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Cuba is down to 33rd in the world in life expectancy.

That's terrible - only one notch above the USA, at 34th in the world!

The US has a lot of subcultures.

The ones you are dissing for low life expectancy are likely not the ones that you think you are dissing.

Cuba is down to 33rd in the world in life expectancy.

That's terrible - only one notch above the USA, at 34th in the world!

According to Michael Moore they've got free and "incredible healthcare"......

Even that's total bullshit.

Before the Revolution

Prior to the Cuban Revolution, Cuba ranked fifth in the hemisphere in per capita income, third in life expectancy, second in per capita ownership of automobiles and telephones, first in the number of television sets per inhabitant. Its income per capita in 1929 was reportedly 41% of the US, thus higher than in Mississippi and South Carolina.

More televisions per capita than the US after the 1950s US economic boom years?

After about 60 years of communism/socialism:

In 2016, Cuba ranked 68th out of 182 countries with a Human Development Index of 0.775, much higher than its GDP per capita rank (95th).

Cuba is down to 33rd in the world in life expectancy.

Hell, even that's probably bogus given the way the Cuban government cooks health statistics, all the better to bamboozle the Michael Moores of the world.

Yay socialism!

Any country where the population is limited to 1500 kcal/day because of poverty and has to walk everywhere is going to wind up healthy. :-/

And no, the science is clear, there is no direct correlation between number of guns owned and the amount of gun crime

Correct. Many other countries have as high or higher rates of gun ownership with much lower gun crime and gun death.
It's not guns. It's Americans with guns.

Hmm, actually, that's pretty much what the GP said. I think you missed their point.

but in Europe, that number is over 280k

Care to break that down per capita? And cite sources?

Even better, would you care to comment on the difference in drinking/alcohol culture between Russia (ranked 1st for deaths attributed to alcohol) and Spain, or Italy (153rd and 162nd, respectively). The US is 64th for reference and has a much more homogenous culture, for its population, than 'Europe'.

Face it. You [...] are willing to twist facts

Yeah, about that ...

and use insults to do it.

I'm not sure calling mass shooters 'nutters' is an insult. Perhaps you were offended by referring to people who may have been swayed by Russian Facebook posts as 'dimbos'.

Part of that is force of violence

That you conflate 'being an adult' with a necessity for violence speaks volumes of your culture. I rather think you've made the GP's point for them.

(caveat, I'm from neither the US nor Europe. I don't think reducing guns or access to guns in the US is going to solve gun violence. I think income inequality is a significant part of the root of the problem. It tends to track pretty closely to violent crime across cultures, and the areas of the US with the highest levels of inequality tend to have the highest levels of violence, crime and hence violent crime.)

Texas has about the same cancer rates

No, Texas has higher cancer rates than California. However, Texans also have a significantly lower life expectancy than Californians

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy...

and the only warning labels they have are the ones that say "hippies will be shot on sight".

That is extremely inaccurate and shows ignorance of Texas history. Did you know that Texas was the US hotbed for psychedelic music? And not just the 13th Floor Elevators and Roky Erikson, either. The hippie and psychedelic scenes in Dallas and Houston rivaled those on the West Coast. You should visit Texas some time. The people, culture and food are fantastic. It's a rather extraordinary place, and once they get rid of gerrymandering, it might actually be state the rest of the US can be proud of.

Just gonna leave this here...

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy...

The influenza death rate is lower in the U.S. than in many countries with universal health care and paid time off for illness. And the difference in the rate between it and many better countries (France, Germany, Canada) is so small as to be statistically insignificant.

So either paid sick days just don't matter that much to the spread rate of influenza, or the health care system takes care of it just fine despite not being universal, or both.

How about life expectancy? America isn't even in the top 30.
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy...

It's an interesting theory, but based on preliminary digging I did into it, the data doesn't back it up.

Here's Alcohol consumption per capita. The U.S. is towards the bottom (least) of the pack.

Here's Rate of alcohol-related deaths. Eastern European countries top the list. Germany, France, Denmark Sweden, Norway, Finland, Austria, Poland, hell even Canada all have higher death rates than the U.S. Italy and Spain have much lower death rates.

Here's a list of countries with the highest alcoholism rates. All have no drinking age or 18 year drinking age.

