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Comment by joelthelion | Hacker News Reader

> So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?

It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.

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> assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.

I beseech you to contemplate how badly this might be abused, and how monstrous the consequences could be. Even now MAID in Canada and other forms of assisted suicide in Europe have arguably gone way too far.

It is my life. Not yours. What you are afraid of is openly murdering people.

There are lots of ways for you to end your life. You do not have to involve government or society. You do not require sanction or assistance.

The only people who might require assistance and sanction are those who are so catastrophically ill that they cannot function independently at all. But MAID has already killed people who were able-bodied! (And some for stupid or trivial reasons: https://care.org.uk/news/2024/10/poor-lonely-and-homeless-op... )

Traditional suicide is incredibly stigmatized; ending one's life manually is a huge trauma to place on loved ones. The benefit of MAID is that it's dignified, and won't leave families searching for answers after a death.

The article you shared mentions a report and a committee that analyzed the report. You don’t happen to have any further details on those do you? I couldn’t immediately find the details in the article

> There are lots of ways for you to end your life. You do not have to involve government or society. You do not require sanction or assistance.

By the time you think suicide is the better option, you are often already in a managed and locked down environment in which it is difficult to impossible to commit suicide in an acceptable manner. Believe me I know it.

"Suicide in an acceptable manner" sounds as like an oxymoron.

Why would you care that it's "acceptable" by society which you will no longer take part of ? If your concern is pain, then perhaps that is your mind telling you NOT to end your life and seek therapy instead.

Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which is rather rare.

We should not be encouraging or celebrating suicide, it takes away innocent lives, especially younger ones. If you ask the survivors, many of them are glad they didn't go through with it.

Acceptable by the person who wants to die. That usually means not too painful, and not causing more stress than necessary to the persons you care about.

Wanting to avoid pain is very much not a reason to seek therapy, what an absurd thought.

> Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which is rather rare.

As medicine and technology advance, assisted suicide will make sense/be required in nearly 100% of natural human deaths. With enough money, we will be able to keep people "alive" (on paper) arbitrarily long. It will be nothing like what people think of when they describe extended lifespan, but turning off all the robotic parts will still be tantamount to assisted suicide.

If you're (a) unconscious, (b) hooked up to a bunch of machines, and (c) can't wake up or live without an operational hookup to those machines, then: When the doctors turn them off that is neither suicide nor murder. It will be then, as it largely is now, an informed decision made by medical staff and next of kin.

> However, lobbying efforts have steadily pushed for broader access and eligibility...British legislators have to consider how easily assisted dying can be expanded, how easily abuses can go undetected.

Wait, how exactly does one "abuse" MAID?

People being so deep in poverty and addiction that they opt for MAID as an option isn't a symptom that it's "too easy" to access it, but rather that _society_ is failing them. And when those people finally say "Well fuck this shit I'm out", we reply "That's not allowed". Disregarding that companies won't hire them, rent & housing are ridiculous, they''re not allowed to put their tents anywhere and when they get kicked out their tents & belongings are trashed instead of being given back.

The argument is that society should not put resources into things like assisted dying programmes: they should put resources into making life worth living for people who would otherwise take the assisted dying option.

Only one of those options seems financially practical, unfortunately.

It's funny to say this when there in fact is wealth but is mostly tied up in assets owned by rich douchebags and trust fund kids. Financially practical is just a nonsense word considering money isn't even tied to anything anymore either.

If this is true (and I don't think it is), then we need a fundamental, radical overthrowing of the social order, and a lot of work put into constructing a new one. Any system where putting people to death is more "practical" than giving them fulfilling lives must be destroyed, and replaced. (It may be more effective to destroy and replace the system gradually – "reform" – since revolutions tend to have too many moving parts for Blanquists to keep track of, the situation has to be pretty bad before a popular revolution becomes likely, and the world's so interconnected now that foreign powers will take advantage of the malleability of a society undergoing revolution, likely to the detriment of the locals.)

Several people in the Netherlands have died through MAID who had only psychiatric conditions with no serious physical problems. And these were not people mired in poverty and addiction who were failed by society. We can argue the merits of particular cases but many people would consider that an abuse.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/16/dutc...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

Why is a psychiatric problem less "deserving" of MAID than a physical problem?

It's not a matter of "deserving" but rather the greater potential for abuse. Most psychiatric conditions have no objective signs and so diagnosis depends largely on observed symptoms, which are often patient reported. Most of those psychiatric conditions can be treated to an extent, or patients can learn to manage them: they aren't comparable to something like untreatable stage-4 cancer.

I'm not familiar with MAID, but AFAIK I live in the European country with the most liberal euthanasia policy, and hardly anyone here thinks it's gone too far, let alone way too far.

This! Eurovision has prepared us for this moment of unity: Knuckles-Knuckles

I hold the opposite view on this issue. While I firmly believe that everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about their lives, my primary concern is that certain groups and especially governments are actively promoting assisted suicide. Even if it's merely coincidental, I find the underlying incentives perverse, for lack of a better word. Admittedly drawing from a Hollywood sci-fi perspective, I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.

> I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.

That's just assisted suicide with extra steps.

How do you stop forced assisted suicide or do you think it will never happen?

But then how would you justify the healthcare racket?

Ah, the good old ‘your medical bill is my dividend’ retirement plan.

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