A 120-Year Lease on Life Outlasts Apartment Heir (1995)

Yes but she was "only" 90 when he signed the lease :)

Andre-Francois Raffray was the dude that made the deal and died in 1995 at 77. Jeanne Calment is the women who died later in 1997 at the age of 122.5.

It's hard to catch up, when everyone moves at the same speed.

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.

Because he had no nose?

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.

They won't be forced, but if they don't pay they will lose the apartment.

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)

His wive got the apartment two years later, so I don't think she was upset by the deal in the end.

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.

Actually death rates level out fairly quickly, at least until you hit a wall at about 120.

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.

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.

How curious--I suppose leaning on the Raffray side of the story?

murkt

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.

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.

Please don't break the HN guidelines by going on about downvotes.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11368361 and marked it off-topic.