Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Jeff Bezos loves being on the move. He sits in the back of a white van, beaming as usual, surrounded by an entourage of lanky young lieutenants from Amazon.com the Web's biggest retail store and, someday, if Bezos gets it right, Earth's Biggest Store. The early-morning landscape of southeast Kansas hustles by: wood-frame houses, trailers, motels with lots of pickup trucks in their parking lots, a Kum & Go convenience store, cow pastures and the dull, forever flatness of the prairie. You've heard of places described as cow towns? Coffeyville was actually labeled Cow Town...
...handle everything: washing machines, cars, rubber gaskets, Prozac, exercise machines, marmalade, model airplanes, everything but firearms and certain live animals. You name it, Amazon will sell it. "Anything," says Bezos, "with a capital A." And that's the point: Jeffrey Preston Bezos is trying to assemble nothing less than Earth's biggest selection of goods, then put them on his website for people to find and buy. Not just physical things that you can touch, but services too, such as banking, insurance, travel...
This is ground zero of the New Economy? At age five, Earth's Biggest Bookstore is now Earth's Biggest Selection, in keeping with Bezos' plan for world domination. Meaning what, exactly? Well, in a sense, Amazon isn't about technology or even commerce. Any moron can open an online store. The trick is showing millions of customers such a good time that they come back every few days for the next 50 years. Amazon is, like every other site on the Web, a content play...
Then came trains and factories, and with them the need to coordinate the schedules of hundreds and even thousands of people. It was the railroad companies that invented time zones, in 1883. Because of the earth's rotation, the sun was highest at different times in New York City and, say, Washington, which lay a bit farther west. The 11-min. difference in local noon could lead to disaster at intersections...
What Price fails to mention in his intellectually self-indulgent piece is the amount of evil that people would have visited on the earth without a doctrine of divine love to temper their actions. Imperialism and enslavement predate Christianity. Evil men use the handiest reason to justify their evil deeds. It is a grim tribute to the success of Christianity that so many villains, as well as holy men, have used the name of Jesus as the rationale for their acts. What was Price's motivation for "updating" the Gospels? The word of God is not first and foremost...