Iranian election fun

[zerojunkie]

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

kinda of a hijacking (of my making) I guess but periodically we go down this road... so if we don't lead in those catagories who does? Just so we can look at side be side comparisons. Just for the record... statistics on this stuff often fail to represent a valid side by siude comparison. For example, many love to cite live child births and claim Cuba's got a better rate. When you dive into the stats we find that if a direct comparison is used rather than simply relyuing on Cuba's reported rate it is no longer true. (Cuba is extremely generous with itself in compiling its statistics)

Oh, agreed on compulsory education but on non compulsory (meaning private k-12 and university) you're gonna have a hard time denying our position as the best in the world. So, it comes down to how you decide to do your rankings... do you compare our worst to others best or our best to others best.

It would be disingenuous to compare our health care system to a country like Cuba's. I'm saying we're usually among the top ten, but we're not the best. There are other industrialized nations who's health care is better in one or more ways than ours. But I do agree, measuring which health care is better even among industrialized nations isn't something that's very easy or clear cut.

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

You're addressing a "why" when he was simply stating a "what."

and I was saying why his "what" was wrong. :P

[zymote]

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

kinda of a hijacking (of my making) I guess but periodically we go down this road... so if we don't lead in those catagories who does? Just so we can look at side be side comparisons. Just for the record... statistics on this stuff often fail to represent a valid side by siude comparison. For example, many love to cite live child births and claim Cuba's got a better rate. When you dive into the stats we find that if a direct comparison is used rather than simply relyuing on Cuba's reported rate it is no longer true. (Cuba is extremely generous with itself in compiling its statistics)

Oh, agreed on compulsory education but on non compulsory (meaning private k-12 and university) you're gonna have a hard time denying our position as the best in the world. So, it comes down to how you decide to do your rankings... do you compare our worst to others best or our best to others best.

again... you're comparing our lowest to their best...

education... the world sends its best and brightest to our universities. They send their sickest to our best hospitals etc etc. But you're right - money matters in the equation.

Yeah, there's no disputing that the US is by far the best place in the world if you're rich. The difference lies in how the rest of the population lives. Sure we have great private schools and colleges (of which I was a beneficiary), but you don't see our public high school seniors displaying fluency in 3-5 languages, unlike somewhere like the Netherlands. As far as rankings go, I'd just compare our median to theirs, not best to worst.

[name change request]

Originally Posted by zymote

Yeah, there's no disputing that the US is by far the best place in the world if you're rich.

fuck that, i'll dispute it right now

the best place to be if you're rich is wherever the fuck you wanna be cuz you rich foo!

[jaesun]

Originally Posted by matias pecile

my question is - does any of this really even matter considering the ayatollah calls all the shots?

From what I've been reading today they are still protesting even after the threat of violence against them by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They have now gone to the roof tops of buildings screaming "Praise Allah. Death to the dictator" in defiance.

[PETA]

Originally Posted by zerojunkie

It would be disingenuous to compare our health care system to a country like Cuba's. I'm saying we're usually among the top ten, but we're not the best. There are other industrialized nations who's health care is better in one or more ways than ours. But I do agree, measuring which health care is better even among industrialized nations isn't something that's very easy or clear cut.

We're talking different things here though. I was saying we have the best hospitals and schools. By that I don't mean take all of our hospitals etc and average them out and compare the number. I mean take our best hospitals and compare them to State X's ten best. You're offering averages I'm offering top examples of each catagory. Which directly addresses Zymote's comments... money matters.

Originally Posted by zerojunkie

and I was saying why his "what" was wrong. :P

ha - but his what was simply... we fucked up the Iraqi Army really fast. And we did. Besides, you left out the fact that General Franks had ZERO interest in anything other than the military campaign and his disinterest needs to be factorted in too (as well as many other things.... dammit)

Originally Posted by zymote

you don't see our public high school seniors displaying fluency in 3-5 languages, unlike somewhere like the Netherlands.

