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US Near Bottom In Life Expectancy In Developed World
Hugh Pickens writes "Louise Radnofsky reports that a study by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine has found U.S. life expectancy ranks near the bottom of 17 affluent countries. The U.S. is at or near the bottom in nine key areas of health: infant mortality and low birth weight; injuries and homicides; teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections; prevalence of HIV and AIDS; drug-related deaths; obesity and diabetes; heart disease; chronic lung disease; and disability. Americans fare worse than people in other countries even when the analysis is limited to non-Hispanic whites and people with relatively high incomes and health insurance, nonsmokers, or people who are not obese. The report notes that average life expectancy for American men, at 75.6 years, was the lowest among the 17 countries and almost four years shorter than for Switzerland, the best-performing nation. American women's average life expectancy is 80.8 years, the second-lowest among the countries and five years shorter than Japan's, which had the highest expectancy. 'The [U.S.] health disadvantage is pervasive — it affects all age groups up to age 75 and is observed for multiple diseases, biological and behavioral risk factors, and injuries,' say the report's authors. The authors offered a range of possible explanations for Americans' worse health and mortality, including social inequality, limited availability of contraception for teenagers, community designs that discourage physical activity such as walking, air pollution as well as individual behaviors such as high calorie consumption. The report's authors were particularly critical of the availability of guns. 'One behavior that probably explains the excess lethality of violence and unintentional injuries in the United States is the widespread possession of firearms and the common practice of storing them (often unlocked) at home,' reads the report. 'The statistics are dramatic.'"
...let's get real: for the government, the insurance companies, the health care providers, etc, etc, etc, ad eternum...that's a good thing.
It's the high inequality stupid, having a bigger bigger portion of the population being poor will do this...
The rest of you would be working yourself to death too if you were making $7.25/hr., had no job security or benefits, couldn't afford a hospital stay, and were afraid you would get laid off if you took a vacation. No 3-hour lunches or month-long vacations here. We WORK for a living! Even the relatively affluent can get fired or laid off at the drop of a hat in the USA.
But don't worry. You'll learn what it's like soon enough. Greece has already started. No more free rides, fellow Athenians!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Switzerland tops the list, yet the authors criticize gun availability in the US?
It's already been pointed out that the reason why the United States has "high" infant mortality is that we count ALL live births as a live birth. In some European countries, if the baby dies within a few minutes or a few hours it isn't counted as a live birth and therefore isn't part of the infant mortality numbers. In one country, I don't remember which one, if the baby dies with the first WEEK, it isn't counted as a live birth. So, yes, if you manipulate the numbers and redefine "live" birth, you can end up with a low infant mortality rate. On the other hand, if you count it as a live birth if the baby draws even a single breath or twitches, then your numbers do not mean the same thing.
... but the birth rate is among the highest among developed countries. So there is nothing to worry about :)
here comes another 1000 post long flamefest about guns.
seriously slashdot. you are just posting these to troll gun owners and increase page views right?
perfect catchpa = panicked :)
http://xkcd.com/418/
Conversation derailed before it starts, to the availability of guns. It's in the summary.
America is the country of big pharma, big macs and big guns (and big pollution even if it greatly depends on pop density), but do incidents make up for the difference with other countries? Switzerland has guns too and tops the health chart, after all.
#1 The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on earth.
#2 The United States has the highest percentage of obese people in the world.
#3 The United States has the highest divorce rate on the globe by a wide margin.
#4 The United States is tied with the U.K. for the most hours of television watched per person each week.
#5 The United States has the highest rate of illegal drug use on the entire planet.
#6 There are more car thefts in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world by far.
#7 There are more reported rapes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.
#8 There are more reported murders in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.
#9 There are more total crimes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.
#10 The United States also has more police officers than anywhere else in the world.
#11 The United States spends much more on health care as a percentage of GDP than any other nation on the face of the earth.
#12 The United States has more people on pharmaceutical drugs than any other country on the planet.
#13 The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world.
#14 Americans have more student loan debt than anyone else in the world.
#15 More pornography is created in the United States than anywhere else on the entire globe. Eighty nine percent is made in the U.S.A. and only 11 percent is made in the rest of the world.
#16 The United States has the largest trade deficit in the world every single year. Between December 2000 and December 2010, the United States ran a total trade deficit of 6.1 trillion dollars with the rest of the world, and the U.S. has had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976.
#17 The United States spends 7 times more on the military than any other nation on the planet does. In fact, U.S. military spending is greater than the military spending of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined.
#18 The United States has far more foreign military bases than any other country does.
#19 The United States has the most complicated tax system in the entire world.
#20 The U.S. has accumulated the biggest national debt that the world has ever seen and it is rapidly getting worse. Right now, U.S. government debt is expanding at a rate of $40,000 per second.
Of course our life is much shorter here. Wall Street has set things up so they take ALL our money, especially when it comes to things like hospitalization. They want us to slowly get cancer, so we can spend the vast amount of money we accumulate the last 50 days of our lives. Personally, I'd blame the lobby, corrupt political structure, and the VERY corrupt FDA.
Switzerland is at the top and has tremendous amounts of gun ownership. Our life expectancy is due to our crappy healthcare system and even worse access to it, high infant mortality, rampant poverty, lack of safety nets, etc. Oh and our obsession with fast food doesn't help either.
I for one think that if out life expectancy were shorter we'd try to pack more in to our years. There is no point in living your last 5 or so years in a home. You become a cost center, bringing down the lives of everyone around you, save for the geriatric nursing industry.
In fact I think they should skew it all to the shortest life expectancy so that everything after is a bonus. Just like Stephen hawking. "My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus."
Stephen Hawking
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
... bears shit in the woods, the Pope is a Catholic, ect ect,
Guns, junk food, and driving if you need to travel ten yards down the road. Is anyone surprised?
Blah blah infant mortality rate first breath.
Guns are safe, only insane people kill people.
Did I miss anything out?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
"...and the common practice of storing them (often unlocked) at home" being an important piece of information.
One behavior that probably explains the excess lethality of violence and unintentional injuries in the United States is the widespread possession of firearms and the common practice of storing them (often unlocked) at home,
Excuse me?! This doesn't sound like science to me at all, and despite my agreement with the conclusion, disqualifies the researchers.
This is the kind of analysis I have been wondering about. Since most of the previous studies done in this area don't seem to try to factor thing like the large number of American fat asses or smokers or other choice items. While it appears to do a better job of trying to factor out some of the issues it doesn't look like it manages to do all of them or I might need to read it in more detail. But it looks like there is some good evidence that our health care system does really kind of suck unless you can afford the Mayo Clinic or other premier hospitals.
Time to offend someone
Well, if we would just stop clubbing and knifing each other to death, like the rest of the gun-confiscated developed world, we wouldn't be dying so much, would we?
Doesn't the fact that the Swiss have a very high rate of gun ownership and the highest life expectancies negate their (idiotic) hypothesis that guns might account for the lowered life expectancies in the US? The accident rate for guns is actually quite low compared to many other types of accidental death (auto accidents, etc.).
