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Posting this at top level since its burried in replies:
Fact time. You don’t always die when shot, and the US is a baby factory. I can’t find good stats on non-lethal gunshot, so I’ll do the rest.
Verdict: Pretty accurate.
- 8.4% without health insurance (33 in 400)
- 11.5% poverty rate (46 in 400)
- 20% adults at or below literacy level 1 (80 in 400)
- 57% mental illness untreated (228 in 400) (requires math from NIH source)
References:
Btw your 20% figure includes those at Level 1 literacy, only 8% are below level 1 (from your source)
What is level 1 defined as?
People with Level 1 Literacy can:
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Locate one piece of information in a sports article
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Locate the expiration date on a driver’s license
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Total a bank deposit entry
People with Level 2 Literacy can:
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Interpret appliance warranty instructions
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Locate an intersection on a street map
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Calculate postage and fees when using certified mail
People with Level 3 Literacy can:
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Write a brief letter to explain a credit card billing error
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Use a bus schedule to choose the correct bus to take to get to work on time
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Determine the discount on a car insurance bill if paid in full within 15 days
People with Level 4 Literacy can:
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Explain the difference between two types of benefits at work
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Calculate the correct change when given prices on a menu
People with Level 5 Literacy can:
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Compare and summarize different approaches lawyers use during a trial
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Use information in a table to compare two credit cards and explain the differences
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Compute the cost to carpet a room in a house
i can’t interpret warranty instructions, but I’ve done the credit card thing. I also found the phones from the manufacturer that were compatable with my non-international telecommunications service. (I got the first Sony waterproof release in the age of ricepacks)
So I’m… esoteric.
I saw that warranty one and was like, welp, I’m already in trouble.
Then I got down to the lawyer one, and was like hey only lawyers can understand lawyers in court. A lawyer I am not.
Damn, I’m fairly dumb but I think I could put this on my resume, I’m a lot higher in literacy than I expected.
A lot of them seem to be mathematical questions
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Oh good catch. Will edit.
I wanted to test myself to get a sense of what “level one literacy” actually meant but you have to pay to take the test and the OECD already gets enough of my money as is.
Here’s a good study on gunshoot statistics thay include nonletal gunshot wounds:
Which comes out to about 1/7 of a person in that room being shot per year.
Yea, if 1/400 people were shot a day, nearly everyone would have been shot by the time they were 2.
But its not as shocking if I say that there are a million people in the room and one gets shot per day! (But I mean, that still seems significant to me.)
In their example, almost everybody is getting shot every year. Happy birthday, BLAM!
Quick Google results showed me between 15 and 20% lethality for single GSWs
That needs an addendum, otherwise it sounds like any GSW is about as lethal as covid19:
Not accounting for suicides and precision shooting, a single GSW is likely an accident, which drives the lethality down considerably. Filter out unintentional single GSWs and I bet the lethality is rather different.
This article indicates there’s no difference, in fact, and is lower than the conservative percentage I was getting earlier.
That’s good to see a lot of the statistics are close, and I appreciate the sources.
That said, for a full picture, I think you should mention that the average 20 year old doesn’t have 18 gunshot wounds (365 wounds per 400 per year, is about 9.1 wounds per person per decade, or 18.2 wounds per 20 years per person)
So I’d appreciate if you include a bullet point about that.
You didn’t fact-check how many trans people there are in the U.S.1
It looks to be between 0.5% and 1.6% of the total U.S. population (2 - 6 in 400).
References:
- https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf
- https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-say-their-gender-is-different-from-their-sex-assigned-at-birth/
Semi-related, the number of intersex people (in the literature they talk about people with “disorders of sexual development”) have also been estimated to be around 1% of the population (4 in 400), source:
https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a
1 yes, the U.S. isn’t mentioned in the OP, but your sources are looking at U.S. demographics and so I will continue with the U.S.-centrism already present.
Some Thoughts (oh boy):
There is a weird logic to pointing out how few trans people there are actually are in the OP. Even if there were many more trans people, (like if there really were 1 in 5 trans people as is commonly mis-perceived), would that make the GOP’s campaign of fear-mongering and animus any more justified? I don’t think this is what Shon (
@gayblackvet) was going for, but it almost seems like a consequence of how the message was written.Maybe I’m wrong here, but does it seem like way it is written implies that the problem is not that the trans panic is unjustified in its fear of trans people, but that it is merely blown out of proportion? Maybe the angle was that even if we assume trans people are a problem, it’s still so few people it’s not worth all this panic and legislation (there are >500 anti-trans bills in the U.S. right now, over 40 of them have already passed).
Rhetorically this perspective-taking might be effective in appealing to mildly transphobic centrists or moderate conservatives who are not entirely comfortable with trans people but who might not want to be perceived as transphobic and don’t want to be associated with the rabid and vocal transphobia of the GOP.
That wedge between a more moderate closeted transphobe and a more openly transphobic right-wing one is politically useful, so I am not necessarily complaining, but there is a concern here about whether tackling transphobia is really the goal here, and if so how we should best go about that.
my favourite is how tennessee effectively made insurance more expensive for everyone because one trans child wanted to play sports with her friends in school
what’s the story?
they basically put up a bill that banned tenncare from contracting with organizations that offer gender affirming care in any state, which is… a lot of organizations which limits the options which makes everything more expensive. at the time it was all based on a lawsuit from one 8 year old trans girl who wanted to play sports with her friends.
