Why undertakers are worried | Hacker News Reader

Why undertakers are worried

economist.com

57 pointslxm53 comments

Good! They should be worried!

This is one of the greatest things about the internet: the reduction of information asymmetry.

Occupations like investment advice and sometimes auto repair exploit the heck out of information asymmetry.

The death business is especially nefarious because not only are they exploiting information asymmetry, they also exploit emotional overload.

When I was in college, my dad died in another country. The mortician had me over a barrel. The hospital had one funeral home they worked with and before I knew it, the funeral home was in possession of my dad's body. Want to transfer it to another funeral home? Well there's a charge for that. My only option was to pay them whatever they asked to cremate him. I paid some outrageous amount (I believe it was about $600, which was a fortune in the small 3rd world country he was in) for cremation and a little urn and box to carry him in.

Even as a guy who was emotionally relatively stable (I was mostly estranged from my father), it was still an infuriatingly weak position to be in as a "customer" of one of these predatory businesses.

Huh, what do they do if you just say "Alright, guess he's your problem now"? Pretty sure my parents would be cheering me on from the after life. We're not the most sentimental bunch.

Ha, good point. We had relatives back in the States that were expecting something to bury so I was stuck.

You could have burned something else of similar volume, maybe a load of his clothes, and put it in an urn.

Cremains are kind of distinctive, though. In fact, once you know what they look like you can find them at waterfalls and mountain tops all over the place.

err... Not sure if i should google or not...

Edit: got curious. I guess it's just white/pale ash?

It has little chunks, maybe 3 or 4 millimeters wide, where you can see the spongy, internal structure of the bones.

I heard that used to be true for older cremations, but not for newer ones (due to higher heat & efficiency) ?

Last time I saw a dateable sample (i.e. straight from the crematorium vs. at a mountaintop or waterfall) was about nine years ago, and it was quite chunky. This was from a crematorium in Arizona that was presumably using modern methods. I do recall that there was an episode of a TV show a while back (Dexter?) where someone did an ashes swap and it was discovered because the ashes looked like they were from the 70's, but that could have just been something the writer dreamed up.

You can almost imagine an eccentric subculture rife with debate over the preferences and arguments in favor of the virtues distinctive degrees of granularity in cremated human ashes, not unlike peanut butter varieties.

The defining aspect of the argument being whether you can tell the ashes came from a human, or whether you'd rather not know, or care to think about it.

The show was "six feet under"

Interesting. Maybe someone can chime in on how it would be different from ash at the center of a fire pit?

Watch the movie "Meet the Parents" ("dinner scene"). It's funny, but you can skip to 2:30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pctsr5jf0Pw

File a claim against his estate, most likely.

You can add Ambulance service as one of the extremely exploitive services. They don't even give you an estimate of what it's going to be then you get a bill in the mail for 2900$ for a 25 minute ride!!! Word to wise, never use ambulance service unless you have a really high degree of confidence in your medical insurance company.

The funeral industry is going through a bit of a transformation right now. Relatively unchanged for the past 100 years, a lot of funeral home owners haven’t really felt the pressure to change.

2017 was the first time cremations eclipsed the traditional casketed burial in the U.S. This is a huge business problem as funeral homes rely heavily on ceremonies, merchandise, and other services to keep their businesses open. Now you’re starting to see the innovators take off, while those that are not adapting lose market share. Those offering low-cost cremations are doing very well, while those still stuck and expecting the consumer behavior to change are suffering.

Being the CEO of a tech company in the funeral space (Parting and Parting Pro), we see this anti-change sentiment holding funeral businesses back. After interacting with many funeral directors, you realize they aren’t the snake oil salesmen they are made out to be. However, their lack of understanding of tech really does hold them back from communicating with their customers. This leads to sticker shock that gets magnified by information asymmetry.

Interesting, I write the software that runs one of the largest custom memorial and headstone etc businesses in the UK.

It’s strange to see an industry I directly know a bit about on here.

