to fail, and to try again, in a country wealthy enough to give you a reasonable chance of success, and a decent living if you fail, is invigorating once you've taken advantage of it. I now make a comfortable living doing work I enjoy. If I lived somewhere else I'd probably ride that out through retirement. But this is America, and I think I can do better. My wife and I are going to found a company, and try to build something great from the ground up. And if we fail, we'll still be all right!
I'm not going to pretend there isn't a lot of ugly here, but you should know that part of our culture is we put our flaws on full display. Broadly speaking, we don't hide our problems, we shout them from the rooftops. There's typically some truth (though much exaggerated) to the complaints. But I find that most criticism of America is either comparing the United States to its own ideals and blaming it for falling short, or comparing the United States to an idealized image of some other country or compilation of countries. In the case of the latter, I don't find the worst of America losing to the best of other countries terribly compelling. As to the former: guilty as charged. We do not live up to our ideals. But the ugly condemnations of our nation and each other you see blaring across the internet are the public face of the continuous struggle of the United States to better define and implement our founding principles. How can we improve without frank argument about our problems? America is not a finished product: we are always lurching towards a more perfect union.
There's a great metaphor for the difference between the United States as presented on the internet and the real thing. Doubtless you've seen the meme images of the American highway surrounded by fast foods restaurants and gas stations beneath a forest of garish corporate signage, usually accompanied by condemnatory text. This is Breezewood, Pennsylvania. Had the photographer turned ninety degrees to the left or right, that photograph would have been of the beautifully forested Appalachian foothills. The photographer chose to record the one ugly spot in acres of sylvan beauty, and that's all anyone sees.
Not that you can tell from this snapshot, but I have a pronounced cynical streak. I see the same challenges, the same seeds of eventual disaster that other commenters have highlighted. But every society, throughout history, has always been but a generation from failure, has always carried within itself the seeds of its own collapse. Nothing is fated - we can overcome these challenges, and the arguments are so heated because we have so much to fight for.
In many circles in the US there's a saying: "There are Americans born all over the world, some just need to make it home." I hope you make it, because we're just getting started.
Thank you. At this point so many kind souls like yourself have endorsed my arrival in the States that I'm tempted to muster all of you up and march on the State Department haha.
I'm not writing a longer reply only because I fully endorse everything you've said, and it means a lot to me!
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You've put my feelings into words better than I ever could.
We're not too different. I too am Indian, ADHD riddled, and confused at how un-appreciative my fellow coastal-Americans are of this great nation. My American girlfriend lives out in Europe and refuses to appreciate the great nation for what it is. I quote her from last week : "Screye, we need to talk about settling down in the US and how it is going to shit. Abortion is illegal and everyone is becoming conversative." God bless her.
I was lucky enough to choose the 'right' science, the one with an easier pathway to the US, but that's about it.
All global super powers are ruthless. America too is a ruthless global superpower, one that tries to be benevolent, more so than any that came before. There is no ruthless superpower I'd rather be oppressed by. The US is so wildly productive, that no amount of crumbling infrastructure or urban zombie hordes can so much as dent its economic productivity. It's a fucking cheat code in nation form. Competing is futile.
If that wasn't enough, its secular founding document has an appeal so universal through time and space, that even the best efforts of enemy nations can't stop their best from dreaming of America. The people here are fair and uncorrupt. They try to be race blind, as much as their caveman genes would allow. They don't treat me as an outsider, and all they ask is I try.
The country has issues, but the US is a nation in decline in the same way that Michael Jordan was 'over' after his 1st retirement.
All that being said, this is exactly what I thought about Intel, and they some how managed to stay in their slumber until everyone had leap frogged them and it was too late.
Intel can go on begging Congress for a hundred billion every few years to “keep America in the race” for chip development.
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You're already in the States and I'm not, that seems likely a major difference to me haha
I'm glad you made it out, it would take a real asshole to begrudge others for achieving what they dreamt of themselves, especially when it costs me nothing.
Medical licensing restrictions are driving me up the wall, we doctors really do forget how much less red tape is involved for most professions when it comes to simply just grabbing a new job and heading over. I know the US is still unusually difficult in that regard!
I think I've already said in this very thread that there's no jackboot I'd rather live under. Do you think they'd annex India if we shot at a few of their ships? A man can dream can't he?
For legal reasons, I must inform the officers at the local American Consulate, and well as my future immigrations officer, that this is a joke.
Do you mind if I ask what the specific problem seems to be? I'm... let's say friendly with some US attorneys who specialize in immigration law and can probably propose a hypothetical some time that'd get a relatively serious answer. It wouldn't be "legal advice" and there'd be a game-of-telephone aspect, so I obviously can't promise anything would come of it, but I can at least see if the roadblock is insurmountable or simply difficult.
Sure, I appreciate the offer a great deal indeed.
There's a website called the World Directory of Medical Schools, that collates the details of individual med schools across the globe, and is pretty much the official registry recognized by most nations across the world.
In said website, you can find things like the date of establishment of an entity, its address, contact details and such.
There's a section called "Sponsor Notes", which records information such as whether the ECFMG has verified the credentials of the place and has given its stamp of approval as meeting the standards they set. I believe it's also used by a few other bodies, in places like Singapore, but the ECFMG is the most important by far. This is entirely unrelated to whether the med school is recognized by the government or licensing body of its own nation, just an additional certificate.
This is also nigh ubiquitous, you'll be hard pressed to find a med school that doesn't have it, at least when I checked, but is also not a legal requirement for a legitimate med school in India. People simply take it for granted.
My alma mater lacks this sponsor note. I suspect it's due to a tumultuous period in its founding, when even its standing with the local government was contested, and since this is India, the corrupt millionaire politician who founded it beefed with the other corrupt millionaire politician who lead the party he seceded from, the latter leaning on the government to get back at him by blocking the process of certification by the IMC.
It was eventually resolved, but either served as sufficient deterrent that the ECFMG wouldn't accept them, or far more likely, they simply didn't bother applying since it's not legally required, whereas being recognized by the IMC/NMC in India is. They also didn't have much motivation to, because the overwhelming majority of my seniors or even my classmates had absolutely no aspirations regarding going abroad, it was a very middling med school and they had their hands full getting into our own competitive postgraduate programs.
I contacted the ECFMG on my own, or rather with a friend who also wanted to give the USMLE, and they informed us that in order to pursue the matter, they need to correspond with the relevant authorities in my med school. I did my best to plead the case to them, and while the Principal at the time was sympathetic to our plight and pleased that some of her students had higher aspirations, she had to speak to the managing board who held the purse strings (it's for profit, and I don't know how much this sponsor note actually costs, the ECFMG doesn't say).
