Taking data for a whole country and drawing conclusions about a specific region may not be so good. For example, in the paper there is a lot of talk about bad data in the US but when they turn to the blue zone in the US there is no issue with the data. It's considered well kept.
For other places, like Sardinia, they don't explain whether the variations (1st of a month, etc) are happening at the local level. Can the data there be trusted? We are left to draw conclusions because many gaps aren't explicitly filled in.
The blue zones project limited the places they would label a blue zone to those that had good data. Many places were rejected because the data wasn't good. Looking at those places, like the UK or France, and stating they have untrustworthy data actually confirms the blue zones work of rejecting claims there due to untrustworthy data.
You're making the odd assumption that the clerk at the counter was able to, or cared enough, to backdate the birth certificate, and that there was an intentional lie, from the parents. This suggests an extreme naivety of the role/important of birth dates, 90 years ago.
yes, thats exactly what I am arguing.
that is - pointing out weird numeric improbabilities in birth dates is not damning in terms of strictly indicating pension fraud.
they are unreliable as recently as 60 years ago, and certainly were even more unreliable 100+ years ago.
But what's the scale of this problem? If only 1 in 100 have curiously round birthdates, that's not a problem. If 1 out of 2 have curiously round birthdates, it will still be suspicious if 100% of supercentenarians had it.
I don't quite understand why it would be a problem for birth certificates. Surely the date of birth noted on them doesn't have to be the date they're first printed?
The point of my story was that, yes, in this poor European country as recently as 1960.. people were regularly registering children weeks late, and the government would only issue birth cert where date=today. Which is why all of my aunts & uncles have a real & official birthdate which don't match.
This was happening in a place & time where there were telephones & buses.
It was simply inconvenient to get to the city immediately, so people went when they had the next opportunity, and presented opportunity to "choose a birthdate" by when they appeared.
This is only 1 particular example in 1 place of weirdness of official birth dates.
Imagine areas of the world a little further back when travel would have been by foot or horse. Given that this was happening even in a somewhat developed place & time, all sorts of stuff could be happening elsewhere for random, benign, non-pension-fraud related reasons.
But your example doesn’t fit the pattern of days divisible by 5 so it’s irrelevant.
The 5th of January is equally likely to be on any day of the week including weekends. Simply delaying + office days etc don’t get you that pattern it only shows up if people are filling in arbitrary dates.
Further if people are filling in arbitrarily dates +/- N years or even months that’s going to dramatically increase the number of officially extremely old deaths. Aka far more people die at 100 than 107. So randomly add or subtract a few years and on official paperwork you might lose one person who actually died at 107, but then add 2 people who actually died at 100 but officially died at 107.
> I don't quite understand why it would be a problem for birth certificates. Surely the date of birth noted on them doesn't have to be the date they're first printed?
I don't think people cared (or care even today) what is the date written on the birth certificate. And if the state really cares, they won't accept some date they're being told: using the current date is safer.
Why would the state trust their citizens so little? Where I come from births were registered by (Lutheran) priests for hundreds of years, and they had no problem accepting and noting the birth date the parents provided. Why would they not trust it, why would parents lie?
A friend named his daughter Andrea and registered her... before she was born. There was some benefits that expired at the end of the year.
At that time, there was no easy way to know the fetus' sex, so he chose female in a hunch and used a name that is female in Spanish, but male in other languages, so he could later allege an error.
She was born in January, a couple of weeks later than the certificate.
There are other traditions in some parts of Europe, such as assigning a newborns birthday as that of a child previously deceased. (Obviously possibly years away.) So, there may be additional explanations given we already have several here.
Because the experts are in a joke, pseudo-scientific field in which the most prominent person is the man who verified her age with laughably poor methods and has a vested interest in not being proven wrong.
The few skills that are transferable across the whole industry are a tiny part of what it takes to do many jobs, especially more senior IC roles. There is no certification that is possible.
I think you vastly overestimate the skills that are necessary for most jobs.
Also, it should be noted that Amazon and Google don't interview for specific jobs -- they interview you for a job at the company and then you get placed. That would imply that at least at Google and Amazon, the skills are transferable across everything they do.
I don't think this is as new as you're suggesting. Mythical Man Month, from 1975, mentions side-effects in functions as a problem. Even lambda calculus is functional programming. Recursion existed before loops.
I'd say that it's actually a (relatively) more recent phenomenon that OOP took over the world.
I do wonder if the people who wring their hands over big-tech employee class-systems have ever had a 'real' job or if they think they get fancy perks simply because their employers are kind.
The lack of valuing their customers is what made me finally give up on Android. Android's biggest problem is the same as it was 5 years ago - the support doesn't last for long enough - and all they've done about it in that time is some half-hearted upstreaming of <1% of their kernel patches (project icebreaker) as yet-another skunkworks alternative to an existing project. The attitude seems to be that they assume Android will always have its market share and the users are captive. So just chug along in mediocrity and let the e-waste pile up.
Exactly why they can't be trusted!