tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7473868723209254713.post3961638649977409020..comments2023-12-03T10:38:26.053-05:00Comments on Technology Almanac: The Invisible WebGregg McPhersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07890946031765666621noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7473868723209254713.post-86022266740709637802012-04-11T13:36:08.751-04:002012-04-11T13:36:08.751-04:00This is a thoughtful, interesting, and altogether ...This is a thoughtful, interesting, and altogether excellent column. I'm just now reading it for the first time. Somehow I missed it earlier but I'm glad to have read it today. I hope Eric Schmidt reads it, too. I suspect he'd agree. Perhaps the problem—or one of the problems, anyway—is that we define "self-interest" too narrowly. It is, for example, in our larger self-interest that the icecaps don't melt and the rising seas eliminate half of Florida, changing for millennia the entire coastline of the United States because we have chosen short-term interests of the few over longterm interests of the many. It is not in our self-interest that guns are ubiquitous and that guns made here are smuggled into Mexico for the benefit of drug lords in their gang wars so that drugs can be sent back to the United States where enormous fortunes are made selling them on the streets of most cities in America. It is not in our self-interest to export our own legal but lethal addictive drug, nicotine, which is probably responsible for more deaths worldwide than all the poppies in Afghanistan and all the coca in the Andes combined. It is in the short-term immediate self-interest of tobacco growers and the cigarette industry, gun manufacturers and the NRA that lobbies for them, industrial giants pouring pollutants into our air and water to continue doingvthe enormous damage they are causing. . . well, you get the idea. John Donne said it 500 years ago, but we have yet to learn the lesson. "No man is an island . . . never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."William McPhersonhttp://williammcpherson.tumblr.comnoreply@blogger.com