X-Message-Number: 6095
Subject: Re: "investing in cryonics"
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 08:49:30 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <>

> From:  (hEpCaT)
> 
> It is dangerous to assume that suspension funding alone 
> would be enough continue a suspension.

No, but I'll guarantee you that bad management of suspension funds,
especially when they are largely invested in the mortgage of the
building the bodies are kept in, doesn't improve odds of
survival. (I'm trying to be understated here.)

> Investing in your own cryonics organization makes the 
> probability of its survival, and therefore your own revival, 
> much more likely than to count on the integrity of future 

Let me be blunt, Mr. Cosenza. If Alcor's patient care fund goes
bankrupt thirty or fifty years hence because for ten or fifteen years
it seriously underperformed or lost a substantial fraction of its
principal, you aren't going to be personally making up the shortfall
-- if you are alive, I doubt you will have the money. Its all very
ballsy to speak of it as though caring meant more than being rational
about investments, but the fact is that caring isn't going to pay the
rent or for liquid nitrogen -- money is. Furthermore, in fifty years,
lots of the people that "care" now will be dead or on ice.

The amount of rationalization going on, especially in the replies I
saw to my message on the subject, ("The investment isn't in Alcor, its
in this LLC that by legal fiction isn't Alcor"; "Well, its not THAT
bad an investment"; "We agree that real estate is usually bad but this
is different"; and now "Caring is sharing" or whatever David is
spewing here) is really amazing. You even violated your own bylaws and
public statements about the subject. Have you no shame?

Fact is that you guys pulled a whopper. I hope for everyone's sake
that it doesn't cause any real trouble because we know what that would
be like.

Perry


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