[rescue] SparcCenter 2000E on Ebay

[Phil Stracchino]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 02:09:51PM -0700, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> --- Phil Stracchino <alaric at caerllewys.net> wrote:
> > And the US makes a poor showing in numerous areas,
> > including life expectancy at age 1 ... 
> 
> Wow - cite the source please...

See about two links back in this thread.

> > but I can't help wonder how
> > much of that particular statistic is not due to any particular
> > failing of US health care so much as it is a symptom of the War
> > on Drugs, thanks to which one of the leading causes of death among
> > males aged 14 to 22 is drug gang members murdering each other.
> 
> Uh, the death rate among males aged 14 -> 22 impacts on the infant
> mortality rate how, exactly? People join gangs for the healthcare and
> get their neborns shot? I don't follow the logic.

That isn't what I said.  You're mixing apples and oranges (possibly
intentionally so).

Prenatal drug exposure affects infant mortality, and also increases the
number of very-low-birth-weight babies.  Death rate among teenage males
affects infant life expectancy.  The two are not the same thing, any
more than disk is memory or CPU clock rate equals throughput.

To illustrate how death rate among teenage males affects infant life
expectancy, let me give a rather exaggerated example.

Suppose for the moment that there is a pandemic disease for which we
have no treatment or prevention (we don't even know the cause or the
vector).  It infects eighty percent of all babies between the ages of
sixteen and twenty months, has a 100% mortality rate among those it
infects, and takes about ten days to kill its victims.  We don't know
why 80% of babies contract it and the other 20% don't, but we know it is
never contracted past the age of two.  Those who survive the disease,
though, generally live until old age takes them out on a bell-curve from
roughly eighty to one hundred years old.  In this scenario, a
one-year-old child has an *average* life expectancy of approximately 18
years.  If the child makes it to two years old, though, then average
life expectancy -- which is now the average of the *survivors* -- jumps
to around 90.

Follow?


-- 
 .*********  Fight Back!  It may not be just YOUR life at risk.  *********.
 : phil stracchino : unix ronin : renaissance man : mystic zen biker geek :
 :  alaric at caerllewys.net : alaric-ruthven at earthlink.net : phil at latt.net  :
 :   2000 CBR929RR, 1991 VFR750F3 (foully murdered), 1986 VF500F (sold)   :
 :    Linux Now!   ...Because friends don't let friends use Microsoft.    :