• silvercove@lemdro.id
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    1 year ago

    This is the ultimate irony. America spent 60 years trying to condemn Cubans to poverty. Yet Americans live less than Cubans do.

  • guyrocket@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Life expectancy for men = 73.2 years in the USA.

    So if I retire at 66, I can expect about 7.2 years of retirement. That would even be 1 year before my social security retirement age of 67. And I will have worked 52 years to achieve that retirement (I started a part time job at age 14). Work 52 to get 7.2.

    Not exactly a great deal, is it? Shouldn’t retirement be at least a decade?

    • ATQ@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      If you want the government to pay for your “retirement” then the retirement age is 66. But you can retire literally whenever you want as soon as you have the resources. Which might be in your late 40s or early 50s depending on education, career, and personal goals.

      Also keep in mind that “life expectancy” is an average that is reduced by men that die from car accidents, strokes, and whatever else much earlier than 66. The life expectancy of a 60 year old male in the US is 80.

            • ATQ@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Did you expect that younger generations would just inherit all their wealth? I’d have thought that this kind of landed gentry outlook wouldn’t be what a tankie like yourself would promote. Instead, due to the linear nature of time, young people of every country in every stage of human history generally have less wealth than their elders. Because they’ve had less time to accumulate it. What part of that are you struggling with?

                • ATQ@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  Awwwwh, don’t have a link for hurt feelings huh? I accept your apology. 😂🤣😂

      • JoBo@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        You’re accidentally tapping into the problem here. Wealthy Americans can and often do retire very early, enjoying decades of comfortable retirement. That is made possible by the people who break their bodies for very little pay and who get little or no opportunity to retire at all.

        It’s pretty bad everywhere. But in the US it is especially obscene, thanks to the lack of universal healthcare and the enormous disparity between pay at the top and bottom, and the leaky to non-existent safety nets.

        I don’t know how you manage to grasp half of that picture without apparently even realising that the rest of it must exist.

        • ATQ@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          If you want to propose that the US should have better healthcare and other social safety nets, you’ll get no argument from me. If you’d like to propose that the wealthiest should pay for these things via taxes (or other lawful disincentives), I’ll agree with that too.

          But depending on how left or right you consider yourself then a significantly reduced, government sponsored, retirement age is a more complicated question. Someone on the right might tell you that an earlier retirement is a reward for the effort and ingenuity you expended through your life. Likewise, someone on the left might argue that you have a responsibility to be a productive member of society for as long as you are able. Even moreso if you are particularly talented. I, personally, believe that there is plenty of room for diversity of outcome without compromising equality of opportunity.

          My only point in my first couple comments was more than a decade of government retirement is not only possible but also likely for anyone in the US that makes it through their heart-attack years in their 50s, and that retirement earlier than that is possible based on education, career, choices, and luck. As illustrated by the fact that just over 50% of the US population is retired at 55. Everything after that was just antagonizing a troll. Which I find hilarious. YMMV.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Other countries that are ahead of the U.S. in terms of life expectancy include: Colombia, Uruguay and Chile; Costa Rica, Panama and Puerto Rico; and Turkey, Greece and Albania.

    The U.S. ranks around 50th in the world for life expectancy (depending on data and what is considered a country or territory), and this has dropped 2.7 years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    However, the decrease in mortality for pneumonia (38.5 percent) helped the other way, as did a reduction in risk from other respiratory illnesses and Alzheimer’s disease.

    The country has a high ratio of medical professionals and focuses on prevention and primary care.

    In the years since, China’s life expectancy has steadily caught up with, and could now overtake, that of the U.S., depending on the country’s 2021 data.

    According to the World Bank, global life expectancy dropped, from 72.76 to 72.75, for the first time in 2020, after recording 60 years of gains since 1960.


    The original article contains 457 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

      • GFGJewbacca@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Thank you! I was thinking the same thing. I hate it when news sources perpetuate racist disinformation.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      mortality for pneumonia

      In case anyone doesn’t know where this stuff comes from: Think grandma breaking her leg getting into hospital lying in bed all the time and thereby contracting pneumonia. She had to stay that long because her bones don’t heal as they once did, and she contracted and died from pneumonia because her vascular and immune systems aren’t what they once were. Incredibly common cause of death among the elderly.

  • Ignacio@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Cubans, as far as I know, are Americans too. I don’t recall Cuba being part of Asia.

  • HurlingDurling@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    So the CDC chooses the year where when we where still dying from covid because an orange idiot and his group of red hat morons to set the average? No shit it will go down.

        • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          Truth: I clicked that expecting to read about a Cuban vaccine for liberalism (mostly wondering how that worked)

        • macrocephalic@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I really admire what Cuba has done in the last half century. They’re a fairly resource poor island nation who were cut off suddenly from the trading partner who accounted for 85% of their trade. While they’re constantly struggling financially, they have a huge rate of tertiary education, better female participation in the professional workforce than almost all nations, a decent happiness score and a now a better life expectancy than the richest nation in the world.

          However, the creation of COVID vaccines was not difficult. COVID is not that dissimilar to a number of existing viruses which we already have vaccines for. The production of a simple vaccine is easy, but rounds of testing and approval take a long time. This is how come Cuba could create vaccines based on existing techniques with slight tweeks.

          • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            However, the creation of COVID vaccines was not difficult.

            Looking at the shitfest around the vaccines in the west i would say otherwise, including how they refuse to release the patents.

            • macrocephalic@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              The ones you had to wait for in the west were mRNA vaccines. They are newer, more complicated, and in theory customisable to a wider range of infections. While I’d love to see these opened up and used for their full potential I can see why the pharma corps don’t want that.

              While I haven’t looked, I’ll bet that the Cuban ones were"simply" using a deactivated virus - which is less effective and especially less effective against mutated strains.

      • HurlingDurling@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        But they didn’t have people preferring to take horse dewormer, saying it didn’t exist, or trying to drink bleach instead of taking the vaccine.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          You may have just hit on part of the reason why Americans can now expect to live three years less than Cubans.

    • eatmyass [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      It was a global pandemic. So Cubans were also dealing with Covid.

      Also in 2021 Biden was president. And they say life expectancy went down from 2020, the year trump was president