The French transitioned the majority of their grid to nuclear back when I was a small child. Their electric prices are lower than Italy, Germany, or the UK. Of the big European countries, only Spain’s is lower.
They are also completely unable to build any new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 13 years late on a 5 years project and 7x over budget.
Their proposed EPR2 fleet requires 11 cents/kWh and interest free loans. Sum freely. With the first reactor coming online in 2038, if everything goes according to plan.
New built nuclear power in 2026 just doesn't square with reality when the costs and timelines are factored in.
Anyone could’ve picked up the mantle of fixing the NRC, which is an obviously broken agency. France transitioned the majority of its grid to nuclear back in the 80s. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, anyone could have picked up this low hanging fruit and fixed the problem. Nobody even tried.
From an American perspective, it’s not the “rhetoric,” it’s just “noticing.” My mom is an immigrant who was not brought up here to absorb the rhetoric. But when she went to Canada and Australia to visit family, she came back ranting about how poor everyone was and how small the houses were. (I take it you have fewer suburban McMansions and giant SUVs.) It’s hard not to notice our GDP per capita is 50% higher than yours. It’s big enough now where we notice it just going up there to visit family.
And you can say what you want about safety nets for poor people, but that doesn’t affect most Americans. My parents are on Medicare and they head down to the ER every time have a stomach ache and get a CAT scan. Meanwhile my family is convinced that Canadian healthcare nearly killed my aunt when she had a kidney issue because they didn’t immediately schedule her for a million tests and surgery. (I suspect that isn’t true and the Canadian system reasonably triaged the care.)
And to be clear, I like Canada (and I love Denmark). I’d rather have a more orderly society with an efficient and expansive government that’s focused on comprehensive outcomes across the population, in contrast to our system where you have McMansions but randomly you can fall through a giant crack. But Americans temperamentally are biased towards upside potential and they devalue downside risk. This is a cultural trait that seems very quickly absorbed even by immigrants. My immigrant family isn’t meaningfully American in many respects—they don’t have Anglo sensibilities about things like civic institutions and personal freedoms—but they’re indistinguishable from other americans in their materialistic optimism
> From an American perspective, it’s not the “rhetoric,” it’s just “noticing.”
Yes, but that does not go against the parent comment. When you grow up in it, you have it in you, and it's difficult to question it. If you ask Americans who live abroad, they often have a more nuanced perspective.
Apart from American finding it better in the US than everywhere else in the world (your "noticing"), there is this tendency from Americans to genuinely believe that the rest of the world agrees with that. "Everybody wants to live in the US because it is the best country in the world".
And this is very, very far from true. It's not just about money. The US have a lot of fossil energy, which is good for their economy, which is good for their military. The US is a big and rich country, which makes it powerful. But that is bad for the countries and people who are threatened by the US (and recently the US have been militarily threatening countries who until then were seeing the US as an ally or at least a friend), and it is bad for our survival (through the climate and biodiversity issues).
Tons of people outside of the US wouldn't want to live in the US, even if it meant earning more money. And on top of that, tons of people outside of the US feel threatened by the US, for good reasons.
This comment underscores how mono-dimensional some people are.
To Rayiner more stuff, bigger stuff = happier and more fullfilling life. An incredible lack of depth.
That is also the reason why Americans when they go abroad are astonished and always come back saying "people are amazing" somewhere else, well no wonder considering the state of domestic affairs and domestic relationships between people.
Please offer my apologies to your mom , as it's true that our vehicles are dangerously underdimensioned , maybe next time something in the order of 10-15 short tons could be adequate to transport her to the nearest McMansion (or McDonald's rather).
A more diplomatic way to say it would be that it is a different culture. And I would agree that Americans struggle to see that other countries have different cultures and different priorities.
If you believe that the goal in life is to live like an American, then obviously the best at doing that are... the Americans. The mistake is to not recognise that other people may have different beliefs.
> To Rayiner more stuff, bigger stuff = happier and more fullfilling life. An incredible lack of depth
Please read my whole post! I’m a Europoor at heart. I live in a 3BR house with three kids and no yard despite being able to afford a bigger one. I drive an EV, and it’s not a Tesla. I’m just trying to convey my impression of American culture though the lens of my mom, who embodies this aspect of American culture quite strongly.
Yo, chill. You can always make your point just fine without resorting to aggression or making it personal.
