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There's a tendency among Europeans to tribute the problems they see in the U.S. to structural problem with the U.S.

Most European states are very homogeneous in their racial makeup. The U.S. has an extremely large immigrant population, making it very ethnically diverse for a developed nation (I believe only Canada is more diverse). If you compare to a map of homicide rates, with the notable exceptions of Canada and Russia, you'll see a very strong correlation. More ethnically diverse countries tend to have more homicides.

We as a species are still very tribal. When the population is homogeneous and fewer tribes are in conflict, there tends to be less violent crime. When the population is diverse and more tribes are in conflict, there tends to be more violent crime. That's probably all you're seeing. The Canadians I've met are genuinely nice and friendly towards outsiders (almost to a fault - they have problems standing up for themselves when they're being taken advantage of). Americans tend to be more of the type who won't take crap for others. The high U.S. prison population is probably a consequence of maintaining low developed world crime rates within an ethnically diverse population. (I haven't visited Russia nor met many Russians so I can't speak for why their correlation is the opposite of most of the world.)

Drop a few million people from all around the world into any EU country, and I suspect you'd either see their crime rate or their prison population skyrocket.

Relatively, yes. Consider Silicon Valley. It stretches 40 miles between San Francisco and San Jose, and is about 7 miles wide. San Francisco is the most desirable part of the area, because it has a large walkable downtown area with lots of shops and public transport. Start going down further down and you are into suburbs where you need a car. The central parts of the towns like Menlo Park, Palo Alto (close to Stanford University) are very desirable because they too have walkable down town areas. Then you are into areas like Mountain View and Sunnyvale. If you are on the Eastern side of the peninsula, then you really need a car to get around. Central San Jose is very polluted, and so many people prefer to live up in the mountains where the air is fresher.

Also, they are interested in working for startups, designing and implementing new code, with the chance of going IPO or being bought out, rather than being in support, maintenance or hardware verification.

Because many graduates prefer to live in areas which are walkable downtown and have a social life (to maintain a professional network of friends to help find the good jobs) they prefer to share a room in a house in these areas rather than an apartment somewhere isolated. You are looking at a monthly rent of $4000 to $8000 upwards for a house. Parts of Silicon Valley are majority Mexican, Black or Asian.

http://geocurrents.info/wp-con...

http://www.geocurrents.info/wp...

Relatively, yes. Consider Silicon Valley. It stretches 40 miles between San Francisco and San Jose, and is about 7 miles wide. San Francisco is the most desirable part of the area, because it has a large walkable downtown area with lots of shops and public transport. Start going down further down and you are into suburbs where you need a car. The central parts of the towns like Menlo Park, Palo Alto (close to Stanford University) are very desirable because they too have walkable down town areas. Then you are into areas like Mountain View and Sunnyvale. If you are on the Eastern side of the peninsula, then you really need a car to get around. Central San Jose is very polluted, and so many people prefer to live up in the mountains where the air is fresher.

Also, they are interested in working for startups, designing and implementing new code, with the chance of going IPO or being bought out, rather than being in support, maintenance or hardware verification.

Because many graduates prefer to live in areas which are walkable downtown and have a social life (to maintain a professional network of friends to help find the good jobs) they prefer to share a room in a house in these areas rather than an apartment somewhere isolated. You are looking at a monthly rent of $4000 to $8000 upwards for a house. Parts of Silicon Valley are majority Mexican, Black or Asian.

http://geocurrents.info/wp-con...

http://www.geocurrents.info/wp...

You expect good widespread public transportation in a place like this? Do you realize how big and spread out we are? We can fit your whole country inside some of our larger states.

Take this into consideration. That's Russia overlaid over the continental US. Don't forget out population is much more distributed than that of Russia (AFAIK).

All the problems we are having with food production are directly related to factory farming.

We're not actually having any problems and the price fluctuations that are occurring are not caused by so-called 'factory' farming. The problem is that high yield agriculture is concentrated in too few places.

Consider hogs; 80.9% of all hog production comes from two places; the US and China. One is coping with an outlier drought and the other is dealing with a rapidly growing domestic demand for meat. That leaves the rest of the planet out in the cold.

The solution is rising prices. Nations and people that have complacently relied on a few "bread basket" sources of supply have discovered fresh motivation for producing commodities. There is a boom in S. American agriculture as a result. This phenomenon is planet wide.

This is ultimately a good thing. Less reliance on those few traditional "break basket" nations will create supply stability, to say nothing of the self sufficiency of new third world bread baskets.

You, being the rich, comfortable malcontent you've been trained to be, will see this as a tragedy, while you simultaneously accelerate the process with your ill considered policies. As with the evacuation of our industry, the evacuation of our agriculture to the third world has begun.

So go to work and dream up lots of new regulation for domestic agriculture in your home nation. Don't stop until anything more productive than a hobby farm has been eradicated. The rest of the world will take up the slack because people are going to feed themselves whether you like it or not.

Sure thing

Also, there's this little-known fact that latitudes near the Equator are much bigger around than extreme latitudes.

Also little known is the fact that the land masses aren't evenly distributed. Canada and Russia are amongst the largest land area countries, but have much lower populations for a reason - there's a huge amount of land up north that's been uneconomical due to the permafrost, glaciers, and such.

Though in checking up on the studies, I did see that farmers would have to shift crop types all over - switching to more heat/drought resistant varieties.

I'm not convinced there's enough benefit from a warming arctic to offset a scorching equator.

To be honest, neither am I. There's reasons why I'd support a massive building program for nuclear power, I hate coal power for numerous reasons(but wind/solar isn't there yet).

I know you're being funny and I got a chuckle out of it ... but just fyi:

South American has the lowest levels of opiates use of any region in the world, cocaine at about half the rate of first-world countries and cannabis lower that all areas except SE Asia.

http://geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Per-Capita-Opiate-Use-Map.jpg
It would seem Africa and East Asia use less opiates on average, thanks to Brazil.
Perhaps even Australia may use less opiates on average.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevalence_of_opiates_use, I looked up my own country, the Netherlands, where laws on opiate usage is somewhat more lenient than most countries in the world; about halfway down and much less than highly anti-drug countries such as the US. What does that tell you? Either enforcement is less in the US (22% of inmates will tell you otherwise; http://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/usa/incarceration/) or legalizing drugs actually lessens drug use (taking drugs is not rebelious and anti-establishment if you can legally do so).