The Last Known Person Born in the 19th Century Dies in Japan at 117 (kottke.org) 193
Jason Kottke: As of 2015, only two women born in the 1800s and two others born in 1900 (the last year of the 19th century) were still alive. In the next two years, three of those women passed away, including Jamaican Violet Brown, the last living subject of Queen Victoria, who reigned over the British Empire starting in 1837. Last week Nabi Tajima, the last known survivor of the 19th century, died in Japan at age 117.
Japan? Take it with a pinch of umami. (Score:1)
Surprised, such a law abiding country, with a tradition of ancestor worship would let their parents die and be without last rites, committing financial fraud, etc.
Re:Japan? Take it with a pinch of umami. (Score:4, Informative)
It's actually a flaw in the way the system works when someone dies. You can get a funeral and intern their ashes at your family grave site without the national government necessarily getting wind of it. It's an "easy" crime because it only requires the child to do nothing, to make no effort to inform the government of their parent's death.
I forget what changes they made to stop it happening now, but checks were put in place.
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It's an "easy" crime because it only requires the child to do nothing
that sounds dishonabru
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Isn't just Japan. Children and other relatives have been collecting dead pensioner checks for ages. Here are some recent examples...
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-sco... [bbc.com]
https://www.thelocal.it/201609... [thelocal.it]
https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
Re:Japan? Take it with a pinch of umami. (Score:5, Informative)
Children collecting pension checks dont report the death of the pensioners for years.
You are only looking at half of the problem. When parents die in Japan, the children often inherit worthless plots of land in distant rural villages. There is no way to legally abandon these plots or forfeit ownership, and no one wants to buy them, yet taxes are due on the land every year.
So the kid cashes Mom's pension check from the government, and then sends the money back to the government to pay a stupid and unavoidable tax. Unsurprisingly, many Japanese people don't see that as "wrong".
It is impossible to reform this system, because political power in Japan is actually directly tied to these stupid little worthless plots. Even if your family has lived in Tokyo for three generations, political apportionment of the Diet is still based on the fiction that your "real" home is the plot of land in the countryside. So the representatives from these nearly empty rural districts have huge political power and can block any reform.
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Very similar in Greece. ...
But at some point the "government" realizes that you cashed in the health insurance pay out for the funeral but/and still cash in the pension
No witnesses anymore, so there! (Score:3, Funny)
19th century didn't happen, totally fake news by the Fake News Media and overpaid WRONG government scientists. so sad.
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You're forgetting that there HAS to have been a 19th century, or else it's harder to prove that man is responsible for climate change!
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The sweet joy of English verb tenses. [youtube.com]
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Well technically without the 1800s, we'd have no discovery of absorbsion and emission spectra, and thus we would never have proved climate change was being caused by humans. And for that matter the discovery of the greenhouse effect itself in the late 1800s
Learn from history (Score:3)
Great. With them gone we will be free to repeat the mistake of history with abandon.
Great Depression 2.0 is already underway, a good dose of nationalism is bedding itself into many countries, and sweeping waves of technological change are on the way. I guess we don't have the monarchy anymore so that's a plus.
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2008 Was Great Depression 2.0
We actually solved the problem of depressions by calling them recessions.
My expectation is this sense of global nationalism is it may put us in a recession, enough to make people realize that we live in a global world, and we cant put the screw on an other country without it coming back to us. Just as long as we can get over the bead and circus that is going on.
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Yeah, was watching CNBC last week, and they were talking about how the bond yield curve was flattening....and usually when it starts that, a recession is about 2x years off.
Apparently the situation gets more dire if the bond yield curve gets i
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Yeah, republics are so much better than monarchies. Think of the great strides made in the 20th century by such powerhouses as Germany, Russia, Spain and Iran, just as soon as they got rid of their monarchs.
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Ireland
Nefarious Plot (Score:5, Funny)
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This sounds so stupid that I'm now certain it's going to turn out to be true.
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That would make a great mockumentary.
Re:Nefarious Plot (Score:4, Insightful)
Extra bonus points if you can get John Cleese to be the narrator.
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Too late, he died.
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No, you've got it all wrong.
This clearly demonstrates the fatal long term effects of dihydrogen monoxide.
That stuff was probably all over the place in her house.
She never had a chance.
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I'd bet that a significant quantity of dihydrogen monoxide could be found in her body tissues!