The company I work for is actually pretty forward thinking for a none-technology company, largely down to my boss been smart as hell.

It’s interesting sofwware to work on as well bit of everything, C# for the sandblast orchestration software, java for he inventory terminals, php (the legacy system..is interesting), typescript.

It fits me because I like a varied set of skills and the ability to work in a bunch of domains.

We recently experienced a stillbirth after 38 weeks. I was thankful to have a level-headed, knowledgeable friend at our side to question most of the hospital norms. We were in no shape to push back. After asking the right questions, we were able to work with a local monastery to bury our child for a grand total of $0. IANAL, but at least in California, we determined that in our situation working with an undertaker was optional. State law clearly gave us rights to control and custody of our daughter's remains.

It's common for funeral homes, in the South East, to do no cost or very low cost infant ceremonies and burials. Maybe common in other areas too, but I can't say for certain.

I saw this first hand in Georgia, North Carolina and Virgina. I was licensed and worked in the industry in two of those states and attended mortuary college in the other. So, I know a good deal about the profession in those areas.

Glad to know that your friend and the monastery helped you. It is a difficult time and being asked/expected to make decisions makes it even harder.

Damned, so sorry for your loss. :(

Glad to hear that you had that support from your friend, at the very least.

Stay strong.

So terribly sorry for your loss.

The Big Lebowski said everything that needs to be said on this topic :)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vKjBFsyYC0g

Just cause we're bereaved doesn't make us saps!

When my mom died a few months ago, none of the family wanted a funeral. Waste of money in our opinion. We went with direct cremation with a firm that does only direct cremation and saved thousands of dollars over direct cremation at a traditional funeral home. Shit is a racket.

It's interesting that donating your body to science is nowhere to be seen, either in the article or the comments.

Many organizations will even provide a stipend to the next-of-kin, and some even still provide cremated remains (to the next-of-kin) once the body has served its purpose.

Furthermore, consenting to organ donation can serve an immediate life-threatening need.

Speaking of which, would a DIY funeral pyre be legal in this country in some shape or form? Purely hypothetically. Seems like an interesting product idea. It doesn’t have to be a pile of logs, could be just a thick body bag with enough burnable material to completely incinerate the body inside.

I'd venture a guess that it's mostly uncharted legal territory. If the information at [1] is accurate, home burial is legal in most states. Unless state law is worded to state that burial is required it would seem to me that you're free to dispose of the mains however you desire, within reason. If you can do the cremation far from civilization I doubt anyone would care, but if your neighbors smell what they think is a BBQ but find out they were really smelling grandma going on to glory, they might freak out a bit.

1: http://coeio.com/burial-laws-state/

Burned humans smell much fouler than barbecue, I've been told by a former fireman.

Hm, I’ve read elsewhere that burning human flesh smells not unlike cooking pork. I think I’m fine not finding out for myself.

The hair alone would be pretty nasty.

Probably not. A crematorium gets up to 1400 degrees F. I doubt a thick body bag could do that.

How about if it’s something like thermite, or staged combustion with a very high temperature stage at the end?

Thermite is dangerous, essentially impossible to extinguish until it burns out, and would burn through any realistic oven. It also emits a dangerous amount of UV so you need welding goggles and distance from the burn. If you really wanted to burn a body (illegal in most cases) it’s a matter of good airflow and the right accelerant. And disarticulstion of the limbs and head, which for me at least, would be a difficult thing emotionally. Once you’ve hacked your loved one into roughly even pieces, dig some ditches lined with steel drums, get some charcoal and wood, wrap the pieces of your loved one in natural fibers soaked with jet fuel, and light it up. Make sure that you layer their “chunks” on a scaffold or logs, and try to make sure that there is a clear “intake” and exhaust at opposite ends for airflow. If needed take the remaining remains and subject them to a second pass with jet fuel.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be able to do that to a total stranger, never mind someone I cared about.

