'Longest Living Human' Says He Is Ready For Death At 145 (telegraph.co.uk) 314
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes an article from The Telegraph: An Indonesian man who claims to be the longest living human in recorded history has described how he "just wants to die". Mbah Gotho, from Sragen in central Java, was born on December 31, 1870, according to the date of birth on his identity card. Now officials at the local record office say they have finally been able to confirm that remarkable date as genuine. If independently confirmed, the findings would make Mr Gotho a staggering 145 years old -- and the longest lived human in recorded history.
"One of Mr Gotho's grandsons said his grandfather has been preparing for his death ever since he was 122," according to the article. Though he lived long enough to meet his great-great grandchildren, he's already outlived four wives, all 10 of his brothers and sisters, and all of his children.
"One of Mr Gotho's grandsons said his grandfather has been preparing for his death ever since he was 122," according to the article. Though he lived long enough to meet his great-great grandchildren, he's already outlived four wives, all 10 of his brothers and sisters, and all of his children.
December 30th (Score:3, Funny)
I was born on December 30, 1870 and as soon as my birth certificate arrives in the mail I'll be able to prove it.
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I was born on December 30, 1870 and as soon as my birth certificate arrives in the mail I'll be able to prove it.
Big deal. Your 6-digit id would seem to indicate that there are those older than you here on /. - but not me :-)
Re:December 30th (Score:5, Insightful)
It me, fam.
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6 digit IDs are for suckers.
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Big deal. Your 6-digit id would seem to indicate that there are those older than you here on /.
You know that your userid is not tied to your age right? And not all people stick to one account for their whole lives.
Re:December 30th (Score:5, Funny)
Big deal. Your 6-digit id would seem to indicate that there are those older than you here on /.
You know that your userid is not tied to your age right? And not all people stick to one account for their whole lives.
Ya. It's a /. meme. But I guess you might be too young to know that -- having a 7-digit uid and all. :-)
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It was also the "done thing" to lurk for a while before posting. Well, that was the case before Eternal September, anyway...
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It was also the "done thing" to lurk for a while before posting. Well, that was the case before Eternal September, anyway...
This. If I would have made an account when I started using /., I'd have a 3 or low 4 digit uid, and given that both of us made accounts around the same time, I'd wager you would as well. There's something to be said for actually learning about a community before you join it.
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It was still the done thing.
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I don't remember any user database crashes. I created my account the afternoon of the first day that accounts existed, and it still works.
I'm from the past (Score:2)
The only thing left is to confirm your current address. Unfortunately, I can only time travel forward so letting them know where to send it in 1884 may be a challenge.
Captain Kirk says... (Score:3)
(There's an episode of the original series where a man gives up immortality to be with the woman he loves....)
Re:Captain Kirk says... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well - no.
The person in the article has a sharply declining quality of life - having to have help going to the bathroom, and significant amounts of care, being able to do very little for himself, as well as being blind.
Many people in this condition - even at a much, much younger age, would contemplate ending it.
Precisely. (Score:3, Insightful)
People want to believe that he is depressed because his kids and wives are gone. It is romantic to be depressed when you have no family or lovers.
Smart people don't make others responsible for their own happiness. Wives and kids come and go (especially today, thanks to the divorce revolution). Once you can find the natural wellspring of joy within, you are no longer dependent on these ever-changing circumstances to be happy.
But...when your daily routine is an ongoing repetition of pain and indignity, wit
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Wives and kids come and go (especially today, thanks to the divorce revolution).
Holy shit, nice hand-wave!
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Absolutely. If he still had a 30 year old body, he would probably not want to die.
Re:Captain Kirk says... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Captain Kirk says... (Score:5, Interesting)
Quoting without permission Rob Landley:
http://lists.celinuxforum.org/... [celinuxforum.org]
"I'm sorry, I'm confused by the CONCEPT of having a shortage of TODO items.
