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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.
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.
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.
obviouslt your agenda forbade you to read:
"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."
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.
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
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.
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.
Knowing several people in various states in the US, ranging from middle-aged to old... I'm anything but convinced. It seems to me that compared to Norwegians (and most likely to everyone in Northern Europe) you work harder for longer for less pay, and have less to show for it at the end of your life. I don't think that most people enjoys working 60-80 hours a week, knowing that they can't afford to retire... meaning they will work until they drop dead.
To quote a comment that arose over a Christmas dinner a few years ago; "What do you call retired people in the states?" "Greeters at WalMart."
The plural of "stuff I know" isn't data, but in this case it seems like the data is backing up the stuff I know. You don't "pack more into your years" - you're worn out faster by an system built to benefit the rich, and even the rich seems overall less happy than most people I see over on my end.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
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.
Interestingly though (and contrairy to your comment), most of the reasons why life expectancy is lower in the U.S. happens before the age of 50. So the probability of a newborn child to even come to an age of 50 is lower than in any other of the 17 countries. So it's not the last 5 years that are important here (if you ever get 75 in the U.S., your life expectancy is on par with the rest of the countries), it's the deaths occuring before the age of 50 that make the numbers so miserable.
This must be down to the corporate "death squads" who decide who will get treatment and who won't.
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
But that is still less dangerous than swimming pools, yet there is no uproar or outrage over that. Why aren't we implementing swimming pool regulation? Do swimming pool owners really have any business not fencing their pools? Given that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, we really ought to direct our focus elsewhere.
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.
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"
obviouslt your agenda forbade you to read:
As did yours. Mind explaining how "teen pregnancy" has fuck-all to do with health?
Mental health is still health.
Ever met a pregnant teenager? I have; They tend to be a bit... emotionally unstable.
Keep in mind that 18 and 19 are still part of your teenage years.
Don't be a pedant.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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
Mind explaining how "teen pregnancy" has fuck-all to do with health? Keep in mind that 18 and 19 are still part of your teenage years.
I'll field this one. "Infants of adolescent mothers are more likely than infants of older mothers to use a variety of health care services that suggest poorer health. A considerable proportion of this greater use seems to be attributable to specific characteristics of mothers, such as socioeconomic characteristics, rather than to an inability that is common among adolescents to promote infant health or to use health care appropriately."
Emphasis mine.
I really think you could have guessed this if you'd thought about it for just a few seconds.
I am not a crackpot.
Ever met a pregnant teenager? I have; They tend to be a bit... emotionally unstable.
And easy lays.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
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.
Compared to Norwegians? You mean the country that's so rich from oil money right now that they pay the Swedes to come do all of their menial jobs? Countries like Norway, Saudi Arabia and Quatar are petrostates. You can't use them as a model for nations that don't have large oil-to-population ratios.
I don't think that most people enjoys working 60-80 hours a week
The average non-farm worker in the United States works a little more than 34 hours a week.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm
I really doubt the data is backing up most of the stuff you "know".
The analysis could probably be tailored to fit any assertion you wanted to make. A breakdown by state in the US probably reveals significant discrepancies.
And if the UK were split into constituent parts, no US state is likely to be worse than Scotland for general health and life expectancy.
From the summary: "The report notes that average life expectancy for American men, at 75.6 years"
From your link: "Men in Scotland are expected to live for 76 years"
How did they overlook this?
Mind explaining how "teen pregnancy" has fuck-all to do with health?
Teenage parents tend to smoke, drink, and use drugs to a greater degree than their peers. Children born while their mothers are teenagers have significantly lower scores on standardized IQ tests, do poorly in school, and have more health problems than children with older mothers.
But correlation is not causation. If a mother has her first baby while she is a teenager, and has more children later, the later children do just as poorly as the first. So the problem is not that teenagers have children, but that stupid people have children, and having a child while still a teenager happens to be highly correlated with stupidity.
Keep in mind that 18 and 19 are still part of your teenage years.
Keep in mind that having a kid when you are 18 or 19 is usually a pretty stupid thing to do.
