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Actual effectiveness ratios for birth control:

US CDC document on actual effectiveness

Highlights:

Condoms are about as effective as the withdrawal method, sponges, or the rhythm method. 20% or so failure rates. [snip]

... when used inconsistently you should add. With perfect use you get (Trussell J, Contraceptive failure in the United States.) way better numbers:

Our estimate of the proportion of women becoming pregnant during a year of perfect use of the male condom is [...] 2%.

Which means with a proper education you can lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies significantly.

Actual effectiveness ratios for birth control:

US CDC document on actual effectiveness

Highlights:

Condoms are about as effective as the withdrawal method, sponges, or the rhythm method. 20% or so failure rates.
Spermicides are worse (!) (28%)
9% annual failure on the pill.

The only truly effective contraception methods are *just* the methods they won't allow young kids to get. I had to get a signoff from my wife at age 29 for a vasectomy. I was told they wouldn't do it if i were single or if I had been married with no children. Reason: ex post facto lawsuits by women aggrieved by the urologist denying them children within their marriage. Similarly, just try walking in and asking for your tubes tied at 16 or an IUD implant.

The bottom line is that the "conservatives" advocating abstinence training are actually right. The only actual way to reduce teen pregnancy is to encourage them to stop fucking so much. The birth control available to them _does not work_. They should all just screw bareback from what I can see.

We have such a control group: Random pedestrians.

In 2013, 4,735 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes in the United States. This averages to one crash-related pedestrian death every 2 hours

considering how long we've had pedestrians and how many pedestrians there are if you want to compare PoGo to random pedestrians you're gonna need a much bigger PoGo dataset.

We have such a control group: Random pedestrians.

"In 2013, 4,735 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes in the United States. This averages to one crash-related pedestrian death every 2 hours."

> Tacoma Narrows Bridge [...] jackscrew failure [...] Lithium battery fires

And how many of those things happen now? That's the thing about engineering failures: We can learn from them. So yes, the early days of automated cars will have mistakes. It's inevitable. But they're mistakes that can be corrected, and every time that happens it's less likely that someone dies when they get into an automated car.

Meanwhile, human drivers keep making the same mistakes, over and over again. 28 people die every single day due to drunk drivers; that's 28 trivially preventable deaths every single day (source: http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehicl... ), and that's just one category of human-caused error. The computer may make mistakes, but it won't keep making them.

I rather come down with the other Mumps than maintain that!

And yet you were foolish enough to make an absolute statement with no evidence to back it up, and you say it's super uncommon, when in fact it's very common. The stats on M2F trans: 18% are lesbian, 32% are bi, 50% are straight. 16% of Latino, 17% of white, and 56% of black M2F are also HIV positive (source: CDC), so it's far more than super uncommon. There's also the trans-fans. Guys who specifically seek out transwomen because that's what they want.

Those numbers are absolutely insane, and yet there they are. Makes me wonder what the hell people are trying to prove - that the more people who f*ck you the more of a woman you are? We say it has nothing to do with sex, and yet so many go on sex shopping sprees after. And if you go on Failbook, you can find many of them bragging about how many dicks they've had after surgery.

I guess they feel that they have to make up for lost time or something ... but with those HIV stats, they're doing it wrong, and 82% are doing it with men (50% straight and 32% bi), and most don't stop at one, so that puts the lie to your "super rare" claim.

Way to ignore suicides, accidents, children accessing guns in the home and all the other bad things that happen that wouldn't happen if people didn't have guns laying around

I would've thought the events of the last few months would've put to rest this flawed line of logic. The folks saying "guns don't kill people, people kill people" were right. If you take away access to guns, people don't magically become non-violent and pacifist subjects. They figure out other ways to accomplish their goal of killing people. Like build bombs, or drive a truck into a crowd. These things still happen.

The number of people killed in the U.S. in 2013 from accidental discharge of firearms was 505. By contrast, the number of people killed by drowning (mostly in pools) was 3,391. 2,780 people were killed by fires. The number of people killed by going to the hospital was 2,768. Heck, the number of women killed due to complications from pregnancy was 1,138. All of these are a much bigger danger than gun accidents. You just have a warped view of the relative size of these risks because the media disproportionately over-reports gun accidents (probably because most of the people who work in it would like to see the 2nd Amendment repealed). If their reporting reflected the actual statistics, every single news story about a child accidentally killing someone with a gun would be accompanied by 7 stories of a child drowning in a pool, 5 stories of children dying in a fire, 5 stories of children dying due to a botched surgery or mistaken treatment at a hospital, and 2 mothers dying while giving birth.

21,175 people committed suicide by gun. But 19.974 people figured out some other way to kill themselves. So it's pretty safe to say banning guns wouldn't affect the suicide rate in the slightest.

The 11,208 murders by gun are the only area where the argument holds some ground. 4 people were only wounded in the Wurzburg train attack because the perpetrator only had a knife and axe. 1 person was killed and 5 wounded in the Reutlingen attack because the perpetrator only had a machete. If they'd had guns, the toll probably would've been higher. But it's foolish to think the number would've been zero (4,913 people were murdered without a gun). And 29,001 people were killed due to alcohol, 30,208 people were killed due to falls, 35,369 from car accidents (some overlap with the alcohol stats), 38,851 from overdoses and poisonings, 41,149 from suicide. If your goal is saving lives, all of these are much more important issues we should tackle first, before gun violence.

