Maybe, but these are pretty famous writers and artists. I'm sure we would care today if say, Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald had locked away some works 88 years ago.
Those trees will mature in 2050ish timeframe. If this person put together a trust to manage the particulars, they might be alive to ensure the trees get harvested and processed into paper.
Trees get turned into paper every day, I'm sure there's a paper mill willing to take the work, especially in Northern Europe.
I agree, this is pure (US) boomer behavior, they still think that the world will care about them almost a century into the future from the moment of their deaths. The world won't do that, one of the reasons being that said boomers have been quite talentless given their resources.
Vanity is not a trait exclusive to people born in an ill-defined interval of time. You internet using people need to come up with a better term for people you want to blame for everything bad in the world. Jobs, Wozniak, Berners-Lee, or that Ethernet dude, Metcalfe, are not responsible for the end of the world.
I am not a fan of these super-natural art projects. It is one thing to make a statue that might stand for a thousand years ... or not. It is another to designate forest land and other resources, to attempt to lock them away from use by future generations.
The legal system dealt with this hundreds of years ago. We cannot have "dead hands" dictating how future generations should live and work. The proper vehicle for such things is government. Donate the land as a park or nature preserve and cross your fingers that your intent will be respected.
A similar worry developed around the concept of compound interest. Some semi-rich people wanted to park money in bank accounts for a few generations in order to make thier great-grandkids into powerful people... with explicit instructions on how to use that money/power. Such multi-generation shenanigans are against the general public interest.
> We cannot have "dead hands" dictating how future generations should live and work
The whole world is dictated by dead hands. I cannot walk around pristine forests (maybe I even need to pre-register), I need to deal with bureaucracy, I need to pay taxes, almost every single landscape is ruined by human buildings, etc. So what is that even about?
Those things are controlled by government, which you may change. You aren't confined to a single job/city because your dead father hold you their by contract, the penalty being you repaying for all the food you ate as a kid.
Legal to try, but massively impractical unless you are rich enough to setup an estate to police the matter. You need to have someone checking on the situation, forever.
Courts have thrown out most wills that demanded children stay married or only marry in or out of particular races or religions.
I guess you live in a city. Or a highly populated country.
There's lots of unused land in this world. Most of Canada is. I live in a rural area, and loads of forest land, yet I'm 20 minutes to a city with 1M in population.
A few hours more outward, and it's just all empty federal land.
Where do you live? Surely not the US, Canada or Mexico. These places have lots of untamed, not locked down land.
>We cannot have "dead hands" dictating how future generations should live and work.
Almost everything (tech, cultural, etc) you have now is because of "dead hands".
Wish we had more dead hands dictating how future generations should live and work. And more current people having a vision of the world and what they build and live for beyond their own lifetime.
> Almost everything (tech, cultural, etc) you have now is because of "dead hands".
And a bunch of those hands belonged to total assholes who gained their foothold in our lives and culture by fucking over vast numbers of other people and preventing alternatives (sometimes superior alternatives) from becoming what we have now instead. You really don't want all of those dead hands dictating how future generations should live and work. Some of them would happily see you dead or enslaved if it'd make them or their family a dollar richer.
It's easy to look around the end result of luck and survivorship bias and assume that what we have today was the best possible outcome and imagine how wise and benevolent the people who got us to where we are now must have been, but I think you'd be disappointed if you took a hard look at how typically human and flawed the dead creators of some of the things you now enjoy were, and what might have been if that wasn't the case.
28 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 36.6 ms ] threadremind me in 88 years.
Also, file in “things that will never happen.”
Trees get turned into paper every day, I'm sure there's a paper mill willing to take the work, especially in Northern Europe.
So, instead of some future people celebrating this project, they just think "Ew, what kind of monster would wish harm on a beautiful old tree?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
who are you to determine what is and isnt shallow. what does your trite comment teach about anything other than how much of a nag you are gackle?
The legal system dealt with this hundreds of years ago. We cannot have "dead hands" dictating how future generations should live and work. The proper vehicle for such things is government. Donate the land as a park or nature preserve and cross your fingers that your intent will be respected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
A similar worry developed around the concept of compound interest. Some semi-rich people wanted to park money in bank accounts for a few generations in order to make thier great-grandkids into powerful people... with explicit instructions on how to use that money/power. Such multi-generation shenanigans are against the general public interest.
The whole world is dictated by dead hands. I cannot walk around pristine forests (maybe I even need to pre-register), I need to deal with bureaucracy, I need to pay taxes, almost every single landscape is ruined by human buildings, etc. So what is that even about?
Courts have thrown out most wills that demanded children stay married or only marry in or out of particular races or religions.
There's lots of unused land in this world. Most of Canada is. I live in a rural area, and loads of forest land, yet I'm 20 minutes to a city with 1M in population.
A few hours more outward, and it's just all empty federal land.
Where do you live? Surely not the US, Canada or Mexico. These places have lots of untamed, not locked down land.
Unless, of course, you're in a city.
Almost everything (tech, cultural, etc) you have now is because of "dead hands".
Wish we had more dead hands dictating how future generations should live and work. And more current people having a vision of the world and what they build and live for beyond their own lifetime.
And a bunch of those hands belonged to total assholes who gained their foothold in our lives and culture by fucking over vast numbers of other people and preventing alternatives (sometimes superior alternatives) from becoming what we have now instead. You really don't want all of those dead hands dictating how future generations should live and work. Some of them would happily see you dead or enslaved if it'd make them or their family a dollar richer.
It's easy to look around the end result of luck and survivorship bias and assume that what we have today was the best possible outcome and imagine how wise and benevolent the people who got us to where we are now must have been, but I think you'd be disappointed if you took a hard look at how typically human and flawed the dead creators of some of the things you now enjoy were, and what might have been if that wasn't the case.