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those plant farts will be the end of us all.
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Why The Oldest Person In The World Keeps Dying [fivethirtyeight.com]
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I have an alternate theory: the older and wiser you are, the more likely you are to eventually give up - from sheer disgust if nothing else (apparently there was a huge wave of annoyed centenarians who said "enough is enough" when flat-brimmed hats came into vogue).
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Whatever it is it seems to have a preference for males, who are usually targeted decades earlier for elimination.
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Are we talking about Foster?
Predictive power (Score:2, Funny)
No lifespans over 120 (two significant digits) years.
Still holding for 2500+ years of history.
Genesis 6:3
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No lifespans over 120 (two significant digits) years.
Jeanne Clement. 122 years, 164 days.
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The parent post indicated two significant digits. The trailing zero is ambiguous.
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You ascribe more to what is in the bible verse says than what is actually there.
Its your decision to claim the bible only gave 2 significant digits. And that decision raises a lot of issues, given the timing. Genesis predates the decimal system, predates the decimal point, predates the invention and use of zero as a placeholder. The notion of '2 significant' digits doesn't even make sense when numbers aren't represented by 'digits'.
Second, its pretty controversial to even claim that the passage is about the
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No. Significant digits require *digits*.
Your 'by defnition' argument depends on the interpretation of leading and trailing zeroes -- which depends on there being leading or trailing zeroes in the numerical system. That's not possible when the passage predates the use of zero as placeholders.
Indeed, in hebrew texts the passage is written using the word 100 and the word 20. Hebrew also has symbols for each numeral up to 20, as well as for each of the first several hundreds. So in hebrew it could be written in
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Again, you are conflating 2 separate issues.
I have no objection to the notion that 120 years shall be taken an imprecise value.
I have substantial objection to the notion that it should be taken as a very specific imprecision, that being '2 significant digits in the decimal system'.
It matters because it brings into question how much deviation from 120 is 'allowed' before 120 becomes 'wrong'.
Frankly, I'm willing to allow it quite a bit more variance than 2 sig digits decimal would allow for.
Of course, I'm als
Y1900 (Score:3)
Finally, the Y1900 problem solved itself!
Funny, 117 posts (Score:1)
https://imgur.com/a/kjePRDy [imgur.com]
Only displaying from treshold 2, though.
Ok... (Score:2)
Can we NOW stop using FAX machines?!?
for those who care about the 1800s (Score:2)
Emma Morano who died last year was the last person who was born in the 1800s to die . ( 29 November 1899 â" 15 April 2017)
Re:Hey Miss Mash... (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong, mr. russian goat hole. 1900 was the last year of the 19th century. The first century went from 1 to 100 A.D., and so the 19th goes from 1801 to 1900.
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So tragic (Score:4, Funny)
This poor woman was still hanging on waiting to see The Year of Linux on the Desktop (tm)
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I'm not really interested in the labelling of centuries relative to some arbitrary event that was not marked at the time. I'm far more interested in when the most significant digits change.
It seems therefore sad that the last human who was born in a year beginning with 18 passed seemingly without note.
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not true, it was noted . https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
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What's the one thing that a new year changes? The numbers you write when you write the date. The one it takes 3 months to get used to. 1999 -> 2000, when all the digits changed, made a far bigger difference than 2000 -> 2001, when only 1 changed.
When 2000 approached, we didn't say "no, hold on, nothing interesting about this date, let's wait until 2001 to celebrate the _real_ millennium"? Well, some people did, but the rest of us were busy celebrating the change of the (arbitrary) year's most signific
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Exactly. And Jesus is born in the year 1 before himself (December 25, year 1 BC). A few days later was January 1 AD, the beginning of year 1.
That is according to Christian mythology, of course.
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No, the birthday is only celebrated on Dec 25. The meaning of the latin for A.D. is containing the year of Jesus' birth, by definition. If he was born on Dec 25, it would be the year Dec 25, 1 A.D. by definition.
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The meaning of the latin for A.D. is containing the year of Jesus' birth, by definition.
Historians, on the other hand, seem to be largely of the consensus that Jesus was born around 6 B.C. - 4 B.C.
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At least they acknowledge he was real. They can have whatever year they want
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At least they acknowledge he was real.
Almost certainly real, because there's evidence for his existence. Not a very controversial position to take, even among historians.
