What are 6 thru 10?[snip]
Brad, the link took you to the rest of the article. I've appended and attached for you here.
I'm starting to be amazed at "the things I miss". What link? I didn't see it. Honest....
But now I've seen 6 thru 10:
6 Manned Spaceflight 7 Prisons 8 Cosmetic Implants 9 Lie detectors 10 DVDs
These seem to me more "interesting" topics than the top 5, which all seem to leave little space for "argument" (to me at least).
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Manned spaceflight? This is one I might leave to "market forces". If and when there is a business case for it, it could happen without having to be paid for by tax levies, couldn't it?
Prisons? The article is right that we already live in a society of close to universal surveillance and behavior management, even if enterprise has been deregulated (isn't that an interesting cohabitation: "free markets" and universal social control in depth? -- isn't this a great topic for this forum?) I read that 600,000 students are taking their SAT tests this morning. Anyone want to call that "free range teens"?
Cosmetic implants? I'm all in favor of more beautiful bodies housing more beautiful minds (Imagine having sex with Socrates? Well, we know that Alcibiades went on to "screw" Athens, and Mrs. Socrates is not even a footnote to history like Mary Magdelene or somebody). *However*, I have read that, in Brazil, breast *reduction* surgery is far more popular than augmentation, because they think too much is gauche. It should be obvious that we need a WAR against unhealthy lifestyle, just like a WAR against terrorism. If everyone was the best they naturally could be, and it the cream was not skimmed off the milk (i.e., if the beautiful people remained more distributed thruout the general population), this would be a topic that might be revisited with very different perspective than today when Americans are geting so much more obese that the airlines have been told to recalculate their maximum number of passengers on a plane.
Lie detectors? "Are you now or have you ever been...?" But what is so very different between lie detector tests and the SATS (those 600,000, again)?
BM: Remember the 600,000. Q: Why? Looks all right to me.
DVDs. I find the complaint that DVDs are fragile "wussy" whining. Remember LP records? I could play one dozens of times and it would still not have any scratches or even fingerprints on it. Can't people take care of things? (Doesn't that sound Republican?) But the Democratic part of me says this is a battle the dems will eventually win because it costs almost nothing to distribute the information that gets put on DVDs via the net -- especially if we don't have our scientists trying to find ways to use more bandwidth that nobody has yet thought of.
The question about the information explosion as a whole was asked some time ago by Walter Ong:
What is the purpose of acquiring perfect French pronunciation, If the person has nothing of value to say in any language?
** For Futurework, I think the most interesting issue here ** is the relation between free markets and pervasive ** high-technology facilitated and mediated (they don't ** call em "media" for nuthin...) social control.
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Now. I will once again propose one technology we *need*: The disciplined cultivation and reflective self-study of peer discourse human association. I would call this "Political Science" if the name had not already been taken for a similar but different discipline of some persons studying how other persons behave but not studying their own work process of studying those other people, etc.
"Yours in discourse...."
\brad mccormick
-- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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