This is just the top of my head _Linux_ stuff, and doesn't include purely-me
items like learning LUA. I want to get a mac and learn THAT stuff. I want to
get my master's degree so I can become a full-time college professor when I'm
ready to retire from programming. I want to write multiple books. I want to
start a third convention so I have an excuse to wave the Cartoon Guide to
Federal Spectrum Policy at people
(http://www.newamerica.net/files/archive/Pub_File_1555_1.pdf). I want to learn
to draw so I can start a webcomic. I have enormous stacks of books to read.
I need to watch the rest of Mythbusters, catch up on the new Dr. Who, and play
Dragon Age. I want to garden and cook and bike and swim. I want to get rich
and start the world's largest nudist resort. I want to dig up the recording
of the time I got Neil Gaiman to say "By Grabthar's hammer, you shall be
avenged" into a microphone (after his reading of Crazy Hair at Penguicon 2)
and also get Ralph Nader to say "Luke, I am your Father" into another
microphone. I need to completely redo my website (and make a "random cool
stuff" page listing http://sidhefaer.livejournal.c... [livejournal.com] and
http://theglen.livejournal.com... [livejournal.com] and so on...)
Theres... a shortage of stuff to do somewhere?
Really?
How does that work?
"
Re:Captain Kirk says... (Score:5, Funny)
"Living forever isn't boring, you are."
-Me.
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"Living forever isn't boring, you are."
-Me.
I'm suspicious as to whether or not you're qualified to judge if that's the case.
Do you have a birth certificate proving you've lived forever?
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So maybe all that minor stuff on your list would take 20 years. Maybe. Lets triple it and say 60.
you still have infinity more years. What will you do for the next thousand? the thousand after that?
I mean many writers have touched on this. For me, I often can picture of the "apathetics" in the movie Zardoz. Who just kind of froze up one day.
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My list is currently expanding asymptotically.
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Given a young healthy pain free body, you would never finish your interests.
There would always be new "pokemon go"'s coming along to get excited about.
New musical instruments to master.
New places to see (because they are changing if you live long enough. The world today is almost completely different than it was in 1935.
New inventions to be excited about.
A much longer investment horizon mean you'd probably go through being wealthy and being poor multiple times (I was wiped out in the panic of 2160, 2310, 2
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I support this way of thinking. New and interesting stuff (and people!) will always keep coming along.
I wouldn't mind a several-thousand-to-effectively-infinite lifespan, as long as I had someone to share it with.
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For the first thousand years, contemplate the number one in complete fullness. For the next thousand, the number two, and so on.
Never run out of 'new and interesting things to think about'.
Re:Captain Kirk says... (Score:5, Interesting)
My father was 100 years of when he died. Up until the last 4 months of his life, he was living semi-independently. He lived in his own house, with people coming in to help him with such things as cleaning and preparing meals; other than that, he looked after himself.
I am terrified of the prospect. As some point, I should start living a more risky lifestyle, since 3 out of 4 of my grandparents lived well into their '90s. Maybe I can kill myself in my early '90s through a skydiving accident or something.
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I am terrified of the prospect. As some point, I should start living a more risky lifestyle, since 3 out of 4 of my grandparents lived well into their '90s. Maybe I can kill myself in my early '90s through a skydiving accident or something.
Don't worry. It doesn't always work out that way. My wife's parents both lived until they were in their 90s -- father died of Parkinson's and mother died of Alzheimer's'' (both within a fairly short time after becoming debilitated), but Sue [tumblr.com] died at 61 of a brain tumor (just 7 weeks after diagnosis). I was 42 at the time, now 53. Both of my parents are still alive and healthy in their 70s. I don't know what's in store for me going forward, but at least I'm not afraid of death - because Sue is there somewher
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I'm much less afraid of death than I am of the crap I might go through between now and then.
