What Armenians should know about life in America (2014)
An entertaining, informative read, and I agree with 60+% of it. I&#x27;m still going to nitpick the stuff that I don&#x27;t think is correct. Also I read the piece on his front page via HN last year, about how it&#x27;s literally impossible to scale a consulting business past a size of 1 employee, and thought- good, entertaining writer but a bit of an exaggerator:<p>I don&#x27;t believe that overall US tax rates are the same as Western Europe, sorry, especially as he seems to add in every line item that he can find (excise tax, etc.) Aside from the fact that European income tax rates are consistently described as significantly higher- there&#x27;s a 20-25% VAT to consider, yes? To be fair if he lives in California I can see how it&#x27;s approaching European rates. I also do agree we get less for what we pay for.<p>The US does have a huge problem with most of the best jobs &amp; human capital being concentrated in a very small number of cities, and I agree that this does contribute to high rent&#x2F;real estate prices. (And some people are determined to maintain this system because of some handwavey idea that this is a desirable state of affairs). But you can definitely have a quality lifestyle in a tier 2 US city with a professional career, and I&#x27;d suggest everyone- immigrant or native- who thinks the Bay Area&#x2F;LA&#x2F;NYC&#x2F;Seattle&#x2F;Boston&#x2F;DC are too expensive to move. You don&#x27;t have to live in an area where the average house price is $1-2 million.<p>Suburbia is dreadful and has been criticized in the US for decades &amp; decades now, but it is definitely not true that the vast majority of Americans live in a suburb. I share his desire for walkable, medium-density cities.<p>The US legal system is also extremely bad&#x2F;overly punitive, but I philosophically disagree with whatever he&#x27;s trying to say that judges or prosecutors should have more discretion in the interests of a higher ideal of &#x27;justice&#x27;. Way too much to fit into an HN comment, but rule of law societies should be procedural&#x2F;formal&#x2F;rigid- when we give government functionaries broad discretion to use their subjective &#x27;judgement&#x27;, they&#x27;re just or more likely to abuse it and be unfair, racist, even more punitive, etc. (This is in no way a defense of how over-criminalized the US is, but the solution is to change the laws- not gives judges &amp; prosecutors more arbitrary, discretionary power and hope that they choose to be nicer with it)