Soon you could also be turned into an ice cube and then jiggled into dust.

https://nypost.com/2018/04/16/freeze-drying-dead-bodies-could-be-the-future-of-cremation/

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so what are the differences in costs relative to standard cremation?

cost for equipment
cost per body

it seems to make a lot of sense

An employee confided in me how her mother's funeral and burial would have cost roughly $60k to be interred next to her father at the cemetery. She ended up having the remains cremated and bought a nice urn. Then with the help of her boyfriend she went into the cemetery at night and dug a hole on top of her father's grave, placed the urn and buried it. Final cost about $1,800.

I do body recovery and transport for several funeral homes and also a Medical Examiner in Florida. Basically, I'm a "Body Snatcher." I handle bodies from hospitals, hospices, private homes, crime scenes, auto accidents, etc,etc,etc.

The "cremation machine" is called a retort. It gets fairly loud and fairly warm while standing next to one. Surprisingly, there is very little odor if at all.

There is usually a waiting period of about a few days before a body can be cremated. This time can vary from state to state.

Cremations have become more popular over the years as it can reduce the cost for families that can't afford all the pomp and circumstance or just want simple send-off.

My father-in-law's cremated remains we sent from Hawaii via US Post marked as "women's jewelry".

I know I've seen this done by someone else where it was done slightly differently with better, more thorough cremation. I think they put the pig in the chair and let it smolder naturally, with the fat melting, wicking into the cloth, and feeding the fire for hours like an oil lamp. This video really looked like the cloth just burned and scorched the pig, but not really '(non)spontaneous pork combustion'.

The best evidence you have for your claims (as I see it) is anecdotal at best.
3rd world countries 1) are not at all vegetarian and 2) don't get most cancers Westerners do largely because they don't eat processed foods or expose themselves to carcinogenic chemicals constantly....we do.
Again, NEVER get your science from the internet.

"Pro-life" is by definition "anti-choice".

If you're really pro-planet, a MUCH better way to go about it is try to get people to have fewer children. That will make exponentially more difference than some people eating fewer animals. In fact, if past human behavior is a guide, if we all stop eating animals, animals will cease to exist for the most part, so that's not helpful to them at all.

Again, fewer people is the proper answer, not forcefully change biologically engrained behavior. I made that choice, so I can eat all the animals I ever possibly can and I've done more for the planet and it's animals with that single action than 1000 vegans with vegan children...or more positive difference than one vegan with children, depending on how you want to look at it.

As a living being, I'm standing up for all living beings who certainly object to your choice to breed, both the voiceless and those with voice, and saying stop making choices that negatively impact us all, like having more children and grandchildren. If enough people would do that, eating meat won't be an ecological issue. ;-)

I didn't watch the videos, I don't get my science from the internet. I read scientific publications that contain peer reviewed science papers, and I've never seen one that said ALL the nutrients found in meat could be replaced with vegetable nutrients easily, simply, viably, or without excessive expense.
Also, it ignores that fact that most produce available in the first world comes with a huge carbon footprint and massive ecological damage because of the production methods, so it's not the 'clean' trade off you seem to assume.

Small family farms were plenty to meet demand for all of human history until about the last 50 years. Quit having kids, and it will be enough again and we can stop abusing animals and the eco system just to make enough food for humans.

A short, good life is preferable to no life at all.

Nope. I should have scheduled the one in that picture that's mine to end his life at least a year earlier, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. NOT doing it was immoral. If someone had been willing to eat him, I would be all for it. If someone wants to eat me, go for it...I suggest slow smoking and a molasses based BBQ sauce. Eating my dog would be ecologically sound, as opposed to the cremation we ended up with, or burial, being the only other option available.
If I raised dogs for food, I would not think twice about ending their life in their prime. That would be the reason they existed in the first place, and without that reason they would never get that chance.

Again, milk cows only exist because someone wanted to partner with them to benefit both. Without that symbiosis, they would not get the opportunity to exist at all. IMO, existence is preferable to no existence. Yes, they need to get pregnant at least once, but as I understand it, that's it so long as you keep up with milking them. Veal, now there I'll totally agree with you that IT'S abuse.

