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Yup. The major plausible (natural) causes of death at his age are cardiovascular disease and cancer. His habits indicate he's a relatively low risk for heart disease, so I'd be a little surprised to see a heart attack or stroke out of the blue, but even with cancer there's commonly much less than a year between "no symptoms whatsoever" and "medical investigation reveals tumor(s)". In the cancer cases I've been close to, at most there's been a subtle weird symptom that perfect hindsight would have looked at sooner (declining aerobic stamina that turned out to be lung tumors, in a smoker who didn't exercise and so didn't realize the low stamina was unusual; constipation that turned out to be a huge prostate tumor, in someone who had a poor low-fiber diet and didn't think much of the problem until it got very bad). In other cases, sometimes the decline has been as sharp as someone feeling perfectly fine one minute, then knocked unconscious by effects of their big brain tumor the next minute.
Age adjusted cancer death rates have dropped in half over the past 70 years, but a lot of that was the reduction in smoking, so medically staving off 50% of cancer is probably an upper bound. Effectively curing nearly half of cancers is pretty awesome, but the other half are still a real threat. 24% would be an overestimate for someone in above-average health, but give me 10:1 odds instead of 4:1 and between cancer and assassination I'd take the "President Vance" side of that bet.
We need a younger bench of politically interested and competent people, for this among many other reasons. It'll be interesting to see if either party manages to pull that off. I would have guessed the Democrats had the best chance, expected due to voter demographic breakdowns and indicated when they elected AOC at 29, but this week Wired is whining about "The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover" (not-the-bee link, so you don't give Wired ad dollars for that) and I guess it's not impossible that this could end up a culture war issue polarized in the opposite direction instead.
There's a huge store of untapped talent in nerdy young men who will work wonders for the low low price of not being the side that kicks them in the teeth and spits on them.
Maybe it's possible to set up a "neutral vs liberal" situation, where you get to draw from the entire talent pool that isn't part of the "queer black girls in STEM" internship and scholarship system. Find the Asian guy who still got into Harvey Mudd, or the 1600SAT white guy at Cowpoke State U. who won a competition to decipher ancient burnt scrolls, and be the first person to reward them for their abilities or give them a compliment that isn't low-key accusing them of stealing recognition from "marginalized groups."
(Does anyone have that old quote from the guy whose school tried to disqualify him from some award because they didn't want to celebrate a white boy when there was a perfectly good Marginalized one they'd rather give it to?)
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