X-Message-Number: 8807
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 11:28:30 +0100
From: John de Rivaz <>
Subject: Re: Bequest vs suspension.

In article: <>  
writes:
> All when you could simply have 
> donated the money to a good charity that would guarantee that people who 
> are starving could get something to eat."  Anyone care to try to counter 
> that objection?

I hope there will be other ideas, but this is logical:

Suppose that instead of spending $28k with the Cryonics Institute for 
cryopreservation, you spend $28k during your retirment on a 
"holiday-of-a-lifetime". Is this selfish or depriving others of their 
inheritance? If you think the answer is yes, then is it depriving others of 
their inheritance if you spend any money at all during your retirement? 
Suppose you sell all your assetts and buy an annuity and rent everything, so 
that when you die you leave nothing? 

There are organisations that do a sell and lease-back, so in practise you 
could do this and not part with your home and its contents. (see note at 
end.)

If you (or the person with whom you are discussing cryopreservation) thinks 
it is acceptable to diminish your capital to fund your retirement, but it is 
not acceptable to dinminish it for cryonics, then why? Surely the logical 
thing to do would be to comit suicide and be cremated immediately the salary 
checks stop coming, to leave the maximum amount for posterity.

The answer may come back that cryonics may not work for you. The rejoinder 
whould be that retirement may not work either (ie you die soon) or that the 
holiday ends in disaster (as it did for csome elderly people visiting the 
Pyramids this week). 

However this never seems to work, probably because the person concerned 
thinks that you are gambling that cryonics will work is so unlikely to pay 
off. However for the person being suspended, the chance is worth the gamble, 
however small the odds. This point seems to elude most people - unless a 
better argument can be found on this NG.

Note

Of course the organisations that provide buy and lease-back (usually 
insurance companies) do it to make a profit, but logically, cryonics 
organisations ought to be able to offer this as part of suspension 
arrangements. Unfortunately the legal-political cartel makes this 
impractical at the moment.

If someone was to do a sell and lease-back, and die the following day, the 
insurance company would make a huge profit as they would only have made one 
payment. (Usually the deals are worked out so that the sale produces an 
annuity and the rent is less than the annuity so the client, usually in 
his/her 80s, gets an additional income - that is the point of it.) As this 
is a commercial deal, there is no death tax on the transaction, even if the 
client dies the following day. It would make enormous sense if the 
organisation making the profit was the client's cryonics organisation or a 
reanimation fund (or both). That way, death taxes are avoided.

-- 
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