She ended up leaving and being replaced by a new one, and there the matter languished as I was too busy applying myself to the one country that would take me as is, the UK.
That's where it stands, while my friend is rich enough that she could sue my alma mater, that would be pure lawfare and I don't think we actually have a case, since it's not a legal requirement, just a nice to have that almost everyone else does.
That's about it, it's not obvious to me that legal recourse will help, but I'm not averse to finding out! I am perfectly eligible to go to the US by other routes, but the USMLE gatekeeps my ability to match into a program and thus practise there.
Please do let me know what your friends say, even if it only confirms my fears, and thank you again for offering!
I apologize for the lengthy delay in getting back to you, there was indeed a game of telephone as well as having to wait for someone to return from leave. Unfortunately the people I spoke to were of the opinion that while your issue may be resolvable, it's not something any of them have experience in. It appears you were correct in that it is more of a USMLE issue than a legal issue, and so they cannot offer any real answers to the hypothetical I proposed. That's not to say an immigration attorney would be useless to you, in fact they would probably make a good resource, but unfortunately I have come up dry on my end. Also, immigration attorneys are not cheap. I realize this was a very long wait for a very short drink of water, for which I again apologize.
Hey, I genuinely appreciate you remembering to get back to me!
It's as I feared, but that's fine, I was ready to deal with this outcome. I'll do my best to handle things from this end, and given that immigration lawyers are unlikely to help with the USMLE as you've said, it's a good thing I don't have to pay for them just yet.
Thank you, you did keep up your promise, and I hope I can find a solution on my lonesome or with the help of people in the same boat.
Glad I was able to get back to you - even if it was with less than ideal news. I will say that I wouldn't rule out all immigration attorneys as being unhelpful, merely that the ones I spoke to had never encountered your specific issue before. I also hope you're able to come up with a good solution! Best of luck.
Thank you, and I'll keep at it from my end! If it does seem to end up at a point where I could use a lawyer, I'll be sure to ask.
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Our State Department is dumb but not that dumb. We didn't even try to annex Grenada; we ain't fool enough to try to take India. And America, despite the common claims, has never really been much of an imperial power in the traditional sense of sending governors to run vassal states, so you can't even get that much. (You'll note we effectively did the empire thing in Afghanistan, but it wasn't even what we were trying to do and we did a bad job of it.)
Spoilsport!
I don't think the US has expanded its borders for almost a century at this point, I'm struggling to think of anything but some remote pacific islands with 3 coconut trees where that might not be the case. I'll have to Google that.
We should at least have called dibs on Luna. Outer Space Treaty my ass.
Hey, depending on how fast SpaceX advances, it might be a reality. What are the Chinese going to do, throw rocks at you?
They should at least try and claim a large chunk of it, because the OST is more an artifact of nobody really having the ability to monopolize most astral objects than something with staying power. If you can't get there in numbers and with the ability to stay, it's all moot.
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Cold comfort, but this is frustrating and bad for Americans as well. What's sold as being about medical safety sure looks a lot more like professional protectionism, controlling medicine as a cartel from where I sit. Extending the same opportunities to Indian doctors that we do to Indian software developers holds significant appeal, but I doubt it's coming any time soon.
I certainly have mixed feelings on the matter, since it both makes it difficult to get in as barring a few states like Texas (and Minnesota too? I think they did something recently), foreign doctors must match into a residency program regardless of their international qualifications.
This obviously inflates the salary the locals command, since there isn't nearly enough of them to meet all the demand. They're also more immune to mid-level creep, which is absolutely not the case in the UK. They make more than junior doctors like I do, for less work and better conditions, and they can't even prescribe.
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Don't count Intel out yet. Institutional inertia at enterprise scale is a hell of a thing, and all it takes is one big breakthrough to get most/all of the performance- or value-conscious people to switch sides. They can coast for quite a few more years while they try to pull a miracle out of somewhere.
Honestly, Intel CPUs are still perfectly competitive with AMD on the server side. And frankly we have less problems at scale with Intel than I see on our AMD fleet.
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It sounds like you already know what to do. Attraction is not a choice; your girlfriend’s a hater.
You will not convince her, as you haven’t already. You can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into, especially a girlfriend.
Sure, maybe she’d be cool without air-conditioning, with a tiny house, with your salaries disappearing into the ether. However, if she won’t be cool with it, it’d only get blamed upon you. It’ll likely only get worse from here.
Stupid self_made_human, ugh, I can’t even. Our house is small, without omnipresent airconditioning, and we aren’t even saving up a bag. Plus these blokes keep hitting me up on Insta, Tinder, and chatting me up in the street…
I wish you good fortune in the wars to come.
Eh, this is debatable. I've met more than a few people who've held onto positions they've uncritically followed the footsteps of, until their first time someone came along and explicitly challenged their beliefs. I'd agree however, that the odds aren't good, considering the context, heh.
I actually do agree it's theoretically possible to logic someone out of a non-logic'd position, but it happens so seldomly for meatspace acquaintances and relationships that the probability can be lossily rounded to zero.
One possible counter-example of logic'ing people out of a non-logical position I thought of while I was writing that comment was the Pitbull Question (PQ), where it appears that the wrong-thinkers have been winning, even on Reddit. However, this was not accomplished by "Despite being 6% of the dog population, pitbulls commit 66% of all fatal attacks"-posting but rather spreading awareness, news articles, and videos of pitbull attacks, especially where the victims were sympathetic, like women and children. Anecdoting people out of a non-logical position.
It is not a coincidence that the PublicFreakout and ActualPublicFreakout-adjacent subreddits have strict rules against Noticing.
I agree with this.
As I already mentioned, I'm not at all that optimistic about the plausibility of most people changing their beliefs in light of a logical challenge to it. The overwhelming majority of people's beliefs are not arrived via logical deduction or consideration. Then again, that also includes people like us. I'd put to you a challenge I've tried subjecting myself to in the past. Try to formalize as many beliefs that you hold, consisting of premises that someone else should believe, on their face. I'd contend you couldn't do it. I couldn't, for most of my beliefs. As big of a believer as I am in logic and mathematics and hard empirical evidence, if those were the only beliefs I'd be willing to act on, I would be such a nerd. I'd never be able to interact with another human being. Not that I'm all that successful on that front, in the first place.
I think for most people, ignorance and impulse overpower ideology. I fully agree with the problem of Noticing. That's the biggest problem I've had, all across platforms like Reddit. Any ideology that lacks an update mechanism is going to force you to dig in your heels, and into highly uncomfortable positions, that have you defend the most insane looking ideas. But I don't think that's where the problem of Noticing stems from. People have their tribal identities and intellectually primitive beliefs before an ideological artifice begins to appear in the mind.
