permaculture

[mmiller@pcsia.com]

At 10:31 21-08-99 -0600, you wrote:
>
>At the risk of seeming a bit of a crank, I want to revisit those sobering
>stats once more. So in our village of 100 people,
>
>>1 would own a computer
>
>  I was idly leafing through a copy of Forbes yesterday, and read that
>"over 300 million computers are in use today." That means, given a
>population of 5-6 billion, that not 1, but 5 or 6 of our villagers would
>own a computer. Nitpicking? Hardly; that's a 500-600% error. I'm sorry that
>the anti-Western political agenda of the author is so strong that he's
>willing to ignore the facts.

It is always good to be skeptical especially about something that is hard
to be accurate about in the first place but you did not consider how many
of those "computers in use today" are in business, library etc. and not in
private ownership.  This also does not cover the fact that some people have
multiple computers.  Right now I have four.   It is very easy to be Western
centric when you live here.  I did not find this post as an anti-western
agenda - just very revealing about my level of consumption compared to the
rest of the world.  If  you want to see a real thought provoking an
"anti-western/commercial" site, go to 

http://www.adbusters.org 

and check out the spoof ads about North American consumption.  Mike Miller