And if the UK were split into constituent parts, no US state is likely to be worse than Scotland for general health and life expectancy.
Deep-fried butter vs deep-fried mars bars... no, I don't think I can call that one. (OTOH, Scotland's much further north than anywhere in the continental 48, so there's a lot of health problems associated with lack of winter sunlight to contend with in addition to historically poor diet.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
If my previous comment is insufficiently clear, MOD PARENT DOWN. It's bad statistics.
"What do you call retired people in the states?" "Greeters at WalMart."
I don't know if all those people are working because they have to. Some may just want to work. I would be quite happy being a greeter at Walmart. It actually sounds like a fun job to me. When you have nothing better to do, why not stand around and smile and say hi to people all day? It beats doing nothing. Even if I am able to retire at 60 there is no way in hell I would stop working. I'd just work less, and not care about money. I know an older couple that is retired. The wife works at an elementary school 20 hours a week. They definitely do not need the money at all. She does it because she loves children and its something for her to do 20 hours a week.
And if the UK were split into constituent parts, no US state is likely to be worse than Scotland for general health and life expectancy.
You may or may not be right but that doesn't change the fact there is a serious problem in the US.
nope, in civilised countries people fight each other with fists and go back inside the pub afterwards.
THe BBC article also says Scottish life expectancy increased by seven years over the previous three decades. In the US, that increase was only 4.5 years. That would suggest Scotland has overtaken the United States in that period and is now pulling away. Here's historical US data.
About 17 of them do. Your link shows a life expectancy of 80 for women and 76 for men. It doesn't give decimal places, or overall numbers, but 78ish is probably pretty close. According to wikis list of US States life expectance 17 (and DC) below 78. The US as a whole is 78.6, so Scotland's life expectancy is only a half-year or so below the US Average.
It should be noted those 17 are a) Southern states utterly dominated by the Conservative movement, b) the bit of the Rust Belt currently controlled by the GOP, or c) the District of Columbia. You can find a lot of narratives from the data to link these states, but the common denominator seems to be a) currently governed by people skeptical of government spending on health care, and b) large minority populations.
BTW, the list of top US States by life expectancy also supports their thesis. The top 6 are dominated by Democrats, with 6 Democratic Governors and 11 of 12 State Legislative Chambers being Democratic. Number 7 (North Dakota) is reliably Republican at the state level, but also likes to send Democrats, some quite left-wing on economic issues like universal health care, to the US Congress. You don't get a strong consensus that government should stay out of health care until you hit numbers 8 and 10.
The list of bottom ones supports their theory even better then I've implied. The bottom 12 or 13 states are Southern states, Oklahoma, and Appalachia. They don't have anything near universal health care in those states partly because they're poor, but mostly because the voters there refuse to vote for anyone who wants to spend tax money on anything. DC is smack-dab in the middle of that pack of mediocrity, but a) it's not technically a state, and b) it isn't really self-governing. Congress meddles in DC's internal affairs quite frequently, and except for a brief period (2009-2011) Congress has been remarkably hostile to universal healthcare.
Anyone know of a good page that lists, in large letter point form, why the Switzerland vs. US gun ownership argument is total bullshit?
I want to link to it every time some idiot brings it up.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
In our fantasies, there's always one answer, that if we could just make it happen, would fix everything. In real life, it's never so simple. In real life, there are a lot of things that need to change. We can talk about root causes, but fixing the root causes is really hard, so it's not necessarily a bad thing to also address the symptoms.
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
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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.
Because pregnancy and childbirth are inherently dangerous, for both the mother and child. Just because a 13-year-old is biologically mature enough to have a child, she is no way emotionally mature enough to care for that child without significant assistance, something even affluent, white (or perhaps especially them?) girls often do not receive. Easy to see how this could lead to higher mortality, through emotional problems increasing the likelihood of suicide, or just poor parenting leading to accidental deaths. And this doesn't even touch the idea of teenage pregnancy being an indicator of poor decision-making overall.
Thats part of the problem, the idea that you're either working or you're doing nothing.
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.
Many people in government don't want to do that, many do.
