Young Americans Are Dying at Alarming Rates, Reversing Years of Progress | Hacker News Reader

Young Americans Are Dying at Alarming Rates, Reversing Years of Progress

wsj.com

WSJ really makes you dig pretty far into the article to get to this nugget:

> The U.S. is the only place among peer nations where firearms are the No. 1 cause of death in young people.

For a country that's notorious for going above and beyond to protect children from immorality, it's almost shocking how it'll do basically nothing to protect them from actual death.

Death, hunger, illness, rotting teeth, etc.

The problem (according to half the country) must be the LGBTQ and the teachers indoctrinating them.

@dang

GP is clearly being sarcastic and mocking a current streak in US politics to further politicize and ostracize LGBTQ people instead of addressing issues of violence and drug use against and among children and young people. If the comment really offends your sensibilities though:

1. Earn enough karma (501) to downvote.

2. Earn enough karma (what's the target?) to flag.

3. Email hn@ycombinator.com; @dang doesn't summon him.

Accusing half of a country of being anti-LGBTQ stupid ignorants of big issues is super reductive and you shouldn't be defending this.

I represent half that country. Are you familiar with sexual dimorphism, comrade?

I bet most of those deaths are gangs fighting gangs, that's why nobody cares. If tonorrow US includes Somalia as an overseas territory (like Guam), our stats would show a spike of AK-47 related deaths, even though nothing would have changed on the mainland.

If you compare firearm & vehicle deaths Firearms Deaths per 100,000 population: 14.7 Motor vehicle traffic: Deaths per 100,000 population: 13.7. You only have a 1 person improvement in outcome with another severely regulated segment.

I doubt putting in a licensing regime would significantly improve anything.

Both of those are significant outliers over our peer countries, however, which tells us that this problem could be easily solved if we wanted to. Licensing would help if done properly, as would restrictions on type, storage, etc. – Switzerland has tons of guns but they also have those kind of restrictions and a much lower rate of death or injury. All we need to do is roll back some judicial activism earlier this century and agree that the preamble to the second amendment still has the meaning the founders intended.

Similarly, America has reversed the declining vehicle death trend by subsidizing massive trucks which are designed to maximize the harm they inflict. Some of them would not be legal in other countries due to poor visibility or safety, and others are dangerous due to our culture of not enforcing traffic laws and designing unsafe roads.

All of these are choices and we could simply copy what our peers do to save thousands of lives per year. We have chose not to, but we could make better choices.

I'm not taking the other side, but that's a really bad argument. You're missing a reason for us to think that traffic deaths put any kind of floor on firearm deaths. Given the very different usage patterns, I would expect the two numbers to be basically unrelated. If we try to get at the impact of licensing and regulation by looking only at cars (and we can get very different answers if we look at other things) we see that comparing US historically to US today or US today to some other countries today, safety improvements are probably saving more like 20 people per 100k - bigger than the entire problem that remains with either cars or guns (and "bigger than both combined" is well within the error bars).

And finally, if we can reliably save 1 person per 100k, that's a significant improvement for the 3k people we've saved and the people who love them! Whether it is worth what we have to trade away, and whether we can actually get a reliable improvement, is a separate question (whose answer likely depends on the particular policy proposal under discussion).

I don't really see how this is hard to understand:

The US Federal government exerts control over things it has control over. Since it has limited control domestically (more so, consequences for exerting control domestically) it exerts control outside of the country. So foreign policy can contradict domestic policy easily. The entity has unparalleled resources but cant unilaterally do much for long domestically.

Its tried to do a lot about gun availability periodically in the states, this was always struck down which is why we have more of a free for all now.

> The US Federal government exerts control over things it has control over.

The US Federal Government isn't even close to exerting control over the things it has control over. The federal government could enact firearm policies matching the most restrictive state policies. Closed private sale loopholes, concealed carry permits on a 'may issue' basis (and issued only by an understaffed ATF office upon proof of extensive training). Strict assault weapons ban. Huge hoops to jump though to obtain handguns. Beyond all this, the Constitution is open to amendment and in that area all bets are off.