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Not going to report this because I don’t know if it breaks any rules, but you’re the one being a hater here friend. You didn’t even try to discuss anything about the thrust of his post, just told him his relationship was doomed. Come on now.
At least try to engage with the substance, and maybe throw this in as a post text if you absolutely have to.
Oh, how heckin magnanimous of you not to report, friend. Very wholesome.
If not for the “no, u” remark about being a hater, I would had thought this comment was meant elsewhere.
This is merely isolated policing of “thrust” engagement. I engaged; you just didn’t like the content of the engagement. At least ten of the paragraphs in OPs post were directly talking about the girlfriend, albeit granted some of the paragraphs were short.
So come on now, less of this mod-LARPing and passive aggressive condescension please.
Hey man, the Motte wouldn't be what it is without passive aggressive condescension. I find attacking someone's relationship online who you barely know based on one data point to be particularly distasteful. In general, I think the CW thread should be more focused on actual topics and arguments than our personal lives.
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I don't feel like it's report worthy myself.
Deeply misguided, certainly, but that's not something I want to see being punished unless there's no other recourse.
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I know you're trying to look out for me, and I appreciate that, but even if the US doesn't work out, assuming I can fix the ECFMG issue, there are mutually acceptable countries like Australia or Canada on the cards.
A step down salary wise, but still better than the UK.
It's not as cut and dry as the US or my girlfriend.
I can only hope you trust me when I say that I've been with her long enough that I don't think this is a concern. If not, well I'm helpless to change your mind!
There are already dozens of men trying to chat her up on Insta, that's a fact of life for any pretty Indian girl, but she summarily blocks them even without reply. I see no reason not to rest the weight of my confidence on her, assuming her tiny frame could take it.
Err.. Thanks? I really don't think it'll come to that, not that we don't fight (a lot). Just not on those terms.
Is it somehow worse for Indian girls than whites girls? Or is it just that the kind of man to ask for bob and vagene online would more readily proposition an Indian girl instead of a different race?
Indian men usually have negative rizz for one (apologies for the zoomer slang, it basically means charisma or game).
I've slid into DMs with success before, and the way these guys go about it pains me. The first and most important principle is to not to lay it on too thick and maintain plausible deniability.
To an extent, many of them don't have better options, since Tinder in India might have even worse odds of getting laid per hour of swiping. Dating outside the workplace, college, or mutual friends is rather difficult and fraught.
I can't speak authoritatively as to what ails the white women of the world, since I haven't dated any, but in my eyes, common sense dictates that if they have to deal with the boobs and vagene crowd that leaks out onto the wider internet, Indian women have it worse. They just don't bitch about it as much!
*bobs
I'm sorry, I've already said I'm a bad Indian haha
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In my taste-experience, which of course does not necessarily correlate with their health benefits, American fruits and vegetables are low quality. Even farmers' market produce supposedly grown like 20 miles away from me tastes plasticky and empty. A few years ago I was in my birth country, Russia, in a part of the country a few hundred miles south of Moscow. The produce tasted wonderful. I suppose that this might be some inherited biological birth-preference or childhood preference of mine, but I kind of doubt it.
What is the food like in India?
Never felt this tbh (just returned from europe). Fruit tastes similar. Go to farmers markets in LA, they seem fine.
Local produce in the US- especially the south- is way better than the generic mass market stuff.
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Yeah, this is one that I generally feel the Euros win on. Having a simple pan con tomate in Spain is almost irritating due to how clear it makes it that American tomatoes suck. Lots of good food to be found at restaurants, easy to get excellent meats and cheeses at the butcher, but the fresh produce is simply inferior to what you'll find in a typical European city.
Just grow your own tomatoes. It’s trivially easy and crazy cheap. And you can grow any variety you want. I’ve got six different varieties growing right now, some are close to harvest time.
We have a few out on the porch. Live in a townhouse though, no backyard for a meaningful garden.
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Uh.. I mean it's food, I've never stopped to think overly much about the exact quality of produce. It looks about right, isn't filled with worms, and keeps in the fridge. That's about all I can say.
I'm a very bad Indian. Or at least a non-stereotypical one, so I don't like most of it.
Now biryani, that singlehandedly justifies the Mughal occupation in my eyes. You wouldn't believe how I missed it when I saw the awkward semi-recognizable versions I found in the UK.
But say what you will about our cuisine (Indians have multiple cuisines as distinct from one another as Greek and British cuisine are to each other, maybe more), we know how to use spices and make flavorful food.
But I like Western cuisine more overall. That's just me, no broader judgement implied.
I should add that my experience of American food has been pretty shit. The vegetables are tasteless and overgrown, the pork smells and tastes like it was marinated in a sewer (and that’s only an exaggeration most of the time), and the chicken is this spongy tasteless unrecognizable species of meat.
I’ve had good American food as well, but it was definitely the outlier rather than the norm.
Edit: also everything tastes too sweet for some goddamn reason
So you've met the people who overcook the shit out of everything.
And also beefsteak tomatoes.
I mean that even when it's just me cooking, the chicken is remarkably bad, the pork is absolutely rank for some reason, and the vegetables are stringy and bland even when I try to buy from either ethnic or higher-end grocery stores, compared to what I could do with equivalent ingredients elsewhere; and this is even more true for many (non-fancy) restaurants. I mean, seriously, what is up with your chicken? It's horrible!
(American beef is pretty decent, though.)
That isn't to say that there aren't good restaurants in the US -- I've been to a fair few -- but I don't think the food is particularly good outside of, say, New York and LA. Even San Francisco was pretty disappointing, even if it wasn't horrible.
Steakhouses and grillhouses are pretty hit and miss in my experience, and there's really only so far that I can take burgers, pizzas, doughnuts, fries, barbeque, cheesecake, etc. as "good food". Americans have managed to butcher most continenal European foods that have travelled over the pond; Italian-American is on the whole really not close in quality to Italian, for example. This goes down to individual food items, too - the bread is just better across the Atlantic, as is yogurt, as is the seafood (especially around the Mediterranean), ...
And don't get me started on the "ethnic" cuisines. Most of the Japanese food in America is a travesty (or at least it was until very recently, and I haven't had the opportunity to check in the last five years), similar with Korean food (mostly pretty shit). Most of the Chinese restaurants in SF were unimpressive; I think I thought one, maybe two Chinese restaurants were good, and maybe another handful were passable to decent? I thought SF was supposed to be a city with a high Chinese population? And I haven't even got around to most of the Malaysian or Thai food.
