The solution to this is known by everyone, including those who will fain ignorance. Implement universal healthcare (including mental health), regulate guns (insurance, registration, training, buybacks, red flag laws) including banning weapons of war, build public transportation and transition away from car-mandatory living in all but the most rural areas, and push for democratically-controlled unions and worker co-op…
nitpick: it is "feign ignorance" or "fain be ignorant", not a mix of the two
You can't compare murder rates in the US with Sweden. They have a real welfare system, diminishing social inequalities and with that the feeding ground for crime.
Sounds like a great idea… …but it’s also worth pointing out that murder rates are also a lot lower than the US in other developed countries that don’t have Scandinavian levels of welfare transfers.
The other developed countries still have much lower income differences between rich and poor than the US though. I think this is a bigger contributor to US crime levels than its gun policy.
Also, I don't understand the focus on murder rates. Compare all violent crime at least.
The full text of the amendment is pretty clear that "a well-regulated militia" depends upon "the right of the people to keep and bear arms", it does not limit that right. In order to train farmers and craftsmen into an effective reserve fighting force, they have to have weapons of their own they can practice with. Times have changed, obviously, and civil society no longer depends on citizen firearm ownership. You can…
> We should probably repeal and replace the First Amendment while we're at it, and tie up some loose ends like Citizens United and the inability of U.S. governments to criminally punish hate speech. I am not a gun nut, and have little interest in owning/shooting guns. I've done it, and found it boring. But my defense of the 2nd Amendment is based on the domino theory that if the 2nd can be ignored, there goes the Fir…
Repealing am amendment isn't ignoring it. It's the opposite.
You could clarify that you mean the rights stated in the amendments of course.
I’m around 195cm. There is plenty of space. I can fit very comfortably into most vehicles (passenger planes excluded). Outside of leg and elbow room, what can you even do with that extra space when stuck in a traffic jam?
You may leave less room for rear seat, adult passengers if you drive a compact car. It's still manageable, and fine for occasional trips, but I wouldn't choose that car to drive 4 adults daily.
...I wouldn't choose that car to drive 4 adults daily.
Is this a typical thing that cars do? I'm not sure if I've seen 4 adults in a car in the last month.
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…
It doesn't matter that most people die of cancer or heart diseases, as these are old people and these are also prevalent in other countries. When someone dies at 25 from a drug overdose, however, age expectancy is greatly reduced as more expected years are shaved off. The US has WAY more of those than other developed nations.
There is literally a graph I linked, and several other in his twitter thread, that show you are not correct. The difference is caused by deaths in all age groups, throughout every age bracket until about 79. Obviously infant mortality rates in the US, which are higher than elsewhere mainly due to poor prenatal care, have the biggest impact on a per-person basis. But we can see that it does not add up to explaining away 74% of all deaths in the US as insignificant (CDC link indicates top 10 causes make up 75% of all deaths), simply because even though the difference is greater in younger age groups, the absolute number of deaths is still too low to completely change the statistics. It certainly has a measurable impact. About 1/3 of the difference, as I said.
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…
>There's something very deeply wrong in American society, and I don't see things improving any time soon. Any hypothesis as to what it is? I think it is a lack of community. We've become transactional and virtual/online communities are not sufficient. In terms of driving I think it got a lot worse during the pandemic because with the lack of daily commuter traffic allowed people to drive faster and hence more reckles…
All day long, every day, the news media attempts to gin up more wars. They foster ignorance, fear, and hatred. Foreign leaders who haven't been in the news for years are made the primary focus overnight, just because that's where we're supposed to bomb next. Not all of us can even imagine why we should fight people in other hemispheres who've never done anything to us, so our fear and hatred lands closer to home. That's a big reason we have such tyrannical prison sentences.
If we didn't have a gigantic military that spends over a trillion dollars a year on the purchase of armaments, our armaments manufacturers would have less money to make our news media insane.
> America is a much larger country with a much larger difference in outcome between different people. Chart us against the entire OECD, then. The results are stark . https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low
All I'm saying is pooling the entire United States into a single data point is fairly useless. We need to know which demographics are the ones bringing down the average the most in order to make moves that will improve this metric the most.
It’s not useless because we are comparing countries. By breaking up a country you are basically changing the question to get a more favorable answer.
> America is a much larger country with a much larger difference in outcome between different people. Chart us against the entire OECD, then. The results are stark . https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low
All I'm saying is pooling the entire United States into a single data point is fairly useless. We need to know which demographics are the ones bringing down the average the most in order to make moves that will improve this metric the most.
But you're governed by one federal government, so this point isn't so relevant.
If America had a government and voting populace that actually cared about each other and weren't afraid to have universal free healthcare, we wouldn't see the problems that exist within the data?
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…
How am I supposed to read your first image? It appears to me that heart related issues, all else constant, have less an effect (2.2 for men) than all the other issues mentioned (2.3-3.3).