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Some stuff is less damning than it sounds for example - "supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five" One

Some stuff is less damning than it sounds for example - "supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five" One of my parents comes from a poor rural area of Europe where well into the 60s, it was normal to have a "real" birthdate & an "official" birthdate. This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc. So I have aunts & uncles with real-official birthdate deltas of up to 2 weeks. I'd imagine that going back to 1900s or 1880s, when travel was more difficult, who knows. Further, it is possible that the office in some of these areas for registering births was only open certain days of month/week, the further back you go, etc. Maybe they only went into the city on market days when they had other business, on the first Monday of the following month. Don't discount superstition and people registering births on nearest special days like saints days, etc. Some of these abnormalities get lost to time. Many of my family didn't realize they had a real-official birthdate gap until 30+ years later when their mother told them.

forinti 4y ago
That's true. I know some old timers who were born in one place but registered later somewhere else. This issue was even more pronounced in South America because of the distances.
gifnamething 4y ago
You're just arguing in favour of birth dates being unreliable.
- neaden 4y ago
  To +- a few weeks, not years.
  - detrites 4y ago
    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.
- FeteCommuniste 4y ago
  Unreliability on the scale of weeks would be rather less significant than years or decades.
  - gifnamething 4y ago
    Only if you're planning on telling the truth
    - nomel 4y ago
      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.
- steveBK123 4y 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.
  - vintermann 4y 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?
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      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.
      - Retric 4y ago
        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.
01100011 4y ago
Wife's grandma recently died in her mid 90s. No one in the family actually knew how old she was. In many developing nations, such recordkeeping was often oral and unreliable.
e40 4y ago
My grandma, born circa 1900, had a birthday of Feb 14. She loved Valentines Day. The cakes she would make for that day, and other goodies... so good. My mom and I are sure she chose that day. Her parents both died when she was 8-10. Consumption.
goodcanadian 4y ago
I had a great aunt (died before I was born) who believed her birthday was two months later than it actually was. The date that everyone believed to be her birthday was exactly 9 months after her parents wedding (her real birthday only seven months after). I had another great aunt (who I did know) whose drivers license said she was ten years younger than she actually was. They just took you at your word without verifying when she got it.
eviks 4y ago
Did they not allow reported dates in the certificate in the part of the world? Theoretically you could have issued the certificate in April recording the correct date of birth in January
- jrumbut 4y ago
  People weren't as concerned with record keeping back then, these things were just gonna grow mold and feed mice in a drawer somewhere unless someone was trying to annul a marriage (for consanguinity) or argue over an inheritance. Then the modern administrative state sprang up very fast and the generation born in the late 19th or early 20th century was caught in the middle.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    And in many areas of Europe the official papers for birth, death and marriage were held by churches for a long time before being taken over by the state. On the other side of my family, a family member made a records request re: ancestor born say around 1880 and the official government response was that the papers had been at a church long burned down and paperwork lost.
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      A huge amount of documentation was lost in WW2 as well.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  No, it was government bureaucracy that was serious enough to only issue papers for the date on which you appeared.. but not serious enough to have staff distributed across the rural areas to actually be accessible to people outside the big cities.. It's easy to mandate things that are easily enforceable (date=today only legal birth cert). Doesn't mean its a useful mandate.
darth_avocado 4y ago
My dad is 4 years younger than his age on paper. He had no birth certificate when he was born and when he was finally being put in school, being home schooled so far, was able to answer questions like a 3rd grader. So the school decided to put him in 4th grade and just made up his birth year (dad's family knew the date but that would make him ineligible for 4th grade).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- steveBK123 4y ago
  While not as extreme, many of the real-official birthdays straddle month end / month starts. In one case it kicked someones birthdate to a new calendar year and his pension kicks in a year later as a result. They always joke the donkey was slow and cost him an extra year of work.
- jefftk 4y ago
  The school couldn't tell from looking at him that he was closer to Kindergarten-aged (5) than 4th grade (9) !?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - darth_avocado 4y ago
    The school didn’t care. They didn’t want him to repeat grades if he already knew everything. They were focussed on his development than arbitrary restrictions around age.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      OK, but physical development is important too. Middle school would be rough as a 9/10 year old. He was 14 graduating from high school?
      - 4y ago
docandrew 4y ago
This could be ruled out as the explanation by looking at deceased records as well - if people who died around the age of 30 in the 1950s, 40 in the 1960s etc. also all had curiously “round” birthdays then we could chalk up the fraud to poor recordkeeping instead. I’d be kind of surprised if such a coincidence hadn’t been previously noted though, surrounding discussion of the “birthday paradox” for instance.
int_19h 4y ago
This could describe why birthdays are concentrated on a particular day of the week, but what place would have market days or something similar running on a cadence that consistently falls on days of month divisible by 5?
- notjulianjaynes 4y ago
  Random guess, that works out to 1.4 times per week, annually. So maybe something like Friday 9-5, Sat 10-2 hours could explain it?
chaostheory 4y ago
Official and real birthdays is a thing in Asia too. Many boomers base their birthdays on Asian calendars instead of the Gregorian one. Another issue is related to buying immigration related identification.
colonwqbang 4y ago