It derives power from the collection of states and their delegates

It could do those things but like I said, not for long given the current consensus

Correct, which takes us back to my initial observation that the current consensus is to protect children at all costs from immorality, and not lift a finger to protect them from firearms.

paradoxical way to agree but we do agree

https://archive.ph/OwgOY

Dr. Steven Woolf, that’s mentioned in the article, did an interesting interview on PBS Newshour. Here it is:

https://youtu.be/s2N3U2s3COM

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place, But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

I’m seeing a big uptick in normalized degeneracy or vices, no data just the people involved

Maybe I’m just interested in some aspects of some underworlds now

Or people attracted to them dont call it degeneracy or underworlds now

Hard to say

Lots of people are trying to “normalize” lots of things though

tl;dr it’s fetanyl. Youths are adverse to drinking but have insanely easy access and willingness to do fet. I see more and more high school age kids joining the junkies in the streets of Seattle. It’s really wild to me to constantly see high school age kids choosing to join the standard homeless to do drugs all day

When there is no hope for the future people do very odd things. Imagine being a high school kid these days. What do you have to look forward to? Absolutely nothing but misery.

What do they have to look forward to? Same as everyone in the past, maybe more depending on what you value.

In the past you would look forward to having a family, owning property, living life. Now generations Y, Z, and Alpha (these poor souls in particular) have permanent debt, non-existent wealth, global habitat falling apart leading to mass famine and migration, increasing dystopian governments, and being automated out of a job.

There's no there, there for kids. I'm being quite broad with the definition of kids.

I understand those of us who are fortunate to benefit from other's misery might have a differing perspective but that's not the reality for the average individual especially if you're still in school.

In certain portions of the past, you could count on war--not many time zones away, but right in the neighborhood--famine, plague, etc.

War is a constant within the history of the United States continuing until today. While for a lot of folks it's indeed many time zones away, for those unfortunate enough to be in those areas or sent to those areas that's no comfort. As resources grow more scarce over the next handful of decades that far off time zone will get closer and closer to home.

I mean look at COVID and toilet paper. Now imagine that's the only clean water and nutritious food and you'll have an idea of what this will look like.

Your confusing the national consensus, vs state-level consensus.

There is a significant chance of them living to see AGI, immortality and space travel. Half full vs half empty perhaps.

Even if we did succeed at any of these it's not a given that they would be good for everyone.

There is no good that can come of humanity discovering immortality for example. It would be the worst thing we could do. Do we really want an upper class of immortals and a lower class of people who aren't? Because that will happen.

Space travel? Okay so all of the rich stay here on earth and send us peasants off to colonize cold and unforgiving rocks and mine asteroids for them?

Don't even get me started on AGI.

If these things come to pass it won't matter to most kids. They'll be too poor and resource starved to enjoy it just in time for the drought and famines.

>living to see AGI, immortality and space travel.

You mean living to see other people enjoying or otherwise benefitting from these advances. A homeless junkie is not exactly the kind of class with access to groundbreaking immortality treatments.

Realistically, high schoolers of today are going to grow into a post-globalization era, everything will be much more expensive for them, housing and education will be out of reach for many. And then there's the absolute havoc they will inherit with climate change. The next generation is dealt a pretty terrible hand.

They’ll get to experience some of it as indentured servants on some off world colony /s

I believe the technical term is "bloodbag"

AGI seems plausible enough but especially for the other two, I don't think we can take it for granted that the development of these technologies is imminent; that it will be economical, ethical, or just vaguely wise to use them; or that they will be generally good for mental health and quality of life, those things not necessarily being aligned with what does the most for the survival of our species, which inevitably comes up in discussions of being a space-faring civilization.

A comfortable life on a healthy Earth, with less disease and suffering, privacy if you want it, liberty, and favorable opportunities seems both more achievable and reliably "good".

Ridiculous take, travelling the world is cheaper and easier than ever. If you work hard you will likely be able to buy a ticket to visit the moon, something only a few humans have ever done.

Starvation is at an all-time low, you have access to all of human knowledge and the best professors online for free.

The world is great and this is the most exciting time to live.

> If you work hard you will likely be able to buy a ticket to visit the moon, something only a few humans have ever done.

I’d be surprised if more than another couple dozen people make it to the moon in the next generation. Maybe more but certainly almost no one (statistically speaking) will be able to visit the moon by just working hard.

However, I don’t take issue with the rest of your optimism.

