Slashdot Mirror

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri-crime-total-crimes
How's that prison-as-a-deterrent thing working out for you, America? Not so much, huh,

We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defense spending - where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.

Literacy: 48th.
Math: 32nd.
Science: 14th
Life expectancy: 33rd
Infant mortality ('05-10): 40th.
Median household income: 4th.
Labor force: 3rd
Exports (per capita): 43rd
Exports (gross): 2nd
Incarceration (per capita): 1st
Adults (belief in angels): No reliable statistics available. 41-80%
Defense spending (gross): 1st
Defense spending (% GDP): 2nd (tied with Russia)

"where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies."

False. Only the next 14. Of those, only 9 are allies.

critisim debunked, nothing to see here, carry on ...

We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defense spending - where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.

Literacy: 48th.
Math: 32nd.
Science: 14th
Life expectancy: 33rd
Infant mortality ('05-10): 40th.
Median household income: 4th.
Labor force: 3rd
Exports (per capita): 43rd
Exports (gross): 2nd
Incarceration (per capita): 1st
Adults (belief in angels): No reliable statistics available. 41-80%
Defense spending (gross): 1st
Defense spending (% GDP): 2nd (tied with Russia)

"where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies."

False. Only the next 14. Of those, only 9 are allies.

2007. 2013 now and 1/3rd of somalians suffer from depression and the common cure is to chain them up.

A few things. First, no country on the planet has 1/3rd of its population suffering from depression. The highest year over year incidence rate has been reported at .8%, with a lifetime incidence of 8-10%, if you're unfortunate enough to be a woman in that country. And that country is not Somalia. Somalia rated 153 out of 192 this past year on per capita depression. You'll never guess who got number one. And Somalia also rated pretty low on incarceration rates. Guess who got number one again?

How should I put my reply to your "debunk" as succinctly as possible.... AMEEEEERICA FUCK YA! I bet they're so jealous of all that freedom we got, eh? -_- Both of you are wrong; Both for "defending" the 3rd world, and for "attacking" it. Somalia is doing just fine; Worry about your own damn country.

The amount of proven reserves in oil shale (tight oil, NOT shale oil which is just low grade kerogen, a step up from peat moss) are limited. Planetwide use of "oil" is about 85 E6 barrels per day. You get into trouble with definitions - do you include condensate from natural gas wells or not, but we're going to do an order of magnitude calculation here, so don't get too picky. So, about 3 E10 barrels / year - that's a shitload of fossilized plant poo.

So, even if you take the cornicopian approach of quite a bit of tight oil available world wide (30 billion [3 E 10], you only get a year's worth out of it. Of course, there are other forms of oil - conventional oil from the big, classic fields in the Middle East and Alaska, oil sands, and others, but you begin to see that all of that tight oil doesn't kick the can much further down the road.

We're doomed.

If you mean globally, Christianity is a distant second to Islam.

That's an incorrect statement, easily refuted by checking Wikipedia or a Google search.

And I suspect there's been more Apple products sold in America than there are Christians.

At first I was skeptical. There are 234 million adults in the United States, of whom approximately 44% attend church regularly; so you're guessing that more than 103 million Apple devices have been sold in the US? Apple, Inc. has been around since 1976, so you may be right, if you count every iPod and every Mac and so on all the way back to the Apple I.

The vast majority of these 30,000 causalities are in the former eastern block countries on roads dangerous by design.

In the more developed countries the number of fatalities per km driven is very low and setting the max. speed to 70mi (~113 km) would not change anything.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/tra_tra_acc_inc_car_cra_fat_rat-inc-car-crashes-fatality-rate

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Road_safety_statistics_at_regional_level

Motorway density and risk
Statistically, the numbers of road deaths are particularly low for many regions with high traffic volumes. This is true especially of many regions in western Germany and England, in particular around major cities, and of most parts of the Netherlands. Especially around major cities and transport hubs (e.g. seaports), high traffic volumes cause congestion, which reduces average speeds and, therefore, also the likelihood of fatalities when accidents do occur. A closer look at this phenomenon also reveals that many of these regions tend to have high motorway density. In general, motorways are much safer than secondary roads. Furthermore, mainly transit traffic uses existing motorways, thus keeping the number of road fatalities in these regions relatively low, despite high total traffic volumes. In fact, the quality of the roads in these countries is especially high, contributing to the low number of accidents. By contrast, fatality rates are high in regions with low motorway density, such as all of Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic except their capitals, the whole of Bulgaria, Poland, the Baltic Member States, some of the eastern federal states of Germany and many rural areas in France and Spain. These data strongly suggest that the high proportion of traffic using motorways is an important factor behind the low number of road fatalities in many regions.

