Benefits fraud seems easier in other counties. Here, you see the occasional news story of someone getting arrested for hiding grandma's body to keep her Social Security check, because they can't have a proper funeral without the government noticing.
I haven't read the linked article yet, but the excerpt is great. I am completely prepared to believe that.
People over like 90 start to look really similar, so you could probably just find another old person if the government tried to check.
It's absolutely hilarious. As to 1, this is a point that's very much there in the paper - one of the biggest tells is that the supercentenarians go away suddenly in places where registration suddenly improves.
If they don't acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I'll just get someone to pretend I'm still alive until that changes.
This is great
But I didn't read about people in Sardinia hiding corpses. But maybe they've had enough practice from other things that they don't get caught.
When I lived in Morocco I often heard about people who were impossibly old, almost always they were a Sufi Shaykh. I actually met one of them who was widely acclaimed to be over 150 years old. He looked old to me but at a guess not a day over 99.
Is Dan Buettner on social media? I wonder how he's coping.
(Probably his swimming pool of money helps.)
It's interesting that there does seem to be a fairly hard ceiling to human aging at the current time. There's a few extreme outliers, although even some of those like Jeanne Calment have been questioned, but it looks like it tops out fairly predictably at around the same point.
My grandfather lived to a couple of week shy of his 103rd birthday, and what was interesting was the sudden switch off. When he was 100 he could have passed for 80 and within about 18 months he looked incredibly frail.
There was a guy who used to sit by me in church, a dapper Italian man with a spectacular mustache. He would walk out of church and light a cigarette and walk to the bus stop. I later learned he was 90 or so then. He quit smoking a couple of years later and I started giving him a ride home. The last time I saw him he was walking a little dog. He said he didn't recognize me because he'd had covid and lost his memory. That was probably late 2020. He didn't make 100, but got close.
At my grandfather's funeral, I met my great aunt, who has recently turned 100, and her opinion was that a) everyone congratulates you if you make it to 100 but b) being 100 isn't all that great and worse because everyone acts like it is. On cue, someone comes up -- "aunt, how wonderful that you're 100"....
My grandfather was genuinely pleased to make it to 100, and he quite liked people bringing it up. I sometimes think he stayed very healthy and relatively dementia-free* until past 100 just so he could hit that milestone.
* he did have cognitive issues, but they wouldn't have been obvious to a stranger.
I'm going to try dressing like an Italian gentleman from the 1950s and see if that helps me live longer.
re: 14
To be honest, that sounds like quite a good choice anyway.
My fencing coach made it to 100 exactly, after "70+" years of coaching. Not sure exactly when he stopped coach, he was definitely still doing it in 1998 at age 91.
One time he was telling a story about an old fencing buddy and said "he was the fencing master for Teddy Roosevelt."
The other 90th birthday party I went to when I was in highschool was the mathematician who ran the summer math program I went to, who made it to 96 and was still lecturing at 94 when he had a stroke.
Whoa, my fencing coach was still a *flight instructor* until age 92.
16, 18: shot, chaser, strongly suggests a sequel to The Princess Bride.
If I skim these articles correctly, vegetables-and-exercise still probably increase my chances of getting to 80 in reasonable health, they just don't do anything extra for my chances of getting to 100?
The trick is to get the vegetables to exercise.
So, it turns out the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to extremely small particles or extremely old humans.
Secrets to a Long Life
1) Avoid war zones
2) Get good genes
3) To be determined.
My grandfather's secret was:
1. Avoid being shot while in actual war zones*
2. Exercise every day into your 80s/90s.
3. Retire at 65 and laugh heartily while collecting your pension for nearly 40 years.
Definitely no workaholism for him. He'd started working in cotton mills when he was about 14. The day he was eligible to retire, he did, and he never looked back while collecting a full scale 1970s final salary pension for the rest of his life.
* RAF in WW2, and then Palestine in 45/46. So he had the pleasure of Hitler trying to kill him and then the Irgun/Palmach, etc.
The oldest people you hear about are nuns. Do we think those records are accurate. I find it hard to imagine living until 118.