Put another way, America is the only place I know of where the food processing is sophisticated enough yet the average food quality is bad enough that the food in Honey Honey Boo Boo makes sense.
On the other hand, Western cuisine is good. The few times I've been to Europe the food has generally impressed me. I'm not sure why Americans can't seem to replicate it.
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I'm in it for the grease and massive portion sizes my dude, they could paint the cheese green and call it lettuce and I wouldn't complain.
(You're Japanese right? Maybe it's because they didn't use much MSG)
I see that you truly are an American in spirit.
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It's kind of a cliche, but I've often seen it in real life, that the most patriotic Americans are immigrants.
All the things you say about America are (mostly) true. It's still a pretty good place and anyone born here was damn lucky. Now we preach to those who were handed possibly the best civilization ever that it's actually evil and should be dismantled and spat upon. Those who succeed in dismantling her.... well, they deserve what they get.
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Tell her you want to move to a leftist state like Massachusetts or California that has similar laws to Europe. Tell her that America is so big thinking all American states are the same would be like an American thinking there is no real difference between living in Romania or England or an American being fearful of living in Spain because of the policies of the Hungarian government.
There's no problem with appreciating and even loving the society you live/grew up in, without needing to fetishize it all the time. To some people like the OP, that may be what "America" means to him. To other people, it's meant something quite different. It's just a matter of who benefits.
I grew up with a material quality of life that's probably comparable to the average American that isn't wealthy and didn't live in poverty, which is to say well, but had it horrible in almost every other measurable dimension. That isn't a reason to love America though. That's just running away from the horrors of a life without modern technology and conveniences. Nobody would prefer to go back to more primitive times, and that's equally true if you were living in 1700's compared with the 700's (yes not every historical period applies, I get it, the Dark Ages were really a thing). Certainly didn't have a great home life. Certainly didn't have a great educational environment. Certainly didn't grow up in a good neighborhood. I don't think that's a great way to measure the intangible wealth and overall health of a society though.
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That's a good argument, I've tried making a similar one in the past, but she'd trust it more from a native.
India is no slouch when it comes to size, but even it is dwarfed by America.
So you want a leftist state AND biryani? I got bad news for you, dude, your dream home is in Newark, New Jersey.
I am warning you, if I go to the trouble of visiting and find out that the biryani there is the same abomination I found in the UK, I'm going to cry and shit my pants.
I can't assure you that f3zinker isn't right, having never been to India. But while you can find the UK stuff, you're probably smart enough to avoid places like "Brick Lane Curry House", so it will definitely be better than that.
(And a correction, it's Newark Avenue in Jersey City, not the city of Newark)
The UK is the same. “British Indian” food was created by Bangladeshi immigrants to appeal to the British palate. It can be excellent, but it’s its own cuisine, it’s like Tex Mex or Italian-American cuisine of the “red sauce” variety.
London has some of the best Indian fine dining in the world, my favorite is a place called Bibi but there are also a bunch of great examples, especially when it comes to North Indian cuisine. It’s so weird to see international culinary snobs complain about a £9 “Tikka Masala” from the “Brick Lane Curry House” as if it’s an indictment against all Indian cuisine in Britain. America has some of the world’s best Italian cuisine but you won’t find it at Olive Garden.
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Sorry to say this, but as a Desi who visited and ate Desi foods in some Desi strongholds in the East Coast of the US like various parts of New Jersey. You will be disappointed. A lot.
But on the other hand, they have BBQ, Chinese, Italian, Mexican !!, and just about everything else. So you wouldn't really miss good food all that much.
I always thought you were a Turk or Central Asian or something!
I don't recall saying anything that would suggest I live in Turkey or.. Kazakhstan for that matter.
I usually don't speak about my ethnicity/nationality unlike @self_made_human because I don't live in the shithole so their matters; let that be political, cultural or otherwise are more or less irrelevant to me. I'm a worse Desi than him, I'm illiterate in my mother tongue! I've grown up elsewhere.
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I'm sufficiently irony poisoned that if hear someone tell me "Ayy, I'm walkin' here" in an Italian accent I'd just keel over and die.
That or my heart failing from my biryani diet. I've eaten more of it than 5 average people combined. This is actually not a joke!
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His girlfriend's dream home is in a college town.
I was thinking Ithaca, NY might be a good fit for both.
If they can deal with the weather there.
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This is a bit much. America has a huge obesity problem because they stick all these chemicals in their food. While obesity is a better problem to have than malnutrition as in India, it's still a problem.
Australia is like a better version of California. American brands like Starbucks can't compete with our domestic, high-quality artisanal quality coffee. Our food doesn't have nearly as many chemicals in it and people aren't quite so fat. There's no weird tipping culture. Our medical system is better than the NHS (we poach a bunch of British doctors) and more cost-efficient than the US. We have good beaches. There aren't any open-air drug markets and barely any visible homeless (this was a big shock when I was in San Francisco). Public transport is used for transporting the public (even people who wear suits), as opposed to being a moneypit full of undesirables. Very low crime generally. Plus we have resource rents to subsidize the rest of our economy because our population/land value ratio is very generous. Our national debt is half that of the US and we had a surplus this year. Taxes are roughly equivalent to the US, well below European standards.
On the down side, there's a cancerous compulsory superannuation scheme that siphons off 9% (and rising) of worker income so big finance can squander it and charge fees on it. You can manage your own superannuation if you fill out a metric tonne of paperwork. Our technology sector isn't as advanced as the US, though we do pretty well in quantum computing and materials science. Wages are somewhat lower than the US, though property is fairly expensive (likely due to how desirable this country is). People don't work as hard as in the US either, so it's somewhat balanced. No guns and a mildly more authoritarian government. It gets quite hot in summer but we can afford air conditioning.
Broadly speaking, I'd put Australia just ahead of the US or UK, having been to all three.
I'm against compulsory superannuation too, but I think you dramatically overstate how bad it is. It's trivial to find a good fund and put your money in there and get good returns. And then you have a nice pile of money waiting for you when you retire.
Property is indeed expensive, because we have high immigration rates that our construction rates don't keep up with. But not as bad as the UK.
I don't know what pathways Indian doctors take to get here, but there sure are a lot of them, so a pathway must exist.
The food is a lot better than the US too IMO.
The biggest problem in my opinion is disastrous energy policy that is leading to skyrocketing power prices.
The pathway to simply becoming "a" doctor in Canada is relatively simple (albeit still gated off from me for the same stupid reason the US is).
But specialization is a far bigger hassle since they're uber protective of their local residents, making it a PITA to progress in your career.