Where did you get those 0.23 days for Germany from? Because that's exactly what I looked up and found my 17 minutes.

http://www.verivox.de/nachrichten/pro-jahr-im-durchschnitt-157-minuten-stromausfall-65179.aspx

And I start to question the reliability of those statistics. BOTH. 6 hours vs 1/4 hour for the SAME ITEM?

Your previous http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_out_day-energy-electrical-outages-days link lists Germany at 0.23 days in 2005.

Ah, ok, But that statistic does NOT give the average time without power per year, but the number of days per year on which a power outage happens.

OK, let me compile the numbers:

Numbers of days with power interruptions: Germany 0.23 (source: nationmaster) vs. US ??
Average time without power per year: US 8 hours (source still unknown) vs Germany 17 minutes (source: verivox article)

If we combine these numbers: A typical German household can expect a power outage every four years that will last 68 minutes.

The source of the second one is the "World Development Indicators database". So it makes sense that 1st world countries are not completely represented in that data. The US average of 8 hours (0.33 days) compares fairly well with a similarly geographically large country such as Russia (2.73 days), or a well-developed industrial power such as Germany (0.23 days).

Where did you get those 0.23 days for Germany from? Because that's exactly what I looked up and found my 17 minutes.

http://www.verivox.de/nachrichten/pro-jahr-im-durchschnitt-157-minuten-stromausfall-65179.aspx

And I start to question the reliability of those statistics. BOTH. 6 hours vs 1/4 hour for the SAME ITEM?

Your previous http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_out_day-energy-electrical-outages-days link lists Germany at 0.23 days in 2005.

Getting statistics on this is an error prone process anyhow. The US alone has several regional electric grids with minimal ties between them. Then each regional grid feeds into hundreds of local/regional utilities who actually deliver (and sometimes generate) the power. I am a little doubtful that these utilities collect information on every single outage, and especially in a common format. Querying all the utility companies in the US seems implausible. Perhaps they polled a sample of customers, but then they are relying on customer memory which seems like a stupid way to collect this kind of data.

Other countries often have national grid operators so getting this kind of data might be easier.

Intresting chart:

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z6409butolt8la_&ctype=c&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_y=gci_2.07&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&dimp_c=country:world&idim=country:USA:JPN&ifdim=country&ind=false&icfg

According to this, the quality of the US poer grid is compareable to Slovenia.

Unfortunately, this one here doesn't have data for the US: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_out_day-energy-electrical-outages-days

But 8 hours power outage per year sounds more like a developing country to me. (Here: 17min in 2010. Drop from 18min in 2009)

The first chart appears to be an opinion survey- "How would you assess the quality of the electricity supply in your country (lack of interruptions and lack of voltage fluctuations)? [1 = insufficient and suffers frequent interruptions; 7 = sufficient and reliable]". I don't make a habit of dismissing charts completely, but this doesn't seem to be based on actual data about the power system. People in the US have an opinion of their electrical grid which is comparable to the opinion which people living in Slovenia have of their grid. This doesn't mean much to me and could be influenced by any number of factors.

The source of the second one is the "World Development Indicators database". So it makes sense that 1st world countries are not completely represented in that data. The US average of 8 hours (0.33 days) compares fairly well with a similarly geographically large country such as Russia (2.73 days), or a well-developed industrial power such as Germany (0.23 days).

Intresting chart:

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z6409butolt8la_&ctype=c&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_y=gci_2.07&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&dimp_c=country:world&idim=country:USA:JPN&ifdim=country&ind=false&icfg

According to this, the quality of the US poer grid is compareable to Slovenia.

Unfortunately, this one here doesn't have data for the US: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_out_day-energy-electrical-outages-days

But 8 hours power outage per year sounds more like a developing country to me. (Here: 17min in 2010. Drop from 18min in 2009)

I have doubts. Per this link http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/tra_dri_sid_of_the_roa_lef_or_rig-driving-side-road-left-right Germany is a right-hand drive state (along with most of the continent). For the most part, you drive faster toward the center, e.g. left lane is the passing lane.

