Valeria took neuropatients (including my mother's brain)
Oh my god, I'm so sorry you and your mother are personally caught up in this. How horrifying.
Actually, I am not emotionally disturbed. But my immortality hopes shifted to indirect digital immortality from cryonics.
What's your confidence in that succeeding? What would you consider success?
One measure that occurs to me is that a biological version of you and a digital version of you would both agree that the digital version is an accurate or faithful or acceptable translation.
I am insanely annoyed that something like this is happening.
I don't know very much about the conflict, but concerning just the storage of preserved people, there should be ~0 disagreement on what the best course of action is (keep the people cooled until they can be revived).
What is the conflict about (in a very birds eye view)?
Valeria is a director. Others do not satisfied by her rule and decisions and tried to removed her legally. She created new company to prevent hostile takeover by outsiders. She got part of assets, but not all. She tried to grab remaining assets: duar-containers with bodies.
The main problem is that cryonics is in the grey legal zone and there is no way to solve things legally without everyone arrested.
The second problem is that the main actors are former husband and wife and what we observe is a bitter divorce with fight for remains of family business.
Also, I was under the impression that cryonics was a business with significant returns to scale--two facilities storing 100 bodies each is much more expensive than one facility storing 200 bodies, which makes 'market share' more important than it normally is.
Old facility was really not very well. It was in a private house near other living facilities. Neighbors were not happy.
New facility is build in a remote forrest. So moving to a new place was inevitable.
I hope your mother has already, or will eventually, turn out to be securely preserved still. You have my sympathy.
From metaculus...
Early attempts at cryonics facilities have previously failed when the organisations went bankrupt. Several facilities existed in the US starting in the 1960s, which often relied on funding from the living relatives of the cryopreserved, and could not maintain conditions when relatives were no longer willing or able to pay. As a result, all but one of the documented cryonic preservations prior to 1973 ended in failure, and the thawing out and disposal of the bodies.
It may be very bad and wrong or cryo preservation companies to shrug off their responsibilities in this way, but blaming individuals might not be hitting the right target. The standard capitalist company structure is a poor fit for preventing the problem, since they involve no duty to do something forever ... the individuals running the company can wind it up, with no personal responsibility.
This is from Wikipedia and doesn't really explain the full context. Cryonics in the 1960s/early 1970s was an absolute failure, but within the US, they learned hard lessons since then. Alcor and Cryonics Institute are both non-profits and seem like pretty stable organizations. If you disagree about that please let me know why.
FWIW I actually recently updated Wikipedia to reflect this fact (that Alcor has been in continuous operation since the 70s).
Actually, I think that organizational cryonics is too fragile, and we need room temperature chemical preservation (or moon storage)
For a long time, Russian cryocompany Kriorus suffered from a conflict between two groups of owners. One is led by Danila Medvedev and the other is led by his former wife Valeria Pride. Long story short, Valeria took neuropatients (including my mother's brain) 1.5 years ago and moved them to an undisclosed location and built a new building for the company. Large full-body patients remained in a building controlled by Danila.
Today people controlled by Valeria arrived at the full-body-patients building and took large containers with liquid nitrogen and full-bodies. However, the other side called the police (or, by other accounts, police was naturally attracted to a strange track with smoke and dead bodies), and the track was stopped not far away from the initial location. By latest information, the vacuum containers have been returned to their original place but could suffer some damage.
I also remind you that both sides have two different narratives about who is the villain and who has legal rights.
You could see photos from the event in Telegram messenger (please remind me how to embed them here): https://t.me/transhumanisminheart/6261
I will update this post when I will have more information.
UPDATE: September, 8: No arrests so far, containers are back and will be refilled with nitrogen today, but 3 bodies were separated and taken by Valeria. No data about possible damage. Both sides agree that the bodies remained at cryogenic temperatures inside containers during the ordeal.
Update 2: bodies remain in original location, vacuum duars are leaking. No information about nitrogen refill. Danila told media that bodies could explode during the transportation. Police is working on the spot. Given recent gas explosion in nearby town and police envolvment I expect that bodies will be warm in two days. But most neuropatients are intact in other location I hope.