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Technology Stocks : George Gilder - Forbes ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: synchro who wrote (1550)	5/14/1999 4:51:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 5853

//I have a sister-in-law who "knows in her heart" that technology kills all living things, Bamby [sic], trees, earth, water, and the Tooth Fairy. It goes without saying that Rachel and Silent Spring are her mantras. God, if I could demolish that BS once and for all, I might even go to next Thanksgiving's family dinner. // People know in their brain about lead in gasoline which poisoned people for half a century. They know in their mind about thalidomide. They know in their heart about Chernobyl. They see with their own eyes the feats of clay by the scientific priesthood. They watched NASA fire a frozen o-ring into a billion smithereens along with 7 people. They today see the brilliant CIA use a map from the 1880s to pinpoint a target for super-powerful, super accurate, laser-guided smart bombs with computing power on board smarter than the whole of the USA Congress, Senate and President combined; by 'accident' choosing the Chinese embassy. They have very, very good reason not to trust the self-anointed. Those are Irwin Jacobs 'very, verys'. That's why some shroud-waving over the greenhouse effect, brain cancer from cellphones or any other technological nightmare is easy to raise. People are primed to expect themselves to be cannon fodder for the stupid and greedy who will clip rabies viruses into genetically modified chicken to make the chickens immune to salmonella. People instinctively know that it is them versus the universe and even their wife and children are not necessarily totally on their side though interests there are usually aligned [until there are sufficient assets to bring in the lawyer's cartel to carve up the marital corpse]. People also know that if they don't understand something, they are possibly in trouble. Trouble is worse than a few casual technological and profit benefits to other people. The lump of bone above our eyebrows is not to keep our hair out of our eyes - it protects a big model of the outside world which is in charge of keeping itself in business. People who can't figure stuff out, are more likely to be 'selected' out of the gene pool. This is undesirable for them. Evolutionary pressure is quite harsh and is now going faster than in all of human history combined - if punctuated equilibrium is the right model for evolution, then we are being punctuated right now. Some people don't like being punctuated and rightly so. They have no idea whether they are being punctuated or not. So anything that looks like it might be a punctuation is rejected and smashed. The world is absurdly complex and comparing life now with life in the 18th century when nearly everyone messed around on farms, will immediately show how hard it is for anyone to retain a grip on a 'successful way to live'. A supermarket doesn't represent a food supply. It is an experiment on how well our instinctive taste, electrolyte and other metabolic feedback mechanisms keep our diets on the straight and narrow. If we are salt short, we'll get a salt craving. If dehydrated, we drink. If low blood sugar we eat. But do our instinctive appetites ensure we get all we need in the way of nutrients and avoid the things we shouldn't eat? The answer is no! Check out the people around you and maybe you. Even trying to eat a 'good diet' is impossible for people. You have no idea whether you are getting enough selenium, zinc and all those micro nutrients. Anyway, to cut a long story short, most people are scared and they have good reason to be. Unfortunately for them, unless they get political power and have a 'Great Leap Forwards' and shoot all the 'intellectuals' or make them work to serve the proletariat, they and we are stuck with the punctuation process. Maybe we'll all be punctuated and The Web will be 'it'. Much like Chimps and our common ancestors could be said to have acted as a pathway to 'us', we are a mere pathway to 'it'. A bit of knowing in our heart, or mind, or brain, or guts that we are in trouble, is perfectly sensible. We are. I'm running out of telomeres! The Web isn't. I've got a good job with The Web, so I'm on easy street [investor in Q! and Globalstar]. People trying to get by in anachronistic jobs know that all this technology is swamping them and what seemed a sensible, stable and happy way of life. They know fear in their 'heart'. Their 'brain' is just an adjunct to the raised hair on the back of their neck and the adrenaline which seem so much more real than being told all this technology is fine. In an analogy, you can see the effect of how Bill C's brain is an adjunct to other hormones. Luddites see technology = feel fear. Bill Clinton see intern = get dilated pupils, blood rushes from brain to elsewhere. These are not reasoned, but they have very powerful reasons to do with self-preservation [from a selfish gene point of view]. Sorry for the long post [I don't know what came over me]. Maurice [Poor Bambi]