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55 points arielzj | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.192s | source
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michaelt ◴[] No.46198721[source]
When it comes to cryopreservation the thing I find infeasible is the idea a provider would bother with the preservation, under the incentives of capitalism.

If someone pays millions of dollars to a company that promises to freeze their corpse for 200 years, the company can simply freeze the corpse for a decade or two, take the millions of dollars as dividends and executive bonuses, then declare bankruptcy. The dead can't sue.

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DennisP ◴[] No.46198967[source]
One way to mitigate that would be to put the money in a trust which pays the preservation company a monthly dividend. If the trust stops paying, the company can sue it. If the company goes out of business despite its ongoing revenue, the trust can try to find someone else to take over the storage. We already have trusts that manage wealth for multiple generations.
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vintermann ◴[] No.46203837[source]
And how can you trust the trust? We also have plenty of trusts which are questionably aligned with their makers last wills, among them the Nobel peace prize (Nobel didn't just want the prize to go to anyone working for any kind of advancement of peace. He had a very particular instrument for peace in mind, namely peace conferences, which I don't think any laureate has arranged for fifty years.)

I think we have too many trusts already. Let the living decide what's important in life, not the dead.

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1. DennisP ◴[] No.46213454[source]
That's why I said "mitigate" rather than "completely solve." Incentives are aligned better with two entities who check each other and earn ongoing fees, instead of giving a lump sum to a single entity.

And the Nobels might not be awarded exactly as originally intended, but they are still awarded every year. Nobody has swiped the funds for executive bonuses, as the commenter above suggested.