= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on Cryonics as Charity - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (40)
At some point the escalating price does cause the curves to intersect; Russia didn't need seawater at the prices it would cost to build canals.
Which matters why? If you can put the desalinization plant by the ocean and pipe the clean water 85 kilometers to the city (as Australia is doing now, and similar to a planned canal in Israel), the oceanwater still is being consumed.
And consumption of the infinite ocean water is still higher than what it would have been if the supply were smaller. "Supply creates its own demand." Not a hard concept.
Finally, I'd like to ask: how on earth does any of this undermine my original point that cryonics patients increase an economy's capital by not consuming and hence increase long-term growth and net wealth? These are either accounting identities or borne out by many centuries of economic growth, and is a trivial claim.
A suspended person is economically as productive as a nonexistent person.
Nonexistent people have had zero impact on economy historically. Why would suspended people have an effect in the future?
And if supply created demand, there should be a huge demand for seawater, rather than a small demand. As it is, the demand for seawater is pretty much inelastic with supply.
So no such thing as capital exists, savings has no relation to growth, and suspended peoples' past life choices (like not spending scores of thousands of dollars on consumption) contribute exactly nothing to the economy! Of course!
I give up. You have no freaking clue about economics.
I've already pointed out the huge demand. Feel free to calculate how many millions of gallons all the uses I gave make up each year. I'm not wasting more of my time on you.
You should still pretend to try to understand what I said.
I didn't realize that you were seizing the saved assets of suspended people in your calculations; I was distributing them to next-of-kin or as otherwise directed by the suspended.
What part of suspending a person creates capital?
Which you would do... why?
Look up how suspension works.
I would allow a suspended person to provide directions regarding the disbursement of their property for the same reason I would allow it for a deceased person: to do otherwise would be immoral to me.
Looking strictly at the mechanical aspect, suspension requires a capital investment, and the only possible return on that investment is to preserve a brain pattern or entire body. As opposed to, for example, murdering someone considering suspension and giving the money they would have spend on suspension to entrepreneurs with good ideas and business plans.
Yes, there is a certain amount of economic activity which results in the suspension; but all of the labor and materials used in the suspension would otherwise be available for other uses, without diminishing the economic value of consumption.
Suspension as practiced is not like that; there are more capital investments than the mechanical. You really don't know anything about the trust funds?
Do the trust funds have a higher return-on-investment than the investments of active people? The amounts spent on maintaining the suspension are not spent on any other economic activity, and any amount reserved for the use of the suspended is unavailable for any other use.
Irrelevant.
True and false respectively.
I'm not sure why comparing the finances of suspended people compared to active people is irrelevant, when one of the comparisons is between a suspended individual and an active one.
When you wake up, you either have liquid assets or you don't. Any liquid assets aren't contributing to meeting capital requirements. If there's a secondary market capable of absorbing your bonds, then your bonds don't contribute significantly to the available capital.