I’d suggest treating this as an opportunity to reflect a bit on patience and tone. Speaking from firsthand experience, these are things I’ve had to work on myself over time, helped in no small part by this community and @dang’s exceptional patience for which I'm quite grateful. I now owe HN therapy money as well, lol. :)
More generally, it would be nice if we made a conscious effort to keep HN a little less negative overall [1].
I honestly can't see a difference in housing sizes between Canada and the United States -- we've got the same McMansion sprawl all over the place here -- so strikes me this person's mother is just like every other human, and bad at statistics and handling their own biases.
The US does have a higher rate of wealth inequality than Oz and here in Canuckistan tho.
Yes, that's why I found 'house size' a strange complaint. The three countries in question have comparable square footage - the largest-sized houses in the world.
The inequality is what she’s reacting to. Most people in my extended family are professionals or business owners. That class has a lot more money in the US. Top 1% in Canada is $315,000 while in the U.S. that’s outside the top 3%.
Yes, it's absolutely the case that people in our profession and adjacent do a lot better in the US than here.
And the situation for working class Canadians isn't great either right now -- housing prices have skyrocketed. Tariffs from economic warfare are destroying the labour market. There are many aspects about our situation that are inferior.
But guess what -- that has fuck-all to do with how we perceive the relative value of our country or the pride or love we have for our homeland and love.
No, the majority of Canadians don't see the US as the world's best country because the wealthiest there make more money than the wealthiest here.
I worked at Google in Waterloo for 10 years. At any point I could have packed up and moved to the Valley and transferred to Mountain View. I had jobs before that that could have taken me to the US on transfer, as well. I chose not to. Why?
During part of that time, after Trump was first elected, I saw lots of expat Canadians who had been working for Google in the US return and transfer back to our office. They came back and earned less, and the choice of projects in our office was slimmer. But they chose to. Why?
Love of country, of culture, of family, of nature, of the land, nostalgia, familiarity. What came up often when I spoke to people coming back was a strong distaste for the idea of bringing their children up in the American education system with its extreme degrees of inequality, status seeking, elitism around "Ivy League" and ranking of schools right from kindergarten. Values on the whole unfamiliar to the same degree among Canadians.
Expats in particular, and immigrants who primarily migrated for economic reasons... yes, I'd naturally expect them not to understand this POV. I even meet plenty of new (often temporary) Canadians using Canada as a convenient springboard before their "final" migration choice which is the US. Not sure I like that, but that's their choice.
My father is also an immigrant, from Germany. He came here for the nature / wilderness. He's intensely critical of the politics and economics here and where he lives in Alberta, and there's many things in those respects he prefers about Germany. But he has love of land, and Canada is his homeland, because of the peace and love he finds in the rivers, the forests, the muskeg.
I love my people and country I imagine in the same way or similar way Greenlanders love theirs. The size of the McMansions has no bearing on it. Canadians by and large don't walk around proclaiming theirs the best country in the world. We are not interested in our superiority. But we will defend our home, same as any other.
The original point stands -- to talk about "greatest country on earth" and then act baffled or smug about why others wouldn't want to join it -- is nothing but schoolyard bully logic. Like picking on the weird or weak kid in the playground, and then proclaiming that as a moral virtue. This Greenland stuff, and the rhetoric heard about Canada this past year as well, has exposed the very darkest underbelly of the US. One we have seen here many times over 200 years, but many Americans seem blind to.
I know some that did move to the US for economic reasons only that have moved back to Canada because of the way the US has changed during their time there.
I take a drive through Detroit and I "notice" entirely different things which somehow your screed above is mostly blind to.
That's about as diplomatic as I can summon up as a reply to your comment, whose substance mostly proves my point about the bizarre exceptionalist world Americans seem to occupy in their heads. It really isn't "noticing"... what you're talking about. It's ideology.
Also GDP per capita is the kind of garbage metric I would expect someone frequent on this forum, and hopefully literate in statistics, to understand the ridiculousness of deploying in conversation.
Also, there's rarely anybody more invested in seeing the superiority of their new (chosen) place other than immigrants, so I don't think that's the argumentative flex you think it is.
As I said, I like Canada! I’m just trying to explain the American point of view. For example, I care about Detroit. But your typical American doesn’t live in Detroit. The average new home is built in a booming, low tax, Sun Belt state like Georgia and Texas, where my cousins bought McMansions in the last few years.
Also, my cousin grew up in Windsor and having been there plenty of times, it’s shit too.