I'd go so far as to say it's better to go halfway down the pipeline in the UK and transfer to Canada for double the pay, instead of sticking it out at either end.
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I just want to keep my money, why is that so much to ask? My investments do better than any fund manager and so what if I did worse, it's my money. Is there any confidence the money will really be there when we retire, that the baby boomers won't take it all, or the government won't tax/inflate it away? In crypto, there's a saying 'not your keys, not your coins' which should go double for wealth hidden opaquely that can't be withdrawn by law. And $30 billion is charged every year in superannuation fees.
True on the Indian doctor front, I understand that there's a lot of cheating, degree mill universities, fake credentials. Presumably that's why we have these rules and checks, though the UK is more desperate for doctors.
As I said, I oppose compulsory superannuation and this is one of several reasons why.
This however is paranoid rambling. The super funds really do have massive asset portfolios and they really do pay out balances to retirees.
It is indeed important to a) consolidate all your super into one account so you aren't paying multiple sets of fees (this is basic advice but many don't follow it) and b) make sure you are with a fund that delivers good after-fee returns. There are definitely a bunch of funds that provide bad value and eat away at balances through excessive fees.
Having said that, $30 billion in fees does need to be put in context of $3.5 trillion total assets. It's still less than 1%, despite the problems that exist.
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If you can consistently outperform indexes then you should quit your job and become a hedge fund manager. I seriously doubt that’s the case but if true you could become so rich you wouldn’t need the superattenuation.
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Most countries are content to have their own medical licensing exams that international doctors must pass.
If they don't catch the frauds, they're not very good exams IMO.
The UK makes do without the thing that the other Commonwealth countries and the US quibble over, but to be fair most med schools have that by default, which is why it came to me as a kick in the nuts when I graduated and found out mine didn't. It's not a legal requirement for one to have it here.
Also, a major reason that the UK is desperate for doctors is that a sizeable fraction of their native ones have had enough and are fucking off to other countries as fast as they can. So they fill that lacuna with IMGs like me.
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I can just not eat the junk right? I'm not making promises, but you can trust me when I say that I keep my weight within a mostly respectable range while having a rather degenerate diet.
If not, well, ozempic is a thing.
America has incredibly diversity in its cuisine, you can find food from pretty much any country in the world with a little bit of effort.
I can only assume you take this for granted, because finding French, Greek, Persian and African food where I live is impossible as far as I know it.
I'm aware that the discrepancy is not as glaring when you compare it to the UK.
I like Australia too, but the same ECFMG issue that makes only the UK an option for current me applies there too.
And in Canada and New Zealand.
All of them are lazy enough to thrust the issue of verifying medical qualifications to EPIC, an aspect of the ECFMG, as well as an additional sponsorship note from the same that my med school lacks. (This is not a legal requirement in India, only something so common everyone takes it for granted)
Whereas the UK only uses the ECFMG to make sure my degree is real and recognized by my nation. They rely on a professional licensing exam, the PLAB, to make sure you know the right way to hold a stetho.
I'd happily go to Australia, as many NHS doctors are already doing!
This is genuinely hard in America! HFCS is in a lot of things. There are comparisons of products in the UK to US products, the American version is full of all kinds of weird stuff: https://foodbabe.com/food-in-america-compared-to-the-u-k-why-is-it-so-different/
There are stories of Americans moving to Europe and losing weight without effort, plus the reverse.
I think nobody should idolize or denigrate countries excessively. America isn't the worst country in the world but it's probably not the best either. There are different kinds of 'best' and worst too, tradeoffs between wealth and health and affordability, quality of life, crime, sane politics and so on. As much as I like Australia, there are all kinds of things wrong with it too. Nuclear power is illegal for instance and we're busily wrecking our energy market with renewable aspirations. The same quality of planning that fumbles all our defence procurement is also wishing for (but not building) enormous amounts of solar, wind and cables to link them all up.
I notice how you fastidiously avoided referring to the drop bear infestation, blink and I'll call for help.
I broadly agree that to qualify a country as "best", you do need to at least flesh out the criteria you're considering, as well as how much you weigh them.
In the realm of comparing say, the US, Australia, Singapore or even Canada, I see no reason to really argue over which must necessarily reign supreme. They all have their perks, but I think most observers will agree that UK, and certainly India, can't compare by the metrics people typically care about the most.
I think I did a decent job of outlining why the US in particular appealed to me!
I'm rather sleep deprived, but I'll chase down your link later.
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Here in America, people have often cited this point as a foreshadowing of why America is in decline. And the meme often goes something like this, "America is no longer a homeland. It is a marketplace." And increasingly this has become an operative principle sewing discontent in Canada, the last number of years as well. It's difficult for me to see how this is a quality instrument for measuring social health. Sure, maybe Muslims will occasionally help themselves to some Panda Express. But they're certainly not going to celebrate Christmas. And they're certainly not going to attend the gay parade, at least without a truck full of explosives.
Lots of Muslims in the USA probably do celebrate Christmas, to one degree or another.
I'm curious what you would consider American "homeland" food. Nearly all of the distinctly American food I can think of is either hyper-local dishes or the result of a fusion of various European, black, and native cuisine.
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The USA has a far looser set of laws around food additives and also puts a lot more sugar in absolutely everything than any other country in the developed world. If you’re prepared to simply not eat anything processed, then yes, you can. But most people don’t and it’s probably best not to kid yourself that you’re going to- if you eat processed foods in the UK, including meals out of the hospital cafeteria, you’ll probably maintain the same eating habits or even get worse in the US(because restaurants are more convenient and cheaper relative to salary), and that will almost certainly lead to weight gain.
Mostly HFCS, actually, as I understand it.
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In Ozempic We Trust.
No seriously, I think we're about 4-5 years away from killing the obesity epidemic. Especially when generics become available. It's eye-wateringly expensive by Indian standards, but we can wait.
I believe that the CICO model is more than trivially true, so in practise if I notice I'm gaining weight, I skip meals.
Hell, I already have one meal a day. With takeout prices being what they are, that's about all I can sustainably afford haha
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Find a new girlfriend. Someone who not an Indian feminist. Indian women for whatever reason seem to latch on to progressive political whining with glee. Often being of the most radical type. It’s hard to imagine someone like that being a good partner. This type of person is often quite mercenary and will drop you if you hit a bumpy patch. I imagine there are an abundance of traditional women available, in absolute terms if not relative.