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You're terrified of living a long time and being relatively healthy and independent up to the end? Just what are you scared of? I'm scared of spending years just lying on a bed semi-comatose. That would be hell on earth.
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Yeah - I had a neighbor who died at 98 and was still not only living on his own but DRIVING. As a matter of fact that's how he died. He was getting out of the truck to check his mail and didn't have it in park - ended up accidentally running himself over. Now, that incident itself probably proves he SHOULDN'T have been driving, but he was certainly in good spirits, independent, and was mentally sound all the way up to the end.
Granted, if this story is true (big IF), he was still 47 years younger than thi
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"I am terrified of the prospect. As some point, I should start living a more risky lifestyle, since 3 out of 4 of my grandparents lived well into their '90s. Maybe I can kill myself in my early '90s through a skydiving accident or something."
Perhaps that is why there are so many first time 90+ year old skydivers. Interestingly, there are almost no second time 90+ year old skydivers.
"The problem with immortality is that it's boring."
I think that is only a problem for boring people. I find life fascinating an
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"The problem with immortality is that it's boring."
(There's an episode of the original series where a man gives up immortality to be with the woman he loves....)
I've been saying for 25 years now that I may not wanna live forever, but 70 years or so is wayyyyy too short.
I could live a few thousand years eating cheeseburgers and chocolate.
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It's not how long you live. It's how long you live relatively healthy. Once you've lost independence, mobility and a significant amount of your senses live quickly loses it's appeal.
Keep going on those kale smoothies!
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That's fine if you actually like Kale. Otherwise, you're just torturing yourself for no reason. Kale isn't even the only Brassica.
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Sooo... Coffee and various illegal substances?
But others have said it better... (Score:2)
It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth---and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up---that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had. -- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it. -- Ray Kurzweil
The key phrase here is (Score:5, Funny)
Regardless, he'll still be around for quite a while yet. In an interview with Wired, he said he just wants to live until the year of Linux On The Desktop.
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"If independently confirmed"
Can't they just cut him in half and count the rings?
Re: The key phrase here is (Score:2)
There's only one way to be sure. Cut him at the trunk and count the rings. I'll get a saw.
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"If independently confirmed" - which is unlikely
Well, if he is really old, there is still carbon-14 dating.
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They could use tooth enamel. [nih.gov]
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Oh, oh I have one:
He's waiting for September to end.
Painful Life (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Oh, those few times a year my late aunt spent in the hospital, I got a ballpark figure on how much Medicare was billed each time - $50 to $100 thousand. So my aunt was costing the taxpayer anywhere from $250K to $400K - every year since her 80s. Almost 20 years of six figure medical bills.
Not seeking to discount the premise of your story but the figures you are looking at are works of fiction. What is billed != what is actually paid out.
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In a decade or so, Medicare is going to be one of the largest Federal expenditures - entitlement programs indeed.
Already is.
We didn't evolve to live so long. Medical science has outpaced our biology and it's taking a toll on our society.
We didn't evolve for a lot of stuff that we currently do. And I doubt you had to evolve yourself in order to type your message.
As to those medical care costs, I think most people would agree that US medical care is way overpriced for what it does. Sounds like you might agree. But my view is that this overpriced system is not a consequence of the technology, but rather of political systems operating on increasingly empty promises.
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Uh yeah, you paid into it for a purpose, you're entitled to get that back.
And who again promised you this entitlement? Weren't me.
The key problem here is that many people are taking out several times [politifact.com] what they put in.
Some types of families did much better than average. A couple with only one spouse working (and receiving the same average wage) would have paid in $361,000 if they turned 65 in 2010, but can expect to get back $854,000 - more than double what they paid in. In 1980, this same 65-year-old couple would have received five times more than what they paid in, while in 1960, such a couple would have ended up with 14 times what they put in.
Verify by DNA analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Extraordinary claims require ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... extraordinary evidence.
An identity card whose date has only recently been confirmed isn't enough.