What I had in mind is you buy a bag, put the person in it and it does its thing totally automatically. You’d need to do it outside city limits of course and in open air and you’d carefully watch the direction of the wind. I’m not really suggesting people should pursue it, I was merely wondering if it’s even legal.

TBH, I don’t see why human remains can’t be disposed of the way other garbage is disposed of, through the same garbage processing facilities. Just literally take the deceased to the garbage processing center and chuck them into the shredder along with their old mattress.

When it comes to remains, I don’t consider them to be “my loved one”, that part is gone. I will honor whatever wishes they’ve had before they died, but my own wish will be that my loved ones just quickly get rid of my body at a minimal cost and move on. To remember me, just celebrate what I’ve left behind.

There are a few reasons, the most important three are these:

Public health. Corpses are breeding grounds for some very unpleasant pathogens, and you want to protect people from them. People working with the corpses or the machines to process them would be at risk. Back in the days of unregulated burial, it wasn’t uncommon for earthquakes and floods to cause large numbers of shallow burials to erupt. So, public health on a number of levels is a concern.

Emotion. Most people don’t have your attitude towards the deceased, although it’s fair to say that some do. It’s also true that how people think they’ll react may differ from the reality of their reaction when they’re grieving. Most people wouldn’t be comfortable casually disposing of their loved one’s corpses. There are many cultures around death in the world, but few could be thought of as treating the deceased remains casually.

Politics. The first and second reasons combine with cultural and sometimes religious norms and make such a proposal as yours difficult if not impossible politically.

Regarding public health, I’m not convinced dead humans are any worse than dead cattle TBH.

I do agree on the other two points you’ve made. This is one of those things that are fraught with irrationalities and taboos, and have been for millennia.

That's not too hot. An steel oven with brick insulation is enough. Some food ovens can get there.

"this country" lacks sufficient resolution on an international forum.

It is a US site, so “this country”, by default, is US.

Yes but it makes others feel subtly unwelcome.

That wasn’t my intention.

http://archive.today/4K797

Two relatives of mine died recently, one had arranged his own funeral, the other did not.

TL;DR: If you want to make less stress for your loved ones, you'll plan your funeral yourself.

Also I remember seeing a post on HN a while back about water cremation. I thought it was interesting.

* Leaving Earth the Greenest Way Possible: Water Cremation - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Le7rLbkFe4

Can you arrange but not pay for it? I'd be worried about paying for something that is never used (because of unforeseen circumstances).

You can do that.

IMO, the best approach is to just buy a 15K to 25K life insurance policy. If you are young and healthy, it'll only cost 10 dollars a month (maybe less) and the nice thing about those is that you/your beneficiary gets the money at death (tax free in most cases) and the funds can be used for other things beside final burial expenses.

Be careful of some of the plans sold by funeral homes. They may be the beneficiary and you may not be able to move your plans to another funeral home or use left over funds for anything else, etc.

Something for your life insurance beneficiary to watch out for is a funeral director suggesting that they let the funeral home deal with getting the proceeds of that life insurance policy... for a "modest" fee.

I don't know about arrange, but lately my parents circle of friends has been "arranging payment without paying" by giving their kids the funeral money to go into a home loan offset account. So basically they save interest payments and have the cash on hand when needed.

Never used? Like if you somehow gain immortality or something (which is totally plausible)? I feel in that case money is the least of your problems.

(apologies if I misunderstood the question)

I think they meant what if your body is lost at sea, or blown up, or burned in a fire, etc.

There may not always be a body to bury or cremate.

I'd prefer a sky burial, as the Tibetians and Zoroastrians use. This involves birds of prey. In at least the Tibetian style, the bones are handled in a second pass by breaking them up and mixing them with some sort of flour.

This seems unavailable.

Another choice I like is to become biodiesel and fertilizer pellets. This too appears to be unavailable.

I think you would love to read this article[0] about the confluence of antibiotics abuse in cattle, Zoroastrian sky burials and the declining vulture population in India.

[0] http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/sil...

i want to burn up on re-entry. Elon, you hear me?! I want a space burial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com