• BarqsHasBite
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    9 months ago

    Nice to see some mixing up from falling out of windows. Putin to assassins “Be creative, express yourself.”

  • Hyperreality
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    349 months ago

    While assassinations aren’t exactly rare in Russia, I do find it slightly funny when people immediately suspect foul play when old men in stressful jobs die in Russia. Especially in a country renowned for the prevalence of alcoholism.

    I mean, the average male life expectancy is under 65 in Russia. This guy didn’t even die particularly prematurely by Russian standards. And it’s not as if he looks like the picture of health in the picture attached to the article.

    • @[email protected]
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      159 months ago

      Well, you have to factor the guy’ s class into it, not just his age.

      The problem with the “avg age at time of death” is that it picks up thinks like infant mortality (1.7% in 2002 and 2.9% in 1979). You also have to look at the contribution of wealth and class.

      Even there, the better metric for a person might be “expected years of life remaining.” Since someone who is 65 didn’t die in infancy and wasn’t killed as a teen, all of those factors (which drag life expectancy down) can be ignored. If you’re still talking populations and cohorts, you’re still factoring in things like poverty and access to healthcare, but it might give a better understanding of the statistical probability of a person to die of natural causes in a hotel at that age.

    • circuscritic
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      109 months ago

      Exactly. Remove Russian and it’s “61 year old man died of heart attack during work trip”.

      Also, Putin generally doesn’t want any question that the person was murdered e.g. fall from window, poison, plane exploding, etc.

      Now, it’s possible that this was a more discreet operation, or another agency e.g. Ukrainian SBU, but again, “older man dies of heart attack” isn’t exactly unusual.

        • circuscritic
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          29 months ago

          I didn’t even look him up, but I’m sure he did, as he’s a Russian diplomat.

          My point is that in this case, with the information that’s available, the most likely cause of death is natural.

          If additional information comes out, maybe that changes, but a 61 year old man in a high stress job, dying of a heart attack is not suspicious.

          Putin assassinating people with this much ambiguity around cause of death, is uncommon.

          Ukraine killing people with this much ambiguity would be more believable, but again, we’d need more information to become available for that to make more sense than natural causes.

    • Maeve
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      39 months ago

      The average life expectancy for men in my USA community is 64, women 56.

  • @xePBMg9
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    9 months ago

    While experts are checking CCTV footage.

    Is it the hotel janitor?

  • magnetosphere
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    29 months ago

    Since the man is dead regardless, I was “hoping” that it was because an assassin from another country (maybe even Ukraine?) had gotten him. If this is just another example of Putin getting his way and cleaning house, I’ll be disappointed.