You still need to confirm that the card-holder is the person who matches the genuine records.
You also have to assess the credibility of those in the records office and answer questions like "why wasn't this confirmed long ago, like when he applied for a penson (no pension? okay, I'll accept that) or when he hit age 100 (not important enough? okay, I'll accept that), age 110 (you better have a darn good answer) or when he got to be the oldest man in his country (every month of delay in searching for accurate records from this point on makes his claim less and less credible).
It's been 30+ years since he would've been the oldest person in the world. If there haven't been serious, continuous, diligent, credible efforts to find and authenticate his age since the mid-to-late 1980s, then it will take something extra-ordinary, such as confirmation that he fathered someone known to be born more than, say, 120 years ago, for his claim to be accepted. Even if there has been a serious, continuous, diligent, credible effort to find proof of his age for the last 30 years, the fact that it took so long to find it hurts his claim.
Re:Extraordinary claims require ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Indeed. But Occam's Razor only applies to a conclusion's relation to the information you have at hand. It is conceivable that if you collect enough information the same heuristic can lead you in a different direction.
It should be able to confirm his genetic relationship to his putative great-great-great grandchildren, and thus let a lower limit on his age. That and other documentary evidence of him and his descendants could make his age seem plausible. In a world with seven billion people, outliers can
Re:Extraordinary claims require ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"outliers can be very unusual indeed."
There's outliers and there's statistical impossibilities. The chances of him having lived 23 years (almost a 3rd of the average humans lifespan) longer than the next oldest person I'm afraid are so close to zero that you couldn't tell the difference.
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Of course you also need to factor in desire for fame - could be lots of people older than the established oldest who just never saw the point of trying to claim the title.
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There's always a relative who wants to cash in. The documentation in most of the world wasn't very good in the 19th century so it's likely that somebody has lived longer than the verified oldest, but 23 years longer isn't really statistically plausible.
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If you held a lottery where the odds of winning were 1 in a billion billion billion, but someone won, would you call the shenanigans?
Depends on the number of tickets, but normally yes, I would call shenanigans.
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Indeed. But Occam's Razor only applies to a conclusion's relation to the information you have at hand. It is conceivable that if you collect enough information the same heuristic can lead you in a different direction.
It should be able to confirm his genetic relationship to his putative great-great-great grandchildren, and thus let a lower limit on his age. That and other documentary evidence of him and his descendants could make his age seem plausible. In a world with seven billion people, outliers can be very unusual indeed.
The thing is that age isn't the result of one thing. It's the confluence of multiple systems that only evolved to keep us going until 65 or so. With modern conditions that's closer to 85, but after that all our different systems start to fail, and fail hard. You need a lot of luck (and genetics) for each one of those systems to hold up.
Lots of people make it to 90, a few to 100, some exceptional ones to 110, if you make it to 113 you might be the oldest in your country, 115 and you might be the oldest on th
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Cut him open and count the rings!
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I wonder if they can count otolith rings [myfwc.com] like they do for fish? There probably is some sort of (posthumous) dating method short of Carbon 14 that would work on this gentleman (assuming, of course, he agrees to such things).
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C14 dating only works on dead matter, i.e. telling you how long dead matter has been dead. I'm fairly sure when he dies we'll know down to the day, if not hour, when this happened.
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Ok, that's a special case but as far as I know there's no such thing in the human organism.
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... extraordinary evidence.
An identity card whose date has only recently been confirmed isn't enough.
Don't worry, I heard that a UFO took dental records when it abducted him in 1923.
Most likely explanation (Score:5, Informative)
And he still chain smokes (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not surprising to see the western media censoring the second most remarkable fact about this fellow -- he still smokes video [youtube.com]. Similarly, the officially recognized longest living man and woman on the world and only two humans verified to have lived beyond 120 years of age were both smokers (Jean Calment [wikipedia.org] and Shigechiyo Izumi [wikipedia.org].