I suspect your Australian left-side-driving brain turned things inside out.

For the American audience, these speed are not remarkable:
70kph ~= 42mph
80 ~= 48
90 ~= 54 (the "slow" highway speed limit)
100 ~= 60 (typical is 65mph/108kph)
120 ~= 72 (occassionally 75mph/124kph)
130 ~= 78

In NV, there are stretches of road where the limit is 75mph (and that is unenforced due to the 2 patrol car/day schedule, see Top Gear s12e2). 80mph is routine for many parts of California (in spite of a 65mph limit). 130kph sound fast to an American who can't do metric conversions, but it really isn't that fast in practice. You'll see a few people doing 90mph in those situations. 100mph+ is considered unreasonable by about 98% of the population in almost all scenarios. (that would bet 160kph)

On the other hand, a town near me has a school on the highway through town, and that has a limit of 15mph (22kph). And it is effectively enforced by the population going that speed (so no bad actors could go through there faster due to the traffic jam). Hehe, one of our managers got a ticket for 30mph through there yesterday, and he regarded it as a fair cop.

All the evidence for gun control is anecdotal.

Oh, really? I guess by "all" you also mean "all the evidence that doesn't compare us with other wealthy nations." Nice try.

I would agree that we tend to treat the symptoms not the cause. However comparing the UK to the USA

http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/United-Kingdom/United-States/Crime

The UK has higher rape and drug use than the USA. And though i wasn't able to quickly find a reference but I believe the UK has much more knife related crimes. I would suggest most western countries have problems that need working on, it's just most don't have a fixation on guns like the USA

From the point of view of most Europeans where guns are generally banned you all look crazy. We don't have guns and yet somehow aren't being robbed, raped and murdered nearly as much as you guys. At no time in our history would guns have helped us rise up against the government either.

From our point of view you should be trying to figure out how to change your society so that you don't need guns, rather than trying to advocate more of them. You are treating the symptom, not the cause.

Europeans are sure sanctimonious about their "morally superior" culture considering that two World Wars have originated there the past 100 hundred years and it was the site of the Holocaust. And if you think that is ancient history, let me point out the Bosnian War.

The large amount of gun murders is the direct result of the failed drug policy of the US and mostly involves criminal-on-criminal murders that would not be affected by stricter gun laws. As proof, many of the cities with the strictest gun laws have the most gun violence. In general, the US's total crime rate is lower than many European countries: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_vic-crime-total-victims

Or maybe you could explain why the crime rate in England is higher overall?

Using your logic, looks like you guys need more guns.

From the point of view of most Europeans where guns are generally banned you all look crazy. We don't have guns and yet somehow aren't being robbed, raped and murdered nearly as much as you guys.

Oh really?

Assault victims:
  UK 2.8%
  US 1.2%

Rape victims:
  UK 0.9%
  US 0.4%

Total crime victims:
  UK 26.4%
  US 21.2%

Ref: http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/United-Kingdom/United-States/Crime

According to Nationmaster, Australia has 490 million hectares of arable land, while France has 185 million. Environmental Knowledge Systems Australia (EKSA) says that 400 million hectares of Australian land is actively used for agriculture.

Even if France used all of its arable land, it still wouldn't come close to Australia.

According to this, the average person in the US watches 4 hours of TV per day.

However, that doesn't mean the average amount of time per day a TV is turned on is the same. First of all, the previous statistic averages in people who don't own TVs at all. Second, sometimes people leave the TV on when they're not watching it. Third, often the same TV gets watched by multiple people. The first two factors would tend to cause the average to increase, while the latter would tend to cause it to decrease. I haven't been able to find enough information to determine either way.

It's no joke. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity

And the countries that follow the USA on the Obese-o-meter, mostly got there because of the US export of fast food outlets to any country that can afford them.

Funny, other people make the opposite argument, namely that the UK undercounts and the US overcounts. Rape hardly is a good example; viz statutory rape.

In any case, crime in general is much higher in the UK, France, and Germany than in the US.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri-crime-total-crimes

The discussion seems to have moved from "the US legal system sucks and its high incarceration rates are awful" to "maybe the lower incarceration rate is not necessary a bad tradeoff"...

