HUMOR: NANOG stop the economic downturn :-)

Thu Dec 25 01:43:40 UTC 2008

Heard this on NPR's All Things Considered today... Get busy people! :-)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98694231

Poet on Call
by Andrei Codrescu

The Machines Haven't Taken Over

All Things Considered, December 24, 2008  With one pull of a switch, the 
ocean of junk that spilled out of my mailbox every day, was swooshed back 
into the speechless abyss. If you had asked me before this news, what hand 
human or divine could stop spam, I'd have answered like Heraclitus, "Who 
can stop the sea from rising?"

It turns out that somebody before a keyboard can, thank you. There is 
hope. Machines haven't yet taken over. If it's that easy to stop what 
seemed like unstoppable, why can't other seemingly unstoppable 
human-generated and computer-driven phenomena be switched off the same 
way? Why isn't somebody pulling the switch on the collapsing world trade 
going on in the cracks between time zones? What's going on while I sleep 
and my retirement money slips down some unfathomable hole? Why don't the 
providers capable of such cosmic gestures as making the spam-ocean vanish, 
not exercise their benevolent force against other oceans that threaten us: 
the automatic unfair trades, the silent streams of world capital vanishing 
into invisible dead zones, the globe-circling panics?
--
Steve
Equal bytes for women.