Unlike that non-English video where he smokes almost throughout, in this English speaking video [youtube.com], they blur his cigarette in a crude attempt to hide the fact that doesn't fit in our a
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It's not surprising to see the western media censoring the second most remarkable fact about this fellow -- he still smokes video [youtube.com]. Similarly, the officially recognized longest living man and woman on the world and only two humans verified to have lived beyond 120 years of age were both smokers (Jean Calment [wikipedia.org] and Shigechiyo Izumi [wikipedia.org].
Unlike that non-English video where he smokes almost throughout, in this English speaking video [youtube.com], they blur his cigarette in a crude attempt to hide the fact that doesn't fit in our antismoking Matrix. With the reporter's strong antismoking position thus clear, the implication is that he couldn't get several minutes of continuous footage without the old timer lighting up i.e. the fellow must still be practically chain smoking (not unusual among Indonesian man).
Tar is a pretty good preservative. Cf, the LaBrea Tar Pits....
Re:And he still chain smokes (Score:4, Informative)
There's absolutely nothing remarkable about somebody that age smoking. Everybody did for most of their lives. And no doctor has ever claimed that smoking is 100% fatal.
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Likely though he's getting better shit than we do. I'm still not so convinced that it's the tobacco that kills you rather than the various "perfumes" that get added to cigarettes around here.
Won't be uncommon in 70 years (Score:2)
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For it to be not-uncommon in 70 years, a lot of 76 year olds now living will have to still be alive then.
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Although there a many doubter, to me it doesn't matter whether this one person reached that age (his relative may argue or not), what matters is that it won't be uncommon in 70 years (those in their 50 and 60 could go beyond that). A number of technologies are reaching their tipping point.
So far we have not come up with a single intervention of any kind, "technology" or not, that increases the human maximum lifespan by a single day. Nothing that actually slows down aging in humans. Nothing. What we are doing is preventing premature death. We are having a greater fraction living to the same maximum longevities already observed.
So far the only interventions that actually extend observed maximum longevity in rats are regimes of privation that would be considered torture in humans, and could onl
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Taking up sky diving at 75. (Score:2)
Some day I won't remember to pull the ripcord.
That's my insurance against living too long.
Immortality (Score:3)
The big problem with living a long time is that your body deteriorates. I'm 41 and my body isn't what it was when I was 21. When I'm 61, I'm sure I'll be wishing I still had 41-year-old-me's body. But if I was 145? The problems I'd face simply because the human body doesn't handle that extreme level of aging well? I'm sure death would be preferable.
If you could guarantee me immortality with my body frozen at 21 (or even 41), I might jump at the chance. Yes, I might regret it when everyone I knew passed away, but I'd constantly be able to see what's coming up next an could forge new friendships. But aging to 145 seems too long for me. Not that I'm looking forward to death, but I have a feeling that I'd be eagerly waiting it way before I hit 145.
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6.5 million active SSNs for people over 112 (Score:4, Interesting)
However there are only about 35 people in the world over the age of 112. I'd say that having an identity card is a little short of absolute proof that this guy is 145.
Between 2008 and 2011, there were over 4,000 people who applied for jobs using SSNs for people who were born before the 20th century.
http://insider.foxnews.com/201... [foxnews.com]
Commit him! (Score:2)
An Indonesian man who claims to be the longest living human in recorded history has described how he "just wants to die"
Get this man to a mental hospital immediately! If he wants to die, he's obviously insane and must be committed! He could potentially harm himself or others!
An auspicious date (Score:4, Interesting)
The Unix Epoch is 01/01/1970, this guy is recorded as being born 31/12/1870.
Perhaps someone was born 31/12/1969 and some function was trying to translate timestamps from one system to another.
One day before the epoch is a bit of an edge case, and timestamp conversions can be funky. So instead of subtracting 1 from the 70 the function subtracted it from the 19 and now you have an official, but nonsensical, piece of identification in the system.
