I don’t know what I’d do without Google. What did people do before Google? How did they do research? They actually went to a library and looked up stuff and copied it into thick binders full of paper.

That was less than 20 years ago, and I remember a bit from those times. But I was never very good at the research thing, not until Google showed up on the scene. My kids, they’ve never known a world without the Internet and without Google and without every bit of information they could ever want at their fingertips. To them, the library is the place you go to get a community Wifi connection.

And how many years will it be before Wifi hotspots are a thing of the past? We’ll all be on, all the time, connected to unlimited, low-cost, high-speed broadband from our wireless devices. That day may not be too far off.

I’m talking, of course, about the day when Star Trek becomes reality.

I ran into this on Facebook, or Twitter, or some site or another. It’s been making the rounds, I guess.

“It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.”

Of course, with a healthy dose of skepticism, the first thing I did was to research how much was involved in getting a plastic spoon to my dining room table, compared to what was involved in doing the dishes. A plastic spoon costs about 2¢. Washing a steel spoon, even if I paid someone to do it, is still cheaper.

(I’m sure that’s one reason why most people use plastic spoons only on rare occasions. The other reason is that plastic spoons are chintzy, and break in two pieces, and feel funny in your mouth, and generally just kinda suck.)

But 2¢ is still pretty damn amazing. Think about that for a moment, how many steps and how much transportation goes into producing plastic spoon and getting it to your table. And all of that for less than the price of two serious thoughts. Sheesh! It pays for half of itself just by me thinking about it!

Think about the implications!