Since when did "scientists" get to editorialize in their research papers and make wild guesses in the closing paragraphs? Oh, but this isn't science is it.....
Urban sprawl, no exercise, a diet loaded with sugar, salt and hormones, and the only people who can afford to see a doctor are the lawyers who just sued them for malpractice.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
18,735 - suicide by firearm
11,493 - murder by firearm
554 - killed from accidental firearm discharge
31,578 - accidental death from poisoning
All of these numbers pale in comparison to this:
108,000 - killed from adverse prescription drug reactions.
Clearly the firearms angle is over stated.We should be banning doctors.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Seems to be the thing our government is so intent on doing. It's all because of the guns! Forget about the 20k suicides per year.. Forget about our piss poor health care system.. forget about the fact that we take immigrants in and treat them better than our own.. Forget about the fact that 60% of American are obese. It's all the guns fault
not because of guns since everyone seems to jump on the gun issue lately. 11,000 murders might seem like a lot but that's out of 300,000,000+ people.
It's probably these:
1) Lots of immigrants in this country - legal and not legal - especially compared with the rest of the developed world which tends to shun them. These immigrants are probably not the epitome of health like the Swiss. They're more likely to be from the poor regions of Mexico or Central/Southern America. So that averages it down. Yes I read the non-Hispanic whites, read on...
2) Fast food. I think it's more frowned upon in Europe to go out and especially to go out and eat not-really-food that you get from McD's, Burger King, etc, but people in this country probably go at least once a week if not more. Lots of poor people go to these places and don't need to be Hispanic to eat there.
3) Obesity. We're "leading" on that bulging front so it's no surprise.
4) Poor healthcare. People can't afford good healthcare and good doctors especially in the last few years. There are also issues with high levels of stress (scrounging up to save for the latest iCrap vs. buying real food).
5) Income disparity. I don't really care if rich people make a lot more money but the average American salary isn't enough to live properly and I'm not talking about unnecessary purchases, I'm talking about making sure you eat healthy food and that your live is good enough to exercise instead of sitting on the couch after a hard day of doing work you hate and having some pizza because you don't care about anything.
6) Cars rule. Europe is more of a bike nation because it's so relatively tiny and I've seen people here take a car for a store a mile away. This contributes to obesity. There are similar factors about smoking, drugs, etc.
Summary: lots of poor people in poor health, lots of immigrants, lots of idle fat people, lots of drugged up people (legal drugs or not).
The US is 3rd in per capita centenarians. If the other countries health care was so much better than ours, you would expect the US be lagging far behind, not at the top.
Have you looked at the national debt? Or the human rights records? Or the education system where religious fanaticism has to be taught and grade equal to science?
If you don't throw the U.S. in with the developed countries, it fares rather well, apart from the massive debts.
How can you compare the USA with a population of 350M to Switzerland of 8M, we have CITIES with more people! Now maybe if you compared US states vs Switzerland I guarantee you things would shake out quite differently. Also its very amusing the number one reason they cite is gun violence, this is propaganda pumping the public full of bullshit to pass gun control. Perhaps they should ban clubs and hammers, since more people die every year due them as one report recently found. And then there's the other study that found any time you ban or limit guns violent crimes increase.
This must be down to the corporate "death squads" who decide who will get treatment and who won't.
Well, with about 80 kills per day involving firearms the US of A is more dangerous than most of the war zones in the world, comparably to the civil war in Syria or worse than the Egyptian revolution.
So if some gun loony kills twenty kids in a primary school, this is not really upsetting that days gun kill stats in the land of the free.
If we improve, the author can put us near the bottom of the top 5. Or maybe even near the bottom of the top 2. Perhaps we could even be the last of the first place finishers.
Coding Blog
Live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse. - Nick Romano
I'm all for the banning of assault rifles and selling any gun (or ammunition) without background checks... ...but I can't imagine that gun-related deaths significantly effects the life expectancy rate in the U.S. (Maybe in places like Somalia and Afghanistan?)
Way to take an interesting article and make it even more decisive.
For not exporting health care to Americans that the populace can afford.
It's the fault of the video games! It's because we don't pray in the schools! It's ANYTHING BUT THE GUNS!1
I'm so tired of seeing this. Not everyone counts infant mortality in the same way, even in developed countries. When you account fo those differences, the US is not anywhere near the bottom. You are not comparing apples to apples.
There's plenty of research, showing that high income inequality will lead to lower life expectancy, and not just among the poor.
The more economically unequal a society becomes, everybody gets more sick, even the 1%.
And it's not just physical health. There is more mental illness the more inequality grows. You know, craziness, like the kind that would make a 20 year-old kid kill his mom and 20 six and seven year-olds.
There are so many measurements of the health of a society that degrade as income inequality grow, it's not surprising that a growing number of very wealthy people are in favor of having their own tax rates go up and the social safety net made stronger. Some are even starting to take better care of their employees at the cost of stock price (the "market" hates it when workers get paid more). Costco is an example of this. Wages go up and employees get better health care and other benefits and the financial elite say, "What a chump. What's wrong with that guy, anyway, is he some kind of fucking commie?" (If you think I'm kidding about this, check out some of the stories about Costco in the Wall Street Journal or on CNBC. The CEO's name is James Sinegal, and he's decided to earn less than $500k. Wall Street hates the dude because they're afraid he's going to start some kind of trend where bonuses go down and then they won't be able to afford that new infinity pool in their houses in St Lucia.)
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's all right. We just live fast and die young baby. The streets are littered with our overweight corpses.
BYE!
Obviously it's not the guns, it's the video games/communism/vaccines/fluoridated water/contrails/illegal immigrants. (Cross out what doesn't apply.)
Ever heard the saying "Don't feed the trolls?"
You Must Be New Here.
Slashdot has been posting intentionally inflammatory stories since forever. Having a "troll" moderation option is the height of hypocrisy. Not that there's any point in complaining :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Most US companies have eliminated carryover of vacation time/PTO. Most companies no longer have the concept of sick time. Your situation is not the norm.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Remember, girls, there is nothing lower than number one.
- Judy Garland, "For Me And My Gal"
That is simply not true for two reasons: First, this is appears to not be peer-reviewed, and thus does not count as "medical research" by any means.
Sorry. no. This is the National Academies of Science. This is pretty much the gold standard of peer review; you really can't do much better than that. And, yes, NAS reports are very extensively peer reviewed.
You're right about this not being "medical research." This is a review. Reviews are not original research, they are summaries of research done by others-- in essence, a review is the peer review of an aggregate of studies.
The report is here: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13497
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
... when you have to pay for health service ...
(insert picture of typical obese American).
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
no really, why does this matter? while the us's life expectancy isn't the highest, it's still pretty fucking good. there's not much of a difference between 75 and 77 or even 80, and people's quality of life is generally pretty bad once they're that old anyway. i'm totally fine with this.