For the record, I have had enough of these killings. I would ban all firearm that didn't require manually inserting or cocking a weapons to put a round in the chamber, and any weapon that holds more then 3 rounds.
The exception would be honorably discharged veterans who regularly trained with a weapon as part of there regular job while in the military.
Everyplace with thigh gun controls has less murders.
And you premise that everything is focused on one cause is stupid and just shows that becasue you aren't capable of thinking about more then one thing at a time you assume everyone and every organization can't do more then one thing at a time also.
HINT: just because it's the popular thing the media is reporting that doesn't mean it's the only thing going on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
And if the UK were split into constituent parts, no US state is likely to be worse than Scotland for general health and life expectancy.
That's nothing. North Korea is even worse!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
The analysis could probably be tailored to fit any assertion you wanted to make.
The whole point of the scientific method is that it makes it difficult or impossible to tailor your analysis to fit any assertion you wanted to make.
Scientists are people who read How to lie with statistics and put a lot of effort into preventing people from lying with statistics.
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...
Come on, you can still eat healthy when you're poor. You definetly still can exercise if you're homeless without two pennies to rub together. It is personal choice and motivation that are key to healthier living.
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."
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.
It's all socioeconomic and Darwinism.
In today's first-World countries, having money means having access to nutrition, shelter, clothes, quality healthcare, education, and hence a greater chance to survive childhood and reproduce, and also a greater chance to end up with health habits that result in longer life. Young people don't have money, meaning that they are too reliant on the generosity of their parents. It is a sad truth that a large majority of teen pregnancies are in situations where the parents have no money either, and the neo-con approach to social responsibility and education would be laughably ridiculous if it weren't so horrific in its effects. Don't have sex, mkay? Abortions bad, why didn't those girls just shut that whole thing down? We shouldn't be supporting those lazy women who just stay home pumping out kids. Let's repeal Obamacare.
WTF do they think will happen with those policies? That all the poorly educated -lucky to get any mininum-wage job at all- members of society are going to refrain from sex until their thirties, when somehow they'll magically find themselves living the American Dream in a nice suburb, decorating the Christmas trees with their spouse whilst dressed in their best Mr Roger's sweaters, with money and ready to start a family? Like fuck.
Everyone should read Freakonomics.
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.
It's caused by whatever I'm opposed to today, and if only we did what I agree with and have always advocated, these problems would disappear!
FWIW, I doubt it's high inequality, as most low income people I've met in the US tend to be better off than most low income people I knew in the UK.
My guess would be poor access to healthcare, bizarre price differentials that make it cheaper to buy unhealthy ready made meals in supermarkets than make things from scratch, and the bans on walkable community developments that mean any journey outside of the home has to be done in a car, with the exception of a handful of cities that would be impossible to reform into libertarian "everyone forced to drive cars because a lack of choices in something as basic as transportation makes you free" utopias.
Yes I'm aware that the above is the first paragraph applied to me.
Guns? Probably not, but it's worth looking into.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
obviouslt your agenda forbade you to read:
"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."
That would not preclude an effect of inequality in the society on the health of the society. If such an effect were to exist, it would affect the well off in addition to (and plausibly more than) the not so well off.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
Mod Parent UP!!!!
I've seen this first hand! It's insane!
But biologically speaking...I think teen pregnancy is the norm. It's only in very, very recent times have women begun to wait until their 20's to have children. So I suspect teen pregnancy is problematic today due to our social structures rather than anything inherently wrong with it.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I think we have the motto to put on the trillion dollar platinum coin:
"The United States of America - Likely No Worse Than Scotland".
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
Well... if you have a kid at 18-19, your whole situation is likely to take a hit, which can cascade to later children. You could be a genius, and if you're forced to leave/not attend college or work multiple jobs when you are younger, those choices can have a rippling effect for your later ability to obtain a good job and a good education. If you're a teen parent, the effect doesn't stop when you stop being a teen.
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.
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.
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."
Where does it say that? Oh yes... in your Constitution. Which we all know is the UNIMPEACHABLE WORD OF GOD. And can never be amended.