He probably wasn't magic, though.
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point is, if year known and calendar corrected, the year of birth would then be 1 A.D, even if day was December 31. the year before would be 1 B.C.
if Jesus even existed at all, many historians without the poisonous influence of religion have doubts.
Re: Hey Miss Mash... (Score:2, Informative)
There's no such thing as year zero. The first year is year 1.
Re: Hey Miss Mash... (Score:4, Informative)
Correct. In the same way that there is no day zero or month zero, there is no year zero. The first year was 1, and exactly 2000 years later was 1/1/2001.
Thus 1900 was the last year of the 19th century, with 1/1/1901 being exactly 1900 years after the start of the calendar.
Re: Hey Miss Mash... (Score:4, Interesting)
But does it matter? Year 1 on the calendar wasn't determined until 5 centuries later by Dionysius Exiguus. Since they didn't start talking about decades and a meaningful way until modern journalism and history probably in the later half of the last century, it's not like we are tracking 200+ decades of information.
The whole point is to classify and organize things for telling stories. But largely, referring to the 80's, you are providing generalities (ie, cultural trends, politics, generational changes, etc) about a significant chunk of time. If that's the case, does it really matter to say 'we must begin at year 1, and include the next year that ends in a 0 in each decade. Because if I'm talking about the 1980s, I'm talking about the 10 years that begin 198, meaning 1980-1989. 1990 is not a year where the 3rd digit is 8 and the last three digits are in the 80s mathematically.
So on a decade level, it's much easier and more convenient to refer to decades as short hand by 80's instead of being pedantic and forcing everybody to say 1981-1990 since I will protest as loud as you if somebody demands including 1990 in the decade referred to as the 80's.
And if we are going to talk about decades and centuries, which is done primarily by historians and journalists, I don't mind them using a little short hand and making a slightly inaccurate convention that says decades are a period that have first 3 digits of the years the same, and centuries are all the years that have first two digits the same. It's convenient, and who cares if the first decade and century are short by one year. Nobody really discusses the first century and worries about whether year 100 was first century or second.
So, give it a rest, let the historians and journalists do their job, and don't worry, because there is no rule that says decades or centuries must start with year 1 or a probe will be thrown off course because of poor measurement, and we don't need everything counted like we are measuring something like an engineer or scientist. The whole point is classifying the messiness that is human existence and interaction, and who cares if the classification of decades and centuries if off by 1?
Re: Hey Miss Mash... (Score:5, Informative)
Just to add to this, you can refer to the period from 1900 - 1999 as "the 1900's" if you want to group them like that, just like 1990 - 1999 is referred to as "the 90's." However, the grouping of "1901 - 2000" is referred to as "the 20th Century."
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Just to add to this, you can refer to the period from 1900 - 1999 as "the 1900's" if you want to group them like that, just like 1990 - 1999 is referred to as "the 90's." However, the grouping of "1901 - 2000" is referred to as "the 20th Century."
I think it works if you're talking about less than a century, like the Christmas tree became popular in Europe in the early 1800s sounds just as good to me as early 19th century and for all practical purposes means the same. It sounds really odd to me if you say Macro Polo was a 1200s explorer instead of 13th century explorer though. So for consistency I'd rather count centuries one way and decades the other rather than flip-flop at some point, it's the 21st century and we're in the 2010's. I imagine i'll b
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> just like 1990 - 1999 is referred to as "the 90's.
Maybe by the insane.
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There is no meter zero or dm zero or cm zero or mm zero either.
On any scale there usually is only a single point marked as zero.
That is the main reason why Pascal and Modula by default use arrays where the index starts with 1.
Doing date math in Java etc. is only that complicated because some "morons" thought it would be funny that the first day of the week (or month) starts with '0', luckily this is fixed since Java 8.
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Why can there be no year zero?
For the same reason there's no March 0.
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Re: Hey Miss Mash... (Score:5, Informative)
Why can there be no year zero?
Because the "AD/BC" numbering system was established in the sixth century, when Europe still used Roman numbers. Although Latin has a word ("nulla") for nothing, it wasn't a mathematical concept, nor were negative numbers. So the "AD" years and "BC" years were both given positive sequences with no "year zero" in between.
Arabic numbers and mathematical zeros were not commonly used until the 1200s. They were popularized by Fibonacci, who is more famous for his sequences.
