From: "Jeremy H. Brown"
To: ai-tech-sq@ai.mit.edu
Subject: GSB 5:30pm, 7th floor playroom
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 17:09:35 -0500 (EST)

(This was sent to all-ai much earlier in the day, but hasn't come through yet; apologies for the duplicate you'll doubtless get sometime next week. See if you can catch the editing differences between the two versions!)

The hippies figured it out in the eighties.

For years, these long-haired eco-freaks had been lobbying the government, picketing corporations, and occasionally ramming big metal stakes into trees to protect them from loggers, dooming them instead to slow death by rust poisoning.

But finally, in the Me decade, they really figured it out. As their stock portfolios matured, they discovered that they no longer needed to turn to others for help. They could best benefit the environment... by buying it. Here in the 90s, huge tracts of land have been swept up by eco-freak hippies such as Ted "Jane's Husband" Turner, and the tide shows no sign of turning.

We can learn from this.

For years, we here at the AI lab have been aiding the Girl Scouts in their eternal struggle to stay afloat; the bottle-caps, nickels, dimes, and occasional dollar bills have together saved many a Girl Scout from being logged.

But we stand now at the dawn of a new era. With the recent boom in Internet industries, and in particular the incredible success of the IPO of our sister lab's child, Akamai, we can now eliminate the piddly cash. We can save the Girl Scouts all at once, and forever. My friends, now we can perform the ultimate act of charity.

Now we can buy the Girl Scouts. Lock, stock, and barrel.

Of course, with ownership comes responsibility; we must manage this natural resource once we have acquired it, and this leads to difficult questions. For instance:

- who will manage the Girl Scout portfolio? - are cookies really an efficient use of Girl Scout labor, or could we improve the profit margin by having them sell vacuum cleaners? - how will Girl Scouts be distributed to stockholders?

Come figure out the answer to these and other thorny questions as we contemplate our brave new vision -- a world of Girl Scouts without need -- at this week's

************** G I R L S C O U T B E N E F I T ************** ************** 5:30pm, in the 7th floor playroom **************