Fundamentally, violence, terrorism, and suicides (which account for 97% of gun deaths) are social problems. Eliminating the tool via which people are acting out on those problems doesn't make the problem go away. These things will still happen. Just not with a gun. This is a common logical error made by people with bleeding hearts (I won't say liberals because many conservatives make the same mistake too). They don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by blaming people for having faults, so they instead shift the blame onto other inanimate things that have no feelings. Like rap music, or playing too many video games, or porn, or frat parties, ... or guns.

To address these problems, you have to tackle the root social cause. Which is hard, scary, will hurt lots of people's feelings, and there's little consensus on what's the best way to tackle them. So nobody wants to do it that way, when you can take the easy way out and convince yourself that some inanimate object is the root cause, and that eliminating that object will cause all those other problems magically go away.

Actually the debate has some very firm conclusions with several deaths (mostly child deaths) directly linked to drinking raw milk. There was one in January here in the UK and in December 2014, one deaths and 4 serious injuries were caused by children consuming raw milk in Australia.

Presuming what you are claiming is factual (I won't dispute it here), one death in an entire country is insufficient to constitute strong evidence one way or the other. In the US alone there are 3000 deaths and 128,000 hospitalizations for food borne illnesses every year. You'll find more than a few of those come from dairy products that have been pasteurized. One child dying per year is a tragedy but it's not enough by itself to draw any firm conclusions for or against raw milk. I think the evidence thus far tends to indicate that any benefits from raw milk are minor in comparison to the problem of food-borne pathogens but the benefits of raw milk do not appear to be fully understood at this time. For myself I'll stick with pasteurized milk until there is strong evidence against it.

The debate is out about homogenisation, but the debate over pasteurisation is very clear cut.

If you will bother to read what I wrote, you'll not that I agree that pasteurization has a clear net benefit nor did I even hint that we should stop doing it. Whatever benefits raw milk has are poorly understood at present and the risks seem to significantly outweigh the known benefits. That's what evidence based policies are all about.

Personally I dont mind letting adult nutters have their dangerous milk, my problem is when they try to force their bad life choices onto others, especially kids who couldn't know any better.

I'm guessing you don't have any children of your own because there is absolutely no way that you can have kids and not force some of your own bad life choices on them. You (hopefully) won't mean to but it cannot be helped. We all make mistakes and bad choices in our life and our kids just have to live with them to varying degrees. One just hopes that you can avoid forcing the really bad ones on them like religion, lack of vaccines, etc.

Your conspiracy theory fails on numerous counts:

It's fact, not propaganda that "Raw milk causes more than half of all milk-related foodborne illnesses in the United States, even though only about 3.5 percent of Americans drink raw milk".

Your grand conspiracy doesn't involve just the FDA, but instead a multitude of research institutes, like Johns Hopkins, whose scientific findings, across the board, shows significant dangers from drinking raw milk:
- http://www.webmd.com/food-reci...

Here's just a few pages of references you can read through:

- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...

The dairy council doesn't pay out any money to the CDC, and they're the ones who are warning the public about the dangers of raw milk:
- http://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/...

The Dairy Council is a piss-poor choice as a Bond-villain... It isn't remotely as big, rich, and powerful as the many other organizations and industries that public health authorities have put the kibosh on. Think "Big Tobacco" in comparison to "Big Milk". Except milk is trivial to render safe, while tobacco is not.

The Dairy Council could make just as much money from raw milk as it does from pasteurized, so there's little or no motivation for them to launch an expensive grand conspiracy.

In short, you're just like any other run-of-the-mill nut-job. Instead of UFOs, vaccinations, fluoridation, or HAARP, your preferred pseudo-scientific nonsense based around raw milk.

Feel free to do your own searches and give me a list of studies which have shown health benefits from raw milk, and NO additional danger from it's consumption, unlike EVERYTHING I just linked you to... I'll be waiting for your pages and pages of citations in response.

Good links, thanks.

But why does the USA let babies die?

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Health/Infant-mortality-rate

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/infant-mortality-rate-united-states_b_1620664.html

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_05.pdf

http://www.nber.org/papers/w20525.pdf

If you want to get a visceral appreciation for the complexity of medical billing today, check out the Medicare Claims Processing Manual.

It almost seems like you can't merely get an administrative assistant, but you need someone with an A.A. in medical billing.

The thing that really left me aghast was the move from ICD 9 to ICD 10 (diagnosis codes and descriptions). Those #$&!!?! policy geniuses completely abandoned the ICD 9 codes and instituted all new ICD 10 codes. There was a big infrastructure around ICD 9. There is plenty of overlap in the codes, so it's a recipe for mass confusion. It's stunning that there was not even any attempt to have even a scintilla of backward compatibility.