Short of that, tell her she will be in good company in the US. There will be endless women networking events, affirmative action, protests to join, causes to agitate for, white people to complain about. All with institutional, judicial, and community support. She’ll get lots of positive attention for all her political action. She could be special. Probabaly more special than she is in India currently. I’m going to guess she’s not a BJP fan, though i don’t know much about Indian politics. If you believe the progressive party line to the extent that they have one on India, he’s the 21st century hitler. I’d imagine he’s broadly popular and you don’t get much status from bitching about him at home.
I'd rather not find a new girlfriend, thanks. I'm rather attached to this one.
She might have SocJus tendencies, but that comes from having very normie tastes in social media. She tolerates my rather heterodox views, so I can only return the favor.
I'm sure there are some conservative Indians for whom this is counts as good advice, but they are categorically not me. I wouldn't marry an Indian equivalent of a "trad wife" if you paid me money to.
And even if I were to grant you your take on liberal Indian women (partially true as it is), she'd be "one of the good ones" in my eyes.
I have no end of personal flaws, and she loves me nonetheless and is fiercely loyal to a fault.
If it was a straight up fight between my desire to go to the US (with Green Card in hand) and staying with her, it would be a painful tradeoff but I would still pick her.
I had to remind myself that you really do not know this woman.
I despise Modi myself, but he's no Hitler. I like to think my political views are more nuanced than that.
Dont listen to these ppl. Live your own life. You seem happy so cherish what you have. Try to live your dreams mate, canada or aus arent too bad anyway.
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...Something it might help to keep in mind is that you're, like, two or three standard deviations more cheerful and positive in your outlook than a lot of the regulars here, who, having spent some time marinating in the unique local atmosphere, tend to have formed a pachyderm-like outer husk of bitter, misanthropic cynicism, the better to endure the chronic disappointment inherent to chronicling humanity's failures. It can take some of us a bit of time to shake the rust off and switch gears, and a few of us are just... permanently stuck in the frowny-face setting. Sloot in particular, I think, believes that they have divined the fundamental nature of all women, and does not like what they think they've found.
Personally, I find your attitude and general approach quite refreshing, so thanks for that. You're a good egg.
That was strangely touching, thank you.
While we have our differences, I certainly respect you as a poster for being both intelligent and articulate.
Better to meet people who have very different worldviews, but well fleshed out ones, than those with the same but half baked, in my eyes (I'd love to have both, but you can see with my idiosyncrasies that's quite a big ask!)
At least unlike many others, I am mostly content to live and let live; and you seem the same. That's enough for us to all get along, as far as I can see it.
I look forward to your comments in general!
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Hah, thank you for pointing out this tendency in such flowery language. I half-thought I was going crazy with how negative all the comments here are.
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My feelings on America are much like Cicero had of Rome. The state is in decline from its heights and the Republic is a zombie waiting until someone reveals that it’s been dead a long time. She’s a pretty corpse, don’t misunderstand, but she’s a corpse shambling along and what remains of the glamour is makeup on a zombie corpse.
Her government has long ceased to be the government that needs ask permission before meddling in the affairs of her citizens that she considers subjects. If there were any doubts of this fact, I’d simply need point out the entirety of 2020, when a supposedly “free” country took upon itself to dictate the movements and activities and business transactions that her subjects were allowed to take. And all of this without the fig-leaf of a debate or vote or (heresy for any government) a sunset date certain beyond which the state could not interfere. Likewise, this same state was and still is telling and coordinating with social media and the press on what stories the state considers “misinformation” to be labeled and suppressed. We are seeing the birth of the neurostate (https://shadowrunners.substack.com/p/on-neurogovernance) in which the “free” people are managed like cattle, their opinions shaped and managed for them, and so when they’re allowed to vote, they can only vote as the programmers told them to.
But even if there is a dissident vote, the professional technocrats of the deep state can easily bypass the vestigial electoral state and just, go do whatever it wants to anyway. Our Supreme Court has declared an end to affirmative action in state run university. They have no intention of going along with it. When Trump (supposedly the elected head of the government) wanted to change nuclear policy, the deep state refused to obey. The deep state also gets to make and enforce rules that hamstring businesses beyond any sort of logic or practicality (https://fee.org/articles/warning-osha-can-be-hazardous-to-your-health/) and inspections are done by people who have never worked in that industry.
Honestly, there are times I wish the zombie republic would kick off so that we didn’t have to make believe that we live in a free country.
What's this in reference too? The shift to develop tactical nukes? I thought they did obey him there: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/12/biden-trump-nuclear-weapons-526976
This link seems to imply more tactical nukes were fielded. Broadly, I take your point about Trump being defied and outmanoeuvred, especially in foreign policy.
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Is it possible that the US has peaked? Sure, depending on your metrics I can grant that.
Does that mean that it's not worth living in?
Heavens no, even by the standards of liberty you espouse, you'll be hard pressed to find places that compare.
If you're concerned about government overreach in the affairs of its citizens, come have a look at what we have to deal with in India. Or the UK for the matter.
Much like democracy is the worst form of government but for all the others, the US is the same to its own ideals.
More importantly, while I appreciate liberty, it's not the only concern she or I share. I'd happily live in Singapore too.
Except when people say things like "it's worth living in," and then they point to things like medical technology or supermarkets, they're trading on the term 'America' as a proxy for simply talking about 'material wealth' and modern society. Of course, who would want to go back to times without modern anesthesia? And without Deng Xiaoping's hat tip to neoliberalism, the average person in China would be a subsistence farmer in 2023 and wouldn't live in the relative material exorbitance that they now have.
If this was your experience growing up in the US, maybe rolling the dice as a relative middle class person in Bulgaria may not look so bad. That's not to say I don't appreciate what I have, I'm not complacent, but America isn't exceptional in this regard. Countries that are fairly materially well off, don't look with so much envy to the US. They're as equally content where they are in their home country as I am here.
That’s my thing too. Right now we’re cruising on the inertia that was built 100 years ago. Yes, it’s still a good place if you’re wealthy enough that you can avoid the slums in the cities, you can afford a decent private school that bypasses state schools that are more interested in teaching propaganda than literacy, numeracy, and scientific literacy. But I don’t think it can last when we must import the majority of our engineers and computer scientists from abroad, when we’ve stopped inventing, when generations are incapable of understanding the modern world due to poor education, and where infrastructure is bad enough to cause derailments. Sooner or later, as conditions in India and China improve such that importing our brains doesn’t work, and our native kids are too poorly educated to maintain, let alone build or create modern civilization, when our kids are too obese to fight to protect shipping lanes or allies, and when bridges and roads are no longer useable because we can’t maintain them, the makeup won’t hide that.
We're cruising on the inertia of the 1990s - early 2010s, the various tech booms and the great decline in crime.
Being poor sucks anywhere. The slums were much worse in the US from roughly the race riots of the 1960s to the early 1990s (later in some places). They're getting worse again but they haven't reached those lows.
That's what suburbs are for. Maybe small cities without much of a progressive problem.
We don't see table 5. Software developers are the highest at about 40%.
A section of I-95 collapsed (due to a major fire, not lack of maintenance) in Philadelphia and re-opened (granted, a temporary fix) within 12 days. We're decadent, not incapable. At least so far.
This is something every wealthy society becomes in danger of losing knowledge of - overtime. People have always looked at me funny when I tell them there are places in the US that resemble third world countries. I'd rather be broke in the US than broke in India, but I'd probably much rather be rich, living as a middle class American in Russia, than a well off Russian trying to live in the Bay Area; if I really took the time to sit down and do the math.
I've actually thought about this and wondered how the surge in remote work made by COVID, will turn the major cities into economic superstructures that are built on quicksand. Especially when the service sector and technology that's less reliant on physical inputs (but rather the quality of fewer inputs) continues to eclipse even more of the industrial sector. You're already seeing people take tech jobs and moving far out of state.
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Must? To the extent that having more engineers and computer scientists is better, it seems weird to complain about having more of them. You're starving your competition of the best intellectual resources after all and enriching yourself.
Dunno about China, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for India to catch up, unless the country literally bans emigration, which is not on the cards.
Leaving aside that even in the absence of transformative AI, most wars as far in the future as you're assuming will be fought with drones, obesity is the least of your concerns. Maybe you might get better drone operators if they're all chubby gamers.
I'm bullish on ozempic and co myself.
I’m not complaining about too many engineers. My complaint is that we aren’t producing our own engineers. I’ve gone to lots of graduations, and the engineering department in most schools is graduating far more Chinese and Indian students than native born American students. This is a problem because they’ll only stay here so long as our lifestyle is substantially better than what’s possible in their home countries or in other countries. If European countries are a better “get rich” location for them, we aren’t going to keep them. And thus having a good enough education system to create native born engineers is critical to our future as a civilization. Unfortunately our K12 system is so bad that most graduates of that system are simply too far behind to go into engineering.
To quote myself, see table 5. Also table 6.
Europe is moribund, having taken up leveling and socialism to a much greater extent than the US ever did. The more likely danger is that the US follows Europe down that path, not that Europe somehow becomes a better place to get rich.
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Obviously her perception of the US is off, but there are states which in fact banned abortion, full stop(Texas being the largest) and others which have such restrictions as to de facto ban it, gun violence is a serious problem even if it doesn't generally look much like she's picturing, the rednecks you describe are unlikely to provide a particularly warm welcome to even the most English speaking and talented Hindu(they'll resort to interpretive dance to befriend Jose the undocumented day laborer long before they offer to share their non-bud light beer with non-Christian H1Bs), and healthcare costs are legitimately insane with actual healthcare outcomes being not much better than the rest of the rich world except for cancer patients.
However, a lot of that is contingent on the US being huge. It's literally half a continent. If she wants partial-birth abortion there's states that allow that. If she wants guns tightly controlled there's states that have gun control regimes well within the Euro average(which includes Austria as much as it does Germany). On a doctor's salary you'd probably have to specifically seek out rednecks or violent neighborhoods. Oh and did I mention that a doctor's salary buys you in-practice immunity from the majority of America's problems? You could live in a palatial house in a nice suburb in a blue state, have someone else come and clean it, take a vacation twice a year, and still save more than you would in England.
Have you ever met any rednecks? Because this sounds more like a San Franciscan or New Yorker’s extremely stereotyped mental image of a redneck than it does my many experiences with them.
If an Indian guy showed up to any of the gun clubs I’ve been to, brought some beer, and was happy to talk shit about Democrats, I’m willing to bet he’d be welcomed with open arms.
I am a redneck. The fact of the matter is that Indian immigrants are basically imported foreign over educated aristocrats and everyone knows it. Yes, rednecks are in general much less racist than the urban elite think them to be, and a sufficiently American-conservative East Indian bringing a case of kingfisher to your average bbq can probably secure an invitation to the next one(of course, eating brisket and bitching about democrats is strong evidence of not being like the other Indians). But everyone knows what the typical Indian immigrant is and overcoming that initial impression is likely to take some work, because Americans who don’t have an incentive to pretend otherwise are perfectly aware of which immigrants tend to get along well with the red tribe when language barriers go away.
Indian Americans have a tendency to overcompensate to try and "fit in" to the vogue but it backfires and they just come off as jarring, that's how you get the Mindy Kaling types going over the top woke than anybody else that even her white liberal comrades had to keep their distance after Velma. And then you have the constant race warring on twitter between mainland Indians and Black Americans... yeah after that if someone told me the "real" founding members of the KKK were actually Indian, I'd believe them. There were some LARPers but more than a handful of handles that I follow and know are actually Indian (usually HinduNat) were spitting slurs I doubt any Klansman has heard since the last century.
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I’ve had to put up with my share of snooty Brahmins before, so I definitely understand where you’re coming from. I just don’t get the sense that self_made_human would be nearly as insufferable and off-putting to the red tribe as some of his countrymen. In my experience, as long as a stranger makes a good-faith effort to fit in, most rednecks will welcome him no matter his color or nationality. Shooting, drinking, and badmouthing Biden are probably the quickest ways to gain acceptance in the red tribe. I don’t think self_made_human would have a problem with any of those three.
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If it makes a difference to you, I have online friends I'd call rednecks, and we've shot many virtual guns together in relative harmony. They're almost always deeply surprised when they learn I'm Indian, half of them need to check my IP on TeamSpeak. I don't even sound Indian for one, people think I'm Nordic.
I think I can finagle the difference if I ever meet their equivalent in person, the initial barrier doesn't seem as insurmountable, and they'd at least be touched to see me try.
I certainly won't be lying if I minge about the Dems, and I'll just keep mum on the parts of the Republicans I dislike too. Easy enough.
Hmm. I think that you might find acceptance among rednecks in the Northern US, but in the South I am not so sure.
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Is gun violence a "problem"? Yes.
Is gun violence a problem worth losing sleep over? Not in the least. The numbers don't allow it.
The majority of those who die from it die at their own hands, with a gun in their mouth. A large chunk of the remainder are ganbangers who are busy killing each other.
Avoiding a few neighborhoods largely insulates you from any serious risk. I have no plans on working in an inner city ER if I can help it, and I can help it.
Is that a serious barrier to anyone not living off food stamps? You can just drive across state borders the few times this is a concern.