If there were billions of Dutch speakers they wouldn't nbeed to learn 3-5 languages. Fact is, we have little incentive to learn other languages because English is the lingua franca of the 21st century.

Originally Posted by jaesun

From what I've been reading today they are still protesting even after the threat of violence against them by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They have now gone to the roof tops of buildings screaming "Praise Allah. Death to the dictator" in defiance.

tanks... they squish protesters flat

[name change request]

"There is no better way to govern Iran than democracy and social justice!" - Mohammad Mossadegh

[zerojunkie]

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

tanks... they squish protesters flat

Yeah, it's starting to sound like a song we've all heard before and know how it ends.

[PETA]

Originally Posted by joel

"There is no better way to govern Iran than democracy and social justice!" - Mohammad Mossadegh

Yeah, there was a man full of idea.

The Shah fired him. He refused to accept the termination. He arrested political opponents and spent the remainder of his Presidency in bed refusing to speak with anyone in his gov't dressed in his PJs until he fled over his estate walls.... still in PJs
see Ahmir Taheri's Persian Night for more thorough commentary

[name change request]

lol for some reason today i'm finding you funny when usually i find you annoying

[PETA]

thanks?

there's some awkward wording in that last one...

Mossaddeq was in PJs the entire time... not... Mossaddeq refused to speak to gov't cats dressed in Mossaddeq's PJs

should have read, "refusing to speak with anyone in his gov't while dressed in his PJs..."

[FarangBa]

Originally Posted by BradH

both candidates hate america. does it really matter who wins?

Not that much, but hey.. if they don't like Mousavi either, they are on a roll so they can kick his ass out also.

I'm behind the peeps 100%, & when they are through let's just hope they don't end up with something worse!

Originally Posted by zerojunkie

Yeah, it's starting to sound like a song we've all heard before and know how it ends.

Let's hope not!

[FarangBa]

Originally Posted by tricky

it will be a cold day in hell before Xian accepts any of those statistics. Lol. Good luck with all that...been there

Well, actually it's not the statistics you presented.. In fact I became quite curious until I saw the end notes. (See the sources and see the dates). If you can give me something much more concrete I'd check it out. (Something like, i don't know the US. Dept of Health Statistics! Heck, i'd even check out something from the JAMA if they claimed statistics anywhere closte to the numbers you presented)

Endnotes:

1. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, France, OECD Health Data, 1993; OECD Health Systems: Facts and Trends, 1993.

2. Remaining statistic charts listed in Where We Stand, by Michael Wolff, Peter Rutten, Albert Bayers III, and the World Rank Research Team (New York: Bantam Books, 1992)

3. Health Affairs, vol. 9, no. 2, cited by Steven Randall, Jim Naureckas and Jeff Cohen in The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 65.

4. Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, Through the Media Looking Glass: Decoding Bias and Blather in the News (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 81.

5. The Way Things Aren't, p. 66.

6. This was the finding of a county-by-county national survey conducted by the National Cancer Institute in 1975. Cited in "N.J.'s Chemical Belt Takes Its Toll: $4 Billion Industry Tied to Nation's Highest Cancer Rate," Washington Post, February 8, 1976, p. A1.

7. Aaron Antonovsky, "Class and a Chance for Life," in Inequality and Justice, Lee Rainwater, ed., (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1974), p. 177.

8. S. Leonard Syme and Lisa Berkman, "Social Class, Susceptibility and Sickness," American Journal of Epidemiology 104, no. 1 (July 1976), pp. 1,4.

9. Berkeley study: George A. Kaplan and others, "Inequality in income and mortality in the United States: analysis of mortality and potential pathways," British Medical Journal, Vol. 312 (April 20, 1996), pp. 999-1003. Harvard study: Bruce P. Kennedy and others, "Income distribution and mortality: cross sectional ecological study of the Robin Hood index in the United States," British Medical Journal, Vol. 312 (April 20, 1996), pp. 1004-1007.

10. Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer And the Poor Get Prison (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1990), p. 75.