It is almost like there are no senior database or programming architects involved in any of these decisions regarding medical IT. From what I've seen, it seems to me that it's purely non-technical policy staff driving this stuff. You have to get senior database and programming and UI architects in some of these decisions to reintroduce some sanity and control over the complexity of the solutions.

At best, we will be saving the drunks at the cost of some good drivers.

Good drivers get killed by drunk drivers too. And it's worth noting here that a remarkable number of deaths in the US are associated with driving under the influence of alcohol.

In 2014, 9,967 people were killed in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for nearly one-third (31%) of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.

We also have here the fallacy of the excluded middle. There's no reason that sufficiently safe drivers can't continue to drive and the US has a large pool of high mileage drivers who have collectively reduced the accident rate to 11 deaths and 1850 crashes per billion miles.

Now, I noticed in the months ago thread where I first mentioned these US safety numbers, my following observation:

The problem here is two-fold. First, we have a very low accident rate in the US. There is not that much room for improvement. If you look at the proposed benefits of self-driving vehicles, you find that they speak of highway driving a lot. That is already among the safest sort of driving.

Further, both cargo and taxi driving are high priority targets. It would replace the safest human drivers, the ones who do it as a profession.

There could be a period of time when automated driving makes things worse due to replacing the safest human driving and human rather than the worst.

Sorry, I don't see replacement of the worst drivers as being a serious issue. Even wholesale replacement of all human drivers would still gain from getting the worst drivers off the street and thus would have somewhat weaker safety thresholds to meet than the best human drivers and still come out a net gain for safety.

The real problem is that some implementation proposals of self-driving vehicles looks to replace the safest drivers first not the worst drivers. For example, if you replace all truck drivers with less safe self-driving vehicles while doing nothing about the drivers who generate most accidents, you will see an increase in vehicular accidents and deaths.

Google is probably one of the worst companies around today. I can't think of any other causing more damage to society.

Really? Let's try an easy comparison...

Tobacco companies are contributing to about 6 million deaths per year and trillions in direct medical costs ($170 billion per year in the US alone).

And you think Google not policing its app store diligently enough is somehow causing more damage to society?

1. Secondhand Smoke Harms Children and Adults
2. There is no risk-free level of secondhand smoke exposure; even brief exposure can be harmful to health.1,2,6
3. Since 1964, approximately 2,500,000 nonsmokers have died from health problems caused by exposure to secondhand smoke.1

1. Health Effects in Children
2. In children, secondhand smoke causes the following:1,2,3
3. Ear infections
4. More frequent and severe asthma attacks
5. Respiratory symptoms (for example, coughing, sneezing, and shortness of breath)
6. Respiratory infections (bronchitis and pneumonia)
7. A greater risk for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

Health Effects in Adults

1. In adults who have never smoked, secondhand smoke can cause:
2. Heart disease
3. For nonsmokers, breathing secondhand smoke has immediate harmful effects on the heart and blood vessels.1,3
4. It is estimated that secondhand smoke caused nearly 34,000 heart disease deaths each year during 2005â"2009 among adult nonsmokers in the United States.1
5. Lung cancer1,7
6. Secondhand smoke exposure caused more than 7,300 lung cancer deaths each year during 2005â"2009 among adult nonsmokers in the United States.1
7. Stroke1

From the American Cancer Society

But go ahead, claim all their science is junk and you're smarter than the experts. That seems to be a symptom of people who can't admit facts.

There's never been any proof that second hand smoke is even remotely dangerous.

This is an absolute fabrication. You are a liar and a bad one at that.

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/dat...

There are 10 scientific paper linked at the bottom of that CDC page that affirmatively show a statistically significant connection between secondhand smoke and the conditions and problems listed. The smokers lungs only filter about 10% of the pollutants contained in the tobacco smoke, the rest remain in the second hand smoke and will be absorbed partially by the next person that inhales the smoke.

However for many infections, such as the un-fun norovirus, a person's immunity is temporary, not permanent. http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/artic... So the exposure to these agents does not result in a stronger immune system but does result in additional illnesses. How do we, then, clean off the nasty critters but keep the "good" ones?

I don't think that will work, since there are very few genetic diseases that kill you between 20 and 40
The theory isn't about genetic diseases, it's about genes that increase your likelyhood of death between 20 and 40.

Major killers of 20 to 40 year olds are accidents, suicide and homicide. link Some of those injuries are due to higher risk taking behavior in youth, which would be selected against. Suicide also has a genetic component, and would be selected against.

Just to reiterate this, here are the U.S. rabies cases in people from 2003-2013. Although human rabies has nearly been eliminated in the U.S., you can see that more than half the cases were transmitted by bats, more than 2/3 if you only look at cases where the exposure happened within the U.S.

I think bats are much-maligned too, but rabies is something you just do not screw around with (nearly 100% fatality rate - even our best treatment only has a 8% success rate).