Interesting, but this should be easy to control for in a statistical study. E.g. suppose 20% of people generally have strange looking official birth dates, but 50% of supercentenarians do.
- rovolo 4y ago
  This isn't a good control if the record accuracy depends on the age of person. Imagine if you're trying to find medical fraud and you find out that a lot of supercentenarians have cancer. You try to control by comparing them to the average, and supercentenarians have higher rates of cancer than normal. Is that fraud, or does age lead to higher cancer rates?
  - woobar 4y ago
    The parent suggested controlling by the date of birth of all people born same year. I.e. if only 20% of all people born in 1900 have DOB registered on the first of month, but 50% of supercentenarians born in 1900 have DOB at the beginning of the month then something is fishy. The records accuracy should be same.
    - colonwqbang 4y ago
      Yes, exactly. The question is if having a DOB on the first of the month grants mystical longevity. This can be answered regardless of the general accuracy of birth records.
    - rovolo 4y ago
      That is a decent control, though I think that finding "all people born in 1900" is probably more difficult than you'd imagine. I propose adding "who died 20-30 years ago" because that will make it easier to find comprehensive data. You would need to make sure your survey isn't biased towards people who were notable enough at age 90 to be included, because living past 100 makes people notable in a different way.
elevaet 4y ago
Another thing that happens is being born in a place that does birthdays on a lunar calendar, and then immigrating to a place that uses gregorian/solar, and needing to come up with a birthday in the new system.
raldi 4y ago
The key question is, are living people born in 1923 more or less likely to be born on the first of the month than dead people born in 1923?
- whyenot 4y ago
  What do you think that will tell you? For example it seems to me that people born in more rural area a century ago are both less likely to have accurate birth records, and less likely to have good access to health care. There are probably many other covariates that would need to be controlled for.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  That’s not what the abstract said. It said “the first of the month and days divisible by five”. So 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30. Also, human birthdays aren’t evenly distributed. People tend to have sex around holidays and cluster somewhat. Late August through Early October are popular, and April and May less so. So the statistical significance of the “round number” no doubt exists, but may not be as significant as it sounds to normal modern people in Western society. My grandfather, for example, was reported to the authorities 8 weeks as his country of birth had a poll tax… in his country baptism records are more accurate than civil birth records.
  - raldi 4y ago
    My comment applies to each of these abnormalities.
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    If that's the cause, then you'd expect to see the same patterns in all birth records of people born in 1923 who died, for example at the age of 50 in 1973, as you would in those from the same cohort who are still alive today. So if you took samples of birth records for people born in 1923 who died in 1953, 1963, 1973... and so on, does the pattern hold? If these patterns of birth records are indeed evidence of fraud, you would expect to see a difference for people born in 1923 who are still "alive" today and those who died last century.
nomel 4y ago
> and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc My naive assumption is that they might be concentrated around Friday, or Saturday, or some other more "convenient" day.
epolanski 4y ago
My in law was born on the 29th of February but registered on March 2 because parents thought it was bad luck to be born on Feb 29 and they were busy on March 1. That was in Italy in 1968. My polish father, born in 1954 was registered 13 months later, I don't remember the reason though.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
vba616 4y ago
>This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc. I guess I don't see the connection. Why wouldn't it take a week to get the certificate for most people, and why wouldn't the authorities distinguish the birth date from the filing date? In the US, the sort of birth certificate I have seen - from less than a hundred years ago - has three dates: Born on, Date filed, Date issued. The last two might be the same, but different from "Born on". People who were born in the 19th century, on the other hand, may not have any documentation at all. I don't know the details, but I remember it being mentioned that nobody knew exactly how old my grandmother was, least of all herself. I'm not sure it was a matter of transportation or poverty necessarily - just that everything wasn't controlled by documentation back then. Somewhere I think I read that passports weren't a thing until some time in the early 20th century. Maybe it changed because of WWI?
- NeoTar 4y ago
  I think the implied missing detail is that there was, or was perceived to be, a requirement to register a birth in a timely manner - currently in the UK there is a requirement to register a birth is within 42 days (6 weeks), but I have in my head that at some point it was two weeks. Therefore people might be tempted to lie, saying that the babe was born within the registration deadline. Or it was just that in the time between the birth happening and being registered they forgot the exact date, and either rounded it themselves, or it was done by the official registering the birth due to imprecise data ("When was the baby born?" "Two and a half weeks ago").
mfer 4y ago
> Some stuff is less damning than it sounds This takes the paper at face value and I would suggest the paper is misleading. For example, the paper says... > However, alternative explanations for the distribution of remarkable age records appear to have been overlooked or downplayed. After reading through the original blue zones work and this paper, they didn't make a case that alternative explanations were overlooked or downplayed. For example, when they did the blue zones work they had to spend a lot of time making sure the data was good and many places were dismissed for bad data. This paper puts a lot of focus on bad data. No kidding. The paper puts a lot of time into covering bad data in the US. But, then doesn't take the time to point out any issues with the US blue zone. In a place like where Sardinia Italy they call out things like the murder rate being high and a low survivability rate to 55. Except it doesn't look at people in different age groups where "blue zones" tend to be going away as younger generations eat a different diet. There are levels to the analysis that are missing which makes the conclusions a bit misleading.
avazhi 4y ago
That isn't less damning than it sounds. Whether it was overt or 'accidentally' (as in your case) the data is still unreliable, which is the point.