Nothing more Republican than having the government artificially restrict free market capitalism… wait that not what every Republican I’ve ever known has said they support. Weird.
Those trans people better not play sports! /s
I feel like it would be ok as long as they have health insurance.
Americans care a lot about debating what’s “fair” except when it comes to poverty
Holy shit the literacy rate is kinda shocking…
Do people not like to read? A quarter of the population is fucking NUTS
deleted by creator
This video is a great discussion of literacy. To put that rate into context, ‘illiterate’ often includes people that can read and write a little bit, but still struggle with some vital or everyday tasks. According to Wikipedia, 20% of US adults have a literacy level at or below level 1 which would be 80 people in this example. This report has a ton of stats and also defines each level of literacy.
85 is a bit high. It would be around 60, and that is the global illiteracy rate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate Still too high though.
This basically comes down to how you define literacy.
Nationally, 21% of Americans have level 1 or below literacy on the PIAAC literacy scale. That’s probably where the 85 people came from.
12% are at level 1, meaning they can only read at a basic level. 4% are functionally illiterate, and 4% had some kind of cognitive or physical handicap or language barrier that kept them from being surveyed.
About 34% of illiterate Americans were born outside the US, so they’re possibly literature in another language.
I have no idea how no one has picked up on this and have all decided “Americans are dumb”.
What everyone has missed is the literacy statistic is for ENGLISH literacy. The other 20% or so are pretty much all immigrants that cannot speak English and there aren’t tens of millions of adults with the mental capacity of a rock.
I’m from Connecticut. Willimantic area, not Greenwich area, but we were still less damaged by Jim Crow and similar policies (except for redlining, that fucked everyone). I spoke to a man in 2017, who had been born in the US, seemed aware and thoughtful, and had to get his granddaughter to write down the claim number I wanted to give him, because he didn’t know his numbers or letters.
I didn’t ask, even though it was killing me with curiosity. His granddaughter probably heard the curiosity in my voice, and explained that in 1967, when he was able to leave school, the teachers didn’t care whether a black kid learned to read. They let him leave school at twelve, even though it was well after brown v the board of education. By the time he wanted to learn to read, he was older, had full time work, and it just didn’t click.
That man was underserved by his government well past the point of mistreatment, not stupid. He’s obviously only one data point, but he’s not the only black man who was treated differently in schools
Not entirely.
Only about a quarter of them were born in another country. Then you’ve got e.g. people with severe cognitive delays or some kind of physical impairment such as blindness. And there’s also people whose education system failed them.
It’s honestly a mix of things.
Some people didn’t have an opportunity to learn in the first place. Lack of education doesn’t make someone “fucking NUTS”.
I think they meant a quarter of the population being illiterate, that is, that fact that such a statistic exists, is “fucking nuts,” not the illiterate population themselves.
That’s the beauty of the 400 system. Once you become part of one facet, you can achieve so much more. Poor? Now you have the opportunity to be illiterate and definitely not have health insurance. Which is convenient as you will either participate in or be privy to a crime that increases your odds of getting shot. Let’s say you hit the jackpot on all these and you recover from your injuries, you still have the opportunity to participate in mental illness!
Are they also trans?
If at least 1 person in the room of 400 is shot per day they’d be dead in just over a year…
Last I checked the population of the US wasn’t plummeting, so what else is wrong here?
Oh no I see the point, but I’m hardly going to believe a point that’s surrounded by obvious mistakes or embellishments
In this case, being more accurate would have distracted from the overall point.
Granted, attracting the dismissive comments of insufferable pedants and the wilfully obtuse isn’t ideal either, but here we are 🤷
If anything the people pointing out how others are missing the point, are actually missing the point…
There’s a middle ground between ‘autistically measuring in decimals’ and blowing something completely out of proportion to make a forced point.
People are just getting defensive because it’s an underlying point they agree with (rightly so) and going on attack for anyone calling it out for being disingenuous.
Not to detract from the overall message, buuuut…
48,313 gun deaths in US in 2021.
333,000,000 people in US
On those rates 0.05 people in a room of 400 would be shot per year, so 1 person per 20 years.
It’d 1 person every 2 years in a room of 4,000.
Also those mental health numbers are off given the lifetime prevalence of most disorders being around 5%.
2/400 (0.5%) of the population identifying as trans would be 1,665,000 people - which may be plausible but idk, I generally work on the figure of ~4% of any population being LBGTQI.
Poverty numbers are probably bang on.
“shot” does not mean “killed”.
What I can find is roughly 315 people getting shot every day in the US. Out of 333m, that’s roughly 1 in 1m daily. In a room of 400 that’s 1 per 6.8 years.
Because all the other shit is those two people’s fault somehow, obvs.
They need to make up reasons why their god is being such a piece of shit.
You just accurately (and accidentally?) summarized all religions.
Now the post says shot and not killed. I think that distinction is important. But I imagine those statistics are insane.
I fact checked in other comments 😉 OP is fairly accurate overall, but I didn’t include gunshots since I couldn’t find reliable enough stats on non-fatal.
It’s insane because it’s still bullshit, 1 in 400 would mean that over 800,000 Americans get shot every day, and every single person in America gets shot every 13 months or so.
