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The On The Second Last Evening, Crake Said, Let Me Walk You Through A Hypothetical Scenario Essay

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On the second to last evening, Crake said, “Let me walk you through a hypothetical scenario.” “I’m game,” Said Jimmy. Actually he was sleepy-he’d had too much popcorn and beer-but he sat up and put on his paying-attention look, the one he’d perfected in high school. Hypothetical scenarios were a favourite thing of Crake’s. “Axiom: that illness isn’t productive. In itself, it generates no commodities and therefore no money. Although it’s an excuse for a lot of activity, all it really does is cause wealth to flow from the sick to the well. From patients to doctors, from clients to cure-peddlers. Money osmosis, you might call it.” “Granted,” said Jimmy. “Now suppose you’re an outfit called HelthWyzer. Suppose you make your money out of drugs and procedures that cure sick people, or else-better-that make it impossible got them to get sick in the first place.” “Yeah?” said Jimmy. Nothing hypothetical here: that was what HelthWyzer actually did. “So, what are you going to need, sooner or later?” “More cures?” “After that.” “What do you mean, after that?” “After you’ve cured everything going.” Jimmy made a pretence of thinking. NO point doing any actual thought: it was a foregone conclusion that Crake would have some lateral-jump solution to his own question. “Remember the plight of the dentists, after that new mouthwash came in? The one that filled the same ecological niche, namely your mouth? No one ever needed a filling again, and a lot of dentists went bust?” “So” “So,

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