The next time you need help make sure sure you call a hacker, they are always virtuous. Remember every police office is some low IQ sadist, yes yes they are. 123 police killed in the line of duty in 2015,( http://www.nleomf.org/facts/of...) thats ok they all had it coming. Of course every one of the 985 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/12/26/a-year-of-reckoning-police-fatally-shoot-nearly-1000/) people killed by the police were angels on mercy missions, shot down deliberately by the blue minions from hell. Lets see 11.2 million arrests in 2014 https://www.fbi.gov/news/stori... So that's a failure leading to death of the arrestee of .00879% of the time, not getting hysterical over a tiny failure rate nope. Where is the frantic indignation for the 16,000 homicides http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastat... we don't care about them as they were killed by their fellow victims of police brutality? Or the 38,300 traffic fatalities? ( http://www.npr.org/sections/th...), we don't care about them because they must have all been killed by accidents caused by police chasing peace loving missionaries? I wonder why I have never been shot? Could it be that I follow directions, and lawful orders of the police?

That poses an interesting question. If everyone were an organ donor automatically, would there be as much need for any individual's organs such that a doctor would ever be faced with that situation as spare organs would be plentiful enough so that there really wouldn't be a waiting list?

Going by this data from the CDC (PDF warning), about 150k people between the ages of 15-44 died in the US in 2007. Not all of those organs will be usable for donation for various reasons, but I suspect that it would put a pretty big dent in the number of people waiting on a donation. If you relax the criteria a bit more and include people 45-54, you get another ~180k potential donors. Go up to 64 years and you nearly double the amount again.

The CDC's injury center: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/abo...

Since injury is a health concern, and guns are a source of injury, guns are indeed a health concern.

The domain of the CDC explicitly, by law excludes guns.
If that was never in their charter, then why did it need to be explicitly excluded? Answer: it was in their scope. And the NRA didn't like that, so it was removed.

More info on the supposed CDC 'crusade' from a couple decades ago:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

It is in the CDC's purview:
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/abo...
http://www.cdc.gov/about/organ...
http://www.cdc.gov/maso/pdf/cd...

It is in the CDC's purview:
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/abo...
http://www.cdc.gov/about/organ...
http://www.cdc.gov/maso/pdf/cd...

It is in the CDC's purview:
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/abo...
http://www.cdc.gov/about/organ...
http://www.cdc.gov/maso/pdf/cd...

The CDC's scope is "health problems", not just disease: http://www.cdc.gov/maso/pdf/cd...

Hey, let's add a few important caveats too! All of these numbers are pretty much self-report numbers--I actually got to sit through somebody checking their hometown's murder rate on the Uniform Crime Report...and, in the year she found (part of) a murder victim, they reported a grand total of no murders.

This applies internationally, too. The US usually goes off of the number of people who were ruled homicides by the medical examiner--and the definition they use is "when death results from an injury or poisoning caused by the intentional acts of another human being" [Source, PDF] with there being no requirement that the death itself be intended, which is what's being claimed when somebody's charged with homicide.

Other countries use other definitions for reporting their homicide rates--such as how many got counted as such by the police as homicides, or how many actually reach trial on homicide charges...and I've heard a few reports of countries that only count those where the trial results in a homicide conviction.

If you want a good example of a situation where Twain's quip about statistics is quite true, as well as an object lesson in why it's utterly essential for all statistics to be verified as using the same basis for their count before attempting to compare them.

The biggest problem I could identify with those apps is that the most effective contraceptives require a doctor's visit.

The most effective contraceptives are the implant with a failure rate of 0.05% per year. The pills are pretty far down with 5-10%. https://www.cdc.gov/reproducti... http://www.ashasexualhealth.or...

By age group, 18-24 year olds are the most homicidal and most hate-filled group:

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/8...

That could just demonstrate the fact that those prone to violence or those living in violent places/situations tend to die young, so many simply don't make it out of the 18-24 age group.

By age group, 18-24 year olds are the most homicidal and most hate-filled group:

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/8...

That gun violence number includes suicides which is misleading. For instance, from the 2013 CDC data table 18, it gives firearms deaths at 33,636. The number of suicide by firearms is 21,175. Almost two thirds of those fatalities are intentionally self inflicted by people harming only themselves (which as a free person should be your right even if it is stupid).

12,461 people did die from gun violence in 2013 though. However, 48,545 died from poisoning deaths and only 6,637 of those were suicide. That is 41,908 poisoning deaths not attributed to suicide. It is also more deaths than all firearm related deaths with and without discounting suicides. But suicides were the 10th leading cause of deaths in the US in 2013 and 2014. Heart disease and cancer were number 1 and 2 respectively.

So before banning cars and guns, we should ban cancer, heart disease, and suicides. As for banning foreigners, I don't really care but an American citizen and legal resident has more of a right to have a car, weapons, and to kill themselves than foreigners have a right to enter the country.

It's interesting. About twice as many people die from alcohol related issues than guns in the U.S. Per year, yet, the "socially responsible" people who have jumped in the anti-gun bad wagon do not utter one, single peep about this. They do not refuse to make emoji about the topic, and in fact, some seem to be there. Funny how that works. It almost as if there is a large group of people who want to appear to care about things, than really care. Almost...


Before I forget, here are the links proving what I said: http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fac...
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_...

