You can look at the buying power of the USD in terms of commodities, yes, and to make it fair, you look at commodities that people actually normally spend money on, like groceries and rent, rather than stuff that is the preserve of speculators like gold and silver. That's how inflation is calculated.
Silver is more valuable, because if you sell your silver and buy stuff with it, you can buy a lot more stuff these days. $1.25 in 1964 would have the buying power of approximately $8.78 in 2010 dollars, according to CPI inflation measures.
Why pick silver? Why not pick gold? Houses? Cellphones? Water? Oh right because you had better use the specific good that backs up your ideology, I guess.
You have a right to your games. But the customer also has a right to know. Does every one who bought Call of Duty know that they are funding arms manufacturers and that these games were made with the intention of marketing to them? Would all of them purchase the game if they did know?
The point is that they never told us. If they were up front about 'buy this game and you fund the weapons industry' then I can be an informed consumer and I'd be fine with you buying your games while I go buy my own. Instead all of a sudden I'm told that 10+% of my games purchase goes to something I oppose. I'm not saying ban this sick filth, I'm saying that these need to be clearly labelled, because it matters if I'm effectively funding the wars that I oppose.
People who buy car games are generally happy with subsidising those car companies existence, and indeed can generally be assumed to support motor sports. People who buy FPS games, especially internationally, cannot be assumed to actually favour the real versions of the virtual conflicts they are fighting in.
But the fact that it's the gun industry is the whole point. I, and many people despise the gun industry. I play these games expecting them to be meaningless catharsis, not channeling my money directly to them, and getting back propaganda. The games companies hide their licensing arrangements because they know it would hurt sales. You may find it hard to empathise because you are of the proportion of people who think gun companies are all hunky dory, but imagine if this was happening with an industry you personally hate.
Say, for example, DRM. Imagine that you just found out that Slashdot licenses the Your Rights Online logo from StarForce and channels 10% of advertising revenues to them. If I sit here and say this is no big deal, would you accept that?
Oh, sure, gun companies will definitely try to make money. I'd argue that such actions are amoral, but that's a minor point.
The main blame here is on the games companies licensing the names, in establishing these relationships, paying the money, hiding it from their customers.
Hence the airquotes, no doubt. Such games sell a certain, specific image of war. And this article shows an aspect of the thinking that goes behind that.
A large proportion of people oppose these companies, and would not like to think that their money is going to them, and were consuming intentional propaganda to glorify their products. I'm a FPS gamer, and I for one would reconsider purchasing future modern warfare style games given this fact.
It's shady because the games publishers are (perhaps understandably) evasive about the amount of money they are funnelling into the weapons industry, and are working under direct conditions to portray guns in a positive manner so as to encourage gun sales, even as they claim to be non-political and not pushing violence.
You never provided the sources for your data to start with, and presented them so that they appeared to arise from the same source and methodology and covered the same period. That's your first mistake. Your second mistake was that you never provided a rebuttal to my points. If you claim that drug induced effects exclude accidents - as opposed to accidental *injuries*, then you never provided a quote. Your third mistake is your recourse to conspiracy theories.
It's not that you used the CDC and that paper that is problematic. It's your mixing of them without noting the big, huge difference between them. Re the paper, even as it was published there was substantial criticism. Their CI cannot be considered accurate. As the commentators on the paper note, if you restrict the data they used to only the more recent years, the assessment of ADR deaths falls to 13k.
The study revolves around more than 4 statistics. And life expectancy is generally one of the most accurately measured public statistics, based on real census data with millions of people. The error bars involved are small. For example, for North Carolina, the 95% CI is 74.9-75.0. On the national level it'll be smaller. The study also takes a multi-year view, and the trend is consistent.
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.
I don't really mean to doubt your integrity. I'm more disappointed at the moderation system that currently has the original incorrect post at 5 Informative and with no bonuses for our corrections, for I suppose, probably ideological reasons.
If illegal drug use PLUS legal drug use adds up to 39k, or 31k if you discount some sorts of deaths, what justification do you have to claim that legal drug use alone is 106k? The effect of lumping together illegal and legal drugs is that it inflates the figures, not makes them smaller than they really are.
