There's many claims of longevity which lack official documentation. So you need to live to say 125 and then have a city or governance with a 125 year old piece of paper to back you up.
Therein it's not coincidental that the oldest verified are from places like France, the United States, Canada and Japan.
Some of the documented record-holders turn out to actually be dead, but their families hid their death to continue collecting pensions/social security on their behalf.
This is an important point. No sudden huge finanical loss was incurred when the husband died because of this arrangement. In fact, depending on inheritance tax, the widow might well end up getting a favourable deal (again, financially before anyone accuses me of being callous!). Still, any arrangement in which an individual might benefit from another's death is slightly dubious, much more so if the two parties aren't related.
Too bad she didn't have a Fitbit or Apple health app so we could have that data :-(
--- EDIT:
Who the fuck would downvote that?? Knowing the exercise habits of a 120 year old person should be awesome. You think I'm playing fanboi? Jesus, no it just would have been valuable to know her physical habits. So, explain yourselves.
I didn't downvote you but I certainly don't agree with your point. Data about her exercise is hers. It's private. Just because it might be "useful" (in a cargo-cult'ing "what works for one person surely works for all" unscientific and nonsensical version of "useful") doesn't mean we should have any access to that information any more than access to her email would be "useful" to look at the way 100-year-olds communicate electronically.
In my opinion we should be thinking of ways we can do useful data science without access to private data, not working out ways to make gathering private data easier.
Well, you say that, but given the arrangement, is it? By taking on a viager you effectively act as pension and actuarial agent - and knowing the health of your client is highly relevant to the investment you are making.
This is why one has to have a medical to get health insurance.
I wasn't suggesting no one should have access to other people's data. If there's a good reason, such as informing the basis of a contract in the case of a medical to get health insurance, then both parties benefit - one gets to understand the risk they're undertaking and the other gets insurance. So long as the person having the medical understands what they're handing over that's fine.
What I take issue with is the assumption that any data that could be analysed for some marginal good should be openly available. Data is hugely powerful and incredibly valuable, so we need to take individual privacy in to great consideration. In the case of this old lady the tangible benefits of her data being analysed is so tiny (it's not a controlled study, there's no rigour to 'using a fitbit', and it's a such a small sample size of literally 1 person that any hope of anonymity is impossible) that her privacy is far more important than any possible insight in to ageing that the data might give us.
Dead people don't get much privacy. We already read through their diaries and letters. It's hard to see how they would be harmed by the number of miles they rode a bike being public information.
OP didn't say the data should be taken against her will, more that it was a shame we didn't have access to it. Beyond that, though, I still take exception to the notion that individual privacy should automatically trump [1] the greater benefit of wider society.
There is a general trend in the medical community to adopt consent forms, typically for clinical trials although also more generally as part of health care, that explicitly allow people to state their intent to make their medical data available for research purposes.
Generally, I support the idea that people can voluntarily consent to have their medical data made available for wide-ranged studies. The consent needs to be explicit, and the usage of the data needs to be respectful.
Studying centatarians is probably mainly useful for increasing quality of life for very old people. It's not clear yet whether that translates to useful medical data for the larger population.
> Although the amount Mr. Raffray already paid is more than twice the apartment's current market value, his widow is obligated to keep sending that monthly check. If Mrs. Calment outlives her, too, then the Raffray children and grandchildren will have to pay.
It is very legal and common in France. The overall payment is calculated according to the age of the seller on a scale set down by French law.
It isn't really a purchase or deed contract. It is an agreement between two estates. The property becomes an inheritance so that is why it persists generations. I think that is the best way to explain it anyway.
Then I don't know why the author didn't just say "his family will have to continue paying out of his estate". I suspect that kind of obligation is very legal and common in most of Europe and North America (and probably elsewhere): if someone dies, their debts and contracts are settled against their estate.
The way it's written, it sounds like the family was legally obligated to keep paying until Calment's death, even if the estate ran dry.
The Bible mentions punishments continued to the children, and in some cases up to 10 generations from the person who committed it.
A typical passage might say, "Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me".
I think King David was only allowed to be king because he was the first generation in 10 after such an incident.
I don't know if Israel today still has any crimes that punish the family. It also wouldn't matter for a civil agreement like this.
However, in ancient Israel everyone's debts and land were forfeited every 7 and 49 years, so real estate would be priced according to how far the country was from a reset. That would certainly affect a similar agreement.
It seems most impractical to levy any sort of punishment for ten generations. In the event the family survives that long, the entity charged with punishing them probably won't.
When I said "hard to see how that would be legal", I meant it with regard to modern legal systems, not semi-fictional bronze age legal systems where people can be stoned to death for innocuous things.
If you're looking for a modern example, I think North Korea has a 'three generations of punishment' program. You and your family get sentenced to a labor camp, and if your children are born there they stay there too.
This sort of thing is (in the UK) legal for some timeshares. The common case is your parents buy a timeshare apartment which has a stiff annual maintenance fee. You might not even know about this. When they die, you inherit the property and are on the hook for the maintenance fee. It's usually complicated by the fact that timeshares are easy to buy but very difficult to sell.
