This shit is WILD. Turns out the phenomenon of "Blue Zones," where people have exceptionally long lifespans, are not real and it's just people committing pension fraud.
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Apparently there’s a strong correlation between places in Japan with lots of people over 100 with the locations where records were lost in WWII. Because it’s actually fairly easy to forget how old you are if you lose your whole family when you’re a kid, and there’s no paperwork to check
And yet and yet we've known pension fraud is rife in Japan for decades, this dude just did more maths and more proof
Confirm every person in the "super old" Japan population is actually alive and not quietly buried while relatives still collect their pensions. Because that's a longstanding problem
I can't find the report now from the early 2010s from a japanese prefect that found, you guessed it, over 80 percent of their over 100 population was families not reporting deaths
An indirect task of my father's job involved annuity fraud. Sometimes, he would just email his coworkers like, "we're paying this 105-year-old man, which the actuarial tables say is verging on impossible, yet I can't find any local news article about his 100th birthday. Has anyone looked into this?"
The only wild thing here is that there is something like IG Nobel in demography - corporate made up nonsense & if the Nobel family gave their name to it, they should be ashamed!
I worked on a documentary about senescence and anti-ageing science. It’s all total horseshit. The same AI, pivot to video, smoke and mirrors BS. It’s just about raising money for investors and influence. The only things that help you age well are money and socialization.
"According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997. "
This was truly so wild and reminded me of @michaelhobbes.bsky.social discussing cause of death data on Maintenance Phase- turns out documentation is helpful who knew.
There's been little about the longtime owner--I think the family may have insisted on a strict NDA with Global Tetrahedron. It's what I'd do, especially after what happened at Twitter
It's genuinely as if a carrot and a potato had a baby, and the child only got the worst qualities of each parent. Too sweet and too easily overcooked into orange paste!
I regret that I bought the Blue Zones cookbook. The recipes were thoroughly undelicious. Written by a tipsy looking guy. Then I heard Blue Zones was bought by the 7th Day Adventist Church, which is editing the books to put 7th Day stuff in them.
Oh they eat really well. Fish and veggies and no booze. Highest number of centenarians in a religious sect, I believe. I’ve got issue with the culty elements, but diet is definitely good.
ngl the 20 or so years past what most people consider possible and the fact that you have to be roughly that age to be likely to survive childbirth... even without reading the article it seems likely.
The article presupposes a lot. There are probably many reasons why people who knew them would have overlooked a Jeanne-Yvonne swap and not made a fuss about it. I imagine no one thought she would end up being the putative oldest person ever. People mostly don't want to cause a fuss.
Also - apparently the Mediterranean diet is essentially a post-war construct (it was the name of a cook book by an American epidemiologist who created idealised versions of Italian food, with loads more veg and less animal fat). The average Italian had a terrible diet in the 19th and early 20C.
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(excerpt from the actual paper https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3 )
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240917-more-than-95-000-japanese-aged-over-100-most-of-them-women
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-020-0677-5
Confirm every person in the "super old" Japan population is actually alive and not quietly buried while relatives still collect their pensions. Because that's a longstanding problem
You can keep collecting the pension without proof of life, and the system doesn't have many checks. Hmm...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-020-0677-5
They’re handed out by the Journal of Irreproducible Results.
"According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997. "
https://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023
I had heard it was "interesting" that it was often a place where there was less reliable census info.
[yanking the cork out of a vodka bottle with my teeth and chugging it while readying a fistful of chocolate cake]