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from the does-the-pensioner-want-to-repay-his-benefits-and-go-back-to-work,-too? dept.
In the quixotic battle against old age, some people use skin care and spin class.
That’s not enough for Emile Ratelband, a 69-year-old who feels like he’s in his 40s. The Dutch pensioner is asking a court in his hometown of Arnhem, southeast of Amsterdam, to change his birth certificate so that it says he took his first breath on March 11, 1969, rather than on March 11, 1949. The judges heard his case Monday and promised they would render a verdict in the next several weeks.
Ratelband sees his request as no different from a petition to change his name or the gender he was assigned at birth — and isn’t bothered that this comparison might offend transgender people, whose medical needs have been recognized by the American Medical Association. It comes down to free will, he maintains.
I want to be recognized as an alien trapped in an Earthling's body.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @06:59AM
Hopefully some pathogen will soon wipe humanity off the face of the earth.
It is time to give some other species a chance to do better.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @08:27AM (2 children)
i hereby identify with a 90 yo. give me my pension and a nurse.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @08:50AM (1 child)
Actually you bring up a good point. If this 69yr old wants to be 49. Fine. But he had better repay all that pension he likely got for the last 4 years and I hope he doesn't expect to draw any more for another 15+. What's that? He thinks he should continue to receive it? Hm. Perhaps he's just full of shit then. Or wants to bang someone over 20yrs younger them him without feeling creepy.
One thing the people who change their gender after birth do is live by the restrictions that other gender may bring. They'd be a bit of a hypocrite otherwise to want to be considered X except when they get perks for being Y.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Saturday November 10 2018, @02:59AM
The article states that he is perfectly willing to give up the pension.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @08:33AM
I think every country has it's village idiot(s). He is one of the Netherlands. Every now and then this guy pop ups in the media with some crazy idea (he markets himself as positivity guru), gets his 5 minutes of fame-fix and disappears to the background for some time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Friday November 09 2018, @10:38AM (6 children)
Good. Take his pension away, and all the other privileges that pensioners get. In the UK pensioners get all sorts of discounts despite generally being the weathiest people.
OTOH this case if won would open the floodgates to anyone increasing their age in order to get the pension and privileges.
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Friday November 09 2018, @11:38AM (4 children)
But doesn't pension get calculated from the number of years you have worked?
That's how it's done in France, so no matter your real age, if you can't prove that you have done the ~40 years of work, you cannot get a full pension.
That would however give access to some services that are age-only dependent (like reduced prices on some services and the like) and not related to work.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday November 09 2018, @02:08PM
I would expect there is a maximum value for the pension if it works like Social Security. Earn ten million per year or 20 million per year -- your SS is going to be the same amount.
(Score: 2) by Blymie on Friday November 09 2018, @02:51PM
Hmm.
Here there's "old age pension".. which you get "because old", then there's a variety of grants and things "because old", then there is the CPP (Canada Pension Plan) too.
So sort of a combo of both "your years worked" and "keep the old from starving".
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Friday November 09 2018, @04:02PM
In that same vein, if he was working in 1969 at age 20 in real life but identified legally as 0 years old could he then sue the companies he worked under for violation of child labor laws?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 09 2018, @04:32PM
It probably varies, but my state educational board retirement plan required N years minimum of work (for the state education system) , and then vests fully when X years worked + age reaches a certain number.
The U.S. Social Security similarly has age-based considerations - the baseline amount you can collect is based on income and years worked, but you can retire before the approved retirement age in exchange for further reduced benefits, or later to get increased benefits.
Basically like any insurance program it's a gambling game - you want to balance the total amount you've paid in to the retirement fund against the total expected amount withdrawn before you die. The expected duration of the period between retirement and death is an important factor in that balance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @08:53PM
Good to see you've swallowed that particular glass of cool aid.