Oh. Wait a sec.
poor health translates to increased morbidity and disability, not just shorter lifespans.
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.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
There are breakdowns by state in the US, and there is a great deal of variability. You are correct that this sort of analysis can be tailored to fit any preferred interpretation though. As someone else noted, scotland is actually better than the US average. Might not be when ethnicity is factored in.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
Actually...
- Healthy food is significantly more expensive - and poor people usually have not enough money for anything
- Exercise takes time you probably don't have when working two to three jobs (while still being poor).
I do not mean to say that poor people bear no responsibility for their health. Still, reality is more complicated
than "it's all their own damn fault".
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
Inequality and poverty correlate with health problems even for rich people.
I see that claim all the time, that healthier food is more expensive, but you know, it's just not true. Healthy food is actually pretty cheap, certainly when compared to any fast food or factory packaged crap. I guess if you only eat potato chips, then maybe.
It takes time and effort to prepare and doesn't taste as good as junk food, though. And that's why people eat the crap.
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)
Don't get all logical on us...
Swimming pools have some pretty serious regulations. A lot of places require fences around private swimming pools if they constitute an "attractive nuisance".
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"?
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.
Even if that were true, you can then look at the life expectancy after 1 year instead. Same pattern arises. Or look to see if the difference arises from infant deaths alone. Nope, it doesn't.
Point debunked.
I guess this just turned into a bad statistics topic. Good god, man, do you understand what the word statistically significant means?
If you're unhealthy you have a lower quality of life too, not just a lower quantity.
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
Yes the US still is near the bottom.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm#higher
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.
Heart disease and cancer are the two top killers by far. These tend to be sudden on-set and intense.
You might argue that a better lifestyle of veganism and exercise will help substantially, and it would, but the patient is choosing the tastier, more sedentary approach because that has a higher quality to them.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I don't think that most people enjoys working 60-80 hours a week, knowing that they can't afford to retire... meaning they will work until they drop dead.
I don't mean to be pedantic but in the U.S. if you work hourly you can only get up to 40 hours a week. If you go over they have to pay you overtime.
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.
That's because living in Scotland takes the sting out of death.
These aren't accidents! They're throwing themselves into the road glady! Throwing themselves into the road to escape all this hideousness!
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
What's probably even more important than the "healthiness" of the food is the quantity. That said, it's difficult to get/be overweight if you're just eating fresh fruit and vegetables.
If it doesn't rot, it's not good food.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
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
"Everyplace with thigh gun controls has less murders."
I think you mean to compare the US to other countries. When you look within the US, more gun control has been associated with more violent crime, not less.
I didn't want to be an anonymous coward so I logged in to repost the above. 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/
Someone linked to the CRS article further up the page. Differences in counting infant mortality statistics are not significant. "congenital malformations, disorders related to low birthweight and short gestational age, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)" are the top three causes of infant death in the US.
Racial factors, by which I suppose they really mean socio-economic factors, and low birth weight or pre-term babies are supposed to be the cause of the difference.
Look for:
The U.S. Infant Mortality Rate: International Comparisons, Underlying Factors, and Federal Programs
Elayne J. Heisler
Analyst in Health Services April 4, 2012
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
Every programming job I've had in the US (four in four different and widely-separated states) has separated sick time from vacation time (and none called it "PTO"). Also, it's more common in the US to start with two weeks, not three (but it can be negotiated, of course). Nobody I work with now or at most companies I worked at felt a need to have "butts in seats" for more than ~40 hours a week. Sounds like you've been picking some real choice H1-B sweatshops. (There have been H1-B workers at companies I've worked at, and they don't feel compelled to put in 60 hours either, and were treated just like everyone else as far as I could tell.)
Be honest now: did you actually work in the US, or are you just spreading a collection of myths you've heard?
There are substantial problems with your linked source. The 'number 1 life expectancy' work by Ohsfeldt makes use of a flawed econometric model to estimate unobserved accident rates in the 1980-1999 period. See: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1466986
Life expectancy after medical intervention is also problematic. The US really only does well in certain types of cancer - the article mentions heart attacks, but doesn't show anything to back it up. And the US only does well, if we assuming the patient is receiving treatment in the first place. Far from guaranteed.