Much of the world would have no problem with americans being in love with their McMansions.
But many would find them wasteful, and a terrible place to live, compared to a decently sized apartment (one 10m² - 100 sq ft - bedroom per person/couple and maybe an extra office) in a walkable town.
Just as we find american SUVs totally inadequate compared to our cars.
And it's not matter of cost, we're perfectly “happy” paying borrowing millions of euro for such apartments, and paying far more for our cars.
The bad food is a plus. The most orderly civilizations generally have the blandest food. Almost all societies with good food are chaotic and disorderly. This is true even within the US—nobody raves about the food in Vermont or Utah—and nobody raves about how clean and orderly New Jersey is.
What the fuck is the purpose of having a civilization if everyone lives like a puritan instead of enjoying their lives, also Japan exists to disprove this
Japan is blessed with incredible natural ingredients, but it's famously mild and light on seasoning compared to other Asian cuisines. There's a whole historical tradition as to why Japanese food avoids strong flavors: https://www.sushiya.de/en/washoku/shojin-ryori/
> The other thing is due to the K-shaped economic recovery, where companies realized the bottom 90% have no money and don't bother to try for their business at all. Concert tickets have similarly increased in price and decreased in supply.
You see this all over the economy. Since 1980, income of the top 10%, subtracting the top 1%, has increased much more than the income of the middle 20%. That’s why every brand is trying move upmarket. Disney World ticket prices have increased vastly more than inflation, because the company is willing to ditch middle class customers to chase a more affluent customer base: https://nypost.com/2022/08/03/disney-world-prices-up-3871-in...
This is also why “middle class luxury” chains like Sizzler have gotten squeezed out.
Which is odd since visa overstays should be more "legible" to the government in terms of at least knowing their name and when they entered, which should make them easier and more efficient to deport. Unlike illegals who hop the border where you don't even know how many or who they are at all.
Yup. My immigration attorney said that (when I was dealing with a brief lapse in status, due to a divorce and moving and due dates) "as a white person, and a man working in a high paying job", I was "pretty much at the bottom of the totem pole for USCIS enforcement efforts" while we resolved my case.
And sorry, given ICE's mandates, ruled temporarily okay by SCOTUS, that color of skin, accent, name are effectively "probable cause" for detention, I'd say her perspective is absolutely aligned with current enforcement priorities.
If the government was prioritizing people with darker skin, it would go after visa overstays first, because that’s the primary illegal immigration route for asia and africa. (There is virtually zero illegal immigration from Europe. E.g. only 0.6% of DACA recipients are European. They don’t factor into this discussion at all.) Instead, the government has been focused on border crossings from latin america, where the average person is half white. Maduro’s wife whom they just arrested is a white blonde lady! Kilmar Garcia and his wife are whiter than anyone on The Jersey Shore. Meanwhile, illegal Indians are flying under the ICE radar.
Clearly the distinguishing factor is money, not melanin.
It seems odd that the US government doesn't have enough resources to just go after everyone whose in the country illegal, and instead has to prioritize and triage based on e.g. money or melanin. I think people would find it more fair if they just went after everyone whose illegal.
By Europe you are excluding Russia right? Mexican/Latin American wealth is correlated to skin color like it is in the USA, so most of the illegal border crossings are from those with darker skin, not just the “average Mexican.”
I’m not excluding Russians. They make up a vanishingly small percentage of DACA recipients, for example: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/daca.... I don’t know where folks got this idea that there were tons of europeans overstaying their visas. Visa overstays are a route for Asian and African illegal immigrants. And however you slice it, those folks are going to be darker, on average, than the folks coming over illegally from latin america.
This whole narrative is silly. The government is prioritizing stopping the flow of poor people more than people who can afford a plane ticket. Obviously.
DACA are just dreamers, by that measure most DACA holders are probably South Korean (left over from babies who came here in the 80s and early 90s, and can’t go back because to South Korea of harsh conscription rules). I’m not sure what you think DACA has to do with real illegal immigration (actual adults coming to the USA and overstaying their visas, not just babies).
> Visa overstays are a “bigger problem” according to whom? Could someone reasonably consider illegal border crossings a bigger problem because they involve completely unvetted people, as opposed to visa overstays which involve people who were at least minimally vetted in getting a visa?
All I said was that you could reasonably consider illegal border crossings to be a “bigger problem,” even accepting that visa overstays account for a larger volume. You’re tacitly assuming that “bigger problem” and “bigger volume” are the same, but my point there was that those aren’t the same.
