Friday, April 09, 2021

A Rant On The Internet Outage

The Internet went out in Minneapolis or the Twin Cities area in general.  I don't if the outage was national or worldwide yet.

"As I write this The Internet is down.  How many people have died as a result of the loss of The Internet?  The Internet didn’t exist when I was growing up.  The computers that did exist were large things that were owned by major corporations and universities.  Supercomputers took advantage of the speed of light.  Data processing consisted of using IBM punch cards.  How many people remember IBM punch cards?  Programing languages were simple and taught by math departments.  Military orders were typed out on manual typewriters, I copied my travel orders on to a file (which may be found on my Flickr site) as a result of the Killian Memos fiasco.  Books were purchased at physical “brick and mortar” bookstores.  How many bookstores have gone out of business because of Internet retailers?  The Internet is simply a tool.  A tool is simply a means to an end.  The ultimate end is Human Life.  We must understand that a fear of tools is simply irrational.  An employee of the Healtheast Care System in St. Paul was afraid of an image of several firearms on a coffee cup used by one of the security guards.  A customer at a supermarket was afraid of the light of a bar code scanner touching her groceries.  A firearm and a bar code scanner are simply tools.  There is no reason to fear them.  Alcoholism wasn’t caused by a supply of alcohol, but by the alcoholics.  The Holocaust wasn’t caused by a supply of Zyklon-B, but by the beliefs of the perpetrators.  Zyklon-B was developed and marketed as an insecticide.  The Oklahoma City Bombing wasn’t caused by a supply of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, but by the beliefs of perpetrators.  9/11 wasn’t caused by airliners and box cutters, but by the beliefs of perpetrators.  Any horror wasn’t caused by the tools that were used but by the beliefs of the perpetrators.  There is simply no reason to fear a tool."

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