forinti 4y ago

That's true. I know some old timers who were born in one place but registered later somewhere else. This issue was even more pronounced in South America because of the distances.

gifnamething 4y ago

You're just arguing in favour of birth dates being unreliable.

neaden 4y ago
To +- a few weeks, not years.
- detrites 4y ago
  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.
FeteCommuniste 4y ago
Unreliability on the scale of weeks would be rather less significant than years or decades.
- gifnamething 4y ago
  Only if you're planning on telling the truth
  - nomel 4y ago
    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.
steveBK123 4y 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.
- vintermann 4y 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?
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    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.
    - Retric 4y ago
      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.

01100011 4y ago

Wife's grandma recently died in her mid 90s. No one in the family actually knew how old she was. In many developing nations, such recordkeeping was often oral and unreliable.

e40 4y ago

My grandma, born circa 1900, had a birthday of Feb 14. She loved Valentines Day. The cakes she would make for that day, and other goodies... so good. My mom and I are sure she chose that day. Her parents both died when she was 8-10. Consumption.

goodcanadian 4y ago

I had a great aunt (died before I was born) who believed her birthday was two months later than it actually was. The date that everyone believed to be her birthday was exactly 9 months after her parents wedding (her real birthday only seven months after). I had another great aunt (who I did know) whose drivers license said she was ten years younger than she actually was. They just took you at your word without verifying when she got it.