(posting anon since I modded here)
The Newsroom Clip
Well, even though this article was editorialized and not science, let's dive in a bit:
1. The study referenced through multiple links shows the US with higher rates of death in ALL categories. Violence being one of many causes, not THE causes of the difference between the US and other countries. How did guns become the main focus of the editorial? Oh yeah, gotta scare the useful idiots.
2. Just because the US isn't #1 on a list doesn't mean that anything is "wrong." Why is there an expectation that there wouldn't be some distribution between different countries? Here's a thought experiment: IF Americans disproportionately died from ATV accidents because we did so much more ATV-ing than (say) the Japanese, does that mean we should ban ATVs? Or should we accept that different cultures have different values and lifestyles with the pros and cons that come with the differences? Back to the US, *I* believe that drug abuse and obesity are bad things, but that doesn't mean I have a right to force other people to live like the Japanese or Swiss and though the average US life expectancy might be lower than the Swiss, it doesn't mean that YOUR life expectancy can't be like the Swiss by you choosing to live and act more like them within the US. You don't have to be an obese, smoker, non-seat-belt-wearing, diabetic, couch potato even if the average American is.
3. This has been studied to death, but if you remove urban violence (gang and drug), US murder rates are nearly equivalent to other western countries. So, while guns do obviously make murder easier, they are not the reason WHY murders happen.
4. When did a large part of the US population decide that giving up RIGHTS should be automatic if it saves lives? For example, I am SURE that I can prove that if we gave up the right to due process and unlawful search and seizure that we could reduce murder rates substantially. Where are the people demanding that we give up those rights too? Obviously it's a rhetorical question since the answer is that people only care about the rights that they want to exercise and are unconcerned about the ethics/morals of Rights in general. Driving a car isn't even a right and yet people would passionately defend their "right" to drive in spite of the fact that more people are killed by cars than by guns.
So the max is switzerland, with 4 years over the US. Assuming its a bell curve, thats 2 standard deviations above the mean, and the us would be 2 standard deviations below the mean, making the standard deviation 1 year. Are we really calling that statistically significant?! Especially considering the size of the countries involved?! And how did this turn to a gun control topic?!
Link to the full 424 page paper is here.
Link to the (probably paywalled) WSJ article is here although the Yahoo version in the summary above appears to be exactly the same.
How did they overlook this?
Its a good thing we're "one nation under God", and spend 40% of the worlds defence expenditures on our military.
Perhaps if we followed the bible even more, put it into the Constitution that women were not allowed to have authority over men, things would get even better and God would bless this country even more.
If my previous comment is insufficiently clear, MOD PARENT DOWN. It's bad statistics.
cause of death for 14 is DROWNING. teach your children to swim.
The Ministry of Information would like to remind the proud citizens of the United States that we are Number One. No actual information can refute the fact that the US is Number One. Propaganda of this type is to be reported at once to the Minister of Information.
Please continue on and remember the United States is Number One.
An official statement from the Ministry of Information
---------------------
The problem is a broken system where "Official Facts" superseed actual analysis of information.
Every "fact" should be open to analysis and provide open access to its supporting documentation. And examination of that documentation should be encouraged. People should be educated to be very suspicious of any statement without open access to its supporting documentation. Instead general education encourages the rote acceptance of the official position.
In the US, sports like off-road biking, flying small airplanes etc. are common. Many people can commit suicide easily with guns. Here in, Germany it's a lot harder to engage in those activities. Committing suicide requires a lot more effort than simply putting a gun in my mouth. Even getting a motorcycle license is much more involved and costly (it costs many thousands of Euros). If you know German food, it's not surprising obesity rates are a bit lower too. And Germans generally seem a bit verklemmt when it comes to sex, so STD rates are lower too. If you look at US causes of deaths, that does explain a lot of the difference in life expectancy. Does that make life in Germany "better" than in the US? I don't think so. Having fun carries a certain amount of risk, and I'd rather have more fun instead of living a couple years longer in my 80s.
Any research that doesn't reach the conclusions you want must be biased. That is the cognitive bubble, right there.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Come on, man, take a chill pill. Studying epidemiology is useful, and just because the results don't make you comfortable doesn't mean they are wrong, or that the study is an "anti-gun" study.
To a second amendment absolutist, every article on social problems that mentions guns looks like a screed against guns. But this article just mentions guns as one factor that's different in the U.S. than in different countries. It mentions lots of other factors as well. You could as easily call this a screed against obesity, but it's not that either. It's an analysis of a lot of factors, of which guns and obesity are two.
The summary claims, in standard politically-correct fashion: "The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people, since recent studies suggest that even highly advantaged Americans may be in worse health than their counterparts in other countries."
And of course, they don't tell us where these "studies" are. The authors take official statistics reported by governments at face value, statistics which are likely manipulated, as is famously the case for infant mortality. That, and the fact that they blame guns, indicates that this paper is nothing more than politically-motivated propaganda.
I see. You can't actually argue the numbers, so you use an ad hom.
Grow the fuck up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Aren't we also the fattest country? Couldn't this be the reason? Although, smokers are declining in the US that could also be another cause. We used to really smoke that tobacco before the current century. We also tend to eat more red meat than our europeans friends.
So we're letting the colonies into being in the category of 'developed' now? How very PC.
1. There's lots of evidence that high levels of inequality make everyone's lives poorer, including the rich. Crime is higher if there are lots of poor people (and naturally lots of it is aimed at the rich), pollution, all sorts of things.
2. You call that a strong antigun reference? They suggested that violence in the US tends to be more lethal because there are lots of easily accessible guns around. That's in the *summary*. Switzerland has lots of guns but everyone is trained, as part of military service, to use and store them correctly.
3. Biased much? That's not an anti-individual statement. It's suggesting that some of the choices you've made, in many cases more extreme than any other western nation, have negative consequences for health. No value judgement about the cost/benefit at all.
Japan's life expectancy in 2010 was 82.9 years, according to the World Bank. In 2006 it was a little lower.
Japanese-American's life expectancy in 2006 was 84.5 years, according to HHS quoting the NIH.
Everybody discussing this issue without taking confounding factors like Simpson's paradox into account should basically be ignored, if you have no chance to respond to them. If you do have a chance to respond to them, then try pointing out facts like the above and seeing if the conversation turns from trying to explain how "the U.S. health disadvantage is pervasive" to trying to explain the opposite. If it doesn't, then you know that their original "explanations" were generated from bias rather than from evidence.
got some holes...
In 31 years in this country I have never know anybody shot. Life expectancy is long & proportional to the amount of medical care & until now it was fine. With Obamatax all this will disappear & instead of healing you O. will give you a pill & euthanasia is coming !!!
2. Wrong.
How to get a firearm is switerland:
Go into the army, be well trained and test, keep your firearm secured. Ammunition is issued and accounted for. You need to get a license every 3 years.
If you go into security you may also be issued a license under strict guiding.
In America, 60% of guns bought are from gun shows by people who don't need any screening at all.
SO it's not the same at all. the NRA is using emotion argument and lies to stop any gun control at all.
The statement you quote is accurate.
""We have a culture in our country that, among many Americans, cherishes personal autonomy and wants to limit intrusion of government and other entities on our personal lives"
true
"and also wants to encourage free enterprise and the success of business and industry. "
also true.