Based on a quick perusal of these stats, I can't find any real pattern or correlation with consumption, minimum age, addiction, and death rate. The one interesting stat was that this is predominantly a white and Hispanic problem. Blacks and Asians are less than half as likely to binge drink. Suggesting either genetics or social culture is the distinguishing factor, since all of those people grew up and live under the same laws.

people are not starving to death on the streets either

Yeah... only a teensy bit over 1% of the total deaths in 2014 were from malnutrition, and I'm sure those people were indoors when they kicked off.

The country is not first world by any measure, but people are not starving to death on the streets either.

No, you're right. The parts of Bolivia where people are starving to death generally don't have streets.

Going by this, they're not even a high priority, but, I forgot, as always, there's a political aspect...pesky 'socialists' and, as the Wikipedia page says '...Bolivia is very wealthy in minerals' (What's that Skip?, their bible says something about not coveting their neighbours' stuff?)

H5N1 H7N9 H7N7 H9N2 H6N1 H10N8 H5N6 HxNy - sometimes it's wise to look in the mouths of gift-horses...

Again: Bolivia is far from a promised land, but things there are MUCH better than most other places in the world. Their death by malnutrition rates are well below most of Africa, for example: http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrition/by-country/.

My point is, in a country which already produces 300,000 chickens per day, offering 100,000 to fight hunger is a bit insulting.

Okay thanks for the clarification but I have to disagree.

While the Indian government puts a premium on protecting girls (perhaps because of the gender imbalance), perspective parents evidently do not.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indep...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy...
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/...
http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/11/...
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

Humans place a premium on their own life but we aren't talking about suicide here.

This map disagrees: http://www.worldlifeexpectancy... ...as does this website: http://www.skincancer.org/prev...

Cuba's health and education stats are above average compared with the rest of LATAM and high when compared with the rest big Caribbean islands.

Cuba's health is not much worse than the US (yeah, that's a really low bar, but that's what most Slashdotters use as reference.)
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy...

Also Cuba ranks above the US in the Happy Planet Index.
http://www.happyplanetindex.or...

Let's say you won't be happy if you're a dissident in Cuba.

You won't be happy either if you're a dissident int he US.
You may stay "free" as long as you remain inside of your Free Speech cage.

There's a lot of hype on this Ebola topic in the media.

Lets have some scale:

The population of Africa: 1 billion
http://worldpopulationreview.c...

Number of people to die of Ebola in the past year: 887
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

The number of deaths in Liberia alone during the last flu outbreak: 5,561
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy...

The Portland city water supply is continually tested, and those tests have repeatedly shown the water to be of higher quality (in terms of dissolved solids/minerals and contaminants) than most of the city/municipal water supplies in the United States -- despite the lack of treatment and open reservoirs.

Yep. Looking at kidney death rates on this map tends to agree with that:
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy...

Certainly I was not playing games. This is the first time I've been accused of using a straw man argument, but I suspect you may be correct about it. I always thought that logical fallacies were more of a debating tactic, but now I guess they are usually just made in error. Oops. :-)

Anyway, I think my reasoning and arguments have so far been rather poor, perhaps mostly because I've been flailing around in the fog of my own opinions: something that I'm sure is more likely if you don't put enough effort into listening (or in this case reading) what is actually being said. Again, my bad.

I'll give it another try. In your first reply to me you were very clear and there was no need for me to search for analogies: "Compare parts of the US to parts of the US if you want to talk about the US statistics. You cannot compare states across national lines with any credibility." That was your apples and oranges argument all along and and I should have recognized it immediately. My apologies for the lengthy and unnecessary digression.

Instead, I should have immediately pointed out to you that I see nothing scientifically wrong with making numerical comparisons like that between countries; something that is in fact done all the time. Here are more than a dozen examples:

• List of countries by HIV/AIDS adult prevalence rate
• List of countries by traffic-related death rate
• The 15 Countries With the Highest Smartphone Penetration
• List of countries by electricity production from renewable sources
• Countries with the Highest / Lowest Average IQ
• Obesity country comparison
• Cancer rates: see how countries compare worldwide
• Paid Vacation Around the World
• Average temperature in the countries of the world
• List of countries by rail transport network size
• Highways > Total (per capita) (most recent) by country
• Total Water Use per capita by Country
• List of countries by suicide rate
• List of countries by incarceration rate
• Drug Use Death Rate Per 100,000
• Teenage pregnancy (most recent) by country
• Snakebite in The Americas

Why would it be unscientific to make comparisons like these? As long as the numbers are always collected in the same way, then they are just numbers and don't attempt to explain anything about differences that may be cultural, legal, socioeconomic, etc. In all cases it's left up to the reader to explain the differences ("it's a police state", "it's probably a poor country", "perhaps they

You might consider that this number is an average. As you know gun policies vary a lot per state. In NM, for instance, the homicide rate is around 12 per 100,000, while in MA it is around 2.0 ;

This interactive map is interesting, you can draw your own conclusions.