I'm simply built different. Semi-unironically. I know how to operate a gun, and I'm confident in my ability to be friendly and charming to win over anyone who isn't a card-carrying KKK member.
(Nor am I a Hindu, if one is allowed to shed the religion of one's ancestors)
In most plausible worlds, we can afford health insurance. In the rest, we can fly to neighboring countries like Mexico to get a sweet 80-90% off.
More of you guys should try it, at least for conditions where you don't need constant ongoing care or acute emergencies.
Like you said, it's a trivial problem to insulate ourselves from most of America's problems while enjoying the benefits.
Now, if only there was a way to live in the Bay Area without fighting junkies and opioid zombies..
Coming from a Southerner in a medium-sized college town, I think your impression is pretty spot on and if I had dictatorial powers you and the GF would have a green card yesterday, instead of my annoying third worlder south Asian (from where and how they got papers, I have no clue; I'm guessing it has something to do with the local university) upstairs neighbors who don't grasp basic concepts like "Don't do your laundry in the bathtub, leak water all over the place, and fuck up my ceiling.". You and the girlfriend (She could bond with the car-hating ex-pat professor from the UK.) would do well socially at the bar I work at and I'm sure that the local hospital or doc-in-a-box could use your help if you're not inclined toward opening up your own practice.
I'm drunk and not overly energetic at the moment but I'll say a few things: Concerning gun homicides, you're absolutely correct. It's a non-issue outside of a few hotspots if you're not an underclass criminal type or suicidal. Concerning abortion, Plan B is like $20 at Walmart, and if you fuck that up Illinois isn't that far away; it isn't as if abortions were overly accessible within Alabama to begin with. As for food, if you can cook or like lowbrow American cuisine (which includes Americanized Chinese and Mexican, maybe a Thai or Indian place if you're lucky.) you're fine. Otherwise, good luck and don't expect to find good Italian food here.
When you coup the capital, I'll be wiring you five dollars for moral support haha.
One of the chief drawbacks of recognizing the stochastic and uncaring nature of the universe is that I have no one to blame for my plight. I'd never have thought that a tiny checkbox next to my med school's name on a directory of medical schools would have locked me into the current trajectory of my life.
I'm unusually unlucky, at least in this one regard. I've very blessed in others!
I like my Italian food hot, greasy, and in large quantities. I hope my standards are low enough that I can bear it haha.
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I'm honestly not sure if this is a joke or not. But if it isn't: you don't have to do anything special to avoid that in the Bay Area. If you're in the areas frequented by street homeless people, there's a lot more of them than there were a decade or two ago, but you can just ignore them.
On the other hand, the cost of living compared to the salaries in the Bay Area seems like a pretty bad deal, so I wouldn't recommend living there if you don't have a good reason to do so.
I used to be homeless, smack dab in the Bay Area. If you don't want to worry about security or law enforcement sweeping you off the streets, you can move nearer to a homeless encampment and buy yourself time before you setup your next box to curl up in elsewhere, 'if' you're willing to tolerate junkies and opioid addicts. But at that point, you're trading one risk assessment for another. That said, I definitely agree with your last statement.
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I could be succumbing to bad advertising myself, not that I seriously think you need to go out with a spiked baseball bat to get your groceries. California still looks like a great place to live, and I for one hope I don't need to rely on public transport where the worst happens.
I do think it does still have a serious homeless and junkie problem (which largely overlap).
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The nearest abortion clinic to the actually populated parts of Texas is in Kansas. This is a 6-7 hour drive from one of Texas' main population centers and a 10+ hour drive from the other two. That's the high water mark for difficulty getting an abortion; a three day round trip(one for each leg plus a day to actually get the abortion) from Houston(Americans would drive that distance, although they'd fly if going to New Mexico instead because Texas' population centers have reliable air service there, so you could substitute airfare to Santa Fe or Albuquerque one a two day trip). And of course even when abortions were widely available in Texas, they weren't exactly free here, so you'd add in another thousand dollars. A thousand dollars, plus 1-2 nights in a hotel(women seeking abortions are not going to sleep on the streets, even if they can get away with it), plus either air fare to New Mexico or gas to Kansas, plus missing time at work- you'd exclude a pretty substantial chunk of the working class from being able to get abortions even allowing for their credit limits.
Now in other states which have banned abortion things are substantially easier for poor-but-not-impoverished women, although if they miss their window under state law in eg Florida they might be somewhat harder.
(Nor am I a Hindu, if one is allowed to shed the religion of one's ancestors)
I won't dispute your self assessment, although unless you convert to Christianity rednecks will probably reckon you a Hindu despite your lack of belief or practice.
Yes, you can afford health insurance on a doctor's salary, and if you work for a hospital can afford really comprehensive health insurance. It's still probably more expensive than you'd expect even if you come out ahead on the whole compared to Britain.
You are of course correct about gun violence; don't stick one in your mouth or head into the neighborhoods the locals tell you to avoid and you'll almost certainly be fine.
I could have sworn that I wrote a lengthy post in response, but I'm already sleep deprived so it could all have been a dream.
Thank you for elaborating, I didn't consider there were actually some parts where abortion did get that difficult to come by.
I'm all for abortion rights, so far in fact that even some abortion rights activists would run screaming in terror. So you can imagine I sympathize with their plight, while still thinking that it's unlikely to be an issue for me and mine.
For anything not acute or that didn't need ongoing care, I'd fly to another country and get it done cheaper. Mexico is quite literally across the border.
If it was a more intensive issue, then I'd just move to a place where it was cheaper for the interim.
Makes little difference to me since I don't think they're being malicious. I don't think the initial barriers will persist when they see that we share some common interests, and I think at one point they'd be calling their buddies over to get a load of this funny Indian dude who knows about guns and how to shoot them.
This is probably correct if your self assessment is accurate.
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I can only go yikes if my essay gave you the impression I was fond of the Confederate flag in any way. At most, I can say that I'm not reflexively against anyone flying it, and I think I can at least get along with them.
Now AR-15s..
My current plan is to sell her on a vacation to the States after we have some more money in hand, so she can see for herself whether it's the dystopian hell hole she think it is.
I'll give that a whirl as far as time and budget allows! Thanks
If you go to Denver you might also consider dipping into Utah, it’s a short drive to canyon lands which is probably the most beautiful part of the American southwest (just don’t go in the summer). Zion, Bryce Canyon and capital reef are also stunning. Lots of people fly to Denver tent a car visit the Rockies, drive through Utah and/or the Grand Canyon before returning from Las Vegas.
I'll try and remember this, thought it might be a year or two till I can make it a reality!
Hmm.. I think my friend has a wedding coming up in the States sooner or later, that would be a fine excuse.
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