Dumb and Dumber

Two stories in the news Friday suggest two different ways in which we're endangering ourselves in our thoughtless rush to become the global Borg. In the rush of events and the rush we get from new technologies that dazzle us--as we are hotly encouraged to be dazzled by marketing and advertising, but also mostly by peer pressure. As well as the mindless acceptance of warped economics while ignoring the immediate dangers, let alone the longterm ones.

Let's start with what seems to be the smaller problem but isn't--it's just more intimate to those reading this on the Net. It has to do with the wisdom of one of our many agricultural-age bits of nevertheless universal wisdom: Don't put all your eggs in one basket. The tech version of this is called redundancy.

The first story comes from the SF Chronicle, and it's about two hours on Thursday when Google was apparently inaccessible. "Frustration, distress over Google outage," the headline reads. Panic set in with some users, who discovered they couldn't get access to their e-mails, fearful that urgent messages were being missed. Companies that store their documents online with Google suddenly found they couldn't access them, raising fears their work was lost."

Google's troubles got a big airing online as users vented. The topic was among the most popular on Twitter, the micro-blogging service, where people posted things like "Google's down and the world stops ... Scary" and "Uh oh, Google is having issues. Let Internet calamity ensue."

Scary is right. The conclusion? In recent years, Google has marketed to companies the use of its online products, such as e-mail and documents, as an alternative to desktop software. But these outages could persuade potential customers to keep the technology in-house rather than paying Google to take care of it.
Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesman, acknowledged outages like Thursday's attract a lot of attention. However, "cloud computing," as the online software is generically known, is more reliable than companies operating their own data centers.

It's the thinking--or lack of it--behind such dependency that bothers me. And business practices that make it uncompetitive to use common sense, like storing vital data both online and on site.

When people fail to take common sense precautions for possible if not inevitable technical problems, it's bad for them. But when redundancy and thinking ahead to possible calamity is normal thinking, then we may really be in trouble. Are people thinking about earthquakes and storms? Are they so tied in--so hooked to GPS that a solar flare or some microwave hoohaw can endanger people, perhaps a city, a nation? Etc.

It's time to put some paranoids--or at least some farmers--on the payroll. Meanwhile, I'm going to do my best to keep a landline even if I have to get a cell phone.

The second story is more directly frightening, and in a sense larger. It was on the front page of the New York Times: it turns out that nobody can find out what may cause salmonella in prepared food. Here's the money graph: Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show."

Let that sink in. Companies we depend on for food don't know who is supplying their ingredients. THEY DON'T KNOW WHO IS SUPPLYING THEIR INGREDIENTS? How in a sane society is that even possible? Yeah, I know, that's an unwarranted assumption about this society. But the insane economics of gathering ingredients from great distances in order to make food cheaper--cheaper? Maybe that's the essence of the craziness. Only lunatic bookkeeping would suggest that transporting huge amounts of foodstuffs halfway around the world is cheaper. It eco-illogical.

Where I live we have much better than average knowledge and choice of local food, and much more choice of fresh food than much of the country. But I may not always have the choice of living here, so it's yet another nail in the coffin: if lack of good medical care doesn't kill me, maybe my food will.

Could we think ahead a little please? Could we think a little?