SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
According to a report by the Congressional Research Service (PDF hosted on Cloudflare; archived copy here),
Although life expectancy has generally been increasing over time in the United States, researchers have long documented that it is lower for individuals with lower socioeconomic status (SES) compared with individuals with higher SES. Recent studies provide evidence that this gap has widened in recent decades. For example, a 2015 study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found that for men born in 1930, individuals in the highest income quintile (top 20%) could expect to live 5.1 years longer at age 50 than men in the lowest income quintile. This gap has increased significantly over time. Among men born in 1960, those in the top income quintile could expect to live 12.7 years longer than men in the bottom income quintile. This NAS study finds similar patterns for women: the life expectancy gap between the bottom and top income quintiles of women expanded from 3.9 years for the 1930 birth cohort to 13.6 years for the 1960 birth cohort.
Apparently, all the advances in medical science and healthy living that occurred during this rolling 30-year interval were visited upon the rich a lot more than on the poor.
According to a different study (open; DOI 10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.0918; archived copy here) in JAMA Internal Medicine,
[...] inequalities in life expectancy among counties are large and growing, and much of the variation in life expectancy can be explained by differences in socioeconomic and race/ethnicity factors, behavioral and metabolic risk factors, and health care factors.
In 2014, there was a spread of 20.1 years between the counties with the longest and shortest typical life spans based on life expectancy at birth.
—NPR
additional coverage:
- Boston Globe (about CRS report)
- WPVI-TV (about JAMA study)
- Time (about JAMA study; Javascript required)
- WESA-FM (about JAMA study)
- The Park Record (about JAMA study)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday May 29 2017, @05:29PM (3 children)
I am as serious as an ebola plague. Eternity is not "a long freaking time," it's *forever.*
Think about it this way: suppose that as a human you can appreciate and have, say, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that's 100 quintillion) years of more or less unique experiences. That's it. After that, things start looping, because there's only so many possible configurations you can comprehend by virtue of BEING human. In other words, you've literally seen and done it all, and this includes all sorts of horrible torture you chose to engage in for the sole reason that it's something you hadn't experienced yet.
*You are no closer to the end of eternity than when you began.* And now you have no choice but to loop it.
Forever.
Boredom is the eternal Hell of the immortal. At some point, even if it's a number of years too big to represent in a 64-bit pointer, you will wish more than anything to die. And you won't be able to. You will be in Hell.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 29 2017, @08:14PM
Douglas Adams tangled with this a bit - the Restaurant at the end of the Universe, time travelling immortals watching every movie ever made, etc. and always being so very bored by it all.
If you take time travel out of the equation, then there's a lot to try to accomplish before the heat death of the Universe, including sustaining your consciousness into another Big Bang, if you can.
I would imagine older immortals would tend to take things more slowly... but, who knows, haven't met one yet as far as I know.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @02:33AM (1 child)
It's trivial to create new experiences. Just delete the old ones.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday May 31 2017, @02:53AM
This is not eternal life proper, then...this is akin to reincarnation.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...