@iseedrawnpeople "USSR" is short for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; "Russia" wasn't part of the name. And the Soviets didn't generally call
themselves Russian for short. English-speakers did, largely because we saw Russia as culturally dominating the whole empire. That's very different from the US convention, where we call ourselves "Americans" even though we only control a fraction of the hemisphere.
@trenslime In fact, NYC
is one of the safest large cities in the country; see for instance
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-rel...n-america-during-the-covid-era-301160847.html . Other particularly safe American cities include San Diego, Mesa, San Jose, Boston, Portland, and LA. The 5 least safe large cities are Baltimore, Dallas, Albuquerque, Austin and Miami.
By European and East Asian standards, NYC is fairly dangerous, but so is almost every other American city. Lotsa guns, lotsa wealth inequality, a minimal social safety net and a trigger-happy police force is how we roll.
As for "niceness," New Yorkers are typically rated as unusually friendly by foreign tourists and by each other (as in, lots of people are friends with their neighbors and such.) It's
American tourists who find them unfriendly, probably because cultural norms are so different between the Midwest/South and the East/West. Red and Blue America have totally different standards for what nice
means.
In my experience, if you do something stupid in NYC, the locals will call you an idiot, instantly forgive you, and then spend 20 minutes helping you figure out what to do next. That feels "nice" to me, but then I grew up near San Francisco.