What Americans Die From Vs. What the News Reports On

Cancer at #2 is more age-related. But that too is fairly preventable. Roughly 50% of cancers are thought to be related to poor lifestyle choices.

Point being - these are major causes of early death.

You could spend your whole life as the pillar of the community with time for everyone and without an enemy in the world, to live a whole 100 years. Along the way you might have made hundreds of friends and given so much to the world. However, you aren't going to make the news.

Meanwhile, a five year old that gets to meet an nasty brutal end could be in the paper for weeks, with the whole town turning out for the funeral and the whole nation taking note. The five year old would not have lived long enough to 'achieve' anything beyond potty training, yet many words could be written about them.

This is just how the world works. The thing is though, there has been much progress in recent decades on what works for longevity. It is not complicated, you just have to eat mostly plants, get about mostly with your own feet, say hello to people, stay away from the toxic chemicals and keep the old grey cells busy. Accident and communicable disease permitting, you should be able to live longer than your ancestors ever did, with a better 'healthspan'.

If you look at the adverts that pay for the news, everything is working against you. They want to get you to be car dependent and wasting lots of money on highly processed food that slowly gets you. Even by watching the news, you are spending time that could be spent in the company of actual human beings.

If the news was to report on what people do die from, as in the non-communicable diseases that go with car dependency and a high-fat diet devoid of fibre, then they would not be 'advertiser friendly'.

Except the majority of people in the US at least aren't healthy. So why are we elevating that question to be something that should be discussed nightly when it doesn't affect most people (as shown by death rates by cause)?

That's still a specific choice with wide ranging implications. Not saying we should or shouldn't report on it, but saying your question has pretty deeply ground assumptions on "importance". And it is not a given.

What I mean is that the time of "timely deaths" can be influenced by human action. If most people die of cancer and heart disease, we should work on avoiding an early death from these causes.

If we can add 2 years of time to our "timely" death of heart disease by eating better, we should do so instead of worrying about terrorism.

There is a whole section in the article about that.

People hit by cars are no less dead.

But of course that won't happen because nurturing the fear is the point, it's how they control people.

Just a hundred years ago, they were unheard of. Our lifestyle and diet is what is killing us and some very big drinks and food companies have everything to gain from that. They are not natural deaths.

My general guideline is: the higher up the news hierarchy (local, metro, regional, national, international) a personal risk is, the less you should worry about it. Car crashes barely make the local news most of the time, they're worth some attention and care. Airliner crashes make massive headlines, not worth worrying about. The news is very informative here, you just have to understand what it's really saying.

Cancer is quite broad. Many of the risk factors such as obesity overlap with heart disease but a lot of patients are still going to randomly get hit regardless of whether they were exposed to certain substances.

I suspect what may be happening is that we have some very sick, elderly people with only weeks to months to live who catch COVID and die. Those deaths may still be counted as COVID deaths.

People should be raving to get rid of cars, period. Proper mass transit is always a better option.

Just because cars become self-driving doesn't mean that they are not a negative externality.

That's assuming it'll meaningfully reduce the rates of child deaths due to automobiles.

You know what will reduce the rate of child fatality due to automobiles for sure and to an even higher degree? Massively reducing the odds kids and automobiles mix. How do we do that? Have more protected walkable and bikeable spaces. Have fewer automobiles driving around. Design our cities better to not have kids walking along narrow sidewalks next to roads where speed limits are marked as 40 but in reality traffic often flows at 55+.

Its insane to me there are neighborhoods less than a mile from associated public schools that have to have bus service because there is no safe path for them to walk. What a true failure of city design.

No. This is false equivalence. You are far more likely to die in a car than you are in an airplane, full stop.

You are still far more likely to die riding in any normal passenger car in the US on public roadways than you are by taking any commercial air traffic, even if you limit it to instances where the driver of the vehicle the deceased was in was not impaired. And that's deaths, ignoring how many people are severely injured. Throw that into the mix and its absurd how much safer airline travel is.

Next: take a look at death and injury comparisons of highways to light rail and other public transit.

(warning: pdf) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/public/publication/8135...

I’m curious at how many Millennials and younger actually watch the news with any consistency. My sense is it’s mostly older folks that still get their info from TV.

> - In Los Angeles it was mostly entertainment news.

> - In San Francisco it was mostly tech related news

> - In Chicago it was often manufacturing related.

Crazy how well this coincides with the type of billboards you expect to see everywhere in these cities.

I dropped off social media for similar reasons. I didn’t want the outrage of others and hype algorithms dictating what I’d spend time thinking about or reacting to. I wanted to be in control more.

I mean, duh. Los Angeles has 263 sunny days in a year. Mentioning weather there is only worthwhile when it's not the assumed kind. Actual rain, if and when it happens, causes traffic jams.

Interesting. So who is cherrypicking all the "Israel hostages" nonsense flooding my news feeds?

I feel like the right lesson to take from this is that all data sources are coming from a certain perspective and motives, and so you can choose what you want to care about.

Perhaps you don't care about any of that, which is a fine and normal choice. But "this source is biased so I won't consume it" leads, really, to consuming nothing (EDIT: if you go too deep down this route). I think that consuming varying grains of salt is helpful in the general case.

("This source is biased in a specific way that makes me disregard this person's credibility on topics I care about" is a subtly different argument that is valid of course)

if you “manage”/editorialize your algorithm to remove these, you’ll be outcompeted in audience share by someone who doesn’t.

>is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.

As opposed to what? They report on what they think the people that are watching or could watch want to hear about.

This is the same as any business that sells what customers will buy.

Cherry picking is when you select examples that are not representative of the whole to win an argument.

How is the news doing this?

All you're saying is that the news coverage is a reflection of the biases people have (like the one above).