Actually the nutritionists and doctors who have been giving them bad advice for decades also share a big part of the blame. That includes the USDA and their stupid food pyramid (but they are the Department of Agriculture not Health so no surprise their priorities are a tad different). The restaurants and food industry providing super huge portions, low fat + high sugar also aren't helping (esp when combined with typical parents training their kids to finish up everything on their plate even if they feel full). Then there's the education system.

Not all rich countries have a big obesity problem: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity
So why are they different? You can put some blame on the individuals, but when a whole country is full of obese people doesn't it make you wonder what else is going wrong? Not all those fat obese people are stupid, I see plenty of smart fat people. So who has been feeding their minds and thus bodies with garbage?

The people who say "it's simple" and just a matter of calories are also to blame. Because it is NOT simple. Not all calories are the same. Anyone who thinks so should try filling up a gasoline car with diesel or vice versa. If there's a difference for something relatively simple like a combustion engine, it is stupid to assume that there's no difference for human metabolism. We don't digest cellulose well, but glucose goes in pretty fast (along with simple starches), fructose is mainly processed by the liver, alcohol by liver and brain, protein needs to be broken down to amino acids, and not all proteins are easily digested. And certain foods make you fart (and if you fart methane it means yet more calories are escaping ;) ).

From what I see only a few nutritionists or scientists do studies where they measure the shit that comes out from their test subjects. The rest measure what goes in, oxygen consumed or exercise done and a few other things but they don't measure the excreted shit or its caloric value. So their studies are flawed.

Finally, spend a LOT more money on public health care (full disclosure: that means us).

Actually, the US already spends more per-capita on public healthcare than most other developed countries. But they get a lot less for it.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hea_car_fun_pub_per_cap-care-funding-public-per-capita

Looks like robberies and kidnappings had a nice spike after the ban. And Australia remains as one of the leaders of the the 1st world in rapes per capita.

sources:
http://www.aic.gov.au/documents/0/B/6/%7B0B619F44-B18B-47B4-9B59-F87BA643CBAA%7Dfacts11.pdf
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_vic-crime-rape-victims

With cheap and guilt-free access to contraception that happens seldom, where anti-choicers don't run amok, there's also the option of abortion for the rare cases where birth-control fails. In contrast "purity balls" and bullshit like that don't work. USA is the outlier among first-world nations:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_tee_pre_sha-health-teenage-pregnancy-share

In USA, 22% of all 20-year-old females have given birth. The equivalent rate for Japan and Sweden are 2% and 3%. (and atleast for Sweden, most of -those- are conservative religious folks - drop that nonsense and the risk drops to sub-1% which is, if not ignorable, then atleast not a major reason for population-growth.

And to be fair: It doesn't make sense to compare murder rates by firearms between countries with varying levels of firearms control. A better comparison is overall murder rate. The U.S. doesn't even make it in the top 37 on a per-capita basis (Source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita)

Notice how many "Western" states there are in this listing, all with gun control policies far stricter than the U.S. Apparently, they are killing each other with items other than guns.

Beneficial use of collegiate football in our society is extremely limited. Apart from those students who use it as their only exercise to stay fit, college football matches are used exclusively for entertainment. Yet this collegiate sport does not require much skill to cause repetitive brain injuries, often to students who play ball only to get into college. So spare us the stupidity of the "sports are for athletics, sports don't hurt people, etc". So people should have access only to participate in the sports they have a reasonable use for. They should be licensed, and inspected regularly for head trauma. It costs our health insurance companies quite a bit of money to cover sports injuries, after all.

Yeah, see how well that line of thinking would fly. You see, the problem with thinking of that sort is that it's a slippery slope.

Your logic is weak and based on comparing on equal grounds things that are not equal. You are comparing sport that is practiced by willing and informed participants following strict rules to somebody walking to you and in violation of the rule (law) shooting you. Do you see how this is not a slippery slope?

Besides, Europe has, pretty much, got U.S. per capita deaths due to guns converted to similar order of magnitude per capita abductions into the sex trade. I think I'd much rather my kid be dead, thank you very much.

That's not true. I am not sure where are you getting your statistics from but here is where I get mine: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_gun_vio_hom_fir_hom_rat_per_100_pop-rate-per-100-000-pop No EU country is even close to US.