This might be true of the deep south (of England), sure as hell isn't true locally here in my corner of Scotland...oh, yes, we do have some rather rich pensioner types around, but it turns out they're white settlers who've sold the house down South they bought in the 60's for £7000 for a goodly £250,000+ and have decided to move to a part of Britain where the houses are (relatively) cheap, their healthcare is free(er) and, importantly for some of them I've talked to, there are lots more white people around (even if they're Scots), locally, thanks to the marinas and river, we get the obnoxious yachting set from down south.
Don't confuse local conditions with global ones, you should live in a community where a sizeable percentage of the locals exist in a state of persistent poverty sometime before you even think of using that 'despite generally' line again.
In 2017, from Age UK
'With one in six pensioners (around 1.9 million) now living in poverty, not including the many thousands more who are just above this threshold and still struggling to make ends meet...'
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Friday November 09 2018, @12:16PM (1 child)
Umpty bazillion teens petition the court to "legally identify as a 21 year old legal drinker"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 09 2018, @12:44PM
Now, now, we have a nice War on Age (and Age Discrimination) going on here, let's not muddy the waters by dragging drugs into it, with one exception. If it's the magic pill that restores people to youth, so that we can all live forever (and behave like teens again?), then, yeah, that would have a bearing on this matter.
A tripling of life expectancy would cause profound changes to society. And I'm not at all sure if it would be a net benefit.
(Score: 2) by Dale on Friday November 09 2018, @03:19PM (1 child)
I wish I could do this to get cheaper life/health insurance rates
(Score: 4, Funny) by legont on Friday November 09 2018, @04:56PM
Well, I want to go 15 years in an opposite direction and start to collect my social security at the maximum rate. Yes, I worked enough for it and I feel really old.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @05:08PM
"It comes down to free will, he maintains."
the only reason you need to "petition" to change your age is because you already allowed bullshit laws to be written in the first place. now you're begging for more legal interference so you can have the freedom you had before you gave it away to begin with.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @05:22PM (1 child)
You can't change your gender. You can't change your age. The best you can do is cross-dress and run.
Or maybe you should work on the real issues behind your transgenderism and age-erism.
Were you abused/raped as a child and now you want to cut off what remains, and did you waste twenty years spinning yarns nobody wanted and now you want the time back?
It is all a khazar jewish evil invention. Wanting to be something you cannot be. So you can waste what you do have.
Not so amazingly, the khazar jewish evil scum never wants you comfortable in your own skin, living your life, helping others in theirs, bringing peace and prosperity through hard work and skill. The khazar jewish evil communist rats divide people based on superficial differences and in most cases no differences at all. The filthy khazar jewish evil communist cancer-causing rats now want you to make age (which is a number) fluid. WTF!!! The filthy khazar jewish evil communist cancer-causing diseased rats convert 237000 to six million and tell you it is now fluid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @07:29PM
Stupidity sure is fluid though, just keeps pouring out of you all day.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chewbacon on Saturday November 10 2018, @03:18AM
...self-identifying, why can't I identify people? I'd like to identify this guy as a 69yo douche in denial of his age. To further justify my desire to identify people, I identify myself as one how identifies others.... airtight.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Monday November 12 2018, @03:30PM
There are interesting conflicting issues at play. Obviously it makes no sense to alter the date on a birth certificate because it's a contemporaneous historical record (other than a provable error or typo); this is clearly being done as a reductio ad absurdum logical argument that it would also make no sense to alter the gender or anything else. (Note I'm talking only about the original birth record, NOT whether people should be whatever best version of themselves they can be with available technology.) And in truth it wouldn't make sense to alter that original record, IF NOT FOR THE PROBLEM that our society legal system still relies on the birth certificate for some proofs of identity, rather than some updated current identification, and without sensible inclusion of newer-style changes as well-integrated as the more traditional change of name with marriage (though even that can be a problem - I once had to wait behind a woman trying to update her driver's license having had 6 different names in 3 states, and lots of paperwork to prove it).
Would you want your GIT or SVN repository to allow alteration of history? Or is the whole idea to show fixed representations of contemporaneous information?