> "there are worse elsewhere" always struck me as vacuous [...] There's a suggestion that when discussing design objectives with a client, it's better to provi

> "there are worse elsewhere" always struck me as vacuous [...] There's a suggestion that when discussing design objectives with a client, it's better to provide multiple prototypes than one, as their differences then become vocabulary for the discussion. I wonder if public dialog might be served by having a richer set of such landmarks. Instead of abstractions like "transparency is good", perhaps more concrete comparison and competition like "look at that transparency in city A - let's aspire to that". And negative exemplars like "we are sooo much better than city B - yay us", and cautionary tales "but let's not get too cocky, given how fast city C declined", and peer pressure "wait, a few years ago we were ahead of city D, but now look at them - we've got to get moving here". Policy choices are currently discussed as "that might tend to have these effects" and whistles, rather than as "that would make us more like cities E or F and less like G or H - is that what we want?" So I wonder if one could have a nuanced, specific, and helpful use of "that is done better/worse in some other place"?