If you want to throw down conspiracy theories then you might as well through the whole comparison out. Maybe the CDC works with gun companies. Maybe they suppress the road accident rate! This is stupid.
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.
How is that a fallacy? Is everyone who dies before the age of 75 unimportant? You do realise you can raise the post-75 life expectancy by simply executing anyone who seems even a little bit sick or poor at the age of 74.9, don't you? Ironically that may well be what the US health system is effectively doing...
It is included under accidental deaths. The line about 'excludes unintentional injuries' refers to secondary injuries incurred by taking actions under the influence of drugs (for instance, driving under the influence). A discussion of the breakdown of accidental poisoning is here, and indicates clearly how it does include most of drug induced deaths (the exception is if the drug leads to long term conditions that then results in a death, but that's a lot more iffy as to how that should be counted): http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/poisoning/poisoning-factsheet.htm
You've made a fundamental error in your calculations. They said the US has a violent death rate of 6/100k. Your calculations assume that 6/100k deaths, or in other words 0.006% of deaths are violent. That is incorrect. What you need to do is divide the violent death rate of 6/100k, by the overall US death rate of 793.8 per 100k - leading to a proportion of total deaths of 0.756%.
Now, to apply the correct calculations, if in a population of people living to 80, 0.765% of them die at 15 instead:
(6/793.8 ) * 15 + ((793.8-6)/793.8 ) * 80 = 79.5.
So about 0.5 years from homicide. Gun related suicide is more often, and takes off another year or so.
Obviously, this doesn't explain the entire difference, but it can have a significant effect.
Slashdot Mirror
You can look at the buying power of the USD in terms of commodities, yes, and to make it fair, you look at commodities that people actually normally spend money on, like groceries and rent, rather than stuff that is the preserve of speculators like gold and silver. That's how inflation is calculated.
Silver is more valuable, because if you sell your silver and buy stuff with it, you can buy a lot more stuff these days. $1.25 in 1964 would have the buying power of approximately $8.78 in 2010 dollars, according to CPI inflation measures.
Why pick silver? Why not pick gold? Houses? Cellphones? Water? Oh right because you had better use the specific good that backs up your ideology, I guess.
You have a right to your games. But the customer also has a right to know. Does every one who bought Call of Duty know that they are funding arms manufacturers and that these games were made with the intention of marketing to them? Would all of them purchase the game if they did know?
I won't, now that I know.
The point is that they never told us. If they were up front about 'buy this game and you fund the weapons industry' then I can be an informed consumer and I'd be fine with you buying your games while I go buy my own. Instead all of a sudden I'm told that 10+% of my games purchase goes to something I oppose. I'm not saying ban this sick filth, I'm saying that these need to be clearly labelled, because it matters if I'm effectively funding the wars that I oppose.
People who buy car games are generally happy with subsidising those car companies existence, and indeed can generally be assumed to support motor sports. People who buy FPS games, especially internationally, cannot be assumed to actually favour the real versions of the virtual conflicts they are fighting in.
But the fact that it's the gun industry is the whole point. I, and many people despise the gun industry. I play these games expecting them to be meaningless catharsis, not channeling my money directly to them, and getting back propaganda. The games companies hide their licensing arrangements because they know it would hurt sales. You may find it hard to empathise because you are of the proportion of people who think gun companies are all hunky dory, but imagine if this was happening with an industry you personally hate.
Say, for example, DRM. Imagine that you just found out that Slashdot licenses the Your Rights Online logo from StarForce and channels 10% of advertising revenues to them. If I sit here and say this is no big deal, would you accept that?
Oh, sure, gun companies will definitely try to make money. I'd argue that such actions are amoral, but that's a minor point.
The main blame here is on the games companies licensing the names, in establishing these relationships, paying the money, hiding it from their customers.
Hence the airquotes, no doubt. Such games sell a certain, specific image of war. And this article shows an aspect of the thinking that goes behind that.
Hey, if it's pirated, then no money goes to these people.
