Friday, February 16, 2018

Online Shopping

Whether you think Jeff Bezos is a Gilded Age robber baron or a philanthropist who helps Dreamers go to college, I am grateful for online shopping. Last Wednesday, my copies of When She Was White and Vegan Pressure Cooking, along with my Massel boiullon, arrived from Amazon.

Amazon is apparently exploring driverless technology as a way to deliver packages. I'm looking forward to the time when we have the infrastructure to safely, quickly, and efficiently transport people and products from one location to the next over a network of magrails. Imagine climbing into a cubicle in your home, entering the address of your destination, and being shipped there without further effort. The day will no doubt come when we can order groceries or books online and have them delivered to our homes within minutes. They'll scoot to us across the magrails (or whatever) in a cute little box within minutes of us ordering them. Restaurants will be able to send us hot, freshly-prepared meals. With advances in virtual reality (one day, we'll all be able to watch Wimbledon or the the Super Bowl from home,) we'll never need to go out.

Perhaps even traveling in virtual reality will become a possibility. One could scuba dive in the Maldives for an hour or two and then visit the surface of Mars, before making a quick stopover in London to watch the Wimbledon final😀 The visual virtual reality we have now will be extended to all five senses, so a quick swim at a beach in Tahiti will feel like the real thing. Hammacher Schlemmer already offers The Exotic Virtual Adventure Run, which allows one to run on an indoor treadmill while giving the visual impression that one is running through the Joshua Tree National Park, or some other exotic location. I suspect that device is quite crude relative to what we will have 15 years from now.

In more Earth-shattering news, our Mama Platy, which was almost spherical yesterday, is looking slim and svelte this morning. I suspect she gave birth to her fry last night. Since I can't see any in the tank this morning, I assume that most or all of the poor things have already been cannibalized😥

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