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Top-level
 I was chatting to a nice lady yesterday about her computer. She couldn't work out how to attach a different keyboard to it. All the while I'm thinking "how long before someone hacks your Windows OS and cleans out your bank account?" She has no idea how exposed she is. One click on a dodgy email and her world could be flipped upside down. How did we end up creating a world where people are thrown to the wolves like this? How badly have we screwed this up. 22 comments
 @leon @ewen H. Beam Piper, 1950s and 60s SciFi author, wrote 1 book and a series of short stories in his "Paratime" series all with this exact plot. The first civilization to discover alternate probability time travel monopolizes the technology and colonizes all the time lines where humans never developed or went extinct, and manipulate more primitive cultures to exploit specific resources. Endless worlds sliced finely like pages in a book, with similar groupings around major global events.   @leon @Urban_Hermit @ewen @bruce @Urban_Hermit @ewen yes, clearly a giant, if he can pipe entire h-beams like a small urchin pipes a penny whistle @leon @ewen I think he didn't like his first name, Horace. His SciFi stuff, as in space ships & alien worlds, he wrote every book within one continuous 5,000 years of future human history. He is considered to be the guy who originated the concept of a federation of planets. But there were entirely different eras: a Federation era with colony worlds & a unified space navy (most of his novels), a Space Viking era of reunification after a dark age, an endless Empire era - fascinating speculation.  The responses and support here on Mastodon has been just marvellous today and if ever I needed a reminder of the good side of humans, you all were exactly that today. Thanks peeps.   @ewen Be thankful you lived to your years without dying of plague and polio. His photos were stolen, a big deal! PS  there's something icky & unattractive about living through a world plague where we all lost people close to us to death or disability & thinking, "so grateful it wasn't me who died, too bad about the rest of you suckers"  I feel like all of us who want better have to become more "militantly kind." That is favor helping people rather than enriching billionaires. Take whatever meager resources we have and channel it away from anyone who is not helping to those who are. This is me typing off the top of my head this morning, with no idea of the logistics involved, but it's something I personally aspire to do more of, any way I can. I don't know if we can change the world with little acts of kindness, but we can definitely change our little corner of it. Every bit of kindness matters. Yes. We need to be actively kind to others. I'm listening to the audiobook "Hope For Cynics" by Jamil Zaki, it's an evidence-based book about the science of human goodness. Take a look/listen, it's certainly helped me quite a bit. We need to create community and learn to trust again. @ewen why did we create a world with so many wolves? I wonder how many people around me make their living in ways which are fundamentally dishonest? More than zero. I work for myself so I have had decades to learn to avoid the toxic people in my sphere of connections. It genuinely surprises me when I am reminded that such folk are still out there. @ewen “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” ― Carl Sagan. |
Gregory's Server
And this is just that section of the world where nobody is dropping bombs on my home, or shooting children in classrooms, or banning access to abortion and other healthcare.
We are living in the worst timeline. If there actually was a multiverse with different planet earths then ours would be the one that nobody else wants to visit.