What are you thankful for?

[thewayne]

A friend sent me this:

So... last week was Thanksgiving. Here is a question:
For which technology are you most thankful?

*Electricity, and electric lights and appliances
*Antibiotics, heart drugs, and other medicines
*Cars, freeways, and gasoline
*Computers
*Cheap, abundant food enabled by agrochemical technologies
*Telecommunications: radio, telephones, television, the Internet
*Other

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This is an easy one for me, and computers ain't it. For me it's medicine, I had heart surgery when I was 18 months old to correct a birth defect, I might not be here had I been born a decade earlier with the same problem.

Yes, computers are my livelihood, but without them I could still write or do photography or who knows what, I am a fairly clever and reasonably talented guy, after all.

Comments

Good sanitation

[josephaz.livejournal.com]

Clean drinking water and a sewer system to take it away after it gets dirty have had a huge impact on the incidence of disease -- even if doctors get all the credit.

Seriously... when was the last time you had cholera? And how soon after the sewer system breaks down does it break out in disaster areas?

So three cheers for sewers and chlorinated water!

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

Of the choices there, it's hard to overlook the advances of medicine (and yes, sanitation is right up there too). However, if getting one item is at the expense of the other choices, then I'd have to go for cheap abundant food. It's Maslow's Hierarchy. All the tech and machinery can be done without but if we all had to scrabble for our daily bread (literally) or face the rollercoaster of famine as they do in Africa still, our civilization as we recognize it would be substantially different. And nasty, brutish, and short.

[deborak]

Hmmm. None of those suggestions really jump out at me. Since sewers have been around since the early Indus Valley civilizations, and people have survived fine over the millenia without cheap and abundant food, I won't pick those either. I'll go with a convenience item.

Strike anywhere matches. Building a fire from scratch is a bitch.

Or Photoshop. Live isn't complete without my LJ icons.