A large proportion of people oppose these companies, and would not like to think that their money is going to them, and were consuming intentional propaganda to glorify their products. I'm a FPS gamer, and I for one would reconsider purchasing future modern warfare style games given this fact.
It's shady because the games publishers are (perhaps understandably) evasive about the amount of money they are funnelling into the weapons industry, and are working under direct conditions to portray guns in a positive manner so as to encourage gun sales, even as they claim to be non-political and not pushing violence.
5-10% of retail sales is a *lot*.
You never provided the sources for your data to start with, and presented them so that they appeared to arise from the same source and methodology and covered the same period. That's your first mistake. Your second mistake was that you never provided a rebuttal to my points. If you claim that drug induced effects exclude accidents - as opposed to accidental *injuries*, then you never provided a quote. Your third mistake is your recourse to conspiracy theories.
It's not that you used the CDC and that paper that is problematic. It's your mixing of them without noting the big, huge difference between them. Re the paper, even as it was published there was substantial criticism. Their CI cannot be considered accurate. As the commentators on the paper note, if you restrict the data they used to only the more recent years, the assessment of ADR deaths falls to 13k.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1152414
Yes, I am a big fan of Goldacre. But that there are bad practices doesn't mean you should defer to gut instinct.
The study revolves around more than 4 statistics. And life expectancy is generally one of the most accurately measured public statistics, based on real census data with millions of people. The error bars involved are small. For example, for North Carolina, the 95% CI is 74.9-75.0. On the national level it'll be smaller. The study also takes a multi-year view, and the trend is consistent.
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.
I don't really mean to doubt your integrity. I'm more disappointed at the moderation system that currently has the original incorrect post at 5 Informative and with no bonuses for our corrections, for I suppose, probably ideological reasons.
If illegal drug use PLUS legal drug use adds up to 39k, or 31k if you discount some sorts of deaths, what justification do you have to claim that legal drug use alone is 106k? The effect of lumping together illegal and legal drugs is that it inflates the figures, not makes them smaller than they really are.
If you want to throw down conspiracy theories then you might as well through the whole comparison out. Maybe the CDC works with gun companies. Maybe they suppress the road accident rate! This is stupid.
This sounds like handwaving. There's plenty of information on dealing with the alleged infant mortality definition difference. See:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm#higher
Adjusting for the difference, the US still ends up behind.
Yes the US still is near the bottom.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm#higher
I guess this just turned into a bad statistics topic. Good god, man, do you understand what the word statistically significant means?
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.
And some of us want to live.
In the end, not all freedoms are equal, and you've got to balance one against the other.
How is that a fallacy? Is everyone who dies before the age of 75 unimportant? You do realise you can raise the post-75 life expectancy by simply executing anyone who seems even a little bit sick or poor at the age of 74.9, don't you? Ironically that may well be what the US health system is effectively doing...
It is included under accidental deaths. The line about 'excludes unintentional injuries' refers to secondary injuries incurred by taking actions under the influence of drugs (for instance, driving under the influence). A discussion of the breakdown of accidental poisoning is here, and indicates clearly how it does include most of drug induced deaths (the exception is if the drug leads to long term conditions that then results in a death, but that's a lot more iffy as to how that should be counted):
http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/poisoning/poisoning-factsheet.htm
You can also note that 'drug induced deaths' is separate from the totals in the full causes of death breakdowns, and observe that it is not listed as a leading cause of death in http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCID_All_Deaths_By_Age_Group_2010-a.pdf .
You've made a fundamental error in your calculations. They said the US has a violent death rate of 6/100k. Your calculations assume that 6/100k deaths, or in other words 0.006% of deaths are violent. That is incorrect. What you need to do is divide the violent death rate of 6/100k, by the overall US death rate of 793.8 per 100k - leading to a proportion of total deaths of 0.756%.
Now, to apply the correct calculations, if in a population of people living to 80, 0.765% of them die at 15 instead:
(6/793.8 ) * 15 + ((793.8-6)/793.8 ) * 80 = 79.5.
So about 0.5 years from homicide. Gun related suicide is more often, and takes off another year or so.
Obviously, this doesn't explain the entire difference, but it can have a significant effect.