The thing is, most of the shit isn't from guns. CDC leading causes of death in the U.S., page 41. Skipping all the disease deaths we get:

41,149 - suicide (21,175 of them by firearms, about 2/3 of all firearm deaths)
38,861 - accidental poisonings and overdoses (passed traffic accidents recently)
37,908 - (land) motor vehicle accidents (nearly 3/4 alcohol-related)
30,208 - accidental falls (mostly among the elderly)
16,904 - other accidents
16,121 - homicide (11,208 by firearms)
4,587 - Other undetermined events (281 by firearms)
3,391 - accidental drowning
2,768 - complications from medical and surgical care
2,760 - accidental fire
1,569 - water, air, space vehicle accidents
1,000 - other land transport accidents
516 - killings by law enforcement (usually by firearms)
505 - accidental discharge of firearms
15 - war

Now, compare that list to what you see the press covering. Suicides, drug overdoses, motor vehicle deaths, falls, drownings, medical complications, are vastly underreported. Firearms (which I've put in bold), air transport accidents, killings by law enforcement, and war/terrorism deaths are vastly overreported. (IMHO fires are reported about the right amount - fires make good video).

Roughly 2/3 of the firearm deaths are from suicide. But firearms account for roughly half of suicides. So you can make a pretty convincing argument that the people who shot themselves probably would've figured out some other way to successfully kill themselves if guns weren't available. So you shouldn't attribute these deaths on firearms.

That leaves the 11,208 firearm homicide deaths up for debate. Which certainly is a topic worth debating. But its importance falls far behind suicide, drug overdoses, motor vehicle accidents (mostly drunk driving), falls (this one is debatable since it's mostly elderly who are killed this way), and other types of accidents. As a whole, these things are 11.7x more likely to kill you than homicide by firearm.

In other words, firearms homicides comprise less than 8% of the shit in the shit sandwich. An objective, statistical approach to reducing the preventable non-disease death rate in this country would prioritize reducing these other causes higher than tackling firearms homicides. The overdose death rate in particular is very troubling, since it's roughly tripled in the past 15 years. This increase accounts for twice as many lives lost than would've been saved if we'd somehow managed to eliminate all firearms homicide deaths. Yet the press practically ignores this compared to firearms homicides.

Don't like those statistics? Then lobby Congress to remove the ban on funding for actual dedicated research of gun violence.

After all, what have you got to lose? If you're right and the current statistics are completely wrong, then actual dedicated statistics research and collection should prove that.

The US government, motivated by the gun lobbyists, do not want real research on gun violence because they already know the result is ugly. They did the preliminary studies already.

Most gun violence in the US is suicide. It is the white elephant of gun ownership. Estimates put suicide as far more the likely use of a firearm over other uses.

Even the man in the recent gay bar shooting killed himself at the end.

No, regardless of what firearm salesmen or government thugs want to believe, there is no a quiet militia of people polishing their firearms waiting to murder you and your children.

There are a few hurting people - fellow blood and flesh humans - who cannot get the help they need.

But Western society stigmatizes illnesses of the mind worse then skill color, gender, race or creed. The names themselves are derogatory. People aren't ill they are 'Sick in the Head.' Nutters. Crazies. Sickos. Wackjobs. People who work on mental health issues aren't doctors, they're shrinks. You don't have anxiety problems you're just a "head case."

And this hurts us directly elsewhere besides the gun ownership debate. The lack of recognition makes these sufferers distance themselves from general society. The delusions make the mentally unstable easy candidates for recruitment by fanatical organizations with fantastical promises. It is rarely the Supreme Leaders of the terrorists that are blowing themselves up. Their foolish footsolders with the illusions of rewards that do not exist are strapping themselves into the suicide vests.

No, we don't need a 'technical solution' to prevent shootings. We need to fix society.

That means changing the ideas in people's heads about what's in their heads.

Could there be a technological solution to the problem of mass shootings?

There will never be a machine that fixes the shooter problem or the gun violence problem. Both of these are people problems and fixes need to start and end with people.

Western Society needs to realize that broken minds are broken legs. You don't ask someone with a broken leg to run a marathon, you call an ambulance. You don't tell someone with depression to stay away you're a downer, you offer to listen. Otherwise these sufferers will turn on their own to what help they can. That help may be a pill or a rope or a gun.

Or it could be someone who says 'pray to my God who says kill the infidels and all your problems will be solved.'

And they will believe them. Because there's nobody to tell them otherwise. (That would be bad for sales.)

Yesterday, June 1, there was a gun-related murder-suicide at UCLA. Two people were killed. There were no other incidental injuries.

Yesterday, June 1, there was also a concert where 2 people died and 57 were hospitalized. Right now they think it was drug-related - either overdoses, or bad synthetic drugs.

By any objective measure, the second story is a bigger deal than the first one. The first story made the national news and was the headline on most news sites (883,000 articles on Google News). But the second was pretty much limited to local news (9340 articles on Google News - Fox was the only news service to carry it nationally). Drug overdoes deaths have more than doubled in the last decade, and at 47,000 per year have now become the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., passing auto accidents at around 33,000.

