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Hong Kong Has No Space Left for the Dead (vice.com)
Justin Heifetz, writing for Motherboard: When Fung Wai-tsun's family carried their grandfather's ashes across the Hong Kong border to Mainland China in 2013, they worried Customs officers, thinking the urn was full of drugs, would stop them. Fung, like many others in Hong Kong, could not find a space to lay his loved one to rest in his own city and would have to settle for a site across the border and hours away. It's an increasingly common story as demand for spaces to house the dead outpaces supply here in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory of some 7.4 million people. Hong Kong's public, government-run spaces to store ashes -- which are affordable to the public, starting at $360 -- have waiting lists that can last years. But many Chinese, like Fung, strongly believe the ashes must be put in a resting place immediately as to not disrespect their ancestor's spirit. Meanwhile, a private space -- one that is not run by the government -- tends to start at more than $6,000 and can go for as high as $130,000. This is simply not an option for many families like the Fung's. In Hong Kong, most people cremate their loved ones and house the urns in columbariums, or spaces where people can then go to pay their respects. While burying a body is possible, the option is prohibitively expensive -- and besides, Hong Kong has a law that the body must be exhumed after six years, at which point one must be cremated.
San Francisco voted to stop burying dead folks in the city way back in 1900. Rich folks had their graves moved. Poor folks often didn't get moved at all. http://www.7x7.com/the-dark-hi...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's related to tech through science-fiction writing. Many authors based stories on the prospect of the world running out of space and alternative solutions being found (removing health and safety laws to increase death rates), allowing the population to eliminate each other to get birth permits. Star Wars even had an entire planet based on this problem (Coruscant).
Some countries like Bangladesh and Singapore have also run out of space. Bangladesh is begging other countries to take their surplus population. Hong Kong already has "coffin apartments". The next stage for them is to start building over the oceans or reclaiming land.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Cemeteries: there's another idea whose time has passed! Saving all the dead people in one part of town? What the hell kind of a superstitious religious medieval bullshit idea is that? Plow these motherfuckers up, plow them into the streams and rivers of America, we need that phosphorus for farming! If we're gonna recycle, let's get serious!
—George Carlin, Jammin' In New York (1992)
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I've been there several times and I have an ex-girlfriend who was born and raised in Guangdong province, which is the part of China just outside Hong Kong and Macau. She and I talked about this. I can't say for all of China, but definitely in Guangdong and Hong Kong and Macau the people there have, by western standards, weird ideas about dead people. There is some real fear of the dead and of ghosts. Of course there is still land in Hong Kong where they could possibly put a cemetery, even if it just was for cremated remains. The real problem is that no Chinese person in Hong Kong wants to live anywhere near a cemetery and they raise holy hell every time any developer tries to put one near where they live. So the upshot is that nobody can ever build a new cemetery anywhere because there isn't any more land that really isn't inhabited by somebody close enough to complain about it. Think of it kind of like trying to build an above ground nuclear waste disposal site and you're really close to the kind of vehement opposition that cemeteries get there. I think it's been well over 10 years, maybe multiple decades, since the last "new" cemetery got opened there and people threw fits about that but it got done anyway. The government simply doesn't want public order disturbed and have the PLA start flexing its muscle so it's just easier to not build new cemeteries so the residents don't complain and if they have to spend many thousands of dollars of money they don't really have to find a place to stash the ashes of Uncle Fong because they are too scared to live near a cemetery that might solve the problem, then that's just how it is. Short of basically having the PLA kill people or throw them in jail if they complain, there's no real solution for this when citizens are convinced that even seeing a cemetery might bring them "bad luck".
When I die, I want to be dismembered and parts of my body surgically implanted in other, still living people. Then my tastes and personality traits can slowly, subtly, influence the recipient -- to commit MURDER!
That's why I check the box.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff