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Wealthy 'Cryonauts' Put Assets on Ice
Carl Bialik writes "'You can't take it with you. So Arizona resort operator David Pizer has a plan to come back and get it,' the Wall Street Journal reports. Pizer is one of about about 1,000 members of the "cryonics" movement who plan to put their bodies on ice soon after death so that in the future, medical advances can save them. A small, wealthy subset of these cryonauts is exploring ways to leave their money to themselves. 'With the help of an estate planner, Mr. Pizer has created legal arrangements for a financial trust that will manage his roughly $10 million in land and stock holdings until he is re-animated,' the Journal reports. 'Mr. Pizer says that with his money earning interest while he is frozen, he could wake up in 100 years the richest man in the world.'"
he could wake up in 100 years the richest man in the world
Or he could wake up in 300 years in sick bay with no money at all.
Three words for you my friends: tax evasion scam.
Good night.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Duh, he'll just wake up in a few hundred years after his consciousness is transferred into the memrouy wiped body of a convict, and recieve RNA memory injections and learn to pilot interstellar world seeding ships.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
David Pizer wakes up in the future and calls his accountant to find out how his account is doing. "Good news!" the man says. "Your ten million dollars has grown to almost one billion dollars!" David is ecstatic and they talk a minute more. Suddenly the phone chimes. "Please deposit one hundred million dollars for the next three minutes..."
Reminds me of the Star Trek Next Generation episode where they wake up people who were frozen. The doc cured them, and one guy wanted to check on his stocks. They thought he was nuts, because why would you need stocks when you could just ask the replicator for anything you wanted?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
There was a horror comic in the early 80's that has a story that I still remember.
A rich man who was dying had enough money to develop the technology to put himself on ice until medical technology was advance enough to cure his disease. He wakes up about 50 years later to find out that medical technology did indeed advance greatly over the years. But there was no cure for his disease. Instead, he was revived so the doctors could harvest his limbs for the veterans of the last World War who lost their arms and legs. Since he was beyond cure, the doctors figured his limbs were still useful to humanity. Advance technology rendered the rich man a basketcase.
The rule against perpetuities should probably stop this in most states. The point of it is to keep property from being tied up and being useless for long periods of time. I think it's probably a moot point until they actually manage to unthaw someone and then keep them alive for more than a second or two.
What?
This scheme was mentioned in at least one of Niven's books. It didn't work - surviving family members took the estate to court to get at their rightful inheritance. I think that's a pretty likely outcome. Another likely outcome is that the estate management will embezzle it (it's not like you can watch them closely when you're dead). It's also possible the government might decide to seize it, if it's a tempting enough target.
"Terry: Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Lou: Why do you always have to say it that way?
Terry: Haven't you ever heard of a little thing called showmanship? Come, your destiny awaits!"
Futurama Pilot
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Reminds me of this little sequence from Red Dwarf:
Holly: They're from the NorWEB Federation.
Lister: What's that?
Holly: NorthWestern Electricity Board. They want you, Dave.
Lister: Me? Why? What for?
Holly: For your crimes against humanity.
Lister: You what?!
Holly: Seems when you left Earth, three million years ago, you left two half-eaten German sausages on a plate in your kitchen.
Lister: Did I?
Holly: You know what happens to sausages left unattended for three million years?
Lister: Yeh, they go mouldy.
Holly: Your sausages, Dave, now cover seven-eighths of the Earth's surface. Also, you left seventeen pounds, fifty pence in your bank account. Thanks to compound interest you now own 98% of all the world's wealth. And because you hoarded it for three million years, nobody's got any money except for you and NorWEB.
Lister: Why NorWEB?
Holly: You left a light on in the bathroom. I've got a final demand here for one hundred and eighty billion pounds.
Lister: A hundred and eighty billion pounds!! You're kidding!
Holly, wearing glasses, nose and moustache: April Fool.
Lister: But it's not April!
Holly: Yeah, I know. But I can't be waiting six months with a red-hot jape like that underneath me hat.
