4 ms·

As the side note says: "The key to Ikarian longevity is not simply a healthful diet; daily socializing may be just as crucial." And taking a daily nap and drink

by frik 12y ago

As the side note says: "The key to Ikarian longevity is not simply a healthful diet; daily socializing may be just as crucial." And taking a daily nap and drink vine. This is probably true and helps a lot. But who created the statistics? The pension system there is widely misused. People keep their death parents "alive" on paper to receive their pension for many years. It was so widespread and the loss so great in Creek (and some other EU countries) that the European Union intervened.

sotirisk 12y ago
And where have you read about this "widely misused pension system"? I am Greek and I can asure you that this is another one of the "rumors" floating around about Greece which, as all rumors, is a blatant lie. In fact, the pension system in Greece has been following the European standards since at least 10 years. I am so sick and tired of outsiders spewing nonsense all of the internet about Greece without knowing any real fact.
- castell 12y ago
  No rumors, the source are the Greek Labour Ministry and the European Union. Search for "greek pension abuse" on Google: * Greece pulls the plug on pensions for the dead (Apr 25, 2012): http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/greece-benefits-idUSL6E8FP4R320120425 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/greece-benefits-id... * 2% of Greek population abuse pension system (26 Apr, 2012): https://www.devere-group.com/news/Greek-population-abuse-pension-system.aspx https://www.devere-group.com/news/Greek-population-abuse-pen... * Greece Still Paying Dead Pensioners (Aug 17, 2013): http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/08/17/greece-still-paying-dead-pensioners/ http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/08/17/greece-still-payi... * New Greek finance sham: 120,000 families claiming 'ghost pensions' for relatives who died years ago (12 October 2011): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048385/Greek-finance-sham-120k-families-claiming-ghost-pensions.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048385/Greek-financ...
  - coldtea 12y ago
    If you read the articles -- and if you follow the proceedings in Greece, this is linkbaity headlines. Title: "120,000 families claiming 'ghost pensions' for relatives who died years ago" Actual content: "Greece has halted welfare or pension payments to 200,000 people either because they are unentitled to the money - or because they are dead, a Labour Ministry official said on Wednesday." Not that the 200.000 number includes all pensions under examination -- and most of those were found to be absolutely OK in subsequent checks. So, first the "dead getting pensions" were far from "120,000" (more close to a few thousands -- and of those "dead cases" most were recent deaths of a few months were the reported death wasn't yet registered (the bureacracy is chaotic). The final tally was some 40.000 problematic pensions (which in a huge messy bureacracy like Greece includes pensions missing a few supporting documents, having 1% less "pension credits" than needed, etc), and around 2.500 cases of "dead pensioners". Moreover, of those "dead pensioners" most were cases of people who died with no relatives etc and weren't declared to stop the pension being deposited. Of the 35 million euros deposited to dead pensioners, the state found that the 21 million euros were such and reclaimed it immediately ( http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=380165 http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=380165 ). The rest could be actual fraud cases. Not as impressive as the BS baity headlines that preceded the investigation one year before. The government merely wanted to give an impression of wide corruption, in order to sweeten the passage of some anti-pension laws.
- makeitsuckless 12y ago
  There are no European standards for pension systems. It's typically one of those things that hasn't been unified. Both the pension fraud and the early retirement age in Greece where hotly debated and well documented topics, not "rumors". I think the problem here lies in the different cultural perception of the phrase "widely misused". For Greek values, 1% is a bureaucratic rounding error. For North European values it's sign of massive corruption.
visakanv 12y ago
That sounds identical to the opening chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers! [1] 'What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures. In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills. "I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."' [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/chapters/chapter-outliers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/chapters/chapter-out...
- meric 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseto_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseto_effect Wow, that is patriarchal oppression and stifling familial roles.
  - b6 12y ago
    I see the part I think you're talking about, but actually, it does not say that there was any oppression or that anyone was stifled.
  - 12y ago
coldtea 12y ago
>This is probably true and helps a lot. But who created the statistics? The pension system there is widely misused. People keep their death parents "alive" on paper to receive their pension for many years. It was so widespread and the loss so great in Creek (and some other EU countries) that the European Union intervened. That's actually BS based on urban legends (and inflated by the Greek government at the time for political reasons). On actual life, this involved a small number, in the hundends, (literaly around 400-500 cases) of people using false certificates for stuff like disabillity pensions which happened in a specific prefecture. Most of those instances were about bending the law to cover some poor person with pension that didn't really qualify for, but couldn't get any other way (e.g. getting a "blind man disability pension" to some seeing old man who without that would have become homeless or be unable to pay for his healtcare). In cultures were such social help is valued above legality, this is something that happens, exploiting laws or holes in the law, etc. Of course this bending is counted as "corruption" (the same way that turning a blind eye in a poor families use of electricity when they don't pay their power company bill would), but its impact is negligible and is mostly a way to short-circuit ineffective social care policies in small societies. For actual corruption we have far better (and more impactful) examples in the higher echelons. It wasn't legal, but it wasn't a "get rich quick scheme" either -- and it was far from "widespread" nor was the loss "so great". If we're talking Amdahl's law this is insignificant as far as the debt is concerned - but being a nice example against Greek corruption in general, it was blown out of proportion and used as an representative example. Don't believe the hype. The same way the right wing blows some non-representative cases of people getting welfare in the US out of proportion. In any case, Ikaria, the island in TFA, is not one of those places.
- sotiris-k 12y ago
  I'm glad that at least you didn't get downvoted to hell based on some BS articles like I did.

by frik 12y ago

sotirisk 12y ago

And where have you read about this "widely misused pension system"? I am Greek and I can asure you that this is another one of the "rumors" floating around about Greece which, as all rumors, is a blatant lie. In fact, the pension system in Greece has been following the European standards since at least 10 years. I am so sick and tired of outsiders spewing nonsense all of the internet about Greece without knowing any real fact.

castell 12y ago
No rumors, the source are the Greek Labour Ministry and the European Union. Search for "greek pension abuse" on Google: * Greece pulls the plug on pensions for the dead (Apr 25, 2012): http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/greece-benefits-idUSL6E8FP4R320120425 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/greece-benefits-id... * 2% of Greek population abuse pension system (26 Apr, 2012): https://www.devere-group.com/news/Greek-population-abuse-pension-system.aspx https://www.devere-group.com/news/Greek-population-abuse-pen... * Greece Still Paying Dead Pensioners (Aug 17, 2013): http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/08/17/greece-still-paying-dead-pensioners/ http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/08/17/greece-still-payi... * New Greek finance sham: 120,000 families claiming 'ghost pensions' for relatives who died years ago (12 October 2011): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048385/Greek-finance-sham-120k-families-claiming-ghost-pensions.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048385/Greek-financ...
- coldtea 12y ago
  If you read the articles -- and if you follow the proceedings in Greece, this is linkbaity headlines. Title: "120,000 families claiming 'ghost pensions' for relatives who died years ago" Actual content: "Greece has halted welfare or pension payments to 200,000 people either because they are unentitled to the money - or because they are dead, a Labour Ministry official said on Wednesday." Not that the 200.000 number includes all pensions under examination -- and most of those were found to be absolutely OK in subsequent checks. So, first the "dead getting pensions" were far from "120,000" (more close to a few thousands -- and of those "dead cases" most were recent deaths of a few months were the reported death wasn't yet registered (the bureacracy is chaotic). The final tally was some 40.000 problematic pensions (which in a huge messy bureacracy like Greece includes pensions missing a few supporting documents, having 1% less "pension credits" than needed, etc), and around 2.500 cases of "dead pensioners". Moreover, of those "dead pensioners" most were cases of people who died with no relatives etc and weren't declared to stop the pension being deposited. Of the 35 million euros deposited to dead pensioners, the state found that the 21 million euros were such and reclaimed it immediately ( http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=380165 http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=380165 ). The rest could be actual fraud cases. Not as impressive as the BS baity headlines that preceded the investigation one year before. The government merely wanted to give an impression of wide corruption, in order to sweeten the passage of some anti-pension laws.
makeitsuckless 12y ago
There are no European standards for pension systems. It's typically one of those things that hasn't been unified. Both the pension fraud and the early retirement age in Greece where hotly debated and well documented topics, not "rumors". I think the problem here lies in the different cultural perception of the phrase "widely misused". For Greek values, 1% is a bureaucratic rounding error. For North European values it's sign of massive corruption.

visakanv 12y ago

That sounds identical to the opening chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers! [1] 'What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures. In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills. "I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."' [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/chapters/chapter-outliers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/chapters/chapter-out...

meric 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseto_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseto_effect Wow, that is patriarchal oppression and stifling familial roles.
- b6 12y ago
  I see the part I think you're talking about, but actually, it does not say that there was any oppression or that anyone was stifled.
- 12y ago

coldtea 12y ago

>This is probably true and helps a lot. But who created the statistics? The pension system there is widely misused. People keep their death parents "alive" on paper to receive their pension for many years. It was so widespread and the loss so great in Creek (and some other EU countries) that the European Union intervened. That's actually BS based on urban legends (and inflated by the Greek government at the time for political reasons). On actual life, this involved a small number, in the hundends, (literaly around 400-500 cases) of people using false certificates for stuff like disabillity pensions which happened in a specific prefecture. Most of those instances were about bending the law to cover some poor person with pension that didn't really qualify for, but couldn't get any other way (e.g. getting a "blind man disability pension" to some seeing old man who without that would have become homeless or be unable to pay for his healtcare). In cultures were such social help is valued above legality, this is something that happens, exploiting laws or holes in the law, etc. Of course this bending is counted as "corruption" (the same way that turning a blind eye in a poor families use of electricity when they don't pay their power company bill would), but its impact is negligible and is mostly a way to short-circuit ineffective social care policies in small societies. For actual corruption we have far better (and more impactful) examples in the higher echelons. It wasn't legal, but it wasn't a "get rich quick scheme" either -- and it was far from "widespread" nor was the loss "so great". If we're talking Amdahl's law this is insignificant as far as the debt is concerned - but being a nice example against Greek corruption in general, it was blown out of proportion and used as an representative example. Don't believe the hype. The same way the right wing blows some non-representative cases of people getting welfare in the US out of proportion. In any case, Ikaria, the island in TFA, is not one of those places.

sotiris-k 12y ago
I'm glad that at least you didn't get downvoted to hell based on some BS articles like I did.