Steve the Pocket wrote:GlassHouses wrote:While the inheritance-with-strings attached idea can lead to very amusing scenatios (Brewster's Millions!), how realistic are they? I have this idea that if someone leaves me something, I get it (minus applicable taxes), and that's that. In my non-expert opinion, conditions would be unenforceable. This probably varies by country, though -- in the Netherlands, natural heirs have some pretty strong rights, which I think do not exist in the U.K. or U.S.
I wasn't even thinking of it in legal terms. There's a sentiment, or at least I've always gotten the impression that there is, that it's mean to disrespect a dying person's last wishes, whether it involves their heirlooms or what they want done with their body or whatever. Of course, that depends on how much you care about them in the first place... or how much you still care about them after they've left you with an unreasonable burden with emotional blackmail attached.
Presuming that the recipients are already aware of the (imminently) decedent's tendency to engage in
trolling behavior of this kind, I would imagine that (1) the collective response to these "gifts" would be "yeah, **** you too, (grand)dad" and (2) those at the bedside are, probably against their better judgment, present to make sure that this whole "dying" thing isn't another stunt of the old man's and he's actually going to be out of their lives at last, halle-fuckin'-lujah.
(Of course, at this rate, he's probably got some
other arrangements made so that he can continue to be an annoyance to his descendants for
years if not
decades to come. Like, spending the bulk of his estate on hiring someone to leave them a harassing message on a random day once per year.)
Really, what strips like this make me think of most strongly is John Scalzi's observation on how the failure mode of "clever" is "asshole."