And four years later, of course, we’re in a different factual scenario. The level of border crossings is down to almost zero now.
> And four years later, of course, we’re in a different factual scenario. The level of border crossings is down to almost zero now.
Border crossings can be a higher priority even if visa overstays account for more volume, because of the different level of vetting for those two routes. But now that border crossings are down, it makes sense to focus on visa overstays. How is any of that inconsistent?
I don't disagree. Some users on here, though, are a little notorious, and my spidey sense went off given past interactions. One search on https://hn.algolia.com/ and here we are.
Persistence of memory—limited deletion of old comments, easy searching through archives—is a key feature of HN that distinguishes it from other forums.
I think it’s worth noting that he doesn’t believe that his mind has changed.
Eh, I can at least sorta see the logic of that; it presumably costs money to find, process, and fly you out. Making you front those costs avoids having to chase you post-deportation (with very little chance of collecting).
Nah, this is a filtering criteria. This is pay-to-illegally-immigrate. Republicans are fine with over staying visas or that kind of illegal immigration, half their spouses do it. Iirc milania did it.
This isn't true. Republicans love illegal immigration because you can underpay people and avoid a lot of regulation.
It is trivial to implement e-verify for employment for everyone. It would nearly eliminate illegal workers. If Republicans (or anyone) cared about stopping the hiring of illegal workers, it is a trivial process to implement. No one wants to do it because then Americans would unionize.
I'm not sure how this intersects with the point of the paper, but part of the problem with the Renee Good case (or things like it) in my opinion is that the focus too often is on the actual events at a particular moment, and not what is surrounding it.
I can see some argument, for example, that goes something like "Jonathan Ross was afraid he was going to get hit by a car and misperceived her as trying to ram him when was trying to turn right, so he fired in self-defense." Then there's a subsequent argument about whether it was reasonable for him to think that she was going to ram him, etc.
However, what's missing from this is a broader discussion about whether or not an officer should be putting himself in that position near a car at all, when it might be anticipated that there might be misperceptions about what is happening. Whether the officer is competent enough to perceive the difference between someone turning their car versus trying to ram them (especially at that speed). Whether they should have let medical personnel help afterward.
When you frame a discussion about perceptions of facts at a particular moment, you kind of get into a frameset of thinking that everything was passively happening, and start overlooking how a particular moment came to be and whether or not the real problems are a set of things that happened minutes, days, or weeks beforehand, and what happened in the time period afterward. E.g., instead of asking "did Jonathan Ross murder Renee Good?" you can ask "were Jonathan Ross and his colleagues competent enough to avoid a situation where they might feel justified in shooting someone innocent?"
I guess I feel like this "cultural perception" question often sidesteps more important questions about whether or not what came to be could have been avoided. This gets more deeply into the underlying attitudes or assumptions driving the perceptions one way or another and lets them be addressed more directly.
We do know that it’s been a longstanding policy of DHS for officers not to stand in front of cars on purpose just so they’d have an excuse to fire upon the driver. There was an internal audit in 2014 that called out this exact behavior.
This may be related to your point, but I think another problem is that we focus on isolated events instead of applying systems thinking. Any large scale government system will result in accidental deaths. Amtrak has killed almost 600 people in the last four years. (This is not unique to Amtrak. It’s inherent in any rail system that has crossings at grade: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-train-driver-talks-about-w....) But as a society we accept that a certain number of bystanders being killed is an acceptable consequence for performance of an important government function.
Law enforcement similarly is inherently dangerous. You can enforce various standards, but fundamentally you have to pick where the set the slider bar on the scale from maximizing law enforcement effectiveness to minimizing accidental casualties.
The in-progress community notes are a shit show too.
I saw the video and saw someone trying to avoid the ICE agent, but also being EXTREMELY reckless about driving a huge SUV close to people with guns. Everyone is at fault here imo.
For reference since I'm going to assume good faith here, I recommend watching the full videos [1] from multiple angles since there's been multiple edits, cuts and potential changes done if you've seen it elsewhere or on social media. These are the unedited and unmodified videos.
I've seen them. The issue I think is that if you've got any political opinion before watching, you'll see something different. This thread is literally inside the comments about that!
If you're a total outsider and think both sides in the US sound like absolute crazy people, I would assume you can more easily see the crazy by everyone involved. Or maybe that's just another type of bias? I don't know...
