breaking news: Madonna + microwave popcorn = bad (real shocker)

warning: listening to Madonna while eating microwave popcorn is bad for you (but not for the obvious reasons)

A few days ago Michael Hiltzik blogged about a piece of spyware on Sony music CD's that gets secretly installed on your PC if you play one of their disks on your computer.

It's breathtaking how the people who made these decisions at Sony (and, let's be honest, at most other corporations) justify their actions.

Loyalty to abstractions like "dollar" "shareholder value" "corporation" "bottom line"... pit people against people.

(yeah yeah, it's a scarcity world out there until Star Trek can make food out of air. i get that. but...)

With each successive layer of abstraction comes a greater degree of separation between us. It's like an anti-Will Smith thing. 7, 8...57 degrees of separation...Charlemagne who?

It becomes easier and easier to make decisions that are anti-social; as anti-social as that kid who blew away the popular vice-principle the other day, just cleaner when you can afford market statisticians to do the sterilizing.

Sadly, we don't need all those layers to confuse us. All we have to do is stop seeing people as customers and start seeing them as consumers. Three little letters and watch what we are capable of!

Customers, we have to serve.

Consumers we must capture, manipulate, cajole, distract, lead by the nose, squeeze every penny out of.

When someone is a consumer in your mind, how much easier is it to do the patently inhumane and indefensible? Consumers are sub-human. Heck, we're sub-cattle.

How much easier is it to make a product that kills the user, degrades health, has obvious warning signs?

In a statement, DuPont said "Allegations that food-contact paper made with DuPont materials contain unsafe levels of PFOA (C8) are false.

"EWG staff toxicologist Tim Kropp agrees that there is no PFOA in the treated paper. It's only after the perfluorinated chemical is ingested that it breaks down into PFOA in the body, he said.

DuPont said its products are safe and that it "has always complied with all FDA regulations and standards regarding these products."

How honorable of them. Their product is not harmful until it leeches into the food that enters the human body. It is our own body that is distorting this noble chemical compound and killing us.

Good thing I can trust in DuPont. I clearly can't trust my body to have my own best interests at heart.

And to think, before DuPont so graciously hath brought to light this dangerous treason, I'd been unknowingly killing myself for decades!

I hope there is a fine DuPont chemical in the near future to help me regulate these self-destructive impulses.

"This was a merry message." - Exeter

(heh. I seem to have worked myself into a dark mood about this. Summoned up quite a piece of sarcastic wit, dinn I?! No doubt I'll be better tomorrow. 'specially if I start the day with one of the 5 FAVORITE BREAKFASTS in the next post. *yummy* :?D )