From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Thu Jun 19 2003 - 18:07:46 MDT
--- EvMick@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 6/18/2003 3:46:31 PM Central
> Standard Time,
> asa@nada.kth.se writes:
> > (Personally I consider decaffinated coffee
> unethical, GMO or not :-)
>
> Me too...If coffee doesn't have caffiene.....what's
> the point?
It's a weapon of mass disruption. I recall hearing
speculation, during the Internet boom, that the most
devastating-to-our-economy single-agent biological
attack one could execute would be to seed the water
supplies of Seattle-Tacoma, Silicon Valley, and
Virginia with an agent that renders caffiene inert.
Effects that would hit almost immediately but take
days
or weeks to be noticed as an attack (plenty of time
for
the assailants to cover their tracks and vanish),
devastating blows to productivity (beyond the direct
production slowdown: ever tried to code when you're so
tired you make more mistakes than you fix? Negative
productivity is not just a theoretical possibility),
the eventual morale blow when the fact of the attack
was confirmed, much money wasted on "cures" for
resulting psychosomatic symptoms from the inevitable
hysteria (no, all the agent really did was deactivate
caffiene; doesn't matter if you got clinical
depression
after ingesting the agent, it wasn't the direct
cause),
and most of the capital (human and otherwise) put into
the attack can be recycled for later uses (more
attacks, or benevolent research).
One could almost imagine a story where this happened,
most of the nation took a week or so to sleep off the
effects, but the perpetrators were discovered and war
declared (said declaration interrupted by multiple
yawns), and the few remaining alert military
(non-caffiene drinkers plus those kept up by a wide
variety of alternate stimulants) swept through the
rogue nation before everyone woke up.
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