eviks 4y ago

Did they not allow reported dates in the certificate in the part of the world? Theoretically you could have issued the certificate in April recording the correct date of birth in January

jrumbut 4y ago
People weren't as concerned with record keeping back then, these things were just gonna grow mold and feed mice in a drawer somewhere unless someone was trying to annul a marriage (for consanguinity) or argue over an inheritance. Then the modern administrative state sprang up very fast and the generation born in the late 19th or early 20th century was caught in the middle.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  And in many areas of Europe the official papers for birth, death and marriage were held by churches for a long time before being taken over by the state. On the other side of my family, a family member made a records request re: ancestor born say around 1880 and the official government response was that the papers had been at a church long burned down and paperwork lost.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    A huge amount of documentation was lost in WW2 as well.
steveBK123 4y ago
No, it was government bureaucracy that was serious enough to only issue papers for the date on which you appeared.. but not serious enough to have staff distributed across the rural areas to actually be accessible to people outside the big cities.. It's easy to mandate things that are easily enforceable (date=today only legal birth cert). Doesn't mean its a useful mandate.

darth_avocado 4y ago

My dad is 4 years younger than his age on paper. He had no birth certificate when he was born and when he was finally being put in school, being home schooled so far, was able to answer questions like a 3rd grader. So the school decided to put him in 4th grade and just made up his birth year (dad's family knew the date but that would make him ineligible for 4th grade).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
steveBK123 4y ago
While not as extreme, many of the real-official birthdays straddle month end / month starts. In one case it kicked someones birthdate to a new calendar year and his pension kicks in a year later as a result. They always joke the donkey was slow and cost him an extra year of work.
jefftk 4y ago
The school couldn't tell from looking at him that he was closer to Kindergarten-aged (5) than 4th grade (9) !?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- darth_avocado 4y ago
  The school didn’t care. They didn’t want him to repeat grades if he already knew everything. They were focussed on his development than arbitrary restrictions around age.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    OK, but physical development is important too. Middle school would be rough as a 9/10 year old. He was 14 graduating from high school?
    - 4y ago

docandrew 4y ago

This could be ruled out as the explanation by looking at deceased records as well - if people who died around the age of 30 in the 1950s, 40 in the 1960s etc. also all had curiously “round” birthdays then we could chalk up the fraud to poor recordkeeping instead. I’d be kind of surprised if such a coincidence hadn’t been previously noted though, surrounding discussion of the “birthday paradox” for instance.

int_19h 4y ago

This could describe why birthdays are concentrated on a particular day of the week, but what place would have market days or something similar running on a cadence that consistently falls on days of month divisible by 5?

notjulianjaynes 4y ago
Random guess, that works out to 1.4 times per week, annually. So maybe something like Friday 9-5, Sat 10-2 hours could explain it?

chaostheory 4y ago

Official and real birthdays is a thing in Asia too. Many boomers base their birthdays on Asian calendars instead of the Gregorian one. Another issue is related to buying immigration related identification.

colonwqbang 4y ago

Interesting, but this should be easy to control for in a statistical study. E.g. suppose 20% of people generally have strange looking official birth dates, but 50% of supercentenarians do.

rovolo 4y ago
This isn't a good control if the record accuracy depends on the age of person. Imagine if you're trying to find medical fraud and you find out that a lot of supercentenarians have cancer. You try to control by comparing them to the average, and supercentenarians have higher rates of cancer than normal. Is that fraud, or does age lead to higher cancer rates?
- woobar 4y ago
  The parent suggested controlling by the date of birth of all people born same year. I.e. if only 20% of all people born in 1900 have DOB registered on the first of month, but 50% of supercentenarians born in 1900 have DOB at the beginning of the month then something is fishy. The records accuracy should be same.
  - colonwqbang 4y ago
    Yes, exactly. The question is if having a DOB on the first of the month grants mystical longevity. This can be answered regardless of the general accuracy of birth records.
  - rovolo 4y ago
    That is a decent control, though I think that finding "all people born in 1900" is probably more difficult than you'd imagine. I propose adding "who died 20-30 years ago" because that will make it easier to find comprehensive data. You would need to make sure your survey isn't biased towards people who were notable enough at age 90 to be included, because living past 100 makes people notable in a different way.

