Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Analemma_ 546 days ago
That's mostly tangential to my argument though. In many people's lives, there comes a point where you can spend arbitrarily large sums of money to postpone death, but only in a form that I, for myself, don't consider all that valuable: I would be willing to be bedridden, intubated, and barely-conscious as a temporary condition if it meant a full recovery for more life later. But as a holding pattern before death, which is what it usually is, I'd rather not, and I personally would like to spend that money in other ways.

Note that this applies even in cases where all the costs are paid by taxpayers. If the state is making me an offer saying, "we'd like to spend $100,000 to keep you barely-conscious for a few months", that might be more generous in some sense than offing me, but I'd still rather they just give that $100,000 to my kids.