"Some of those forces may act against the ability to achieve optimal health outcomes,""
also true.
It's not an left win agenda to point out facts. How ever it has become a very right wing agenda to claim that facts that our contrary to the right wing opinion or left agenda items.
"Facts have a liberal bias' - Stephen Colbert.
Are we suppose to ignore that those factor come into play when talking about health care?
" that hand picked metrics "
I notice you didn't actually back this up with any examples? what is wrong the the metrics they picked? what else would have been appropriate? THOSE thing are what you need to bring up if you want to have a discussion instead of just make excuses to whine becasue something doesn't fit your world view.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"X leads to Y" is a statement about causation. Income inequality by itself is a population level economic measure; it doesn't "cause" anybody's death by itself. The best you can say is that high levels of inequality in a society are statistically associated with lower life expectancies. That is probably true if you simply forget about all the other variables, but that doesn't tell you anything about any kind of meaningful causal relationship between anything.
Even if there is some reasonable underlying causal relationship somewhere, it still doesn't mean that reducing inequality will improve life expectancy. For example, you could simply shoot everybody in the top 10% of income earners. That would certainly greatly reduce inequality in the US, but it wouldn't increase life expectancy. Or, less dramatically, we could probably achieve Japanese-level life expectancies if we changed our society to work more like Japanese society; but would you really want that? I've been to Japan many times, and I gladly trade a couple of years of life expectancy not to have to live like that or eat that food.
Yet another way of looking at it is that increased inequality comes with significant benefits for our society, and a small increase in life expectancy is not worth giving up those benefits for. If you want us to reduce inequality, you need to show that the costs of reducing inequality are more than made up for by the benefits.
Keep in mind that the differences in life expectancy are tiny. Overall life expectancy in France or Spain is about 81 years, it's about 80 years in the UK, 79.4 years in Germany, and 78.2 years in the US, and a big part of the 1-2 year difference between the US and Europe is due to causes that are understood and not related to economics, inequality, guns, or other favorite political hot potatoes.
I can appreciate your desire to eliminate a class of poverty in America, but the issue is complicated - as history demonstrates. So I pose a few questions to you.
Does freedom allow people to make poor decisions?
If someone would rather not work and be poor, is it best to force them to work, or should we just let them be poor and figure it out on their own?
If such people (as referenced above) exist, then is it best to give them money and equalize the classes or to educate them and empower them?
Is America a place where anyone can succeed by persistent hard work and self-discipline? If not, can we make it such a place?
Does a government exist to impose equality across the peoples, or to empower people to better themselves?
Is it possible to force an equalization of wealth across a nation without eliminating freedom? If not, is it worth it?
"With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone."
The problems of the US are manifold. First, the US does not provide minimal social income like most European countries. Also it has a totally privatized health care system, which has been diagnosed less effective than all the state driven systems found in the EU. Second, the inequality is the highest in all Western country according to the Gini index [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient] The US has a similar Gini coefficient than China. High values of this coefficient indicate high inequality. 1 means total inequality, while 0 means total equality. A Gini coefficient of .60 is considered as a limit towards chaos. Higher values indicate that the state or society can collapse in violent outbreaks. Below that value a society is more stable.
If you compare inequality and domestic violence rates, then you can see that higher inequality correlates also with violence. Also inequality and healthcare quality correlate. I hope the US get that someday and stop bashing transfer and fair tax systems.
Louise Radnofsky reports that a study by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine has found U.S. life expectancy ranks near the bottom of 17 affluent countries.
Shocking! But wait, if you extend the list to the 34 most affluent countries, the US would be in the top 50%. Make it a list of 100 countries and you could argue that the US was "near the top." Who picked the list?
The report's authors were particularly critical of the availability of guns.
Do any of the linked articles quantify the reduction in average life expectancy due to guns?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
In here as OP 'cause I really don't feel like looking for another job today.
I'm an internist in what was a 100 bed hospital 20 years ago. It is now a 60 bed hospital. Why? Because 40 of those rooms have been taken over by "administration" where they sit around all day having endless meetings, lunches and power point presentations, and then every few weeks generate yet another form that all of us doctors and nurses have to fill out on every patient - form filling taking up the vast majority (>80%) of the time we spend trying to care for people. This structure is the same at every hospital I've visited recently. I'd estimate that for every doctor, there are around 90 or so people involved at all levels of astonishing bureaucracies and none of my physician colleagues has any idea how to stop it - anyone trying to go up against them is more or less immediately terminated. Oh, they're really good at generating posters to stick all over every vertical surface in the hospital too.
A good doc needs 2-4 nurses to accomplish everything that needs to be done to patch up 20 sick hospital patients in a day. No one else! A patient that comes to see the doctor wants to see a doctor, not 90 useless air wasters that add NOTHING to the medical system and in fact are making the system much much worse, yet are all drawing enough out of the system to make their house, car and kid's tuition payments. If we could eliminate those people, health costs in the US would drop (i'd guess) about 70%, but instead, the bureaucracy HATES doctors and is trying to do everything they can to try to come up with a system that eliminates us. Personally, I've just about had it and am looking into other fields.
It's extremely difficult to go through the tiny print page by page without ordering a $80 copy, but I couldn't find anything in it which said that America still has a high rate of violent death and specifically death by guns after you limit it to rich whites. (In fact, it doesn't seem to contain many real statistics at all.) They use some references which say that America has a higher rate of firearm death, and they use some other references which may survey deaths among rich whites, but they're not combined. Even going by what's in the report, you can't conclude anything about ownership of guns by people who are not poor minorities living in inner cities.
When they blame firearms they fail to note that cars, knives, and blunt trauma are still valid and highly common causes of death in the U.S. Cars kill just as many people as guns. Stabbings and being beaten to death occur more often than deaths from firearms. (I don't know the exact figures off the top of my head. Sorry.)
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
Unless you know of a lot of white non-Hispanic illegals with good health coverage?
USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
So a study comes out that reflects poorly on the US. Instead of saying we need to find solutions, Slashdotters try to point out flaws in the study without any evidence to support their claims. It is why nothing ever gets solved, people don't want to acknowledge any flaws and think everything is great because "MURICA IS #1!". As someone who has extensively dealt with the healthcare system in the US I can say you people are full of shit.
Hey baby, what can I say? The candle that burns 6% brighter burns 94% as long.
Guess I said something that made a liberal upset and got censored for it.
The United States has about six violent deaths per 100,000 residents.
Homicide, they noted, is the second leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults aged 15-24. The large majority of those homicides involve firearms.
OK, let's do the math. Let's assume that other countries have zero violent deaths per 100,000 and have a life expectancy of 80 years. Let's assume that all 6 per 100,000 deaths in the US happen at age 15. How much does that affect our life expectancy?
99994 * 80 = 7999520
6 * 15 = 90
90 + 7999520 = 7999610
7999610 / 100,000 = 79.9961
80 - 79.9961 = 0.0039
The life expectancy difference between the US and the top performer is 4 years for men and 5 years for women. The maximum possible effect of gun violence according to the statistics in this report is 0.0039 of those years.