Animals are not people. They do not usually have the same need for freedom, and those that do have that need were never domesticated. It is not immoral to form a symbiosis with another species as long as you both benefit in some way, otherwise you're just a parasite.

? Taste, as in how animals taste? BS, that's not all. That's a component, sure, but there's incredibly more to it than that.

I prefer to give animals a reason to exist, knowing that without that human centric reason, they simply won't get the chance, but I do my best to purchase animal products that are created with the least distress and best conditions for the animals in question...granted that's not always possible to know.

Trust me, I've tried vegetarian 'meats', I know the difference, and absolutely don't prefer vegan fare, or vegetarian fare that attempts to emulate meat. If I want meat, I'll eat meat. You'll get my butter only by prying it from my cold, dead hands. ;-)

I don't think taste is quite as simple as you imply. Yes, there is a component of 'addiction' to certain foods, especially sugar rich foods.
There's no such thing as vegan cheese or chocolate, you mean tofu and carob...and I agree, they both suck.

Sorry, that's simply wrong. A poor eating vegan can certainly negatively impact the planet with their food choices. It's easy. Oreos for instance, are most certainly made with ecologically damaging factory farm methods creating the ingredients...well, those methods and chemists. I don't know off hand the carbon footprint and ecological impact of an oreo, but it's not "none".

cremation?

Cremation should be the law. BTW, I want to do it with her.

@newtboy

I don't think I'm much in danger of contradiction in suggesting that you yourself have yet to crack a book of feminist theory or engage with a feminist activist making no more extravagant sex/gender claims that the one you quote from that unimpeachable source, dictionary.com (and when did dictionaries move from being an aid to understanding obscure words to the ultimate arbiters of political thought?).

There is no separating the movement from the ideology; this is an ancient truism. Without the movement, the idea dies. Without the idea, the movement doesn't exist. My unfollowable second paragraph comprises only examples of actual, nasty feminist doctrine which I have encountered in the real world, and could probably even document with a few google searches. I can hardly be blamed that this group is so dissolute, so indiscriminately inclusive of maniacs and criminal fanatics that no single representative feminist can be found, no central text can answer for the whole.

But for the sake of increasingly and inexplicably divisive argument, let's attempt to isolate just that 'small-f' feminism in the definition you give: "feminism: noun: the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men", which I will unconditionally repudiate and abjure, for the following reasons.

i) Let's be boring and start with the name. A name that has rightly attracted much criticism, and which Virginia Woolf - not a feminist, merely a devastatingly intelligent and talented woman - called "a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete".* Anyone can see the defect here, an implicitly sexist term that apparently calls for the advancement of one sex at the expense of - whom? Well, whom do you think? A special politics for women only and exclusionary of those other incidental members of the human species, once allies and comrades and now relegated to the other side of what has become a literally unending antagonism.

You may say, "it's only a name", but how little else your dictionary leaves me to examine. No, were there no other social or intellectual harm in feminism, I would reject it on the ground of its name alone.

ii, sailor) Would that there were a known equivalent for the term 'racialism' that could relate to the cultural fiction of gender. The demand for women's rights necessarily requires that such a category 'women' exists, and is in need of special protection. Well what virtue is there in any woman that exists in no man? What mannish fault that finds no womanly echo? Then how is this distinction maintained except through supernatural thinking?

There are no women; and if there are no women, then there is nothing for feminism to accomplish. You may sign me up at any time for the doctrine of 'anti-sexism' or of 'individualism', but I will spit on anyone who advocates for 'women's rights'.

iii) This has been touched on before, and praise satan for that time saving mercy, but I reject the implicit assumption that there is a natural societal opposition to the principle of sex equality and that those who fail to declare for this, again, historically very recent dogma fall by default into that opposing force.



