> One statistic in particular stood out: one in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday. No parent should ever have to bury their child, but in the US one set of parents from every kindergarten class most likely will.
Its an incredible statistic, but even from my own upbringing in a white, middle-class suburb I can name a handful of people that have died that I've known, arguably matching that 1/25 statistic even long before it will come to maturity.
I'm just a data point, but I lost 12 friends before I was aged 20. This was in the rust belt during the 90s. The reasons ranged across the board: opioids, crack, alcohol, cancer, preventative health conditions, accidents, and suicides. I was always amazed that people didn't report on this kind of stuff back then. But, all of my friends were poor.
"A car-wash manager in Alabama can now earn $125,000, about 50 per cent more than the head of cyber security at the UK Treasury"
A bit off-topic but this sums up low-wage Britain pretty well right now. Your tiny house costs £1 million and we want to pay you £50k.
>Your tiny house costs £1 million and we want to pay you £50k.
This is no coincidence. The entire point is to increase the wealth of the wealthiest fraction of a percent without disincentivizing the working class to keep showing up to work every day. Also note this is not a conspiracy but a structural tendency.
This CDC site https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/home says for the year 2020, the leading causes of death for those below age 45:
(a) for Whites, it is unintentional injury which includes overdoses and car accidents (b)for Blacks, it is also unintentional injury but homicide is significant (c) for Asian Pacific Islanders, it is unintentional injury, suicide, cancer, and congenital abnormalities.
It's a mix of overly individualistic culture and the healtcare avoidance/unaffordability. Working blue collar class avoids a doctor as much as possible.
This is a huge part, yes. For a shockingly large number of people in the US, going to the doctor means not being able to pay rent or buy food. And in many areas, there are no doctors to go to even if you're willing and able.
This isn't a problem exclusive to liberal people or areas. Deeply conservative areas are disproportionately suffering from prescription drug issues and overdose deaths.
Nor does the majority of data we have support their conclusion. As you have alluded to, conservative areas tend to have shorter lifespans when compared to population-dense places, because of issues affecting health. Poverty, age, distance to hospital, all of these things drag down their average.
3. Lack of access, due to a lack of affordability and/or availability, to healthcare
I'm a volunteer EMT-B who has a full-time day job so I only work one weekend shift per week and on average I narcan someone once per month. In my state approximately 3,000 people die every year from overdose. Me narcan'ing someone means there's a ~25% chance of them dying in the next year from overdose.
Twice in the last six months someone who was too obese for me and my partner to move by ourselves died while waiting for assistance to arrive.
The answer is quite simple but no one wants to address the massive elephant in the room.
The future our father's made for us starting in the 1980s is barely live-able. We have continued that tradition forward, and offer nothing new and only most things are worse, and that's not addressing that most of our fathers due to medical technology still hold the majority (>50%) of political power rather than passing it on to the next generation and that is unfortunate because they will continue to do so until the day they die of old age.
If there is no hope for a better brighter future, people opt out. If you look at the massive amount of suffering, with the unlikelihood of success rational and intelligent people with no hope of a better life, and the prospect of the equivalent of slavery in the future, its not hard to see which of the options is a better option compared to suffering in unspeakable unknowable ways for years.
Secret systems have been put in place, that amount to the East German Stasi's wet dreams, and are being used against the citizenry without disclosure or due process.
If you look at the amount of agency people have today compared to two decades ago, you see a stark contrast. We have to take what companies say and accept it we have no choice. Concentration of industry has made it so you can't go to another company because they are all owned by the same main branch doing the same things.
Our methods for changing things for the better have been completely corrupted and eroded. We don't even have a voice for the most part because of media systems that have been designed to de-amplify and amplify certain narratives.
Worse yet, the people we have to choose from for our leaders are deluded, liars, and nearly completely corrupt, and I don't like saying that but its absolutely true. Just look at the fighting inflation act or whatever its called. We're going to fight inflation by printing more money, yeah that is not how it works, how deluded do you have to be to believe that?.
Every avenue you have for interacting with daily necessities has been reworked without individual rights in mind. A business can ignore you for 30 days before they have some semblance of legal liability. The courts ignore basic rights (abortion), and lack any credibility thanks to the continued but un-provable [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction]).
People being made to be dependent on the system that is on the brink of failure due to overwhelming overregulation and enforced culling of foods (see egg shortage).
Most US industry acts as an arm of government in nearly every respect where the government prohibits certain things of itself, it has Industry do those things for them instead of protecting our rights and limiting power as they swore to do by their oath's of office.
This is not a coincidence, its planned. One thing might be coincidence, nearly everything going in that direction is a plan.
The problem with the current trends are you need intelligence to solve these problems, and those who are intelligent simply want to have nothing to do with the problem because its a Kobayashi Maru so long as government gets in the way and they have and will continue to do so until your dead, likely from starvation in the near future.
We have at the upper end 10-50 years before most of humanity will likely be dead, and not enough time to change it because deluded leaders use tactics to delude the people. Its common in any totalitarian society, menticide or the killing of the mind, that is what we have to look forward to as the ponzi of the world reserve currency meets the economic calculation problem.
> I've been hearing that the death of the planet has been 10-30 years away . We're still here.
That argument is solely based on survivor bias.
Also, critical systems are now in such a state of brittle disrepair that it wouldn't take much for everything to break down unexpectedly.
Currency (store of value), Fuel/Energy, Logistics (trains/ cheap shipping), and Food (farms), take your pick.