The report's authors were particularly critical of the availability of guns
True enough, but it was because of their preconceived notions, not because the data in the study supports their view.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Most of the time, when the media reports "life expectancy", they describe life expectancy at birth. This is greatly affected by infant mortality. The USA considers all miscarriages, sometimes even abortions, as "infant mortality", whereas many European countries exclude such deaths. Differences in life expectancy conditioned on survival to adulthood is quite modest across countries; it has not changed much in the past 100 years. I did my dissertation on this topic.
Gun statistics dramatic? Hardly - please refer to: http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp
Having been around the world a couple times, I can say, the food here has a couple issues. Mostly, we are served quantity over quality. Taste is replaced with salt, processed fat, and chemical enhancements. The only place that has food comparable to ours is the UK. Other places all the meals are about 1/2 or less of what you get here. You sit down at a table to eat. Soda has sugar, not chemically enhanced corn syrup. When I eat in the US, I get a headache for about 30 minutes after eating. Ive nver had that happen outside the US unless its eating fast food in the airport traveling.
"Americans fare worse than people in other countries even when the analysis is limited to non-Hispanic whites and people with relatively high incomes and health insurance, nonsmokers, or people who are not obese."
Please at least read the summary of the post.
I'm sure obesity has something to do with the lower life expectancy in the U.S. I didn't actually read the article. I'm surprised chronic lung disease is a major factor in the U.S...is that due to pollution?...because fewer Americans supposedly smoke than in European countries.
Nearly a quarter of the workforce in Switzerland is foreign and, as far as the Swiss are concerned, effectively disposable. When unemployment goes up in Switzerland, the Swiss just lay off some foreign workers. Working conditions and pay are considerably worse for foreign workers, at least in my experience (I don't know whether they are supposed to be). And unlike the US, the Swiss are very efficient at keeping track of foreigners in the country (regular registration and "papers please") and presumably at getting rid of them when they are no longer needed. It's no wonder that with such a system, the Swiss themselves mostly end up with the secure, high-paying jobs.
How do I know? I was working as a guest worker in Switzerland for a few years. Someone even accidentally made me an offer for the same kind of job I was doing, thinking I was a Swiss citizen, which gave me a better idea of the job market for Swiss citizens, and then quickly retracted it when I told them that I was not.
Despite the differences in pay and conditions, Switzerland is still a nice country to work in for foreigners, and fortunately most Swiss are more modest and polite than you seem to be. But Switzerland doesn't have a magic solution to the problems of economic development, unless you consider using the rest of the world as a cheap and disposable labor pool a magic solution.
Articles like this are not comparing apples to apples. In many countries they do not report any of the infant mortalities in the first 100 days, first year, etc. This greatly skews the statistics. It is sad to see people abusing research for their political agendas like the author of this report is doing.
What medical care we do have sucks.
I know 3 people personally who were told to go home or handed a stupid diagnosis and were dead the next day.
Urgent care facilities are more deadly than the plague. If you are really sick avoid them. If you have something that even you know what it is OK like you broke your finger. But you have a bad headache you have never had before take two aspirins will not cure an aneurism. skin problem scabies nope lung cancer, Bad knee give it a steroid shot to loosen it up dead the next day. all people in their 40s who went to urgent cares. all had no insurance went there thinking it would be cheaper. Well none of them have to worry about money now.
And a pervasive climate of fear.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
national health care. imagine that.
there's been OVER THIRTY failed attempts in the house of representatives to repeal the national health care that is set to be implemented during 2014?
it's time to end that bullshit and work on actually implementing something that will BENEFIT THE ENTIRE COUNTRY and is a long time overdue.
I just skimmed a bunch of posts, and I'm wondering if more than 0.1% of you actually read any of the articles about it.
Let's see: it noted lack of access to medical care in mostly the below-median-income (i.e, half the country), due to cost.
But let's not create, say, a national medical system, like the UK's NHS, where they're all on salary, and so have no incentive to push all the newest, most expensive of everything, including what the drug co salesman left them samples of. No, we'd rather spend 25% to 75% or more of our medical dollars for multinational profits, as opposed to healthcare.
Oh, that's right, there was also an article I read yesterday, about a study showing that for-profit hospitals gave, overwhelmingly, worse care than non-profit, due to cost-cutting measures like fewer staff, and less one-on-one staff/patient care.
mark
And published in NAS does not necessarily mean peer review
Sorry, but you are wrong.
The NAS FAQ http://www.nationalacademies.org/newsroom/faq/index.html states:
So, yes, the fact that it's a report published by the National Academies of Sciences does mean peer review.
, or a good study.
First, the statement I was taking issue with was the statement "appears to not be peer-reviewed," which is incorrect.
The question as to whether it's a "good" study is a much harder one. Obviously, the purpose of peer review is to try to make sure that it is a good study, but peer review is not perfect. However National Academy of Sciences reports are quite meticulous; for the most part they are good studies. There are sometimes people who disagree with NAS reports for political reasons, and hence people trying to make a case that the studies are not good because they have an interest in discrediting them. These people, for the most part, are wrong.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The 8 are dominated by people who support using tax money to pay for universal health insurance
Something tells me that doesn't fit Utah. Something tells me they're not prepared to publish a report telling us to abstain from alcohol and caffeine, and attend church every Sunday. Then of course you could say it has more to do with sending teens away for some time so they can have accidents elsewhere. Either they're away on mission, or they move out of the state as soon as they can so they can "party" elsewhere.
At the top of the list you've got Hawaii. Maybe a tropical paradise encourages you to exercise more. How does that explain Minnesota though?
You can quantify life expectancy, but you haven't quantified "support using tax money to pay for universal health insurance". This isn't even a correlation-causation fallacy, since you haven't supplied the other quantity to which you allege the result is correlated!
If I had to put money on anything about the South, I'd say it's the hot weather discouraging exercise combined with their food. There isn't anything they don't sweeten down there.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
....I would recommend reading G.J. Meyer's outstanding book, written back in the early 1990s, called:
Executive Blues (pretty much explains our present circumstances, and Prof. Michael Hudson, Prof. Donald Gibson, Nomi Prins, Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Satyajit Das, et al. have explained the rest)
I tracked down the original report here http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13497 (ten clicks away from this post!).
Notice that the reviewers used age-adjusted death rates in presenting their data. Why would that be more valid than raw data and what potential influence does that have on the numbers and comparisons? I am specifically thinking of the violence deaths, where the US rate was far above any other. I could imagine that presenting the data as population density-adjusted rates would skew the numbers for Japan, for instance. Are there peculiarities of the age distributions of the US and Finland that set them off from the other "developped" countries?
Let's take access to health insurance as a proxy. It has nothing to do with support for government health care, but it's interesting anyway.
Just glancing at it, the locus of poor insurance in the South seems to be centered in Texas, whereas the poor life expectancies seem to be centered further east of the Mississippi.
