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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

A variant of this that I heard used to be a problem in India: have someone else declared dead. It can be remarkably hard to fix the problems created in a bureaucracy when that happens.

http://newsok.com/article/3044137

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This came up in Ohio, with the judge ruling a man dead despite his appearing in court to contest to decision.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/10/10/jud...

To misquote Babbage, "I cannot comprehend the confusion of mind that would bring someone to such a decision" .....

edit: oh. The guy went to court to specifically undo a ruling that was over 10 years old, that would have caused his ex-wife to owe the government a lot of "unfairly claimed" benefits. I'm less confused now.

A good rule of thumb is: if you ever see something in the media that cannot possibly be true, it really isn't true - it's just the media doing above-average fact twisting on the story.

But it actually is true in this case.

Even if actually true, the context explains the entire difference between what was said and what was expected.

It literally is true, though. As I said, and the paper reported: the guy was ruled dead, came before a judge and asked for the judgement to be revoked, and the judge told him "I don’t know where that leaves you, but you’re still deceased as far as the law is concerned".

The issue here was that the guy had disappeared for a long time, and been declared dead in full accordance with the law. That specific law didn't have a clause to help reverse wrongful declarations of death, so the judge had to let it stand.

The relevance of the ten year and back payments is mostly that it decreased sympathy for the guy, not that it changed the outcome.

At least the solution was more straightforward for Ulysses.

Literally straightforward, through a dozen axe heads.

Reminds me of an experiment on ants that I once heard of. Put a drop of the pheromone produced by dead ants on a live worker, and watch as the others dutifully carry her to the trash pile, despite the fact that she keeps protesting and going back to work.

I hope they washed her off afterwards. Poor little ant :-(

It would be helpful to give a relevant quote (as well as the link):

"[He was a French astronomer whose] ship was caught in a storm and dropped him off at Île Bourbon (Réunion), where he had to wait until a Spanish ship took him home. He finally arrived in Paris in October 1771, having been away for eleven years, only to find that he had been declared legally dead and been replaced in the Royal Academy of Sciences. His wife had remarried, and all his relatives had 'enthusiastically plundered his estate'. Lengthy litigation and the intervention of the king were ultimately required before things were normalized. He got back his seat in the academy, remarried, and lived apparently happily for another 21 years."

Pretty reasonable to believe he was dead. Plundered is the wrong word, if you are gone for 11 years.

It could be a reasonable word choice depending on what they did with the estate. Legally the new owners would be free to do whatever they like, but you could see how some things would be considered more respectful than others.

There's also a form of fraud where one reports one's own dead if a parent dies. Advantage is that keeping the parent 'alive', pension payments continue.

Rumor has it that some of the claims of "world's oldest person" actually are due to this form of fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato

"Computers don't argue" by Gordon R. Dickson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

"Nobody Starves" by Ron Goulart

There's another absolute classic in this line, about a punchcard error that leaves a man officially dead...but I can't quite recall its name.

> punchcard error that leaves a man officially dead

This sounds similar to the Terry Gilliam film _Brazil_.

"When a fly gets jammed in a printer and results in the incarceration and accidental death during interrogation of cobbler Archibald Buttle – instead of renegade air conditioning specialist and suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle – Sam is assigned the task of rectifying the error."

Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

Not just there, though I'm sure it's horrendously painful to navigate as officious a bureaucracy as India's can be. A friend in Kansas has two — very much alive — special needs children, one of whom, he was informed in a very brusque letter from the state agency that helps them out, had died, and that benefits would therefore cease forthwith.

It took weeks to sort that out.

Reminds me of the MASH episode "The Late Captain Pierce":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Captain_Pierce

Problem in the US too, "Being Declared Dead By The Social Security Administration Is Very Inconvenient... the Social Security Administration accidentally declares about 9,000 people living in the United States dead every year."

https://consumerist.com/2015/05/04/being-declared-dead-by-th...

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