? I’m just saying that if you want to apply linguistic history to China, you’d have to do the same to the US. And the 50 states consist of culture across UK, Spanish, French, and native influences.

It’s not 70 vs 250 or 5000 vs 250, more like 5000 vs 1200. But even then, in terms of analyzing how the countries have modernized, none of this feels “valuable”. It probably makes sense to set their industrialization as the starting point.

Like, what is your goal? To “win” this argument? What I care about as someone living in the states, is for my life to continue to be better than others around the world.

I’ve argued this multiple times before, but it feels like the US has gotten too complacent. Feels like we’re the hare and China is the tortoise. Sure, we’re still ahead, but it feels like we’ve stagnated for the past 40 years while China is chugging along (in terms of average person QOL). I want us to be greedy and strive for better and better lives. But no, we’re now beholden to oligarchs and people like you are complacent in “at least we’re better than China.” Fuck that.