To me, the shooting probably wasn't justified, I don't believe that guy genuinely feared for his life, but she definitely escalated the situation by plainly trying to avoid arrest and being reckless in the process. My take of both sides doing wrong (and neither wrong canceling out the other) has gotten everybody riled up at me today. Oh well, the best I can do is go off what I see, flawed as that is.
The ICE agents WANTED to use guns, they just put themselves in a position where a seemingly trivial action by the driver could be twisted to be perceived as enough of a threat to justify pulling a gun out and shooting them multiple times in the head. Murderers with a badge.
If you believe all that, which I assume the woman in the car did, why did she push the gas pedal? If the ICE agents wanted to shoot someone as you say, doesn't that logically also imply that the woman in the car wanted to be shot at? The logic goes both ways.
Of course, consequences matter, hopefully the ICE agent is prosecuted, fired, and jailed.
The headline and the contents of the article make it quite clear that's not true.
> The Texas Supreme Court decided which law schools would satisfy law licensure requirements until 1983, when the court gave that responsibility to the ABA.
That doesn’t change the fact that the ABA is a private organization. The court shouldn’t have delegated a government function to a private body in the first place.
Your original post is premised on the implication that the ABA has some sort of public status. Otherwise, it makes no sense. It's like saying "there's a right wing effort to replace Coke with Pepsi." Okay, so what?
My point above is that the ABA is the same kind of thing as the Federalist Society. They’re both private organizations. The ABA isn’t some sort of quasi-public body.
The fact that the Texas Supreme Court previously relied on the ABA’s list of accredited schools doesn’t change what kind of thing the ABA is. In CS terms, the Texas Supreme Court rules just had a pointer to the ABA list. That doesn’t change the nature of the object to which it points.
If the ABA had no formal status then we wouldn’t be having this discussion. In fact, the Department of Education formally recognizes the ABA as the accrediting body since 1923. In fairness, conservatives are trying to get rid of the Department of Education as well.
As the article clearly explains, the ABA had the formal status that the Texas Supreme Curt granted them in 1983. What we have now is a change of that policy, giving that power to a political body (an elected Supreme Court) without providing a reason. Doesn't feel like "small government" to me.
> The all-Republican court hasn't given a reason for initiating the change, but it came after months of conflict between President Donald Trump, the ABA and the broader legal community.
The "small government" GOP was a mistaken detour of the late 20th century that died precisely because it was susceptible to stupid ideas like outsourcing a core government function--accreditation in a profession deeply intertwined with government itself--to private parties. Lincoln's GOP was not a small government party, and neither is Trump's GOP.
Its fascinating to watch you twist yourself into knots justifying all types of contradictory actions after they have happened. You are certainly committed to the bit. This is another case where you failed to do any research and are provably false. The Republican Party of Texas wrote an actual party platform in 2024 and limited government is an explicitly stated part of that platform. [0]
Since you brought up Trump, even though he isn't involved in this action. Here is a video of him from February 2025 stating that he is making government smaller. [1]
I'm sure you will come back with some new red herring, but the evidence is here for others to view.
You’re playing word games. The 2024 Texas GOP platform says: “Limiting government power to those items enumerated in the United States and Texas
Constitutions.”
Limiting government power to enumerated areas is different than “small government.” The Texas constitution grants the legislature and the supreme court with power over judicial administration. That includes governing the practice of law in the courts of the state. There’s no enumerated powers problem with the Texas Supreme Court Court deciding what law schools qualify to be admitted to its own bar.
If you keep reading to point #9 on Constitutional Issues, they say "Limiting Overreaching State Government: We recognize that the sovereignty of this State and its citizenry has been imperiled and threatened by the ongoing overreach of state elected officials and agencies."
It's pretty clear that they only mean "overreach" where they don't politically agree. They are perfectly fine when the Governor overrides local rules and ordinances [0] [1] [2], because it furthers their political goals of consolidating power with the Executive rather than the stated goal of limiting government. This action expands the scope and role of government in Texan's lives, that is a fact.
> There’s no enumerated powers problem with the Texas Supreme Court Court deciding what law schools qualify to be admitted to its own bar.
No, it's a political powers problem, which is one of the main things they claim to be against increasing.
Republicans have never been about small government, they just use that as a talking point against the government when it’s providing nice things that benefit everyone (including liberals, which they would happily shoot their own foot off if it meant some shrapnel hit a liberal), and their base is too ignorant or evil to care.
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