191–200 of 399 posts
America is a much larger country with a much larger difference in outcome between different people. A person in South Carolina will have a different life from someone in say Santa Barbara, California.
Chart us against the entire OECD, then. The results are stark.
"1 in 25 Americans being born will not make it to their 40th birthday." Wow. Actually impressed with the analysis backing this up. If you read the entire thread, he actually covers nearly every correlating factor I could think of. And it's pretty clearly drugs, guns, suicide, and cars. (The cardio health one doesn't seem as strong). The one that is crazy to me is the uptick in driving fatalities. Cars are an order of…
A sudden secondary effect - legal pot is leading to many more stoned drivers where I live (NJ).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many drownings could have been prevented but it's still a relatively niche cause of death. Unintentional drowning is ten times less frequent than either of falling or motor vehicle crashes, which are about the same frequency. The main way that drownings could be prevented among adults is by enforcing alcohol rules, or having some in the first place, but that goes against the entire theme of American water recreation.…
> Many drownings could have been prevented but it's still a relatively niche cause of death. I read somewhere that drownings were the 2nd leading cause of death for children. Cars were #1. People drown mainly because they underestimate the risk of it. I know parents who had their toddler drown. The grief and devastation of that never stops, decade after decade. They had camped near a river bank, and the kid wandered…
Basically the #1 causes of unintentional death in age order are drowning (<5), cars (5-20) then drugs (20+).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, there has been a huge increase in the number of accidental fentanyl poisonings. I think this is now the leading cause of accidental death among young people, surpassing even vehicle crashes. Mexican drug cartels have been manufacturing counterfeit prescription painkillers and replacing active ingredients with fentanyl. They have bad quality control and sometimes just put in too much. Fentanyl is so potent that t…
That's why punishing Big Pharma for making opioid pills has the perverse effect of causing more opioid deaths due to no quality control on the illegal versions.
blackpool is the jersey shore of england?
Sure there will be lots of hypotheses for why this is the case. In my experience, though, you can almost ignore longevity and just look at these sociological differences that make the quality of life better for the English: 1. You could easily argue that frequenting a pub shortens your lifespan, but I just loved "pub culture" when I visited colleagues in England. It's a great antidote to loneliness. 2. You can argue…
It seems pretty likely that the US healthcare decisions at the federal level are to blame. This data suggests it isn't the access to healthcare that is to blame as much as the governance of the entire system is forcing bad outcomes. The effect here is too widespread to be "pub culture". I could see city planning being a contributor. But the effect is so extreme the place to start is deliberate policy. It would be har…
"1 in 25 Americans being born will not make it to their 40th birthday." Wow. Actually impressed with the analysis backing this up. If you read the entire thread, he actually covers nearly every correlating factor I could think of. And it's pretty clearly drugs, guns, suicide, and cars. (The cardio health one doesn't seem as strong). The one that is crazy to me is the uptick in driving fatalities. Cars are an order of…
Something happened during the initial stages of the pandemic. People lost their absolute minds and aggressive and reckless driving got way, way worst than I've ever seen. Hell, about an hour ago a cop tailgated me while I was going 15 over the limit, wove through traffic to cut me off, run a red light, then damn near ran another driver off the road. No lights, no emergency, just an asshole. This is the behavior you h…
I think defensive driving is becoming more important as well and I worry far more about driving at night, as people get more erratic, than I used to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smaller cars are more dangerous in a multi-car accident. Most accidents only involve a single car. There is less control in larger vehicles. Everyone thinks they are a better driver than they are and the only way they'll end up in an accident is if someone else hits them. Add all this up and many want to drive larger cars.
> Smaller cars are more dangerous in a multi-car accident. Smaller cars bear more of the risk in a multi-car accident from the more dangerous larger cars. The smaller cars themselves are safer. It's like saying t-shirts are less safe than guns because they won't stop bullets.
The original article points out that the primary difference between the US and the UK (as well as other peer countries) is that you're much more likely to die young in the US. A 5-year-old in the United States has a 4% chance of dying before age 40, whereas a 5-year-old in Australia, Austria, Canada, England and Wales, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, or Switzerland has ~1% chance of dying before age 40 (val…
As you can see in his chart at [1] from the same thread, drugs, violence, and accidents only explain less than 1/3 of the difference, so the rest would be mainly various disease/lifestyle and care related issues (the overwhelmingly top causes of death in the US [2]). I think those graphs are a easy to misread, the long tail of somewhat poorer results is less dramatic than that younger gap, but actually includes much…
I still think drugs, guns, and accidents are worth specifically highlighting even if they aren't the single biggest driver of this disparity in life expectancy. I'd wager that most people are aware of America's obesity epidemic, but they might not realize the extent to which these three (big) factors make the US unlike it's peers. I certainly didn't.
As fucked up as death is, I wonder if a lower life expectancy isn't the worst thing in the world. To some extent in the West, but especially in Asia, we're really starting to see the demographic issues that come with people living for too long. Aging populations, plummeting birthrates, redirection of public resources away from children and families... Maybe we shouldn't be trying as hard as we are to drag on life int…