It's not exactly fine-grained data, and it's not exactly science to be glancing at maps like this. It's Slashdot-level social science, which rates a good solid 2 or 3 on a scale of 100 for science. Based on that, I'm more on your side, where I already was anyway. I just hate to agree with anything based on a 0.25 baked argument. At the very least, 0.5 baked please.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
How are we doing compared to Ethiopians, and other third world countries?
Crime continues to be a problem in the United States, although it's been declining now for quite a long time. It's important to note, however, that signs show that crime is on the rise in Europe. But the thing that irks me here is that for all the attention, some of it deserved, that the Aurora and Newtown shootings get, everyone ignores on-going inner city crime. That kind of crime is far more detrimental to quality of life and touches on persistent social problems. These are problems born out of a lack of education, entitlement mentality and pop culture.
That said, countries measure statistics quite differently. Let's take infant mortality, which is frequently brought up as an example of how miserable healthcare in the US is. But everyone neglects to point out that European standards differ dramatically. The bar for what constitutes infant mortality in Europe is much higher, resulting in fewer deaths counted. Or, more egregious, let's take China where crime and mortality figures are incredibly low but the circumstantial evidence consistently show that things are worse than the government claims.
I agree that there is a problem with violence in the United States and guns definitely facilitate that. I fully support stronger gun control across the board, but I think we need to examine the culture as well. I recall once walking out of a Target and overhearing one employee tell another about how he wanted to beat someone up. It occurred to me that the US is the only country I've been to where regular people talk casually about inflicting violence on someone else. That is a serious problem, and one that goes back to my initial point.
"Oh... to eat pizza again..." by erroneus (253617) on Saturday December 22, @05:20PM (#42371769) from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3335159&cid=42371769 eat a salad lardball.
You ate too much pizza fatboy "Oh... to eat pizza again..." by erroneus (253617) on Saturday December 22, @05:20PM (#42371769) from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3335159&cid=42371769 eat a salad lardball.
Why can't ya have pizza? "Oh... to eat pizza again..." by erroneus (253617) on Saturday December 22, @05:20PM (#42371769) from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3335159&cid=42371769 eat a salad lardball. Sue Pizza Hut because they fucked you up (or was it your own lack of self control and shitty genetics>), lmao!
absolutely nothing whatsoever can be inferred from the study.
Thanks to our fractious political climate this study falls apart on every dimension under the piercing steel scrutiny of /. contributors.
Conclusion 1: social inequality causes it. WTF? They just said that people with relatively high incomes and insurance still fare worse!
Can you imagine a scenario where groups A and B are affected by X, but A is affected /more/ then B? Black and white thinking is a sure sign of the cognitive bubble.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
If facts have a liberal bias then they must be worthless and full of lies.
For just one example http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/25/michael-bloomberg/mayor-michael-bloomberg-says-40-percent-guns-are-s/ could go through your whole "facts" by why waste the time since they are the standard lies of liberals.
...
What else would you expect from a subsidiary of a media company that hires nearly every candidate as a consultant and donates millions of dollars to a particular party?
This article revolves around 4 statistics. US male like expectancy (75.6), Switzerland male life expectancy (about 79.6), US female life expectancy (80.8) and Japan`s female life expectancy (about 85.8). The numbers they do not include are the confidence intervals. Note that the US male life expectancy is within 5% of the highest and the US female life expectancy is within 6% of the highest. If the confidence interval was 3% they would be statistically equal. In something as fuzzy as life expectancy a confidence interval of 3% is pretty small.
If you remove the figures of death by homicide and accidents, the U.S is number 1 in life expectancy. Also, if you look at life expectancy after medical intervention (for things like cancer, heart disease) the U.S. is also number 1. Remember, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/11/23/the-myth-of-americans-poor-life-expectancy/
and then they don't explain shit about why they think that is the case. Do you care to explain it?
Go find a prof in the field. I'm sure you'll find a life times worth of reading on google scholar. If you want to learn something, there's nothing I can do to stop you.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
http://addiction-dirkh.blogspot.com/2010/07/us-leads-world-in-prescription-drug-use.html
We're #1 ...we're #1 ......we're #1
USA, USA, USA
The Jews who control the Federal Reserve, and all the other banks, and thus the CREATION of almost ALL the money in your country. How can they fail when they CREATE money from nothing?
Imagine if you could counterfeit a billion dollars a day in your bedroom, give it to congressmen, give it to media companies, to get YOUR message across, and censor all opposing opinions. THAT is how the Jew has taken over America, and you idiots will actually DEFEND these parasites, because you've been watching THEIR Jew TV all your lives, and going to see THEIR Jew films all your life.
But in similar studies in the past, America was shown to have a lower life expectancy because the rest of the world doesn't count infant morality the way we do.
In America, if a baby is born at a low weight or sickly or just having too many problems to survive, it gets the best health care available, and then it dies a few hours or days later.
In other countries, such a child is considered to have not been born.
The study should also account for the trade-off in disabilities: If you just let injured or disabled people die quickly, the remaining population will look very healthy statistically, minimal disabled people in the population, at the cost of saving or attempting to save those who are not healthy. As health-care improves, you should see an increase in disability, not a decrease.
Many of the causes of premature deaths for Americans are life style related. Watch a copy of "Forks Over Knives" ( the heart surgeon who helped make President Clinton's diet is in this documentary ). If you smoke, quit. If you drink, limit yourself to one a day.
A lot of things still may cut your life short, but you will take out about 2/3 of the top 10 causes of early death for Americans.
Zevia's good stuff. My wife's got a family history of diabetes and has to watch her sugars, so finding stevia has been a godsend. And Zevia's pretty tasty -- I've seen it at Whole Paychecks^WFoods, QFC, Kroger, and Safeway here in the Seattle area.
Happy hunting,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Sugar isn't used as much as HFCS due to its price.
I gotta wonder, though -- how much of that price differential is due to the sizable subsidies the corn industry gets every year? After factoring that in, I suspect that sugar from sugar cane is cheaper to produce than HFCS.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The OP makes it sound like it's a bad thing. Is it really?
Right?
I found this part interesting after naming Switzerland one of the best:
One behavior that probably explains the excess lethality of violence and unintentional injuries in the United States is the widespread possession of firearms and the common practice of storing them (often unlocked) at home,' reads the report.
That is interesting given the fact that all males in Switzerland are required to be in the military between the ages of 19 to 34. They are all given guns and keep them at home so nearly every home has a gun in it.
All else is sophistry.
Pepsi just introduced a stevia based drink, "Pepsi One" into Australia. Since a company as large as Pepsi is interested I'm sure if there's US regulations preventing it then those regulations will be removed soon since Pepsi is sure to have similar lobbying clout to the US corn lobby (if that's who has been lobbying to keep stevia out).
Your "healthcare" still has the vast inefficiency of being an insurance system with medical care tacked on as an afterthought in most cases, but that may improve since there has been so much political and press attention over the last few years.
you gotta start somewhere. the left at least has rhetoric that is in favor of the common man. For what it's worth, if you're a tech worker in America the rate of Work Visa approvals has dropped 28% since we got a Democrat in the office. That's a concrete example of a left leaning law (e.g. protectionism) being enforced as best it can.
Also, when you just give up, you tell the right that they can do whatever they want. It infuriates me to here people say "I don't bother voting, it doesn't matter". When the right wins in a landslide they take it as a sign they can push a more radical agenda. They've been doing that for 50 years, and with it you've seen a decline in the middle class.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
eating like that is expensive and time consuming. My wages have been falling for 20 years, so I spend the weeknights and weekends doing freelance software development to make up the difference (I rest on Fridays)....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
good luck getting anyone on national TV to acknowledge that, much less do anything about it. Taking care 'o the poors costs money, and we're all Taxed to the Max (TM).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Exactly. Cane sugar from Jamaica, Australia, Brazil, Cuba etc would be significantly cheaper than HFCS after shipping (going by examples outside the USA without a tariff) but cane sugar from Florida is not.
It's a textbook example of how protectionism can fail to stop the decline of an industry and how unintended consequences can happen. Apparently consumption of large amounts of HFCS has close to twice the negative effects of consuming large amounts of cane sugar due to the way fructose is mainly dealt with by the liver, so HFCS is increasing what would still be an obseity epidemic on can sugar.
There's no money to be made in fixing these "problems". However, there is a boatload of money to be made by offering treatments for these problems.
The US itself certainly has had rising life expectancy and other rising social indicators together with rising inequality for decades.
I was curious and plotted the data (it's on Wikipedia), and your statement is wrong in general as well. For countries with an HDI>0.7 (think Azerbaijan, Tunisia all the way up to the US and Norway), income growth, income, median family income, per capita GDP, and HDI growth correlate strongly with inequality (i.e., more inequality is generally better), and non-income HDI and life expectancy have no correlation.
For countries with an HDI0.7, there is generally no correlation (they usually have some kind of internal problem, massive corruption, dictatorships, etc.)
Random killing ("whole city") leaves survivors with reasonable DNA. The USA sent healthy people to die, leaving survivors (those rejected by the Army) with crummy DNA. Americans are descended from those survivors, so they have bad DNA.
You left out the non-military death.
The USA sent only healthy people (those with good DNA) to die. All over Europe, unhealthy people were dying at a rate well above normal. The harsh conditions of war killed many people, with the unhealthy ones being most likely to die. Germany even sent disabled (physically, intellectually, psychologically, etc.) people to their death on purpose.
We are descended from the survivors. The USA lost only the best. Europe lost more of a mix, or even mostly the weak.
#1 The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on earth.
Diverse population, many laws
#2 The United States has the highest percentage of obese people in the world.
Food here is so cheap and plentiful that even our poorest people are fat; our wealthier people have to pay people to help them learn to not get too fat.
#3 The United States has the highest divorce rate on the globe by a wide margin.
Actually that's partly because we have such high marriage rates, PLUS we have a large number of people who have been divorced several times.... so while 50% of our marriages end in divorce, the vast majority of our couples never divorce their 1st spouse
#4 The United States is tied with the U.K. for the most hours of television watched per person each week.
Not surprising given that we create most of the TV shows and while many are complete crap the good ones are some of the best. The variety is so large that there's "something for everyone"
#5 The United States has the highest rate of illegal drug use on the entire planet.
Partly because so many drugs that are legal elsewhere are illegal here.... so a user of drug X is not counted elsewhere but is counted as an "illegal drug user" here
#6 There are more car thefts in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world by far.
When you have more cars, and your criminal justice system is not severe enough to scare most thieves you are going to have the highest number of car thefts
#7 There are more reported rapes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.
In many places, they are not reported as "rapes". In some places, the woman is blamed and punished as an "adulterer" and in other places things that in the US are charged as "marital rape" or "date rape" are not considered "rape"
#8 There are more reported murders in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.
The US is more multicultural than most nations and we have more ethnic gangs. A huge number of those murders are also connected to the drug trade rather than being random murders of innocents. If you are not involved in drugs or gangs, your odds of being murdered in the US are lowed than your odds of being hit by lightning or winning the lotto
#9 There are more total crimes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.
The US have a VERY complex legal code (not what we started with but generations of lawyers writing new laws have made opportunities for more lawyers). As a result, ONE offender committing a single robbery will be charged with many offenses (breaking&entering, assault, theft, possession-of-stolen property, etc)
#10 The United States also has more police officers than anywhere else in the world.
We have 300+million people spread across a very large country with multiple levels of govt (fed,state,county,city) which means overlapping jurisdictions
#11 The United States spends much more on health care as a percentage of GDP than any other nation on the face of the earth.
We invent most of the drugs and most of the new devices and most new techniques. And it would cost us less to do these things if we were not subsidizing the rest of the planet. The Canadians and Europeans, for example, refuse to pay our drug companies the fair price for the drugs and threatened to steal their patents if they held-out for the proper prices.... so all the R&D for all the drugs is borne entirely by US consumers. We also provide free care to about 20 million illegal aliens....
#12 The United States has more people on pharmaceutical drugs than any other country on the planet.
We have drugs for all sorts of things and people and their insurance companies are free to buy and use them. People in places with government-run systems may only use what has been "appro
There are 300,000,000+ Americans and the vast majority will never be victims of any violent crime nor will they be involved in any gun violence. In the American town where I grew up nobody can remember any violent crime having ever occurred; people only close the windows of their homes in the summer when they think it might rain and they never bother locking their doors. When I last went back there to visit, people still often left car keys in their cars (nobody can recall a car ever being stolen there). Our big cities (Like Los Angeles where I have lived) tend to very heavily skew the violent crime stats, life expectancy number, jail numbers, etc (though I'm sure some violence occurs in some smaller cities). I once hosted a friend from England, and she simply could not come to grips with the scale of the US; I suspect that most people from Europe would similarly not understand the large leap in scale between Europe and the US and therefore are easily able to see these things rather severely out-of-proportion.
As for your gun comments:
First: so-called "assault rifles" are categorized as "rifles" in US law enforcement stats and more people were killed in the US in 2012 with things like fists and hammers than with rifles. We killed a hundred times as many people with drunk driving than with rifles (of all types). The international and democrat-press fixation on American "gun violence" is interesting but more political than practical. All of our "mass shootings" have been conducted by "disaffected youths" on (or recently removed from) medications so we could just as easily all be talking about a need for "disaffected youths control" or prescription drug control.
Second, as a former member of the US Military, I'd like to salute the Swiss for their responsible gun policies and military posture. The Swiss are one of those very few friendly nations that I cannot imagine the US ever needing to help defend .... I wish the rest of Europe was half as upstanding and responsible; we'd be able to reduce some of our defense spending.
Right now in Pakistan there is a big protest demanding that the local government step aside and let the ARMY take over in civilian matters. The PEOPLE demand the ARMY remove the civilian government.
Fact: Bad dictator Fact: If you are the wrong person, any of the above three can see you dead.