I don't know French law, but it likely is that you cannot cherrypick an inheritance; you either accept all the possessions and all the debts of the deceased, or you accept neither (sometimes with some exceptions as in it being legal to immediately cancel renting agreements for houses. Memberships of sporting clubs typically also automatically end at death)
That would mean the children and grandchildren need not pay, but if they don't want to, they wouldn't be able to inherit anything else from the deceased.
Also, for the widow, it will depends on marital law. In some countries, without prenuptial agreements, at marriage, all possessions and debts of each of the people marrying become shared, and any agreement either of the couple reaches with a third party become one with the couple.
Finally, anybody inheriting this would be stupid not to accept the 'burden'. The money already paid is a sunk cost, so it should be ignored, and the expected amount yet to pay would be small compared to the expected gain (see it as a $500 lottery with a >$100,000 payout, at odds of better than 1:100)
And yet she didn't get to experience what my great-grandmother did, which was to live in parts of three centuries. She was born in 1899 and died in 2002.
Admittedly, she probably didn't remember the first '99.
The annual death rate for people in their 90s is probably in the 10s of %, and rising every year. Someone posted a nice infographic where you could put in your age and it would give you some simulated death ages. It was pretty hard to get over 100 even when starting quite close to it.
The Social Security Administration in the United States publishes an Actuarial Life Table that is updated once in a while based on recent experience of life expectancy at various ages, going all the way up to age 119. This table always UNDERestimates a person's probability of living into the future, because the experience of each age group keeps getting better (that is, the death rate keeps decreasing) for each age group over time.
Someone posted a nice infographic where you could put in your age and it would give you some simulated death ages.
I think I saw that posted to HN back in the day. I've recently been looking up new information about longevity, and a link I've not seen posted here before, from the Harvard Gazette,
48 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadTherein it's not coincidental that the oldest verified are from places like France, the United States, Canada and Japan.
That should probably have been a warning sign that she wasn't going to drop dead any time soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment
BTW, I edited the original.
--- EDIT:
Who the fuck would downvote that?? Knowing the exercise habits of a 120 year old person should be awesome. You think I'm playing fanboi? Jesus, no it just would have been valuable to know her physical habits. So, explain yourselves.
In my opinion we should be thinking of ways we can do useful data science without access to private data, not working out ways to make gathering private data easier.
This is why one has to have a medical to get health insurance.
What I take issue with is the assumption that any data that could be analysed for some marginal good should be openly available. Data is hugely powerful and incredibly valuable, so we need to take individual privacy in to great consideration. In the case of this old lady the tangible benefits of her data being analysed is so tiny (it's not a controlled study, there's no rigour to 'using a fitbit', and it's a such a small sample size of literally 1 person that any hope of anonymity is impossible) that her privacy is far more important than any possible insight in to ageing that the data might give us.
[1] Damn, that word's been ruined, hasn't it?
Generally, I support the idea that people can voluntarily consent to have their medical data made available for wide-ranged studies. The consent needs to be explicit, and the usage of the data needs to be respectful.
Studying centatarians is probably mainly useful for increasing quality of life for very old people. It's not clear yet whether that translates to useful medical data for the larger population.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11368361 and marked it off-topic.
Hard to see how that would be legal.
It isn't really a purchase or deed contract. It is an agreement between two estates. The property becomes an inheritance so that is why it persists generations. I think that is the best way to explain it anyway.
The way it's written, it sounds like the family was legally obligated to keep paying until Calment's death, even if the estate ran dry.
A typical passage might say, "Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me".
I think King David was only allowed to be king because he was the first generation in 10 after such an incident.
I don't know if Israel today still has any crimes that punish the family. It also wouldn't matter for a civil agreement like this.
However, in ancient Israel everyone's debts and land were forfeited every 7 and 49 years, so real estate would be priced according to how far the country was from a reset. That would certainly affect a similar agreement.
That would mean the children and grandchildren need not pay, but if they don't want to, they wouldn't be able to inherit anything else from the deceased.
Also, for the widow, it will depends on marital law. In some countries, without prenuptial agreements, at marriage, all possessions and debts of each of the people marrying become shared, and any agreement either of the couple reaches with a third party become one with the couple.
Finally, anybody inheriting this would be stupid not to accept the 'burden'. The money already paid is a sunk cost, so it should be ignored, and the expected amount yet to pay would be small compared to the expected gain (see it as a $500 lottery with a >$100,000 payout, at odds of better than 1:100)
Admittedly, she probably didn't remember the first '99.
The annual death rate for people in their 90s is probably in the 10s of %, and rising every year. Someone posted a nice infographic where you could put in your age and it would give you some simulated death ages. It was pretty hard to get over 100 even when starting quite close to it.
This guy happened to pick the oldest person ever.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
You wrote,
Someone posted a nice infographic where you could put in your age and it would give you some simulated death ages.
I think I saw that posted to HN back in the day. I've recently been looking up new information about longevity, and a link I've not seen posted here before, from the Harvard Gazette,
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/07.20/10-deathquiz.html
is interesting on the long-term trend of increasing life expectancy.
This is pretty cool as well. I'll put this on my list of goals when I'm old.