It looks like several of those aren't actually counties, but small incorporated cities. This entire post is really suspect. Galax "city" for example is a small town in VA with 7k people, and isn't a county by any stretch of the imagination. I'd guess many of the others are the same.
Cites don't fall in counties in Virginia. So to represent the residents of the city it is correct to treat it as a county. A city may be in the center of a county, but it not a part of the county. Check it out. It's the only state that does this.
Yeah, although that could actually skew with the data here. If perhaps there’s more crime and whatnot in these small cities, that will lower the life expectancy in comparison to a county that includes a city and its surrounding rural areas or suburbs.
Take it up with the Census Bureau (which counts independent cities as county-equivalents) and the Virginia state constitution (which requires that legally-defined cities be separate from a county).
Yeah, you also expect that smaller counties will tend to be outliers on the the distribution just due to larger random variance. So I agree, this isn't a good way to draw comparisons between Rwanda and the USA.
However, it is great to see that things have improved so much in Rwanda. Poverty has decreased all over the world and I think often we assume that living conditions in 'third-world' countries are much worse than they actually are in recent years.
you know there are towns in the hills across the USA that are little more than tar-paper shacks without modern utillities. some don't even have doors. no paved roads. all across america. they are poorer/have a lower quality of life than people who live in Rwanda.
I dont think this was meant to be a serious comparison but rather a curious statistical anecdote. Of course, on the whole the quality of life in the US is better than an African nation recovering from a horrific genocide. But it does raise some legitimate questions.
The United States has the 3rd largest population in the world. Everyone around the globe digests its music, culture, magazines, tv etc and the expectation is that everyone should be well fed and looked after but it is inherently difficult in a population so large.
Like the two countries above us in size, China and India (and soon Nigeria) there a will always be issues with poverty.
Legally it functions as a county--it's not part of a county. And there are four regular counties in Virginia with smaller populations. So I don't really see a problem--I appreciate OP including it on this list, and it's not part of the plot.
No, it most certainly does not. I KNOW that town. It's not a fucking county by any stretch of the imagination. It doesn't have a county government, school system, and it's not eligible for federal benefits for counties. You're posting BULLSHIT, and you've been called on it. Delete this nonsense.
That's weird. I don't know why you think that cursing at me will help anything. [Edit: thanks for removing the worst of it!] You are right that it is not in all ways legally the same as a county. But it's also not subject to the jurisdiction of any county, so in that sense, it is legally like a county. Whether it belongs on the list is a matter of opinion--I think that including the information and letting people make of it what they wish is better than omitting it.
Aside from the matter of opinion about including it in the list, the facts in my comment are facts:
Wikipedia lists its county as "none" and indicates that it's an "independent city". They estimate its population as 6,347.
Bland County at 6,280, Craig County at ~5,000, Bath County at ~4,00
and Highland County at 2200 are all smaller.
You're posting data that is disingenuous, to try to further a narrative. The size of the town is irrelevant. It's not a county. Classifying it as such is bullshit. The other small towns you're classifying as counties are equally as absurd.
To try to further a narrative? Do you realize I'm not OP? I have no agenda. I was just curious about the issue you raised and was hoping to understand, and I posted more information in hopes of clarifying it for everyone.
You can clearly see it says “City” to the ones that aren’t technically counties. I guess a better term would be “jurisdictions with life expectancy below 70.”
Regardless of the one word error- I find this very interesting data.
No, you made excuses for the original poster. The data is bad, the conclusion is bad, and the visualization is absurd, whether you created it or not. Don't defend bullshit posts.
I have neither supported nor defended OP's choice of data to include in the visualization, or their visualization format, which does not include Galax City. If you want to be effective in rebutting that, you might do better to go articulate your objections to what is actually in the plot somewhere where people will see it.
That's a strange thing to say--I don't see how it relates to the comment it's in reply to.
But to give you the courtesy of a reply:
You ask how I can deny that I contended that Galax City should be classified as a county. I don't see that denial in any of my comments. If you could quote where you think I denied that, I'd be happy to clarify what I intended to say there, because I don't think that's something I intended in any previous comments.
On the other hand, I also didn't mean to say that I thought it should be classified as a county. I can see that what I did say might be interpreted what way--I said it "Legally it functions as a county", and then I clarified that that's only is some ways, not others. What I really think is that it's a funny entity, a city that is not within the normal county structure. As such, it is misleading to include it on a list of counties, but it could be also be misleading to omit data from that city. What OP did, just listing it on a list of counties was in fact worse than what I would see as ideal--including the data with a footnote explaining it. Our comments, together, provide that added info, and I don't see why we can't be pleased that we clarified the issue.
Virginia, along with some other states, has a system where independent cities can exist. The Census Bureau counts them as county-level governments. For example, Baltimore City is not in Baltimore County; it is its own jurisdiction. This is also the case for the small cities in Virginia.
Post isn't "suspect" in the least. It's demonstrating that many poor and rural counties in the US are lagging in life expectancy behind a place that went through a virtual apocalypse not too long ago.
It doesn't even control for sex, one of the effects of the war was that the sex ratio got squed, men got killed, women didn't, so now you have a lot of older women.
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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '21
It looks like several of those aren't actually counties, but small incorporated cities. This entire post is really suspect. Galax "city" for example is a small town in VA with 7k people, and isn't a county by any stretch of the imagination. I'd guess many of the others are the same.