The media exerts considerable bias in the stories they choose to cover. They don't like guns, so they carry a disproportionate number of stories about gun violence. They like drugs, so they regularly ignore stories about the growing drug abuse problem. The stats I linked to above probably come as a complete surprise to most readers, because the media simply hasn't been giving it as much attention as it deserves, concentrating instead on publicizing their their other pet "issues." You can either believe whatever the media spoon-feeds you. Or you can educate yourself, do your own research, and figure out where the true problems are.

CDC 2013 stats: total number of firearm deaths: 33,636; number of suicides with firearms: 21,175. Now 21175/33363 = 63.5%, or two thirds of all gun deaths.

I find it interesting that you are making up your firearms figures, and include no links to back up anything you say.

Here is a comparison of total firearm deaths, firearm suicide deaths, and firearm homicide deaths published October 21, 2015. Firearms deaths by suicide have been trending up since 2006, homicide declining steadily over the same period (and, again, showing that 2/3 of firearm deaths are suicide). Please provide your link showing that "last year was a record year for gun homicides", the FBI and CDC have not yet released final figures for 2015 as far as I can tell.

CDC 2013 stats: total number of firearm deaths: 33,636; number of suicides with firearms: 21,175. Now 21175/33363 = 63.5%, or two thirds of all gun deaths.

I find it interesting that you are making up your firearms figures, and include no links to back up anything you say.

Here is a comparison of total firearm deaths, firearm suicide deaths, and firearm homicide deaths published October 21, 2015. Firearms deaths by suicide have been trending up since 2006, homicide declining steadily over the same period (and, again, showing that 2/3 of firearm deaths are suicide). Please provide your link showing that "last year was a record year for gun homicides", the FBI and CDC have not yet released final figures for 2015 as far as I can tell.

Ageing population was already corrected for.

Ok, but ageing population death rate grew relatively more than the others, these are the raw figures.

Suicide inclusion is not significant in ranking states because it effects each score equally. In this case for 2013 it was 6.7 per 100K, so take the QZ article chart and subtract 6.7 from every score. Notice something? That uniform subtraction doesn't change the order. See here . Basically your poor argument is based on you using the word "statistical" while having extremely low numerical literacy.

The only problem is that, like climate change, it's already too late. We should have taken control of antibiotics use *before* antibiotic-immune bacteria evolved. Now it's too late.

No it's not.

Pardon me for being crude, but the fact that we are seeing one patient infected by an antibiotic resistant bacteria doesn't mean the end of the world (except perhaps for that one patient).

By and large we'll continue being able to treat bacterial infections with antibiotics, but the probability of some of those cases not responding to treatment will increase from practically zero to almost zero. More if you're in a hospital that doesn't take sufficient care in the antiseptic department (e.g. cleaning the wards, operating theatres, elementary hygiene on part of staff before touching a patient, and medical equipment). Too bad for the individuals involved, but not a big threat to the population as a whole.

Those primarily exposed to higher risk are patients undergoing cancer therapy, complex surgery, arthritis, dialysis, and transplantation surgery (see http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... pp. 24). The populations concerned are substantial, but with good antiseptic measures only a small percentage will be infected (and run an increased risk of dying).

Of course the CDC warns about consequences (as is it's job). See e.g. http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... . They point to linkage between irresponsible antibiotics use and antibiotics resistance and promote "good stewardship" to slow down the spread of antibiotic resistance (see e.g. http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... ).

In fact the CDC have proposed an action plan (https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/national_action_plan_for_combating_antibotic-resistant_bacteria.pdf ) for dealing with antibiotic resistance (see: http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista.... ) which has been funded by congress (this year).

Sorry to disappoint you: (1) the sky isn't falling down (2) our "silver bullet" antibacterial treatment just got tarnished a little, so that risks of getting a fatal infection when you're in the vulnerable population segment increase (3) there's nothing you can specifically do about that (except trying not to get a condition that requires you to receive treatment) (4) what you can do is supporting commonsense measures (like those proposed by the CDC) to slow down the spread and reduce the risk of getting infected.

The only problem is that, like climate change, it's already too late. We should have taken control of antibiotics use *before* antibiotic-immune bacteria evolved. Now it's too late.

No it's not.

Pardon me for being crude, but the fact that we are seeing one patient infected by an antibiotic resistant bacteria doesn't mean the end of the world (except perhaps for that one patient).

By and large we'll continue being able to treat bacterial infections with antibiotics, but the probability of some of those cases not responding to treatment will increase from practically zero to almost zero. More if you're in a hospital that doesn't take sufficient care in the antiseptic department (e.g. cleaning the wards, operating theatres, elementary hygiene on part of staff before touching a patient, and medical equipment). Too bad for the individuals involved, but not a big threat to the population as a whole.

Those primarily exposed to higher risk are patients undergoing cancer therapy, complex surgery, arthritis, dialysis, and transplantation surgery (see http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... pp. 24). The populations concerned are substantial, but with good antiseptic measures only a small percentage will be infected (and run an increased risk of dying).

