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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 10 2016, @10:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the bring-out-your-dead dept.

The American lifespan declined slightly in 2015, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report based primarily on 2015 death certificates:

Life expectancy in the United States has declined for the first time in more than two decades. Data from the National Center for Health Statistics showed a drop for men from 76.5 years in 2014 to 76.3 in 2015, and from 81.3 to 81.2 for women. The preliminary figures show rises in several causes of death, especially heart disease, dementia and accidental infant deaths.

Life expectancy last fell during the peak of the HIV/Aids crisis in 1993. It has improved slightly but steadily in most of the years since World War Two, rising from a little more than 68 years in 1950. It also fell in 1980, after a severe outbreak of flu. Overall life expectancy for men and women is now 78.8 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2014.

[...] The death rate for cancer has gone down 1.7%, which is significant as cancer is the second-biggest cause of death, causing almost as many fatalities as heart disease. But it seems that fast-developing research into cancer treatments, as well as campaigns on public education and early detection, are having an impact.

But do they account for the effect of fake deaths?

Mortality in the United States, 2015 (PDF)

An anonymous coward sent in an article from The Atlantic covering the same news.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @06:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @06:14PM (#439749)

    so many ingredients that you can't reasonable be expected to understand

    I see a movie: "Francis and the Unreasonable Expectations of Everyday Life." Cannes in the future!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @06:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @06:23PM (#439752)

    Those expectations are only unreasonable in the US...and the 3rd world...

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday December 10 2016, @06:30PM

      by Francis (5544) on Saturday December 10 2016, @06:30PM (#439754)

      Precisely. Those are some pretty modest expectations to have. And there's no reason why we can't have them. But, to hear the investor class whining about it, you'd think that they were going to go out of business. And that might be true for a small number of small businesses, but those small businesses are already on the cusp of going out of business anyways. There's a substantial cost associated with having employees come to work sick or under-rested that generally gets ignored.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 10 2016, @10:48PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 10 2016, @10:48PM (#439820) Journal

        And that might be true for a small number of small businesses, but those small businesses are already on the cusp of going out of business anyways.

        We didn't need those jobs anyway.

        • (Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday December 10 2016, @11:02PM

          by Francis (5544) on Saturday December 10 2016, @11:02PM (#439821)

          I wouldn't summarize it like that. In a healthy economy, that work tends to find its way over to another company. It's mostly cases where the work isn't productive or the economy isn't doing well that that's an issue.

          We could easily have 100% employment if we went back to slavery as well, but I don't think that any reasonable person would suggest that as a solution. The investors need to just accept that rather than being obscenely wealthy, they'll just be quite wealthy. At some point the situation will correct itself, the question is whether that will be peaceful or whether the next American Revolution involves us dusting off the Guillotine.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 11 2016, @07:52AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 11 2016, @07:52AM (#439932) Journal

            I wouldn't summarize it like that.

            But I would and I did. This is a common problem. Activities that are inconvenient to the narrative get grossly devalued.

            But here's the problem with your attitude. Where are all the wonderful jobs going to come from when you keep destroying jobs like this? In analogy, we have a two story house where I want to move up to the second floor. Should I destroy the first floor because I don't want to live there any more? Wouldn't that cause a problem with the structural integrity of the second floor which now rests on a 10 foot air gap?

            Labor-wise where are all the skilled workers going to come from when you don't have the starter jobs any more? What happens when someone loses a job and can't quickly pick up a low paying job while they look for new work? If you keep destroying businesses because they are "marginal" and thus something you don't want any more, what happens when more and more businesses become marginal?

            There is a huge potential here for a slow decay of society as growing pieces of the society get marginalized and become something we didn't "need" anyway.

            For all my posting, I never say that we should take out marginal businesses. Sure, if there's a recession and the business goes belly-up, fine, it's evolution in action. But to destroy a healthy business in a healthy economy and then dismiss the whole thing as something that would have happened anyway (even though that is wrong), is reprehensible.