At 2:57 AM 1/17/96, tallpaul wrote:

-- tallpaul

"To understand the probable outcome of the Libertarian vision, see any cyberpunk B movie wherein thousands of diseased, desparate and starving families sit around on ratty old couches on the streets watching television while rich megalomaniacs appropriate their body parts for their personal physical immortality." R. U. Sirius _The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook_

The absurdity of this point is obvious to anyone with a brain. Why would we want the donors to be "diseased" and "starving"? It is imperative that donors be healthy and non-anorexic (we used to use the phrase "fattened up," but this is no longer au courant). To keep the proles reasonably healthy, the plutocrats are encouraging the current wave of exercise videos, ThighMasters, Buns of Steel, etc. And lots of beer, as the Kobe beef quakers have shown. Other than this, R. U. has it about right, I think. (Ironically, I brought up the new book, "The Winner Take All Society," at the last Cypherpunks meeting. No time to discuss it here, but it confirms my strong belief that we are heading for a economy in which a shrinking fraction of workers have really valuable things to contribute, and a growing fraction of the population does not. I had not recalled the authors, but Strick had a battery-powered laptop and Metricom wireless modem, and ran an Alta Vista search from where he was sitting: ROBERT FRANK & PHILIP COOK, The Winner-Take-All Society, New York: The Free Press.) This may shock some of the newcomers here, who haven't heard this, or who haven't deduced it from our posts, but many of us are elitists. Or, more precisely, we are for people looking out for Number One, with the expectation that many other people simply won't make it. Think of it as evolution in action. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."