Of course the CDC warns about consequences (as is it's job). See e.g. http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... . They point to linkage between irresponsible antibiotics use and antibiotics resistance and promote "good stewardship" to slow down the spread of antibiotic resistance (see e.g. http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... ).

In fact the CDC have proposed an action plan (https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/national_action_plan_for_combating_antibotic-resistant_bacteria.pdf ) for dealing with antibiotic resistance (see: http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista.... ) which has been funded by congress (this year).

Sorry to disappoint you: (1) the sky isn't falling down (2) our "silver bullet" antibacterial treatment just got tarnished a little, so that risks of getting a fatal infection when you're in the vulnerable population segment increase (3) there's nothing you can specifically do about that (except trying not to get a condition that requires you to receive treatment) (4) what you can do is supporting commonsense measures (like those proposed by the CDC) to slow down the spread and reduce the risk of getting infected.

The only problem is that, like climate change, it's already too late. We should have taken control of antibiotics use *before* antibiotic-immune bacteria evolved. Now it's too late.

No it's not.

Pardon me for being crude, but the fact that we are seeing one patient infected by an antibiotic resistant bacteria doesn't mean the end of the world (except perhaps for that one patient).

By and large we'll continue being able to treat bacterial infections with antibiotics, but the probability of some of those cases not responding to treatment will increase from practically zero to almost zero. More if you're in a hospital that doesn't take sufficient care in the antiseptic department (e.g. cleaning the wards, operating theatres, elementary hygiene on part of staff before touching a patient, and medical equipment). Too bad for the individuals involved, but not a big threat to the population as a whole.

Those primarily exposed to higher risk are patients undergoing cancer therapy, complex surgery, arthritis, dialysis, and transplantation surgery (see http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... pp. 24). The populations concerned are substantial, but with good antiseptic measures only a small percentage will be infected (and run an increased risk of dying).

Of course the CDC warns about consequences (as is it's job). See e.g. http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... . They point to linkage between irresponsible antibiotics use and antibiotics resistance and promote "good stewardship" to slow down the spread of antibiotic resistance (see e.g. http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... ).

In fact the CDC have proposed an action plan (https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/national_action_plan_for_combating_antibotic-resistant_bacteria.pdf ) for dealing with antibiotic resistance (see: http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista.... ) which has been funded by congress (this year).

Sorry to disappoint you: (1) the sky isn't falling down (2) our "silver bullet" antibacterial treatment just got tarnished a little, so that risks of getting a fatal infection when you're in the vulnerable population segment increase (3) there's nothing you can specifically do about that (except trying not to get a condition that requires you to receive treatment) (4) what you can do is supporting commonsense measures (like those proposed by the CDC) to slow down the spread and reduce the risk of getting infected.

The only problem is that, like climate change, it's already too late. We should have taken control of antibiotics use *before* antibiotic-immune bacteria evolved. Now it's too late.

No it's not.

Pardon me for being crude, but the fact that we are seeing one patient infected by an antibiotic resistant bacteria doesn't mean the end of the world (except perhaps for that one patient).

By and large we'll continue being able to treat bacterial infections with antibiotics, but the probability of some of those cases not responding to treatment will increase from practically zero to almost zero. More if you're in a hospital that doesn't take sufficient care in the antiseptic department (e.g. cleaning the wards, operating theatres, elementary hygiene on part of staff before touching a patient, and medical equipment). Too bad for the individuals involved, but not a big threat to the population as a whole.

Those primarily exposed to higher risk are patients undergoing cancer therapy, complex surgery, arthritis, dialysis, and transplantation surgery (see http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... pp. 24). The populations concerned are substantial, but with good antiseptic measures only a small percentage will be infected (and run an increased risk of dying).

Of course the CDC warns about consequences (as is it's job). See e.g. http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... . They point to linkage between irresponsible antibiotics use and antibiotics resistance and promote "good stewardship" to slow down the spread of antibiotic resistance (see e.g. http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista... ).

In fact the CDC have proposed an action plan (https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/national_action_plan_for_combating_antibotic-resistant_bacteria.pdf ) for dealing with antibiotic resistance (see: http://www.cdc.gov/drugresista.... ) which has been funded by congress (this year).

Sorry to disappoint you: (1) the sky isn't falling down (2) our "silver bullet" antibacterial treatment just got tarnished a little, so that risks of getting a fatal infection when you're in the vulnerable population segment increase (3) there's nothing you can specifically do about that (except trying not to get a condition that requires you to receive treatment) (4) what you can do is supporting commonsense measures (like those proposed by the CDC) to slow down the spread and reduce the risk of getting infected.

Obesity is the #2 killer nowadays. Keep this up, it will be #1.

No, it will not.
It did hit #1 several years ago and fatties shrieked and yelled (I'd say "and rose up" but.. you know.. fat joke).
So they broke obesity up into many ailments. Go read the top 10 now and see how many are obesity related.

Here let me help with 2015:
â Heart disease: 614,348
â Cancer: 591,699
â Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 147,101
â Accidents (unintentional injuries): 136,053
â Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 133,103
â Alzheimer's disease: 93,541
â Diabetes: 76,488
â Influenza and pneumonia: 55,227
â Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,146
â Intentional self-harm (suicide): 42,773
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastat...