I see no reason why any country should bow to pressure to stop developing weaponry.

For one thing, it speaks to the sovereignty of the nation in question in the most basic way possible. Weapons can be used to protect citizens from the overbearing dictates of another country. Open yourself to unbridled foreign dictates and they could sack your country.

It's hypocritical to justify procuring weapons as a means to protect your citizens, when you're simultaneously allowing about 10% of them to starve to death. North Korea's military expenditure is grossly disproportionate to the size of its economy compared to any other country on earth. I think the international community is perfectly justified in telling them to stop spending so much on weapons and spend more on helping out their own people. If it weren't for their closed society making it virtually impossible to obtain reliable information and downtown Seoul being within artillery range, the UN long ago would've authorized international intervention purely on humanitarian grounds.

sorry slashdot ate my link:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/foo_cof_con-food-coffee-consumption

The majority of Germans finish high school, which is 13 years of post-Kindergarten schooling

That's a common misconception among German intellectuals. You can look at the official data to see that it isn't true: http://www.datenportal.bmbf.de/portal/K23.gus?rid=T2.3.1#T2.3.1

Not to mention that it is not clear what you mean by secondary school.

I'm sorry that it's not clear to you, but It's a standard term: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=secondary+school If you don't understand a word other people are using, you look it up.

I don't know about you, but the schools I went to had solid attendance in their maths specializations.

You finished a Gymnasium, as (currently) about 40% of Germans do. Only some percentage of those people specialize in mathematics. Hence, the majority of German students don't ever see linear algebra.

but that is a distinct minority reserved for people with IQ less than 80 (approximately, but they are legally retarded)

An IQ of 80 is in the normal range; mental retardation means an IQ below 70.

Granted, that's my own personal experience, but what do I know. I'm only from there.

Quite true: you know very little about your own country. You also display a great deal of arrogance towards the majority of Germans who didn't attend the Gymnasium. And you insist others feed you data instead of showing intellectual curiosity and initiative. All of that reflects on the quality of your schooling.

[Citation Needed]

You know, let me tell you about these wonderful data sources: Nationmaster, CIA Factbook, and Wikipedia. If it's there, I don't provide "citations" because I assume you are capable of typing a word into Google and clicking on the link. Here's how you do that:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=average+length+of+schooling+by+country#

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_ave_yea_of_sch_of_adu-education-average-years-schooling-adults

Articles on those sites provide plenty of sources.

America spends more per capita on its schools than any other nation in the world.

Actually, we rank fourth

And on a percentage of GDP basis>/a> The US ranks 37th, tied with Estonia.

America spends more per capita on its schools than any other nation in the world.

Actually, we rank fourth

And on a percentage of GDP basis>/a> The US ranks 37th, tied with Estonia.

No, it doesn't. China performs 10 times as many executions as the US. Even as a proportion of the population, China is in front (or, perhaps, behind). Or is there some meaning of "by death penalty" that I am missing?

I give you relevant facts, and you reply with an incoherent emotional rant...

That YouTube video, though anecdotal in the grand scheme of things, only confirms my broader philosophy - governments suck. In a more capitalist society there could be no "victimless crime" nonsense like the "war on drugs", and Private Defense Agencies would actually be accountable for their mistakes. You, on the other hand, want to give the government unlimited power, including total control over your health care and a total monopoly on weapons of every kind! Read Solzhenitsyn, if not USA's gun rights advocates - an armed populace raises the cost of tyranny. The most peaceful country in Europe, Switzerland, understands this too.

As for USA's high murder statistics (which, BTW, are lower than much of Eastern Europe) - you need to adjust them by a number of factors, most importantly fertility rates. Most murders are committed by young people, of which USA has more than Europe or East Asia. USA also has a greater percentage of immigrants than almost any country Europe, particularly those that come from more violent countries. Most of the crime is caused by government prohibitionism, as well as the ineffectiveness of the law enforcement monopoly. Comparing applies to applies, US states that have similar demographics as Europe (ex. New Hampshire) are actually safer than Europe! You should also look at other crime statistics, like robberies. And, from a broad historical perspective, USA has seen far less large-scale violence than European countries did - USA's most costly wars have been to save Europe from itself!