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
You can't take it with you. So Arizona resort operator David Pizer has a plan to come back and get it.
Does anyone else think this sounds like a bad horror movie?
Perhaps rich people are the ones worrying about preserving their assets for the future, but I don't want people to get the impression that you have to be rich to be a cryonicist.
That mistaken assumption is what caused me to take so long to take the plunge.
I'm a grad student, I make 20k/year, and I have a cryo contract. As a full-time student I pay $199 annually and my life insurance policy ($90k coverage) premiums cost about $1k per annually. If I wanted to, I could have taken out a term life insurance policy and I'd be paying in the low hundreds, but since by definition this is an arrangement you'd want to make for the duration of your life, I thought it would be better to lock in a good whole life insurance rate while I'm still young and healthy. Plus my policy has a safety margin of $10k over the $80k neurosuspension fee.
And that's me, a starving PhD student. Some of you people with real jobs can fund your cryo policy, and toss some money into a trust fund for yourself, and have some left over for charity and heirs.
Cryonics is a long-shot, but unlike many other beliefs about life after death, it doesn't contradict the observed laws of physics. I don't ridicule those beliefs or take any action to restrict them, no matter how alien to my way of thinking they may seem. I therefore expect a free and pluralistic society to reciprocate this courtesy toward my own beliefs.
The one cool thing about freezing yourself that no one seems to mention is the process, if successful, will seem instant to you regardless of how many hundreds of years you're out for. Thinking of it that way makes it seem way more appealing. It's like a crude form of time travel.
All I can say is, let it go. You don't own anything in perpetuity, not even the water and dirt your body is made of.
... You've been frozen for 150 years, but your Cryo company went under about 80 years ago. Actually that company has been bought and sold a number of times. You actually spent a few weeks in a meat locker in Chicago until a new facility could be found. Unfortunately we were legally obligated to dip into your "inheritance" to pay for emergency cooling and relocation. You still have a few dollars left, but after converting them into American Yen, it looks like you will have to go back to work. Mr Pizer? Are you listening to me? Ah... yes, where is the rest of your body? Well, you see after the last market crash the Cryo industry was forced to make a few, um, cutbacks. What now? Well, Mr. Pizer, you've lucked into a wonderful Brave New World, you know. You've been assigned to the circus with all the others. You'll be pulled by trained monkeys round the ring on a special cart along with the other heads. It doesn't pay all that well, but it will keep the feeding tube flowing and cover any back taxes owing. And it does make the children laugh! Mr. Pizer? Now don't be angry with me Mr. Pizer...
Is this sig nificant?
Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y-chromosome changed to X
And when it is grown
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
(Chorus)
Clone, clone of my own,
With your Y-Chromosome changed to X
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.
Asimov and Garrett
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The cold and flu that you and I shrug off today would kill our great grandparents (at an age of young adulthood) in an instant because of sex and diversification.
That's completely not true. You don't think that people's immune systems in any given generation just luckily happen to be attuned to exactly the germs which will be around during their lifetimes? The immune system is extremely adaptable and will effectively attack nearly any foreign menace. We don't have to rely on it evolving to match specific germs that go through a million times as many evolutionary generations as we do.
(As a side note, it's typically not advantageous for infectious agents to evolve to kill their hosts anyway, except under crowded and unsanitary conditions where they can spread very quickly. Many germs could well evolve to be less deadly as world sanitation improves.)
You're probably thinking of the (extremely plausible) argument that the main evolutionary purpose of sex is to "change the locks" against such parasites. But the point of this is more that a genetically uniform population would be vulnerable, so lineages that could vary their genetic makeup would gain an advantage; not that genetic change is the primary line of defense against parasites. Luckily for all of us, it isn't.
Not so sure this is flamebait (I mean it is but...)
Heinlein explored this basic concept (with a timewarp from a nuke) in Farhams Freehold.
-nB
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Nobody lives forever... nobody SHOULD live forever... and if thats wrong and there is some rare person who actually deserves to live forever, it's certainly not YOU. Having accumulated weath doesn't make you deserving - if anything, it probably rules you out.
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