The world is not a meritocracy nor has it ever been. This take is absolutely delusional. It doesn't matter how cheap or easy anything is if people make less and have next to no time off which is most people.

Or, "if you work really really hard, you might be able to buy lunch".

Visit the moon, don't make me laugh.

I don't know if you're being intentionally naive or disingenuous.

Increase the easy widespread availability of cheap fresh locally-grown fruits and vegetables. Build as many vertical farms as are needed to always have drone-delivery of fresh produce. Build it at such a scale that anyone can order as much as they want to eat from their smartphone and receive a drone delivered basket containing automatically picked fresh produce from the vertical farm systems nearby.

> Increase the easy widespread availability of cheap fresh locally-grown fruits and vegetables.

Yes, fresh produce is what's needed to address increased deaths from: transportation, homicide, suicide (ok, maybe an impact in general health on this one which does impact mental health), poisoning. I can imagine the billboards, "Thinking of using drugs? Try a freshly picked apple instead!".

Probably the green space that would be created by doing the same project by removing streets to plant orchards would be pretty effective at removing inputs to those deaths. Green spaces that are only available to a few and don't displace streets I'd be less confident in.

In that case the solution isn't more orchards, it's less cars.

More green space less street capacity, harvest would at best be a proxy for calculating/retaining a coverage requirement.

Less cars on the same streets are speed deaths, replacement with traditional buildings are depression related deaths. I think continuous public green roof parks/paths or something would be more practical than actual harvestable plants.

Yes.

> Build as many vertical farms as are needed

In this case I'd argue that number is zero. Regular farms are altogether superior and vertical farms would increase food prices, reducing availability in the end.

Yes but then you have shipping constraints that results in refrigeration and pesticide practices which destroy the underlying nutrient content and flavor of the produce. Whereas with local vertical farms, you have Byzantine machinery that employs a lot of people and produces maximally-nutritious and flavorful produce that is always in season because it's grown locally and drone-deliverable via smartphone request.

You could order a basket of fresh fruits and vegetables and have it get shipped to your backyard or window by drone.

All of these constraints cost far less than the cost of bringing enough light and the materials required to build a vertical farm.

The techno futurism of stuff like vertical farms is one that sounds great on paper, but fails hard due to practical limitations in the real world. Regular farms, even with required translation and other infrastructure, are both cheaper and more sustainable, barring the sun turning off.

You are wrong because without vertical farming humanity will not be able to scale to hundreds of billions of souls as easily. And vertical farming will be necessary on Moon and Mars and Venus and Europa and Pluto and beyond. And we have unlimited space and raw materials with which to assemble vertical farms in space.

We have many bigger issues than farm space that we need to solve before vertical farming makes sense, if this is your reasoning.

Human population is already declining with no external factors like famine pushing us to do so.

We aren't going to have significant populations on any planet that isn't earth for decades.

I don't disagree with you that vertical farms may become useful some day in the long future, although maybe I'd argue we will move to fully artificial factory food before that happens.

People who are healthy enough to live another 30 years will see people being born on Moon and Mars and food being grown in vertical farms on both Moon and Mars and in space. And then another 30 and we'll hit 100 billion.

Then another 30 years and 100 trillion probably.

This'll happen even if nobody explicitly tries to make it happen, just because the economics will work out.

I see no foreseeable future in which it makes any sense to erect massive, power-hungry concrete towers, pump huge volumes of water up into them, build fleets of drones to carry small quantities of vegetables back down to us on-demand, and drive it all with an absurd amount of software and hardware, much of it requiring rare earth materials.

Maybe if we had nearly free/infinite energy it would be possible. It still wouldn't be smart.

Vertical farming may make sense in a small number of cases, likely where existing buildings can be renovated and repurposed. Localized, sustainable horizontal agriculture is way more energy-efficient, cost-effective, and ecologically sound in most cases.

It is known that vertical farms are very cost efficient, or can be. They can outproduce traditional farms in terms of yield given inputs. If that can be increased further, they should be built as open source technologies as much as possible so humanity always remembers how to rebuild pipelines for optimal nutrition and the lowest cost.

You also have year round fresh produce that isn't treated with pesticides or refrigerated, so its taste and nutrition profile are intact. Vertical farms with drone delivery are locally maintainable pipelines for giving humans optimal nutrition at the lowest possible cost and the lowest current possible shipping friction.

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