elevaet 4y ago

Another thing that happens is being born in a place that does birthdays on a lunar calendar, and then immigrating to a place that uses gregorian/solar, and needing to come up with a birthday in the new system.

raldi 4y ago

The key question is, are living people born in 1923 more or less likely to be born on the first of the month than dead people born in 1923?

whyenot 4y ago
What do you think that will tell you? For example it seems to me that people born in more rural area a century ago are both less likely to have accurate birth records, and less likely to have good access to health care. There are probably many other covariates that would need to be controlled for.
Spooky23 4y ago
That’s not what the abstract said. It said “the first of the month and days divisible by five”. So 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30. Also, human birthdays aren’t evenly distributed. People tend to have sex around holidays and cluster somewhat. Late August through Early October are popular, and April and May less so. So the statistical significance of the “round number” no doubt exists, but may not be as significant as it sounds to normal modern people in Western society. My grandfather, for example, was reported to the authorities 8 weeks as his country of birth had a poll tax… in his country baptism records are more accurate than civil birth records.
- raldi 4y ago
  My comment applies to each of these abnormalities.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  If that's the cause, then you'd expect to see the same patterns in all birth records of people born in 1923 who died, for example at the age of 50 in 1973, as you would in those from the same cohort who are still alive today. So if you took samples of birth records for people born in 1923 who died in 1953, 1963, 1973... and so on, does the pattern hold? If these patterns of birth records are indeed evidence of fraud, you would expect to see a difference for people born in 1923 who are still "alive" today and those who died last century.

nomel 4y ago

> and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc My naive assumption is that they might be concentrated around Friday, or Saturday, or some other more "convenient" day.

epolanski 4y ago

My in law was born on the 29th of February but registered on March 2 because parents thought it was bad luck to be born on Feb 29 and they were busy on March 1. That was in Italy in 1968. My polish father, born in 1954 was registered 13 months later, I don't remember the reason though.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

vba616 4y ago

>This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc. I guess I don't see the connection. Why wouldn't it take a week to get the certificate for most people, and why wouldn't the authorities distinguish the birth date from the filing date? In the US, the sort of birth certificate I have seen - from less than a hundred years ago - has three dates: Born on, Date filed, Date issued. The last two might be the same, but different from "Born on". People who were born in the 19th century, on the other hand, may not have any documentation at all. I don't know the details, but I remember it being mentioned that nobody knew exactly how old my grandmother was, least of all herself. I'm not sure it was a matter of transportation or poverty necessarily - just that everything wasn't controlled by documentation back then. Somewhere I think I read that passports weren't a thing until some time in the early 20th century. Maybe it changed because of WWI?

NeoTar 4y ago
I think the implied missing detail is that there was, or was perceived to be, a requirement to register a birth in a timely manner - currently in the UK there is a requirement to register a birth is within 42 days (6 weeks), but I have in my head that at some point it was two weeks. Therefore people might be tempted to lie, saying that the babe was born within the registration deadline. Or it was just that in the time between the birth happening and being registered they forgot the exact date, and either rounded it themselves, or it was done by the official registering the birth due to imprecise data ("When was the baby born?" "Two and a half weeks ago").

mfer 4y ago

> Some stuff is less damning than it sounds This takes the paper at face value and I would suggest the paper is misleading. For example, the paper says... > However, alternative explanations for the distribution of remarkable age records appear to have been overlooked or downplayed. After reading through the original blue zones work and this paper, they didn't make a case that alternative explanations were overlooked or downplayed. For example, when they did the blue zones work they had to spend a lot of time making sure the data was good and many places were dismissed for bad data. This paper puts a lot of focus on bad data. No kidding. The paper puts a lot of time into covering bad data in the US. But, then doesn't take the time to point out any issues with the US blue zone. In a place like where Sardinia Italy they call out things like the murder rate being high and a low survivability rate to 55. Except it doesn't look at people in different age groups where "blue zones" tend to be going away as younger generations eat a different diet. There are levels to the analysis that are missing which makes the conclusions a bit misleading.

avazhi 4y ago

That isn't less damning than it sounds. Whether it was overt or 'accidentally' (as in your case) the data is still unreliable, which is the point.