Any single one of those areas can lead to a cascading failure.
Most people also don't realize as the world heats up you have to suddenly start dealing with problems only commonly found in the tropics but now at the northern latitudes.
If you've read the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, you'd know why the northern latitude countries were able to develop rapidly whereas the tropical latitudes were averse to human life and husbandry.
There are parts of Africa where microscopic parasites live in the water, and animal husbandry in those areas is impossible. The higher environmental temperatures allow these organisms to thrive. If you eat the meat of contaminated animals, you get sick and die.
There are many reasons why you are asked if you have traveled outside the country recently when you visit the doctor.
31 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 88.7 ms ] threadWow...
I think all of those deaths were OD's.
This is no coincidence. The entire point is to increase the wealth of the wealthiest fraction of a percent without disincentivizing the working class to keep showing up to work every day. Also note this is not a conspiracy but a structural tendency.
£65 != $100. The difference is nearly $20,000. How could the author make this mistake. It made it past the FT editors? I must be missing something...
2. Obesity
3. Lack of access, due to a lack of affordability and/or availability, to healthcare
I'm a volunteer EMT-B who has a full-time day job so I only work one weekend shift per week and on average I narcan someone once per month. In my state approximately 3,000 people die every year from overdose. Me narcan'ing someone means there's a ~25% chance of them dying in the next year from overdose.
Twice in the last six months someone who was too obese for me and my partner to move by ourselves died while waiting for assistance to arrive.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799922583326720/...
The future our father's made for us starting in the 1980s is barely live-able. We have continued that tradition forward, and offer nothing new and only most things are worse, and that's not addressing that most of our fathers due to medical technology still hold the majority (>50%) of political power rather than passing it on to the next generation and that is unfortunate because they will continue to do so until the day they die of old age.
If there is no hope for a better brighter future, people opt out. If you look at the massive amount of suffering, with the unlikelihood of success rational and intelligent people with no hope of a better life, and the prospect of the equivalent of slavery in the future, its not hard to see which of the options is a better option compared to suffering in unspeakable unknowable ways for years.
Secret systems have been put in place, that amount to the East German Stasi's wet dreams, and are being used against the citizenry without disclosure or due process.
If you look at the amount of agency people have today compared to two decades ago, you see a stark contrast. We have to take what companies say and accept it we have no choice. Concentration of industry has made it so you can't go to another company because they are all owned by the same main branch doing the same things.
Our methods for changing things for the better have been completely corrupted and eroded. We don't even have a voice for the most part because of media systems that have been designed to de-amplify and amplify certain narratives.
Worse yet, the people we have to choose from for our leaders are deluded, liars, and nearly completely corrupt, and I don't like saying that but its absolutely true. Just look at the fighting inflation act or whatever its called. We're going to fight inflation by printing more money, yeah that is not how it works, how deluded do you have to be to believe that?.
Every avenue you have for interacting with daily necessities has been reworked without individual rights in mind. A business can ignore you for 30 days before they have some semblance of legal liability. The courts ignore basic rights (abortion), and lack any credibility thanks to the continued but un-provable [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction]).
People being made to be dependent on the system that is on the brink of failure due to overwhelming overregulation and enforced culling of foods (see egg shortage).
Most US industry acts as an arm of government in nearly every respect where the government prohibits certain things of itself, it has Industry do those things for them instead of protecting our rights and limiting power as they swore to do by their oath's of office.
This is not a coincidence, its planned. One thing might be coincidence, nearly everything going in that direction is a plan.
The problem with the current trends are you need intelligence to solve these problems, and those who are intelligent simply want to have nothing to do with the problem because its a Kobayashi Maru so long as government gets in the way and they have and will continue to do so until your dead, likely from starvation in the near future.
We have at the upper end 10-50 years before most of humanity will likely be dead, and not enough time to change it because deluded leaders use tactics to delude the people. Its common in any totalitarian society, menticide or the killing of the mind, that is what we have to look forward to as the ponzi of the world reserve currency meets the economic calculation problem.
> If there is no hope for a better brighter future, people opt out.
We’re trying to make existing economic models work when the human population has doubled in less than a decade. It’s untenable.
I've been hearing that the death of the planet has been 10 - 30 years away for the past 30 years. We're still here.
That argument is solely based on survivor bias.
Also, critical systems are now in such a state of brittle disrepair that it wouldn't take much for everything to break down unexpectedly.
Currency (store of value), Fuel/Energy, Logistics (trains/ cheap shipping), and Food (farms), take your pick.
Any single one of those areas can lead to a cascading failure.
Most people also don't realize as the world heats up you have to suddenly start dealing with problems only commonly found in the tropics but now at the northern latitudes.
If you've read the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, you'd know why the northern latitude countries were able to develop rapidly whereas the tropical latitudes were averse to human life and husbandry.
There are parts of Africa where microscopic parasites live in the water, and animal husbandry in those areas is impossible. The higher environmental temperatures allow these organisms to thrive. If you eat the meat of contaminated animals, you get sick and die.
There are many reasons why you are asked if you have traveled outside the country recently when you visit the doctor.
I don't see what point you are trying to make by discounting dangers that are studied and very real.
If your life depended on knowing about these things, won't you be surprised when reality hits home.
Its common sense for a rational person to not discount downsides that are easily verifiable.
For your further reading and there's a lot more than just these:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7558156/
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/onchocercia...
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/trypanosomi...
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2020/travel-related-...