X-Message-Number: 8786
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997 16:05:41 +0100
From: John de Rivaz <>
Subject: Re: sign-ups

In article: <>  
writes:
> Steve Harris suggests that the #1 response among non-cryonicists to the 
> idea of cryonics is fear that it might work.
> 
> In my experience, the #1 response is total skepticism, as soon as the idea
> moves from the abstract ("interesting concept") to the personal ("You
> mean, would *I* do it?"). 

My feeling is that it is because sign up involves activities such as getting 
forms witnessed and notarized, transferring control of investment decisions 
and money to life insurance companies (ins.cos. are as bad to deal with as 
lawyers) (Unless you are so wealthy as to be able to use a trust), and, of 
course, gambling that cryonics will work with whatever one does set aside 
weekly or monthly to pay the costs of all this. 

None of this is the cryonics organisations' fault, of course, (or even 
individual laywers' fault) it is the fault of the fact that we the public 
have allowed "laywerism" to have invaded and permeated everything we do.

People do not like to admit this is the reason, therefore they can easily 
find other excluses, such as overpopulation, lack of friends in the future 
and other superficially "obvious" reasons not to sign up. (Of course with a 
little thought these reasons are seen to be fairly ridiculous.)

Maybe the failure of the legal system in the US and abroad in several widely 
publicised cases will cause a gradual change in the way things are done and 
cryonics will become a whole lot easier in future. I would suspect that with 
a very simple legal system the sum total of injustice and suffering would be 
about the same, but with the effort spent on "lawyerism" being spent 
elsewhere the overall wealth of the world would be greater. 


In article: <>  
writes:
> For example, it might be recommended that 
> people try to solicit their friends and family to be frozen together.  
> I'd like to hear what other cryonet readers think might be done to 
> attract the Type II relationship-oriented crowd.


The difficulty here is probably the cost if one provider has to pay for lots of 
people to sign up. Also this creates a chain that can never end. If A won't go 
without B, then B may not go without C who will not go without D and so on.


It could probably be done with a radical re-think of how suspension are 
financed, provided the chain peters out before it gets too long. If the people 
involved used the Cryonics Institute (whose fees are the lowest at $28k and who 
have never put them up) enough money could be found for A to sign up, and it was
invested not in life insurance but in a trust of technology shares, so over a 
period of decades then the fund would grow enough for other people to be added 
to the trust. However the trust should al

ways be 30% more than the sum actually needed to suspend everyone in it, on the 
basis that market falls do happen when the funds are needed. 


An alternative would be to let the trust grow to a level that a five or ten 
percent income taken from it each year would actually prepay new people into 
separate suspension agreements without reducing the capital in it. In the long 
term this would be much more beneficial to the cryonics organisation, although 
in the short term they may prefer to have a single prepayment rather than the 
posibility of "jam in the future" that may never come.


"A" would then have a gowing circle of friends going into suspension with him. 
However he would have to be either young by the time he had the first $28k or 
wealthy for the proposal to work. [If the technology shares do not go up, then 
it is because technology has failed and therefore there will be no revivals 
anyway.]


The main trouble with this is that once a serious body of capital had formed, 
there could be pressure from within and without the cryonics movement for it to 
be dissolved before it is big enough to start the process described.

-- 
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