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That is a pretty dumb explanation.
Take a thermometer.
Look at it carefully: now point out the temperature span "zero".
There is none. There is a point zero.
For the exact same reason there is no year zero. But a point zero on the meter which you meter time. The year below the point zero is the year minus one the year above the point zero is the year plus one.
And that analogy holds for every scale, year, month, day, hour ...
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Take a thermometer.
Look at it carefully: now point out the temperature span "zero".
There is none. There is a point zero.
For the exact same reason there is no year zero.
What is the difference between -2 Celsius and +2 Celsius? Answer: 4 degrees.
What is the difference between 2 BC and 2 AD? Answer: 3 years.
So, no, not the same.
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No, 4 years.
With what math skill do you come to 3?
Obviously you have to count from the start of -2 to the and of +2, just like you did with the temperature on the thermometer. And that yields: 4.
It is beyond me why you want to treat a time scale different than a temperature scale or length scale.
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No, 4 years. With what math skill do you come to 3?
Let's LEARN TO COUNT!!!!
Let's start with temperature:
-2 C - The starting point
-1 C - The next temp, one degree warmer
0 C - The next temp, Two degrees warmer
1 C - The next temp, Three degrees warmer
2 C - The final temp, FOUR (4) degrees warmer that the starting point
Now let's count years:
2 BC - The starting point
1 BC - The next year, one year later
1 AD - The year after 1 BC, two years later
2 AD - The final year, THREE (3) years from the starting point
Let me know if you are still having problems with this.
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Why don't you simply take a thermometer and look on it?
Why do we have this stupid discussion?
A thermometer works exactly like year.
There is no one centimeter long 0 degrees stripe on the termometer. There is a point which is marked with zero.
The same for years. There is no one cm long stripe on a calendar for a year zero, but a point market zero.
What is 0.5 - (-) 0.5? That is a one unit long distance. Does not matter if it is temperature, time or space.
If you would introduce a "zero year", you had an aditio
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nothing dumb about it, the year before 1 A.D. was 1 B.C., by definition
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The explanation was dumb.
And as you see by his answer: he does not grasp it.
I blame Fortran (Score:5, Funny)
Why can there be no year zero?
For the same reason, that ancient programming languages like Fortran have arrays that start with 1. Zero was a reasonably new concept that far back having only been invented around 4-5th century BC in India and using it would probably have confused most people.
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Wrong question. Of course there can be a year zero. The correct question is why there isn't one, and that's answered in detail.
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Second day of April = April 3
Third day of April = April 4
Fourth day of April = April 5
Fifth day of April = April 6
Sixth day of April = April 7
Seventh day of April = April 7
Eighth day of April = April 8
Ninth day of April = April 9
Tenth day of April = April 10
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Look, you're wrong. Century dates start at the 1. I know your precious ego can't tolerate being wrong, but that's your problem.
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Century dates start at the 1.
Says who? Is it codified anywhere?
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For dates before the year 1, unlike the proleptic Gregorian calendar used in the international standard ISO 8601, the traditional proleptic Gregorian calendar (like the Julian calendar) does not have a year 0 and instead uses the ordinal numbers 1, 2, both for years AD and BC. Thus the traditional time line is 2 BC, 1 BC, AD 1, and AD 2. ISO 8601 uses astronomical year numbering which includes a year 0 and negative numbers before it. Thus the ISO 8601 time line is 0001, 0000, 0001, and 0002.
Not that also includes ISO 8601 - a recognized standard. So there you go. No year zero, we start with year 1.
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Not that also includes ISO 8601 - a recognized standard. So there you go. No year zero, we start with year 1.
Err, what? Doesn't what you quoted from the Wikipedia page contradict what you just said?
For dates before the year 1, unlike the proleptic Gregorian calendar used in the international standard ISO 8601, the traditional proleptic Gregorian calendar (like the Julian calendar) does not have a year 0
ISO 8601 uses astronomical year numbering which includes a year 0
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It doesn't matter whether the first calendar year recognised as 1, or 43, or 729. What I'm getting is: who or what, if anyone, defines when a century or millennium officially starts and ends?
According to this [wikipedia.org], ISO 8601 says that millenia are x000-x9999, and according to this [wikipedia.org] the same goes for centuries.
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International standard ISO 8601 would seem to disagree. It has a year 0, and according to this [wikipedia.org] and this [wikipedia.org], centuries are xx00-xx99 and millennia are x000-x999.