You are not far off, homicides (excluding suicides) kill 0.7% of Americans. Various sources, including this one

"your chances are much better if you have the operation in the US"
As in 20 per 100K death rate in in Sweden, 35 in US? I know that's not what you were referring to, but it's the result that counts...

Actually slightly less than half of us will.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005083.html
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/life-expectancy-male

Those stats are for the general population. He was talking about us.

Even if your parents were Teetotalers, did you ever ask them if you could have a beer in the house?
Unless its born of religious convictions, some (most?) parents would rather see how you handle alcohol at home
rather than send you out into the world with no guidance.

I had wine on holidays by age 12, so did my kid. Watered down and measured of course, and only at home.
I could be arrested for allowing that in most states.

In Italy there really is no legal definition of when you can have wine with dinner with parental consent, as many
families let kids have (usually watered down) wine at least occasionally. The legal drinking age is 16.
Italy ranks in the middle of the pack in alcohol consumption and low on the list of alcohol related deaths.

The number 1 killer in the first world, by a wide margin, is heart disease, caused by aging muscles and blood pressure increases. In the third world, lots of relatively simple, preventable illnesses are a common cause of death.

However, heart disease deaths are far more prevalent in the developing world than they are in the developed world.

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/coronary-heart-disease/by-country/

You do know heart disease is a relatively simple, preventable illness right? It just requires you to stop eating so much of the poisonous garbage they call 'food' in developed countries. More so in the US with it's love for chemicals.

Really, heart disease doesn't occur in the developing world?

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/coronary-heart-disease/by-country/

Try again.

In 2010 worldwide there were 1.24 road traffic deaths (wow!)

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/road-traffic-accidents/by-country/

U.S.: 33,808 latest year (I believe it's 2010)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate

The U.S. didn't even break the top 100 in traffic deaths based on population...

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/road-traffic-accidents/by-country/

In 2010 worldwide there were 1.24 road traffic deaths (wow!)

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/road-traffic-accidents/by-country/

U.S.: 33,808 latest year (I believe it's 2010)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate

The U.S. didn't even break the top 100 in traffic deaths based on population...

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/road-traffic-accidents/by-country/

It's worth noting that Asian americans have a higher life expectancy than residents of japan.

Japanese Americans have a higher economic status than the median American, and higher than the median citizen of Japan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income

Since race is strongly correlated with life expectancy, the mere fact of a more diverse population brings US numbers down, even if we handle every racial group better.

When we control for socioeconomic status the race correlation of life expectancy either is drastically reduced or else disappears entirely. You are trying to paint an economic problem the U.S. has (extreme disparity of wealth and serious poverty) which we could attempt to rectify as an inevitable genetic thing that no one can do anything about.

Life expectancy is a poor measure to star with, since it's not closely tied to medical care in particular.

Since it contradicts the considered option of the world medical community you need to at least try to post a link to substantiate such a radical claim.

In fact since 3/4 of the potential years of life lost in the U.S. before the age of 65 are due to medical conditions your claim is nonsense. The link is very strong.*

Social factors are a major cause of premature deaths. Life expectancy at later ages may be more relevant, as medical conditions start taking over causes of death instead of accidents and violence.

The claim is false for those under 65, as well as for those over 65, which are acknowledging here.

The definition of live birth as actually calculated differs from country to country and this has a large impact on numbers. As a way of avoiding those differences in counting live births, I suggest perinatal mortality instead. And, go figure, the US is better than some of the countries that regular infant mortality would suggest would surpass it. The UK (25th) for instance goes from being 2 better than us to 1 worse on rates. It's funny, but the numbers on that wiki link do not correspond to sorty by any of the actual infant mortality numbers. I believe perinatal has it's own landmines, but the time frame immediately surrounding birth is more connected to medical system than from birth to 1.

We do better true, but we are still 24th on the list.

