Except the environment in the U.S.—better air quality than almost all of Europe. Except natural beauty in the U.S.— the U.S. has some truly beautiful places to visit and to live. The people are very friendly, especially outside of the cities. These are all good things about the U.S. that has nothing to do with the fact that the U.S. is rich (actually the U.S. being rich is one reason air quality is improving and better than Europe).
Not at all - cities are worse in Europe than in the US. European policy pushed diesel cars for a long time, and Europe burns a lot more biomass for heating than the US does. Both of those are localized - it's particulates, especially during winter, that are much worse.
BTW, you cannot compare a country ("USA") with a whole continent ("Europe"). The countries in europe aren't all in EU or EEC and are much, MUCH more different than US' states are.
"the environment in the U.S." ... and yet you have abysmal drinking water quality in some areas. A friend of mine from Florida was astonished that you can drink tap water in all of Germany. We can all see how bad USA is with it's environment if we link hydraulic fracking to tap water quality.
Many people over here think that a good amount of US americans are so dumb because of lead poisoning.
Air quality: currently https://waqi.info/de/#/c/5.69/7.058/2.8z doesn't indicate that the USA is vastly better. Yes, there are green areas ... but these are areas devoid of people. Europa has this in Scandinavia. In areas where population and industry density is high the USA isn't that good either.
"beautiful places" I grant you that, but that has every region on earth. You also have many, many more awful places to visit. The last two times I was in the USA locals warned me about "no go" areas. That doesn't exist in Germany, for example.
"people are friendly" no, they aren't. You have the highest crime rate in the developed world. People robbing or mugging me aren't friendly. That "no go" areas even exist is also not a sign of friendly. Your immigration officers are exceptional rude and unfriendly --- virtually the first experience a tourist travelling the USA has with their "friendlyness". And your ICE is even more rude: a swiss journalist from NZZ was e.g. detained for about 2 weeks. Instead of just denied entry and put into the next airplane heading to back Zürich. And the detainment was in one single room with about 30 other illegally-jailed inmates with zero privacy. Even the loo was visible for all. That's US friendlyness ...
Even not rutal... the last time I was in TX I heard on local radio that some whites put a colored man with chains on behind an oversized US car and drove him to dead. And if you are an outlier, e.g. you are from a minitory, or LGBTQ or whatever, then you have a hard time in the friendly rural-ness. Many people leave the ruralness towards towns to gain freedom.
> New data from NISAR shows where Mexico City and its environs subsided by up to a few centimeters per month (shown in blue) between Oct. 25, 2025, and Jan. 17, 2026
The labels on the map were also confusing, and at first because of the relative positioning of the texts identifying the airport and the angel I thought up was East and not North, although a closer inspection made things clearer (and yes, up is North).
Now that people know what ai slop is, they start having higher expectations from prose because vacuous articles like these might be misconstrued as slop
It's a shame you feel that way as articles like this were extremely common 30 years ago in the Saturday and Sunday papers. And I do miss them.
I wonder if it's a generational thing, where now every essay must focus on one idea instead of taking a meandering path of curiosity to the author's final point.
I agree with you that this is a Parade-level essay, and I think those were always basically fluff: enough to give a sense that something had been learned about two or three seeming-disparate topics from a great distance, but not enough to actually satisfy curiosity about any of them. In the 80s as a pre-teen, those were the first part of the Sunday paper I claimed, but they never did more than whet.
I don't think it's even about staying on one topic. It's just that the topics were too broad for such a short essay, even had it been relatively dense, and then to that problem the author added long phrases where a short phrase would do, as if trying to pad the length to some predetermined mark.
The article concludes, stating that LLMs are the “apotheosis of knowledge stripped of animating spirit and reduced to mere utility.” Maybe, but LLMs have far more utility than this directionless essay.
What is this corruption you are talking about? What specifically are you talking about? Things you don’t like aren’t necessarily the result of corruption.
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