Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I'd guess the answer to the question is yes (if someone is 70 with no children, it isn't a stretch to see how they might have no visitors for a month).

However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling". China could easily handle high death rates per average worker, practically speaking there isn't an upper limit to how many deaths can be handled. Corpses are generally fairly cooperative and theoretically they'll even go away by themselves if left alone. It is caring for old living people that is the hard part.

View on HN

> Corpses are generally fairly cooperative and theoretically they'll even go away by themselves if left alone.

This is dangerously incorrect, as India is continuing to discover.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis

I think "getting eaten by vultures" is (from our vantage point at least) pretty much the same as "going away by themselves if left alone". That is, it's not like you need to spend money or resources to deal with the problem, you just let nature take its course.

All you need to do is not poison 99% of your vulture population, which is what India did. They learned their lesson, and based on your Wikipedia link, the poison is now banned and populations are starting to recover.

Vultures consuming corpses before family or authorities are aware of the death is pretty much the least civilized norm I can image.

“ The opposite of a civilization in this context, where people neglect the elderly and let them be eaten by vultures without care or concern, could be described as barbarism or a dystopia. These terms often carry connotations of societal decay, where moral and cultural norms have broken down, and the community fails to uphold basic human dignity. “

That’s too simplistic. The situation depends on multiple parameters, including rate of children (future workers) being added, rate of automation advancement, energy supplies, and changes in length of non productive years due to technological advances.

It is obviously possible for old people to live too long so as to become a net cost to society, which means the resources used to keep them alive take from resources that could be spent elsewhere (such as on the young). In fact, that is the top political problem in almost all modern democracies, even though it is not stated that plainly.

It helps not to pile the corpses up or not to let them rot in the sun. The procedure matters.

That’s crazy!

> However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling".

I wonder how social norms could change if faced with a very large number of such cases. Perhaps people will relax social norms around mourning. Like, eventually becoming acceptable to have unclaimed bodies bagged and left in the curb to be collected by the same truck that collects municipal solid waste, to be landfilled.

Slightly less of a change, but something like this has happened before when the existing funeral system was overwhelmed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Necropolis_Railway

When predicting changes in attitudes, it's always safer to assume changes will happen to behaviors that started recently than behaviors that started long ago. In the case of mourning, we've done it since before we could write, and many animals do it too, so it is unlikely we'd stop.

> In the case of mourning, we've done it since before we could write, and many animals do it too, so it is unlikely we'd stop.

We and other animals tend to mourn those that we personally knew and were dear to us. This situation is a bit different, as it involves a surging share of dying people that were left with no close people to mourn them, or even simply notice their absence.

“Bring out your dead!”

BANG

Reply on news.ycombinator.com