48 in poverty seems low
85 being illiterate seems high
I have some really bad news for you about the literacy rate in the U.S.
It’s unsurprising if you understand how horrible & scientifically uninformed popular reading pedagogy was until a few years ago. It probably explains the overreliance of meetings at work where written communication should suffice.
21% is pretty fuckin high
Unfortunately this is accurate. Half of adults in the US are unable to read past a sixth grade level. 20% are functionally illiterate.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy-rates-by-state
How is that possible? People use the internet every day where you need to read constantly. Do those people live without any internet?
If you look at the data, it tells you about 1/3 of those who are illiterate comes from foreigners so that is not surprising. But the largest demographic of illiterates in the US is white people lol
Also they are functionally illiterate. It’s a wide encompassing term that ranges from people who can’t read English because they just moved here to people who can only read basic words like stop and go or words they encounter often in life but not much more than that.
I would imagine many people who are functionally illiterate just go to work, watch tv, and sleep.
Only one getting shot per day? Fuckin’ rookie numbers!
E: extra word
That seems high even by US standards. After a year, basically everyone would be dead.
Apparently the rate is 125 killed by a gun and 200 shot and wounded per day. I don’t know how that would extrapolate from the total population down to 400 people but you are correct that it is, in fact, much less than one.
https://everytownresearch.org/report/gun-violence-in-america/
Err, that’s a nice little quip but that bit about shooting isn’t even remotely close to reality.
Example: There’s about 80,000 - 100,000 gun related injuries in the USA per year. That’s about 250 people getting shot each day. However, we are working against a population of ~330,000,000 in the USA. If you take the 100,000 / 333,000,000 = 0.0003. That’s 0.0003 per year per person. So the chance of a person getting shot in a year in the USA is about 1 in 3,330.
To look at this in another way, the fellow said there’s a group of 400 people and 1 is shot each day. That means in 1 year, nearly everyone in the room would have been shot, and in 2 years some people would be shot twice.
Look, the USA is pretty disgusting with some issues, but if you want to throw numbers around, at least make them accurate, otherwise it undermines the whole argument.
Ackshully
You don’t think it’s important to know the ACTUAL numbers when discussing issues?
If I said 50 million people were eaten by sharks each year and tried to convince my local town to ban swimming, don’t you think it’s important I get the number right?
The numbers presented in the original quote were basically off by 1000x. We’re not talking nit-picking here. It’s off by orders of magnitude.
One in 400 people is shot every day? Yeah I’m gonna call BS on this one.
Maybe it’s just one guy getting shot so often it’s not even newsworthy anymore.
Gunshot Gary keeps shooting himself in the leg to build up an immunity.
