X-Message-Number: 29777 From: "John de Rivaz" <> References: <> Subject: Attitudes to resources Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2007 11:24:08 +0100 >> The market has consistently rejected cryonics as a waste of resources in part because people prefer to spend their dead relatives' money on improving their own and their children's reproductive prospects instead of using it to store their post-reproductive kinfolk in liquid nitrogen. << I have always found this attitude of "the market" disturbing and indeed irrational, if true. If the market had this attitude about other things, no one would take a holiday. This is usually a family's biggest annual expenditure, apart from taxes and other costs of citizenship that do not provide a direct 1:1 benefit. If when someone dies it was possible to add together the annual expenditure on holidays, entertainment etc throughout his adult life, and then apply them to savings, what would the resulting sum be? [I say savings rather than investments, as speculating about such investments would be unrealistic because they would be done with hindsight. The savings rate after tax and inflation is probably quite low, even zero or negative.] Do the cryo-detractors think all the expenditure other than food and clothing is a waste and people should stop buying anything apart from the essential of life to provide for these cryo-detractors and their descendants? -- Sincerely, John de Rivaz: http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy, Nomad .. and more Content-Type: text/html; [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=29777