*The quote is worth taking in its fuller context, written in a time when the word 'feminist' was a slur on those heroes whose suffering and idealism has been so ghoulishly plundered for the tawdry use of @bareboards2 and her cohort:

"What more fitting than to destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete? The word ‘feminist’ is the word indicated. That word, according to the dictionary, means ‘one who champions the rights of women’. Since the only right, the right to earn a living, has been won, the word no longer has a meaning. And a word without a meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word. Let us therefore celebrate this occasion by cremating the corpse. Let us write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a match to the paper. Look, how it burns! What a light dances over the world! Now let us bray the ashes in a mortar with a goose-feather pen, and declare in unison singing together that anyone who uses that word in future is a ring-the-bell-and-run-away-man, a mischief maker, a groper among old bones, the proof of whose defilement is written in a smudge of dirty water upon his face. The smoke has died down; the word is destroyed. Observe, Sir, what has happened as the result of our celebration. The word ‘feminist’ is destroyed; the air is cleared; and in that clearer air what do we see? Men and women working together for the same cause. The cloud has lifted from the past too. What were they working for in the nineteenth century — those queer dead women in their poke bonnets and shawls? The very same cause for which we are working now. ‘Our claim was no claim of women’s rights only;’— it is Josephine Butler who speaks —‘it was larger and deeper; it was a claim for the rights of all — all men and women — to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.’"

I love The Fountain, and I pretty much interpreted the movie in the same way as the guy who did the video (give or take a few details).

I agree that it's a movie about coming to terms with death, and that death is not just a part of life. Life needs death to exist and vice-versa. We are all here, because stars died, and from their demise came the stuff that made our existence possible. And plants and animals die (or are killed) so that we can carry on living. And when we die, it doesn't really matter if we are buried or cremated. The stuff we are made of, the basic components of it, return to where it came from. To where it always belonged. We we're just borrowing it.

I think the tree in the spaceship is in fact the tree Tom planted over his wife's grave. And in his inability to accept her death and his eventual own, he grew attached to the tree because in a way it was the only thing he had left that was a part of his long gone wife. Her body nourished the tree, and in that sense became a part of it. But even trees don't live forever, and after 500 years the tree is dying, and once again he can't accept it. That's why he shouted at his memories of her to leave him alone. He just couldn't take it anymore. Living forever and never being able to let go, is not an easy way to live.

His death in the end, renewed the tree, making it bloom once again. Also I don't agree that he's not rational (as the video puts it). I think that's precisely the problem with Tom. He's completely rational, and ceasing to be and never again seeing his loved ones, scares him more than anything else.

I'm an atheist, and therefore I consider myself a rational person, but this movie really gave me a much needed boost to come to terms with death. Not just mine but of everyone I know. It will be terrible (as it is) when it happens, but not accepting it is denying the universe, and denying reality.

Stars die too. What chances did we ever had?

Probably, but if they use my boat and don't get caught doing it, or just go to international waters, who are they going to arrest?
More likely they'll cremate me and burn me on a remote control Viking ship. That's good enough for em! It's not as if I'll complain if they do it wrong.

Of the many ways one might die I think death by hypoxia as you tumble into the black aint so bad. Your body would probably get a pretty nice cremation when your orbit takes you back towards earth.

ps. Kessler Syndrome is a bitch.

Putting someone in prison isn't harsh enough. There should be a zero tolerance policy with automatic death penalty, which would need to be carried out efficiently. No more prisoners sitting on death row for years. No more ridiculously expensive lethal injections. If someone commits a crime and there's sufficient evidence of their guilt, they are killed quickly (broken neck, slit throat, cattle spike into the head, etc) and cremated. Boom, no more overpopulated prisons and no more wasted taxpayer money on feeding and sheltering criminals who will likely break the law again as soon as they are released.

Enforcing the law is always the trickiest part, since we don't have constant surveillance of every citizen. Therefore, in the absence of surveillance, we have to rely on fear. There's a reason why people don't think twice about speeding, jaywalking or littering. Not only are they very unlikely to get caught, the penalty when they do get caught is negligible. If you gave the death penalty for the above crimes, I guarantee people would think twice before committing them.

As for Norway, they certainly do have a comfortable prison system. If I were to go on a shooting rampage, I would definitely do it in Norway because their prisons don't seem that bad. In fact, their prisons are probably nicer than the living conditions of most criminals. The point of punishment is to deter people from breaking the law in the first place, not make them happier and less likely to do so after the fact.