https://alienencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan

And the scars from the ones we lost to AIDS are old enough to forget about for a few days at a time.

FTL travel implies a mastery over spacetime itself. After that, a practical time machine is a matter of engineering details.

We can be sure that we never get there because we are not flooded with tourists from the future. QED.

Not gramps yet. My kid is just 16.

I’m on a max dosage of clonidine for HBP. I didn’t know it had other effects. It does explain a bit. Thanks for the info.

I’m 62 and had to be advised to get a few fit young people to assist with moving a piano.

As someone over 60: you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Fair. But weighing malice against incompetence seems risky these days with malice ascendent.

I agree. But the line can be difficult to see. Pulling together should be on the lookout for excluding others.

I am terrified that all organizations like this are likely to be raided at some point. Then every known member will be rounded up for blacklisting, “reeducation”, or disappearing.

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the (fill in the blank) party?”

This is being done today. In my area. But it produces the opposite results you may seek.

There is a community near me. Very insular. It hits the national news every so often, but is always top of mind in my region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_Square%2C_New_York

You may have heard of the issues with the East Ramapo school district. I’ll let others fill in those stories. Or you can search area news articles for the past 20 years.

My story goes like this: a community member stopped paying taxes. The property goes for auction. A neighbor buys for pennies because there is only one bidder. The bidder moves into the property and stops paying taxes on his first home. That goes to auction and the first party buys for pennies. And it goes around the entire community. Endlessly. Perfectly legal tax evasion.

One day, a developer scans the foreclosure pages and sees a property for sale. Except he doesn’t know the unwritten rules. So he purchases the place for a song. The community leaves some clear messages that he needs to walk away. He doesn’t get the hint.

One peaceful night, the 911 switchboard lights up. There are shootouts, break-ins, fires, domestic disturbances all over the area. But all are nowhere near the property.

With every first responder in the area tied up, the community got to work demolishing the home - by hand. They took that place apart with crowbars and handsaws in a few hours.

There were no witnesses.

And so the developer walked away. The situation continues to this day. Nearby folks trying to get a rational price to sell their home are assured by a visitor that there will be precisely ONE offer - that they should not refuse.

Lockstep communities are not always a good thing.

Socrates railed against writing. He is credited with saying that it was a crutch that would reduce the human capacity to remember things.

I dunno. Producing the heads of the agents along with DNA tests linking them to American family members would go a long way towards proving the Venezuelan version.

A complex interaction between your unique memories, your unique biological composition, your past and present environments, and the ongoing neurological processes that experience and interpret them.

Very similar things were said when photography was invented. There was great outcry that it debased art as a whole. It took decades before visual symbolic language adapted to the new media and methods. Man Ray was just one artist that found some of the new ground in photography. I’m sure you can find others.

The problem (IMO) is impatience. The pace of innovation is so fast that we’ve forgotten how slowly art history usually happens. We see fads, fashion, and styles change quickly and take it as a permanent seismic shift. Art contains symbolic language that needs to grow and evolve in order to become expressive. Were the first movies masterpieces? Well, they were for the time. But they seem primitive and amateurish to a modern eye. Because the art grew.

I agree the current generation of slop is… Slop. But we haven’t had enough time to judge it this harshly. Yet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammered_dulcimer

I don’t know. It seems like there are some things that need to be kept close. Trade and peace negotiating. Open prosecution and defense cases. Plans during international conflict.

I’ll work on that.

Good question. How would that work?

I agree with you. I was giving you a chance to clarify your point so that you don’t seem like a radical if you didn’t want to. Chill - this is just an Internet forum where we share and discuss ideas in order to widen our own thoughts to include those of others. Here on Lemmy we’re more alike than not. This isn’t reddit. Try not to assume the worst from people.