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ISO 8601 is kind of weird if you go back too far. It specifies a 4 digit date, which is fine, but has no way to denote a "negative" year. So year 0, which per your own link is 1BC, is the earliest possible date you can express in ISO 8601. This is actually fine because technically you aren't supposed to use ISO 8601 for any date before 1583. The reason for that is 1582 is the year that many areas, per the Catholic church, adopted the Gregorian calender (from the Julian calender) and thus skipped 10 days
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The Wiki godz state: " began on January 1, 2000 and will end on December 31, 2099".
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sorry pal, but the year before 1 AD was 1 BC. thanks for making up shit
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...Yhe first century was from 0 to 99 AD. It's a purely arbitrary cut-off, so why not be accurate about it being a CENTury?
Oh, by all means SHOW US YEAR ZERO on the Gregorian calendar (where AD was finally embedded).
There WAS no year zero
Thus 2001 was the first year of the 21st Century.
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No, January 0 is obviously the same day as December 31, that is, the last day of the year.
An interesting tidbit. (Score:2)
Before her death she was the oldest person alive.
This satire would be lost on many who do not think about mathematics.
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Considering most of the people on this site lived through the turn of the millennium on January 1, 2001, I'm really surprised this still confuses anyone.
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Navi's birth date is August 4, 1900. She was born in the 19th century.
Hey! Listen!
It's Nabi
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Remembering the Armenian one is politically inconvenient because referring to it as one offends the Turks, and the dictator currently securing his position there is a convenient 'friend' so we'll just keep our mouths shut.
The Darfur one we'll occasionally mention as Sudan isn't a 'friend' directly, but Sudan's far away and hey, they're useful to China and Russia both. We don't really want to piss those off so we'll just ignore it and hope people will stop mentioning it.
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I'm tired of the pandering that this great "war" and its genocide gets. I get it, wars bad mmkay and killing people is bad.
Remind me why that genocide deserves all of the attention versus Armenian, Darfur, etc genocides?
It doesn't. That's what made that generation great. They saw an evil in this world and were willing to put a stop to it. Remember, they didn't even know about the Holocaust until deep in the war. Millions signed up to fight and possibly die to put a stop to a regime that was trying to take over Europe and Asia. Meanwhile we just let things go on and on like Sudan, Syria, Palestine, the Rohingya, the "drug war" in the Philippines, the drug war in Mexico, Kashmir, Yemen, North Korea, the militarization o
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The "europe" situation wasn't the only genocide in WW2. In addition to the Rape of Nanking that predated the war, the so-called "The Burn to Ash Strategy" policy of the Japanese during WW2 created a nearly equivalent "holocaust" in asia. A few examples below...
Unit 731 [wikipedia.org] (Japan's Josef Mengele equivalent)
Batu Lin Tang intern camp [wikipedia.org]
The Sook Ching in Singapore/Malaysia [wikipedia.org]
Bataan Death March [wikipedia.org]
The Manila massacre [wikipedia.org]
+ many others...
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Group A doesn't like Group B. An extreme wing of group A gains power and tries to kill off Group B.
This isn't about any particular set of values or beliefs. It is just an aspect where Extremists parts of these groups get in control
Normally we get this when such groups will look into themselves and say that members of the groups are not enough aspect of such group to be considered members.
Eg.
Not Conservative Enough, Not Progressive Enough, Not Pius enough, Not scientific enough.... Extremists find ways to
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While possible, it's unlikely, due to the conditions that lend themselves to extreme longevity. People tend to die relatively young in undeveloped cultures, because they lack the medical care that enables long life. It's those developed countries that have the advanced medical care, that also provide public records, which can be used to identify the super-old. The only other possibility, is that there could be a developed country (India or South Korea, perhaps) that didn't have very good public records at t
Re:Women Privelege (Score:5, Funny)
I demand equal lifespans for all people.
Do you know why husbands die before their wives?
Because they want to.
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Simple solution: cut your nuts off. Unix, I mean eunuchs lived longer. Testosterone increases metabolism, which ages one faster.
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Living for a long time or even immortality is a trope in sci fi.
Lazarus Long [wikipedia.org] was born in 1912. So he is now 106.
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Hopefully the afterlife doesn't involve worrying about what goes on your tombstone.