
A 120-Year Lease on Life Outlasts Apartment Heir (1995) - tshtf
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/29/world/a-120-year-lease-on-life-outlasts-apartment-heir.html
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cpncrunch
"Mrs. Calment, physically active all her life, rode a bicycle until she was
100"

That should probably have been a warning sign that she wasn't going to drop
dead any time soon.

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

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donretag
Fantastic story. According to Wikipedia, Jeanne Calment did pass away two
years later in 1997 at the age of 122.5 years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment)

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ArcticCelt
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.

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donretag
Oops, wrong copy-n-paste buffer!

BTW, I edited the original.

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ArcticCelt
No worry I suspected a typo. Like you I went straight to Wikipedia because I
wondered by how long she outlived the article that 1995 article.

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drpgq
Interesting that no one has gotten particularly close to outliving her.

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

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maaku
Solution is simple: move Earth to the vicinity of a black hole.

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dang
I seem to recall that she was asked what Van Gogh was like, and replied that
he smelled bad.

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jakub_h
Because he had no nose?

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aylmao
he cut his ear lol

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gaur
> Although the amount Mr. Raffray already paid is more than twice the
> apartment's current market value, his widow is obligated to keep sending
> that monthly check. If Mrs. Calment outlives her, too, then the Raffray
> children and grandchildren will have to pay.

Hard to see how that would be legal.

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shawn-butler
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.

~~~
gaur
Then I don't know why the author didn't just say "his family will have to
continue paying out of his estate". I suspect that kind of obligation is very
legal and common in most of Europe and North America (and probably elsewhere):
if someone dies, their debts and contracts are settled against their estate.

The way it's written, it sounds like the family was legally obligated to keep
paying until Calment's death, even if the estate ran dry.

~~~
MichaelBurge
The Bible mentions punishments continued to the children, and in some cases up
to 10 generations from the person who committed it.

A typical passage might say, "Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor
serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of
the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them
that hate me".

I think King David was only allowed to be king because he was the first
generation in 10 after such an incident.

I don't know if Israel today still has any crimes that punish the family. It
also wouldn't matter for a civil agreement like this.

However, in ancient Israel everyone's debts and land were forfeited every 7
and 49 years, so real estate would be priced according to how far the country
was from a reset. That would certainly affect a similar agreement.

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gaur
When I said "hard to see how that would be legal", I meant it with regard to
modern legal systems, not semi-fictional bronze age legal systems where people
can be stoned to death for innocuous things.

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MichaelBurge
If you're looking for a modern example, I think North Korea has a 'three
generations of punishment' program. You and your family get sentenced to a
labor camp, and if your children are born there they stay there too.

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spullara
Not really. The widow of the couple that bought the lease collected it 2 years
after her husbands death.

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oneeyedpigeon
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.

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lordnacho
How incredibly unfortunate.

The annual death rate for people in their 90s is probably in the 10s of %, and
rising every year. Someone posted a nice infographic where you could put in
your age and it would give you some simulated death ages. It was pretty hard
to get over 100 even when starting quite close to it.

This guy happened to pick the oldest person ever.

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

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tonyedgecombe
Yes, I think I read that cancer rates fall off slightly after a certain age.

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frogpelt
And yet she didn't get to experience what my great-grandmother did, which was
to live in parts of three centuries. She was born in 1899 and died in 2002.

Admittedly, she probably didn't remember the first '99.

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f_allwein
> She moved that year into a nursing home, which is now named after her.

This is pretty cool as well. I'll put this on my list of goals when I'm old.

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joelhaasnoot
This story somehow made its way into a sermon prep book for pastors - I've
heard this about 20 times in sermons by now...

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

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rokhayakebe
Life is a drama with sprinkles of comedy.

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samstave
Too bad she didn't have a Fitbit or Apple health app so we could have that
data :-(

\--- EDIT:

Who the fuck would downvote that?? Knowing the exercise habits of a 120 year
old person should be awesome. You think I'm playing fanboi? Jesus, no it just
would have been valuable to know her physical habits. So, explain yourselves.

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onion2k
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.

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madaxe_again
Well, you say that, but given the arrangement, is it? By taking on a viager
you effectively act as pension and actuarial agent - and knowing the health of
your client is highly relevant to the investment you are making.

This is why one has to have a medical to get health insurance.

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onion2k
I wasn't suggesting _no one_ should have access to other people's data. If
there's a good reason, such as informing the basis of a contract in the case
of a medical to get health insurance, then both parties benefit - one gets to
understand the risk they're undertaking and the other gets insurance. So long
as the person having the medical understands what they're handing over that's
fine.

What I take issue with is the assumption that any data that could be analysed
for some marginal good should be openly available. Data is hugely powerful and
incredibly valuable, so we need to take individual privacy in to great
consideration. In the case of this old lady the tangible benefits of her data
being analysed is so tiny (it's not a controlled study, there's no rigour to
'using a fitbit', and it's a such a small sample size of _literally_ 1 person
that any hope of anonymity is impossible) that her privacy is _far_ more
important than any possible insight in to ageing that the data _might_ give
us.