Also, what's the deal with the 7th-day Adventist's in Loma Linda?
My own grandfather only made it to 99 but that's still pretty good for someone who was pronounced dead at age 34.
My grandmothers lived to be 100 and 42.
I guess there is a good reason why the Geeblets teachers didn't want them to put "and" in the middle of a number. Like 142.
Speaking of elderly people and rapid decline, my aunt, who was in great spirits when she turned 90, died about a year later after falling and breaking her hip. At first she seemed ready for the long road of physical therapy, but then things took a bad turn and she never made it out of the hospital.
My grandmothers lived to be 100 and 42.
This is the title of your upcoming math scolding book, right? It should be a breakout bestseller.
I'll turn 56 at the end of next month and so far, combining a more-or-less random sleep schedule with a steady diet of caffeine, nicotine, and THC has kept all systems running fine as far as my doctor and I can tell, aside from slightly elevated cholesterol and occasional sore knees and feet. Past results may not be predictive of future events.
Jimmy Carter was able to cast his vote for Kamala Harris. I wonder if he'll last long enough to see her elected or sworn in or if this will be enough.
If he dies before Election Day but his vote counts Trump is totally going to call it election fraud.
Hey, if Trump dies before election day he'll call it election fraud.
By the way, in pursuit of my own apparently plan to achieve extreme human ageing in more than one year per calendar year, I will be in Boston (not the one with the fascists, the one with the colleges) from Thursday to Sunday; I'm available on Friday and Saturday evenings, although I have a flight at 7.35am on the Sunday.
40: I'd be happy to meet up if a group gets together. Friday evening or Thursday evening would work better than Saturday but I could do something on Saturday too. I work remotely most of the time and live in the suburbs, so last-minute changes aren't great for me. But if people can mail something down. Back Bar in Somerville was a hit when we all went there, but people in Cambridge and Somerville might have a better take on good spots.
Thanks mc and heeberton for posting this. I had noted and boolmarked this some time back as a potential interesting guest post for UF but sloth prevailed.
I will note that I had a great-grandfather who lived until 103. My mother would relate visiting him the nursing home in his final year and him saying "Why don't they just let me die Petunia*, why don't they just let me die." Something to look forward to.
*Substitute flower nickname of your choosing.
Why don't they just let me die
I've heard of people who just stop eating and drinking when they reach this point.
It's Cold Front Eve! You guys, I'm so excited. We're not going to be in the 90s tomorrow. I hate climate change.
My mom didn't so much as stop eating, but became unable to swallow because I guess that's one way Alzheimer's works.
On the climate change front, we have yet to turn on the heat. But probably will tonight.
My mom regularly reminds me to never give her any medical intervention ever again. Then my dad says, "Look, if you break your arm, we're going to set it. There are plenty of things that aren't going to kill you but would still be very unpleasant." It's such a fun conversation for all.
There are plenty of things that aren't going to kill you but would still be very unpleasant.
That's just a really bad threat, if you take it out of context.
Particularly if you read it in a Werner Herzog voice, which is the voice I assigned to you dad years ago.
Speaking of animals and houses, yesterday we trapped a raccoon. Was the raccoon what was eating our house? I don't know. So, set the trap again and once again caught something a couple of hours after the trap was set and baited. What is it? I don't know yet because I don't want to go check until daylight just in case the trapped animal is surrounded by other animals trying to open the door of the trap.
It's the particular combination of the gobbledygook in things like 53, coupled with the statistical tie in the polls that gives me such bad anxiety. Like there is absolutely no guard rails on reality for the race to be this close.
53 Trump has become the "sure, grandma, let's get you to bed" meme irl
If it helps, seeing as 1) the Ds have a lead 2) the variance is extraordinarily low and 3) time is running out, there's a strong argument the win probability must be going up, because Trump needs variance to take the lead, there's not much, and there's less and less time for it to play out. If you're 1-0 up with 10 minutes to go and nobody's had a shot on goal for half an hour you're pretty likely to win.
Except you aren't because your analogy will get you red-carded.