Of course it clearly doesn't match the guy born in 1969, but surely someone noticed and "fixed" the problem by associating the record with it's rightful recipient, the oldest guy in the village.
Birth certificates are mostly joke in some places (Score:5, Interesting)
He was working as a village karnam a hereditary village official assisting land tax office and other official government work. A coupld of decades after the independence, the government decided to abolish the heridiatry position and regularize them all as "village officers". Part of the application process was filling documents for age and dates of birth. My dad told him government retiremnet age was 58 and he would be retired in 13 years or so. He did not want to suffer the loss of income. One of the official forms of documentation for date of birth was an affidavit fron the village karnam. So he issued himself an affidavit proclaiming him to be 20 years old!. Only adverse consequence was his traditional Hindu ceremonies he had to do as he turned 60 all had to be done in secret, lest the government becomes aware of his true age!
Was thinking all the birthers could have gone to Kenya. The could find a local dynamic_cast(village karnam) to issue birth certificates for any one for any date.
I thought there was a limit in the low 120's. (Score:2)
If he really is 20-some years past that, I'd sure like to know how/why. I'd like researchers to know how/why even more, and then put their findings to the best conceivable use - keeping me around longer.
What's more likely? (Score:2)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because being "posted to Reddit" and "ripped to shreds" there is an obvious sign of credibility.
Are you forgetting the time that Reddit collectively lynched an innocent man in an effort to identify the suspects behind the Boston Marathon bombing, by any chance? Allow me to enlighten you:
https://gawker.com/reddit-apol... [gawker.com]
Of course, being a redditor I'm sure you'll simply dismiss the entire post for being a link from Gawker, despite the fact that 70% of the content is direct quotes from Erik Martin, apologizing for the boorish and ignorant behaviour of people like you. Feel free. Redditors are like conspiracy theorists, they'll cherry-pick whatever details fit their own narrative and then circle-jerk around on their own, respective corner of the site.
Do us all a favour and go back there for good. Redditors are the pus-filled herpes sores of the Internet.
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You're right, both of them have the non-existent credibility that the Indonesian man does.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
I will sooner dismiss the know-nothing who says "That can't be true, don't bother checking it!" than the know-nothing who says "That might be true, go check it."
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Which tells us what?
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Here's a link for you. [ssa.gov]
Wonder how they arrived at a 0.893381 (impressive number of digits btw) probability of a 119 year old male dying within one year, considering that not a single man in history is confirmed to have reached that age [wikipedia.org].
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My point is those who say the times today are the worst ever and spew some right wing stuff do not know their history. Times were bad in the 19th century. Awesome too if you are educated and middle class (even more so than today) but very tough and brutal. Factories, 18 hour shifts, no EPA laws, children working, people being shot out west looking to escape the missery of the east and fed to pigs, corruption, and crazy dictators and radical ideologies were the norm.
People think Victorian era paradise and J
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Nobody is saying there weren't problems in the past. But the problems we have today are real problems.
I'll agree with you that Obama isn't Karl Marx. But he might still be a socialist; one has nothing to do with the other
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"I don't know why you would call Lenin (not Lennin) a communist or a socialist, he was a totalitarian dictator."
No true Muscovite...
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Those Trumpsicles that you've been snacking on -
They have melamine, ethylene glycol and toxic concentrations of bile. You should just switch to plain ol Kool Aid. It's healthier.
(See, got the conversation back on topic.)
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Core sample
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Well, at least governments are real...
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Interesting fact (IIRC), if he lived to 969 then he died in the year of the flood.
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I suggest that's months. As a friend pointed out, these stories come from people who were desert nomads. Time passing in the desert is measured by phases of the moon, often, AIUI. So did he perhaps live to be 80 years old? Not impossible, and at that age in those times he would be incredibly old.
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Put that Ayn Rand book down!
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We're talking history. Not his story.
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