See obesity on the list?

Pfizer piles up a little moral dirt and then stands on it so they can brag about their moral high ground.

"Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve,"

Smoking kills a lot of people. http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/dat... one out of five deaths that link says.
Pfizer makes things like chantix, nicitrol inhalers, gums, and patches that do not prove very effective in stopping smoking. They are very profitable due to cost and customers coming back again and again. Pfizer also hates vapes because vapes just work.
You look at the FUD aimed at the most effective smoking cessation tool ever and you ask "why?".
Big Tobacco, Big Pharma (Pfizer front and center) and politicians (love the tax dollars and tobacco funds) hate something that actually allows people to quit smoking.
So while there are decades of research on the vape "smoke" compounds, due to their use the theater and stage, now we get scare stories and bans. (If you were wondering the research says the vape "smoke" is an irritant for asthmatics and there are a grand total of 0 cancer deaths linked to it)
When you call the American Cancer Society and say "I have tried everything to quit smoking and only vapes work, I should keep vaping right?" and they say "You should go back to smoking if that is the case." (I actually had this talk with them and I was completely stunned), try searching their site for "Pfizer" and see when the latest "donation" was.
So Pfizer is working their hardest to ensure 500,000 smoking deaths in the US every year and 10 million world wide.. I don't want to Godwin this but that is LITERALLY (correct usage) worse than Hitler.
So after that, they want to take the moral high ground about not helping with a handful of executions each year in the US?.. I do not know whether to laugh or to cry.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/va...
http://vaccines.procon.org/vie...
http://www.vaccines.gov/basics...

Bullshit.

People are against vaccines because if ignorance, not some secret knowledge.

Care to elaborate this with numbers, so we can calculate the risks?

You mean remedial details on the subject? Some people can't get vaccines because of allergies, or because of age. Herd Immunity, I suggest consulting Google.

Ah! I see an AC has found the solution to tens of thousands of deaths per year! Clearly, anybody who dies in a car must be drunk or high!

Lock em all up!

Er... never mind that I hold stock in several for-profit prisons.

Oh please, there a just as many studies saying second hand smoke is harmless.

Shame you didn't link to any. And if you do, please link to the actual articles instead of right-wing news sites who claim such studies exist. Do it like this:

http://thorax.bmj.com/content/...

http://www.jabfm.org/content/2...

http://ash.org.uk/files/docume...

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/dat...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/b...

See, the thing is, when you dig a little into those claims about "studies that show no risks from second-hand smoke", you find that they don't really exist except in the minds of "skeptic" sources like Reason or the Cato Institute.

I work for the single payer health care system of Finland on the administrative side (IT & stats related) and partly because of that, health care has always been one of my favorite subjects to discuss. However something I've noticed when talking with Americans about it is a certain type of illusion/fallacy that many seem to be under, which is that because you pay so much for it, it must be the best system out there.

Just yesterday I had a lengthy conversation on fb about the problems with a purely insurance based model, and even though I tried linking a couple of studies as to the amount of deaths caused by lack of access due to costs, I was labeled a liar because apparently 'everyone in the US now has the opportunity to get health insurance" (a direct quote from him) despite the fact that it's known that there are people who do not meet the criteria under the ACA to qualify for the cheaper/low income insurances whilist also not being able to afford a private one AND that there are also still issues with insurances not covering certain operations. Don't get me wrong, the ACA was a small step in a better direction but the gutting of the public option for all sort of killed the best potential about it. Yet my counterpart in said discussion was adamantly of the opinion that anyone who dies in the US for not getting treatment dies purely because he/she didn't bother to get insurance and hence the system is not to blame.

You've plenty of things where you lead the world, and the medical R & D and high level expertise in the US is unparalleled. However I do wish that more Americans would realize how much you're paying for simple base level health care. I've seen hospital invoices from the states where simple over the counter ibuprofen pills are billed at several dollars a piece. That's a a margin of several thousand percentages. The fact that this is allowed is unfathomable to me. Even if one is of the opinion that a life-saving basic service should be allowed to remain a profit-driven business, having no controls on pricing combined with the insurance lobby has created a gigantic price bubble. This is why the US spends combined (private and tax spending) the most money on the planet per capita on health care, and still the results are far from the top. (Source (wiki))

The profit motive needs to be either removed or curtailed heavily, so that more of the money that's spent can actually be used to improve the level of care and oversight, instead of just increasing the profits of the insurance giants and private hospitals.

We get comparable treatment results and universal coverage (at about 3500 dollars a year per capita) than the US does when it comes to life expectancy, cancer survival rates (in fact, with certain types of cancers we're ahead of the US even) and so on. You spend more than DOUBLE that (8700 dollars according to OECD when totaling private and public spending, though interestingly, the CDC puts this figure even higher at 9500) and the massive increase in spending doesn't get you the kind of results that such an investment should.

You could and should easily be able to arrange for the hands down best universal health care system without spending a dime more than you already are. Don't spend more, spend smarter.

Just my 2 cents, feel free to mod me down for being a socialist scum now.