11. Quoted in Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 270.

[FarangBa]

I mean like this:

ugust 22, 2007 Why the U.S. Ranks Low on WHO's Health-Care Study

By John Stossel
The New York Times recently declared "the disturbing truth ... that ... the United States is a laggard not a leader in providing good medical care."
As usual, the Times editors get it wrong.
They find evidence in a 2000 World Health Organization (WHO) rating of 191 nations and a Commonwealth Fund study of wealthy nations published last May.

In the WHO rankings, the United States finished 37th, behind nations like Morocco, Cyprus and Costa Rica. Finishing first and second were France and Italy. Michael Moore makes much of this in his movie "Sicko."
The Commonwealth Fund looked at Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States -- and ranked the U.S. last or next to last on all but one criterion.
So the verdict is in. The vaunted U.S. medical system is one of the worst.
But there's less to these studies than meets the eye. They measure something other than quality of medical care. So saying that the U.S. finished behind those other countries is misleading.
First let's acknowledge that the U.S. medical system has serious problems. But the problems stem from departures from free-market principles. The system is riddled with tax manipulation, costly insurance mandates and bureaucratic interference. Most important, six out of seven health-care dollars are spent by third parties, which means that most consumers exercise no cost-consciousness. As Milton Friedman always pointed out, no one spends other people's money as carefully as he spends his own.
Even with all that, it strains credulity to hear that the U.S. ranks far from the top. Sick people come to the United States for treatment. When was the last time you heard of someone leaving this country to get medical care? The last famous case I can remember is Rock Hudson, who went to France in the 1980s to seek treatment for AIDS.
So what's wrong with the WHO and Commonwealth Fund studies? Let me count the ways.
The WHO judged a country's quality of health on life expectancy. But that's a lousy measure of a health-care system. Many things that cause premature death have nothing do with medical care. We have far more fatal transportation accidents than other countries. That's not a health-care problem.
Similarly, our homicide rate is 10 times higher than in the U.K., eight times higher than in France, and five times greater than in Canada.
When you adjust for these "fatal injury" rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation.
Diet and lack of exercise also bring down average life expectancy.
Another reason the U.S. didn't score high in the WHO rankings is that we are less socialistic than other nations. What has that got to do with the quality of health care? For the authors of the study, it's crucial. The WHO judged countries not on the absolute quality of health care, but on how "fairly" health care of any quality is "distributed." The problem here is obvious. By that criterion, a country with high-quality care overall but "unequal distribution" would rank below a country with lower quality care but equal distribution.
It's when this so-called "fairness," a highly subjective standard, is factored in that the U.S. scores go south.
The U.S. ranking is influenced heavily by the number of people -- 45 million -- without medical insurance. As I reported in previous columns, our government aggravates that problem by making insurance artificially expensive with, for example, mandates for coverage that many people would not choose and forbidding us to buy policies from companies in another state.
Even with these interventions, the 45 million figure is misleading. Thirty-seven percent of that group live in households making more than $50,000 a year, says the U.S. Census Bureau. Nineteen percent are in households making more than $75,000 a year; 20 percent are not citizens, and 33 percent are eligible for existing government programs but are not enrolled.
For all its problems, the U.S. ranks at the top for quality of care and innovation, including development of life-saving drugs. It "falters" only when the criterion is proximity to socialized medicine.

[Dionysos]

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

If there were billions of Dutch speakers they wouldn't nbeed to learn 3-5 languages. Fact is, we have little incentive to learn other languages because English is the lingua franca of the 21st century.

Nevermind they're still learning 1-3 languages beyond what you suggest is required(namely Dutch & English).

[PETA]

Originally Posted by Dionysos

Nevermind they're still learning 1-3 languages beyond what you suggest is required(namely Dutch & English).

So what? Bully if they speak Finn, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian... there are fewer of those people that there are New Yorkers.

The fact remains that the language of common currency is english and we don't have to learn other languages but people like the Dutch, Finns, Swedes etc have much more reason to learn ours.