Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>To access MAID, an individual must have a serious illness, disease or disability which causes irreversible decline and unbearable suffering that "cannot be relieved under conditions [the patient considers] acceptable," says the federal government.

>"We should be ensuring that we never get to that point because we have better care available," Vachon said.

This seems like wishful thinking. Ultimately until we have regenerative medicine (SENS etc.) people are gonna get old and die. Trying to keep them alive even when they have terrible quality of life is not necessarily a humane option: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...

Sometimes I fantasize about replacing end-of-life care with a cryopreservation option. Given how expensive medicine is, with economies of scale, I could imagine cryonics being cheaper than current end-of-life care. And it actually delivers on the promise of possibly giving people a meaningful extension on life, depending how medical technology develops in the future.

I'd be especially excited about replacing my current health insurance with a cheaper health insurance option that aggressively cryopreserves me (instead of taking care of me 'til the end) if I get a terminal illness.

I'm doubtful that Cardus[0] would advocate for better care:

FTA:

Here’s just a quick snapshot of some of the think tank’s latest research:

• One report, titled “Marriage is good for your health,” claims the traditional institution of marriage has numerous “health advantages,” including “quicker recovery from illness” and “better odds of surviving a heart attack” while an additional report claims common law relationships can lead to “negative health outcomes” – neither report is authored by a medical doctor.

• Another report accuses the International Monetary Fund of “coercing Canadian mothers into the workforce” by calling for childcare investments, while other reports argue social assistance for single mothers gives them an incentive to never get married.

• Elsewhere, the social conservative think tank, which says it is called upon to uphold the free market, calls on unions to stop focusing on collective bargaining and organize social activities for their members instead.

[0] https://pressprogress.ca/why-is-the-media-citing-this-social...

I can agree with them specifically with regards to the odds of surviving heart attacks. If you're alone in your home and you drop to the floor suffering a heart attack, you're almost guaranteed to die. If someone (eg: your spouse) is nearby, you have a slim chance of waking up in a hospital room.

As for the other stuff though: Screw that noise.

Yet they're not advocating for living with roommates, they're pushing a binding institution with legal and social consequences. Because they don't care about peoples' health at all, they care about pushing narratives of marriage being good.

It's a pity there's not a good indication of how many of these MAID deaths fall into the "certain death within (say) six months otherwise" category.

Choosing death on your own terms, should you so wish, rather than suffering through irreversible decline and suffering is not a bad thing by my reckoning.

I question why inevitable death or substantial decline even have to be criteria, if someone sincerely wishes to die that should be their right.

We are all brought into this world unilaterally without any regard to what we might desire, the least we could do after that fact is let everyone end their existence on their terms.

Yeah my take is, instead of preventing people from killing themselves, the government should use it as a key performance indicator for social services. For example maybe you'd go through a survey/"exit interview" before getting the pill, and the government could keep statistics on how people are responding in order to know what could be addressed. I'm not keen to remove the option and force people to suffer in silence.

Cryonics has been a thing now for what, 50-60 years? In that time has anyone ever been a) brought back and b) saved with a medical breakthrough?

No. The focus is on far-future speculative medical technology. Cryonicists tend to be very concerned about making sure that cryonics organizations are fiscally solvent for many decades in to the future, so they can keep everyone cold.

My attitude is, I think the odds of cryonics working are a lot higher than the odds from praying to $diety. If I'm gonna be dying anyways, no reason not to roll the dice.

> Trying to keep them alive even when they have terrible quality of life is not necessarily a humane option

Maybe this is too off-topic, but I've always thought that vegetarianism is not a very well thought through philosophy. Animals kept alive under uncomfortable, stressful, and undignified conditions are ok but putting them out of their misery is not? I know there's a wide fuzzy boundary between the two (some dairy cows are really happy; some slaughter cows die slow, painful deaths) but it doesn't seem like the quality of life of dairy cows, egg-laying hens, etc. is considered. Personally I'd much rather die than be forcibly impregnated, separated from my child, and milked, repeating this cycle for years.

People choose vegetarianism for different reasons, not only compassion for animals. Those that do it for animals but still drink milk could be unaware of how dairy operates, or they could be making an effort to be more humane than average, while under constant counter messaging from the food environment around them. It's a wide spectrum, vegetarians aren't a homogeneous group.

The vegan argument I've heard is that buying animal products creates demand for more animals, which leads to more miserable animal lives. See e.g. https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-...

Yes, that's veganism. I understand divesting completely from animal-based food production. I'm speaking to vegetarianism.

Fun fact: there are north of a million cryopreserved persons in the USA alone right now.

This paper says there are 200:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3275130/

(well, it says "more than 200" as of 2010, but that's unlikely to mean "north of a million" today)

I can not believe it is that high? Really?

I understand that the ice crystals created in current processes basically further destroy the tissue so that rranimation is likely impossible.

It is. Here[1] is one source.

[1] https://www.elle.com/culture/a12445676/the-leftover-embryo-c...

Oh, embryos. That is a little different.

Can you provide a source for this claim?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com