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."
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.)
n today's first-World countries, having money means having access to nutrition, shelter, clothes, quality healthcare, education,
You are describing the USA, not first world countries. In most first-world countries all those (nutrition, shelter, clothes, quality healthcare and education) are available to everyone, regardless of their economic situation. This is especially true in countries of Northern Europe, Germany, France, Italy and a few more, where even university tuition is free or nearly free.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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.
ITSATRAP!
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Well that was informative, but I was looking for something that shows how vastly different US and Swiss gun laws are. US gun owners would probably consider Swiss-style gun controls reason for revolt. They include a government gun registry, regulated private sales, safe storage requirements and a total ban on concealed carry and full-auto weapons.
Some good articles I found, but I want something well-referenced since so much bullshit flies from both sides in the debate:
http://world.time.com/2012/12/20/the-swiss-difference-a-gun-culture-that-works/
http://www.ibtimes.com/us-gun-control-debate-what-can-we-learn-switzerland-732104
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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?
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!
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!!!
I don't know about erroneous' weight issues, or even if he has any--that's his problem, not mine--but my doctor actually gets on my case for being a bit underweight.
Gula Sidan at Stångåvägen 51 is only about a block from our place. They have a deep-dish 'Mexikana' that is just amazing. The place is run by a Turkish family, but their pizza rolls right over the stuff you get from the other pizza place in our 'burb. The latter being run by real Italians... who can't bloody cook. :) In any case, we get pizza from Gula Sidan a couple times a week on average.
BTW, the new Thai joint at Lagaplan 6 isn't bad at all; you might want to give them a try, next time you're in the neighbourhood.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
A sedentary obese life is not a higher quality. They live like that because they can't overcome their urges, or live in an environment which promotes poor health. They don't make an informed decision to be unfit, and most would be healthy if they could. Bad food isn't tastier either, it's usually incredibly bland with most if not all of the flavour coming from salt, sugar and grease. That's why people eat so much of it, it doesn't have the rich flavours to satisfy with smaller portions, and it's so lacking in nutrition the brain keeps you wanting more food because it doesn't think you've eaten.
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.
Scotland is still suffering from the effects of its de-industrialisation. The lowlands and its central belt particularly, used to be home to much labour intensive, heavy industry - steel, shipyards, mining, heavy engineering. The industry is gone, but the people (or their descendants) largely remain. Thus there are many pockets of poverty around. Life expectancy can be extremely low there, due to substance abuse particularly. The area of Glasgow I live in, Calton, has the lowest male life expectancy in the UK - 53.9 years!
Scotland is a special case, and is dealing with some tough social problems that are a legacy of how the world around it has changed over the last 60 years. Scotland has excellent health care though, I've found. They spend quite a lot on social health-care, relative to rest of UK. That the life expectancy is still low is due to that poverty and attendant education and life-choices that seem to correlate with that.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
..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.
It depends on how you define "quality". As much as you are likely to define it in terms of optimum biological function, it is subjective. Cigarettes increase quality for some people, though this is universally accepted as adverse for biological function. It does aid in emotional function. If it didn't no one would still be doing it. And that's just having tobacco in mind.
Nexium is proof of my point. If people went back to a more natural diet with no processed foods (meats, veggies, nuts, fruits) they would not need Nexium. But the standard American would rather take a pill so they can shove whatever crap they want down their gullet. Never mind the change in diet from crap to proper food is less than the cost of the prescription. They want indemnity from reality in pill form.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Not everyone can be an MBA and run the family business (into the ground).
Cheap storage VM.
I don't know what Nexium is, but if smoking improved quality of life most smokers wouldn't want to quit.
I thoguht you were a doctor, Dr Square
Without googling, since you are too lazy to google as well, it is (don't quote me) "A proton pump inhibitor" which basically down-mods the acid production of the stomach thereby reducing acid reflux symptoms. It allows you to continue cramming crap foods in your pie hole with less discomfort.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.