Regarding USA's "shameful lack of a decent for-all healthcare system"... I remember the "for-all systems" back in the Soviet Union - they weren't pretty. What is most shameful is that USA's health system (pre-ObamaCare) is half-socialist, which manifests bad attributes of both worlds - the government pays for the majority of it, innovation is stifled, price competition is stifled, and costs are way too high. There's no reason why health care should be so expensive, with hospitals and doctors charging stratospheric prices that the customer never sees and health insurance companies are mandated to pay. What USA needs is free market competition in health products and services, which would immediately result in a technological revolution similar to the computer revolution of the 1990s, with prices falling far lower and benefits growing far higher than most people can currently imagine! About 90% of health care is information, and most medical tests can be done at home or in cheap competing clinics. The poor should ideally settle for private charity, but a voucher system would be a reasonable temporary political compromise.

--libman

The obesity rate for the United States is around 30% whereas it is 23% for the UK. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity. Other metrics tell a similar story. See e.g http://www.oecd.org/els/healthpoliciesanddata/theeconomicsofprevention.htm. This puts Great Britain as one of the highest obesity rates of any country in the world but still not nearly as bad as the United States.

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.

We, here in the U.S. of A., imprison more people than any other nation.

That's because we don't murder so many as some others, like China, where they legally murder ten times as many people as we do, per capita.

I live in a European state without death penalty. By your logic, as US legally murders way more people than we do, per capita, it should have way much less people in jail as we do, per capita.

Fail...

France and Germany have around 8 times less people per capita in jail than US. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-prisoners-per-capita

From http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/imm_us_vis_lot_win-immigration-us-visa-lottery-winners

  Showing latest available data. Rank Countries Amount
  # 1 Nigeria: 7,145 US visa lottery winners
  # 2 Ghana: 7,040 US visa lottery winners
  # 3 Ethiopia: 6,353 US visa lottery winners
  # 4 Kenya: 5,721 US visa lottery winners
  # 5 Poland: 5,467 US visa lottery winners
  # 6 Bangladesh: 5,126 US visa lottery winners
  # 7 Morocco: 5,069 US visa lottery winners
  # 8 Ukraine: 4,494 US visa lottery winners
  # 9 Nepal: 4,259 US visa lottery winners
  # 10 Egypt: 4,189 US visa lottery winners

Too awesome to make pandering to PISA our #1 national priority...

Comparing the intelligence of countries by testing all schoolchildren is like comparing the intelligence of individuals based, not only on their braincells, but based on their liver and skin cells as well. Your liver won't be any better for it, what matters is the brain.

So South Korean dishwashers have a better understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum than their peers in America. That doesn't mean they're more interested in science - they were simply forced to study for the test, and probably forgot everything they've crammed a week later. When you go to a prostitute in Seoul, she doesn't fellate you very well because she's too stressed out about her math exam... But when you go to a prostitute in Las Vegas - she's all business. ;)

When it comes to top brains, on the other hand, USA is indeed #1 by a huge margin. It's also doing rather well in R&D, tech achievement, corporate governance, etc, etc, etc.

USA has actually spent much of the last 70 years holding back its own development so it could support its allies in Western Europe and East Asia against USSR and China... BMW and Sony are doing well precisely because Uncle Sam wants them to.

--libman

Sorry, I was referring to the grandparent article. However, the original statistic was cited from this report which sorts software by piracy. That's where Armenia is listed as the highest country at 93% and the US is the lowest at 20%. The same list gives a weighted international piracy average of 59.9%, which is high, but is much lower than the 90% that is making the rounds in the press and the number that you gave in your discussion of matchmaking, etc (citation, btw?).

The point of my comments was not to doubt that piracy exists, as it obviously does. But the difference between a country with 93% and a country with 20% must be assumed to be the sum of all the social norms combined (consider that a large chunk of this is most likely made up of businesses and government workers knowingly using pirated or bootlegged software). It may also show just how prosperous the US is, when 80% of software acquired is fully paid for despite 60% of the world's population at large not paying for it.

So again, I think it helps to have a qualified discussion when we're talking about piracy, because every game does not have the same piracy numbers and every country does not have the same social norms around acquiring software. It's not helpful to treat everyone in the US as if they are piratical college students, nor is it helpful to treat the pirates as if they are customers.