There are soon 7 billion people on this planet and statistically speaking, you don't know ANY SINGLE ONE PERSON of them. Go ahead, proof me wrong, what percentage of the world population do you know? Or have ever seen? Cared about? 0.0000000001%? Sure? It seems a lot.
But we all got to live together, share the same resources and hopefully refrain from eating each other just because we fancy a snack. Cannibalism is still not dead even in areas covered in drive-through's.
If we wanted real democracy, what you would need is to vote on issues, referendums and NOT politicians. In fact remove them, keep the civil servants and get them to execute the results of the referendums. The US is actually pretty advanced with this and you can see the results, two US states are now the most liberal places on the earth with regards to pot regulation.
Of course, the US is also among the most backward places with referendums against gay marriage passing.
People just don't want other people to have anything that they do not have or want. The problem always is people, get rid of them and the rest will just sort itself out.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ah, but that's a pretty limited claim, isn't it? It would be literally true if Americans who were wealthy non-Hispanic whites had the third-best outcomes in the world...
They use much stronger language in their other claims - "at or near the bottom", e.g. - so it stands to reason that the change in tone means a change in strength of claim.
Try something new besides USA-bashing. Don't other countries have problems?
Here we go again. By contriving some cockamamy contortion of factors, a US-hating liberal can once again statistically PROVE that the United States sucks.
Really?
And people are risking their lives just to leave the US as they are in other countries? To move to..... Sweden?
While you bloviate about what a downright mean country this is, ask yourself:
Compared to what?
and
What are your costs estimates to achieve your un-achievable utopia?
and
In your solution, how many times do you use the word "Free" and how many times you use the word "Work"?
Didn't USA change it's name to Rome along time ago?
Fructose
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
And wow, my display looks really pink right now, thanks redshift! I thought for a second Slashdot had received a My Little Pony-inspired retheme.
What colour temp have you set it at? try around 4000K if you want it less...salmon-ey.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
Ah, the alternate registered account erroneus uses. Sausage, Garlic, Onions, Mushrooms, mozarella cheese, & oh... the sauce topping off that deep dish crust! Too bad you can't HAVE ANY lardboy. Your scumbag genetics are your undoing along with your lack of self control with "FoOd" (lol). Guess what's for dinner fatass? PIZZA! None for you, you disgusted distorted grotesquerie.
When I started as a practicing Pharmacist in 1981, we had a pretty good health care system. Over the years I watched as the Insurance companies destroyed that system. They started by sqeezing the profit out of the health care providers, doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, etc. This started a viscious circle where, health care providers increased their charges to get the maximum profit out of their work. The health care insurance companies just increased their rates to compensate. Around and around we went, until we, as a nation, are paying an enormous amount of money for health care. In the 80s I voted for any candidate who was for nationalizing healthcare, even, if it meant I may have recieved a lower salery for my work. In the meantime, other, more sane countries decided that national health care systems were the best idea. These are the countries that, now, far exceed the U.S. in the quality of their systems. While the insurance companies started propaganda canpaigns to convince the population that nationalized healthcare systems were horrible! They said they had death panels. Sound familiar? While in the U.S. the only death panels were run by the insurance companies! I know that after all these years of health insurance company's propaganda that it may sound crazy, but, the only way the U.S. can get a hold on our health care costs is to nationalize the system. Get rid of health insurance and thier profit only motives. But, you say, wouldn't that make a government beauracracy that would form their own "death panels"? Just ask yourself this; would you rather have a cold, profit driven corporation deciding who lives and who dies without any way for the public to intervene, or, would you rather want a government agency, which, would be subject to the voting public in charge of our healthcare? In the 1980s we missed our chance. Now, it will be so much more difficult to rout the insurance companies from the decisions on "our" life or death. Obamacare's efforts didn't even dent the surface of the insurance companies hold on the American peoples' healthcare. But look at the argument it has caused. Any small threat to the health insurance gravy train like this is met with huge amounts of protest fueled by the industry. That should tell you something. The health insurance industry is driving this country down to the bottom. Whether you look at the poor health care we recieve or the enormous affect it is having on our economy. Something has to give! Think about it!!!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
In the US you can be fired for no reason whatsoever; only a few classes of reason are forbidden- race gender age (supposedly) etc. The effect is that everything eventually becomes 100% political. Managers maintain a hit list of people they want to get rid of and as soon as they have the opportunity, they execute on that hit list. It effectively creates a "Survivor" type dynamic inside every workplace where who you know and who you've sucked up to carries nearly all the weight and the quality of your work product carries none. Regarding that last past , very simply put, American employers are not going to tolerate you trying to quality-work your way to job security. They know all about this "tactic", have nothing but contempt for it and view it as nothing more than an attempt to "top from the bottom". Letting you control your fire-ability through the quality of your work would put YOU in the driver's seat and there's no way that's ever going to fly around here. Having themselves come up in the same system of exploitation, abuse, kangaroo courts in the guise of "employee evaluations ", favoritism and cronyism they consider it their right and earned privilege to do whatever they want within the confines of their fiefdom and for whatever reason they see fit. Full stop. This is also the mentality of all the managers beneath them, who know to kowtow to the king. This is where the rancor towards Obamacare comes from, aside from Obamacare's attenuation of one of the chief implicit existential threats that keep employees in their place- the threat of dying or being bankrupted because you have no health care. It's the government telling people who think of themselves as rulers of their own nation what to do in their nation. Essentially it's what England had under Henry VIII, say, where power is total and despotic, anyone can be executed at any time for any reason and the lords and earls and noblemen jockey for power positions amongst themselves , while sucking up to the King unless and until the opportunity to overthrow him presents itself. I've been fired many times and never once because of the quality of my work product, my productivity or economic conditions. The majority of my friends would tell you the same thing.
..for the money. Lets face it the US is a system deviced for located accumulation of money and reelection. Industry can stuff americans wih a gazillion calories and will be fine, medicines and threatments prices can be prohibitive and will be fine, everybody will have a gun at hand for those nerve breakdown moments and itll be fine. It is what it is...health, life are second. For funding, research and peer finding please refer to the non-profit Aging Portfolio.
How do we compare to the other 3rd World Countries?
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Life expectancy is to do about health. You have to go to war zones to have violence and gun crime to make a significant difference to life expectancy.
US has an inefficient,expensive and ineffective health system that only a small part of the country can participate in. They don't have a culture of health available to everyone. Look at Uk, European or Australian or some first world asian health systems and you see the difference. Cubans are better off under the communist health system than they would be under an American (USA) system even though they smoke and have really primitive levels of work conditions that increase occupational health risks.
US citizens often like to make excuses like it more violent or special. Its not. Its just another country. Its performing poorly. Yes, it has a lot of people, yes a great number of poor people. But you are a country and will be treated as such. You are also slipping in world rankings.
I love the fact that where I live, male life expectancy is almost 5 years longer than the US, despite having a cancer rate that is twice as high and being more obese than Americans.
Interesting link comparing Australia to USA.
http://www.news.com.au/national-old/how-would-your-life-compare-australia-vs-us-where-it-counts/story-e6frfkvr-1226196606062