On the front page of my New York Times today, this capsule summary:
The French can retire at 62. Or 52. Sometimes 42. President Emmanuel Macron calls the tangle unsustainable. A million protesters disagree.
In the actual article, we learn that the retirement age of 42 applies to one group of workers; dancers in the national ballet. I find it very annoying when an article is teased with a number presented as normal when it’s actually extremely atypical. You could write the same teaser about the United States, having New York City firefighters in mind. But you would be misleading your audience even though the claim would be, I suppose, technically correct.
In fact, you can retire at 38 if you enlisted in the military out of high school!
Do you still believe that mathematicians need tenure because by 50 they would get canned for low productivity, as you wrote in 2007 here?
How is it wrong that people with different professions retire at different times? Of course a ballet dancer should retire before a miner should retire before your or me should retire before some clerical workers. (Well, perhaps you or I should be encouraged to retire early if we run out of ideas.)
your – >you