*There is a claim that has been bouncing in the right wing megaphone echo chamber for four years asserting that if you control of accidents and violence U.S. life expectancy jumps to number one. The claim is false and traces to a single miscaptioned table in a report by conservative think tank economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider. The table shows that the U.S. would lead in life expectancy if U.S. life expectancy tracked the life vs GDP trendline of the OECD. In fact it does not, it does far worse - which is exactly the problem that needs to be solved.

It's worth noting that Asian americans have a higher life expectancy than residents of japan. I can't find a breakdown for life expectancy by ethnicity for Japan. Since race is strongly correlated with life expectancy, the mere fact of a more diverse population brings US numbers down, even if we handle every racial group better. Life expectancy is a poor measure to star with, since it's not closely tied to medical care in particular. Social factors are a major cause of premature deaths. Life expectancy at later ages may be more relevant, as medical conditions start taking over causes of death instead of accidents and violence.

The definition of live birth as actually calculated differs from country to country and this has a large impact on numbers. As a way of avoiding those differences in counting live births, I suggest perinatal mortality instead. And, go figure, the US is better than some of the countries that regular infant mortality would suggest would surpass it. The UK (25th) for instance goes from being 2 better than us to 1 worse on rates. It's funny, but the numbers on that wiki link do not correspond to sorty by any of the actual infant mortality numbers. I believe perinatal has it's own landmines, but the time frame immediately surrounding birth is more connected to medical system than from birth to 1.

As a counterpoint to that claim, note that that Asian Americans (Asian is about as fine tuned as I can find) have a life expectancy of 87.8, while someone in japan (no good breakdown by ethnicity) has a life expectancy of about 83. These sorts of studies are extremely subject to confounding variables that will be ignored to let them make a claim they want. Did they separate out all those confounds in your quoted line at the same time? They used the word OR, so I suspect they didn't. I'd also like to see the life expectancy comparison for non-hispanic whites at age 40. By that time, the violence is much less of a factor. The article claimed it persists through all age groups, and also occured even when limited to whites, but those could be true even if there is no difference when corrected for age and ethnicity at the same time.

I do appreciate that they noted that most of the causes had nothing to do with the medical system per se. However, they apparently chose to blame the availability of guns for gun deaths rather than admitting cultural issues.

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/top-15-causes-of-death

Total homicide is way down at #15. Meanwhile, lung disease caused primarily by cigarettes, is #4. And there are a few other interesting things to note as well if you poke around there, like diabetes and heart disease don't line up at all.

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/your-life-expectancy-by-age

This shows that an average 25 year old in Germany has a longer life expectancy than his counterpart in the U.S. by about 1.2 years.Interestingly, an 80 year old in the U.S. has a longer life expectancy than Germany.

In all fairness, I am not sure that this spells any significant difference in health care as the U.S. has a much higher mortality rate from car accidents than any European country. Regardless, the original discussion was about other countries having poor health care compared to the US, but these numbers show otherwise.

On the possible downside, living in a non-ca state means you might have as much as a 4 year reduced life expectancy.

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/california-life-expectancy

(and barring the likely genetically tainted state of Hawaii, you can do only 1.1 year better).

Read the about us on that site.

On the possible downside, living in a non-ca state means you might have as much as a 4 year reduced life expectancy.

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/california-life-expectancy

(and barring the likely genetically tainted state of Hawaii, you can do only 1.1 year better).

Well, we could always do something crazy and try to look at what little data there is out there about people carrying weapons. Take a state like Florida, where the CCW process isn't exactly hard. And, fortunately enough, the state law requires that statistics on permit revocations and crimes by CCW holders be tracked.

Looking at the published statistics, Florida has roughly 664,000 people currently running around with concealed weapons. Of the 1,647,823 licenses issued, since October 1987, 5,139 have been revoked (about 0.3%). Of those revocations, 4,420 of them were for crimes committed after the person received their license, and 167 of those involved a fire used in a crime. And, it would seem that Florida's average life expectancy is just over 77.

Now, what I want to know is: people like you keep predicting blood in the streets if average, law abiding, citizens are allowed to legally carry firearms anywhere they go. But, so far we've waited for 22 years for Florida to erupt into an all-out bloodbath of gunfire, when is it going to happen? I've been waiting 22 fucking years to see the news reports of Florida imploding in violence, I want my gory news clips now!