You are being rather silly, there are a rather significant number of Americans, 600 million or so which is a rather large pool in which to find talented atheletes, compared with other countries where populations are smaller you would expect a larger proportion of medals.

http://www.medalspercapita.com/ is interesting when you break down medals against the population size you find the USA at 49th place and Ireland at 22nd and the UK at 23rd.

with Gold medals the USA rises to 28th place UK is 11th and Ireland is 23rd going by GDP USA was 66th

In terms of obesity the USA ranks No 1 http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity 30.6%
followed by Mexico and the UK thou to be fair positions 2 - 9 only are relatively close 18 - 24%

Health wise thou you really don't want to be Mexican.

So more directly on topic you cannot compare the health and fitness of a nation just on the number of medals won. New Zealand seems to be one of the healthiest places to live if your white and English speaking.

What's amazing is that only 40/year are in the US. So it is roughly 26 times more dangerous outside the US than inside? Closer inspection says it's .3/Million, which .3 * 7100M is approximately 2130/year, which is much closer but still almost double the 1173 reported here

... they would have patented it then sued everyone for having mass.

Well, there do seem to be more Higg's Bosons per person in the USA than other countries, but it appears that Mississippi has a greater claim than Texas

> It does? How does the US lead, when the LHC is in Switzerland?

Of course it does. The LHC is just one facility in one fairly narrow field. It makes news because high energy physics is sexy.

Nobel Prizes are awarded to people working in the US at a far greater rate than any other country. Even with recent gains by the rest of the world the US still wins more Nobels than the rest of the world combined.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_nob_pri_lau-people-nobel-prize-laureates

Not being sick? Do you honestly believe that most people stop and ask themselves "what impact will eating this donut have on my insurance bills?"

Preventable poor health is the end result of many small decisions poorly made. I sincerely doubt insurance costs have much, if any, impact on those decisions. The costs are abstract, in the future, and dissociated from the behavior that would trigger them. After all, if the incentives actually worked the way you think they should, the U.S. should not have the highest rate of obesity in the developed world.

Furthermore as a counter-example to your hypothesis, you should note the difference between the U.S. and Canada. Canada has single-payer public health care, and has a reasonably similar culture and environment to the United States, however, Canada's Obesity rate is less than half the U.S. rate. By your reasoning those results should be reversed.

Thus since a single payer system reduces costs through economies of scale and bargaining power and does not seem to encourage unhealthy behavior, it seems like a very good solution.

If you want to motivate people to change their behavior you'd better make the costs more directly associated. For instance, you could impose a tax on foods that fail to meet some healthiness standards. That would give manufacturers an incentive to make their food healthier (according to the standard) and give people a direct price incentive to prefer the healthier food. However, I doubt that will happen in the U.S. that's generally considered to be too much intrusion by the government.

Your way of thinking probably explains as well why the US is #1 in prisoners-per-capita.

Imprisonment removes your freedom. This should be punishment enough. Once you are in there, the idea is not to get you even more agitated or depressed. Rehabilitation comes with providing perhaps even things to which you didn't have access in the first place and led you to crime.

Of course in theory it's easy to generalize and philosofize. But still, trying to make a troubled individual's environment troubling, really has poor chances of solving the trouble.

Curiously enough, US today has unrestrained spending without much "socialism". Go figure.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_net_soc_exp_of_gdp-economy-net-social-expenditure-gdp

23.4% of GDP isn't "much socialism'? It's at the very minimum damn close to the average, which is way more than I'd expect in a country supposedly touted for its "Free Market/Capitalistic" society.

...I would guess that the answer is poverty. My wife and I went to see Cornell West speak several months ago and one of the things he pointed out about our educational system is that if you take out the test scores of children who are living in poverty, the U.S. ranks at or near number one in the world in education.

Currently the U.S. has the second worst child poverty rate of the 23 countries listed here, and higher education rankings general correlate with lower child poverty rates.

Quite right, they're driving scooters which most certainly don't burn wood to get around.

Oil Consumption

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_pol_car_dio_per_cap-pollution-carbon-dioxide-per-capita

Per person, the USA is the worst country in the world for air pollution, whereas China and India are among the best. Even if you ignore population and compare absolutely, the USA produces 5x the pollution of India and roughly equivalent to the pollution of China.

If there is a smog cloud over North America, I would be looking much closer to home to find the source...