paddyfool

Cuts to police and social care, education, drug and alcohol services, and increasing burdens on a financially strapped NHS that doesn't have enough beds or staff for our aging population are definitely part of it. I don't think that more incarceration is the answer, however, since that's already at a record high. Meanwhile, in the broader picture, homicide and suicide rates are up across many western countries, from the UK to the USA and beyond, as are accidental overdose deaths. One of a few reasons why life expectancy is peaking. We live in a time of wondrous toys and gadgets; of increasing acceptance of the diverse nature of humankind; of increasing connectivity between all parts of the world; all these wonderful things, and yet people are in despair. EDIT: there was also a good debate on radio 4 this morning that raised some further decent points. There's a massive financial incentive for gang-related crime with the scale of the drugs market, cocaine in particular (£11 billion for this in the UK). We're seeing increasingly unrestrained, rage-driven debate in public fora, including social media, that legitimises picking fights over stupid things. And nobody at a national level is doing anything about it; the focus is all on Brexit and Russia right now.

I clearly need to make my jokes more obvious... would it have helped if I had used this emoticon: ?

What, no "no more deaths this year" option? ;-)

Well done to the four people on nil points who have so far guessed correctly who would not survive four times out of four. Excellent fourcasting skills!

Seriously, the prognosis for prostate cancer is not that bad at all. 84% of patients survive 10 years from diagnosis. http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/prostate-cancer/survival No way he's on the list.

Mustafa Ben Halim for me. Partly because he's apparently resident in Libya again, which is hardly the safest place on earth.

Apologies for the extent to which my random team will have muddied the waters of the stats and facts!

I went for Wouk; anticipating this might be the final winter for the writer of the winds of war, but I'm very doubtful as he still got a memoir published at the age of 100.

Yeah, it might have been saner for me to go with the even lazier "inverse DDP popularity" prediction that occurred to me a little later (ranking 50th at 1st, 49th at 2nd, etc.) EDIT: Although even this would have included Bracknell, albeit at 25th

Out of general laziness / interest, I'm going to enter a team of random picks in random order: Random 25 may-or-may-not-stay-alive 1. Jimmy Carter 2. Marieke Vervoort 3. Rev Billy Graham 4. Devin Lima 5. Dean Francis 6. Doris Day 7. Leslie Phillips 8. Little Richard 9. Jill Gascoine 10. Olivia Newton-John 11. Valerie Harper 12. Terry Jones 13. Leah Bracknell 14. Betty White 15. Greg Gilbert 16. Dick Van Dyke 17. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI 18. Prunella Scales 19. Clive James 20. Donald Trump 21. Alberto Fujimori 22. Henry Kissinger 23. Simon Ricketts 24. Robert Mugabe 25. Liam Miller Sub: Val Kilmer I very much expect they should come last by a decent margin, but I think a random team or two give a nice comparison with the predictive power of other peoples' guesses.

Went for Dick Van Dyke. Deaths of close relatives can be hard on people.

Only 10 days to go now. Statistically, "None of the above" looks better and better. Hopefully, I haven't just jinxed someone on the list by saying so.

How many people on the list live around L.A. or other fire-affected parts of California? Given the effect of the fires on air quality, the possibility of having to evacuate etc, this can't be good for their health.

I can definitely see it happening. The population of frail, elderly celebs gets bigger every year, while the rise in life expectancy is levelling off, so it's easily possible for another year to have even more plum picks than this one.

I perhaps foolishly went for "None" without really doing the research, just thinking that the year was nearly up and that I wasn't really comparing "none" to "not none" so much as I was comparing "none" to "a specific one out of 33". Between general winter mortality and the old age and frailty of many remaining figures, I expect I'll be wrong.

Worth noting that Jimmy Carter has previously stated a firm intent to outlive the rather nasty tropical disease his foundation has been trying to eradicate for the past couple of decades (Guinea Worm), and that job is not finished yet: