Let me begin with a request that has a purpose. I ask the respondents to give a ballpark idea, say plus or minus 3 years, of their actual age. It should be clear to most of us that there is no actual privacy anymore. Most of us elders do miss it, but we go on to make the best of a situation we can really do nothing about. The government, DOD, FBI, CIA, private industry at every level, financial institutions large and small, our internet providers even, are hacked, by sophisticated criminals and foreign agents working for themselves and governments waging cyber-war or billion dollar hustles. We do need to adjust. We don't need to be phobic. No hacker will be able to reap monetary benefit from your (approximate) age alone.
If I buy something on eBay or Amazon, I am immediately inundated in my e-mail and on sites where I play chess or engage in any other activity, with pop-up ads hawking similar products I might be interested in, from other sources. Even select words mined from my personal E-mail correspondence will result in pop-ups or spam mail, as soon as I hit the "Send" button. Somebody got paid for this system and somebody else did the paying.
The young among us are so used to this, it is not even thought about. It is, to all intents and purposes invisible as the air we breathe. The typical young person has a dozen or more "apps" on their phones which not only provide, but track their activities without their conscious knowledge. I have no "apps." Still, my phone itself can pinpoint my location, even if I'm not making a call. Brave New World.
Recently, I posted a response to a Weird K2 thread which seemed to me not at all accurate or thought out on the bulk of its' posts. Thought I would do my best to shed a little light. Instead, youthful heat flared, judging by the anonymous button pushing. I have had little use for Twitter/Tweeting, but compared to hitting a "Like" button, they resemble communication. Here is my last post on the weird K2 thread, which inspired four or five button pushings. I was actually responding to the previous poster. After the pasting, I may not be able to continue the post, but I am not done. I will just add a new entry.
Young fellow,
I do my best not to believe what makes me happy, but rather to embrace what is reasonable as well as I am able. No one has the inside track on the truth. Our mistakes are many. Our triumphs few. We are subject to harm anytime we experiment with ourselves. When we think we have sufficient information, we are much more likely wrong than right.
I do strive to be happy as much of the time as I can. Like life, even this objective is achieved replete with setbacks, false starts and detours. On the whole, I do tend to believe that I am generally happier than the next person. That does not give me a sense of accomplishment or contentment, because the next person is sometimes incredibly miserable, and I would be happier still if the misery of the world were substantially reduced. That is unlikely to happen. There are certain realities we must face.
In my span of life our species has multiplied by 3.5. Our climate is increasingly out of whack. We are in an unprecedented runaway extinction event and we jabber at each other much of the time about nonsense. War was spreading like wildfire when I was born. My childhood games were war, cowboys and Indians (war), cops and robbers (war). There has not been a time without it. Now, at any given time, fifty big wars are going on. Corpses stacked like cord-wood. Refugees by the millions. No end in sight.
We have the illusions of war so deeply ingrained that we do not notice the lie embedded in the question, "Who won the war?" The correct answer is, no one. And no one has ever given me that answer. When I was in my early twenties we came within a hydrogen nucleus of world annihilation. Most of you here today would never have come into existence with only the slightest change in events. This was the very first time (virtually the first year) in the history of the world that mankind had the capability to destroy our entire habitat ourselves, and we almost did it that very year.
I talk to college kids all the time who are essentially almost completely historically illiterate. How many of you know what I am saying is true, without mousing to a convenient search engine? (No link Provided).
Half a decade later, I was proud to be part of the effort to be the first generation to put some of our own members on a neighboring planet. Think of that! Then we bumbled, and we have been bumbling ever since. We trashed orbital space to such an extent that a time rapidly approaches when our future forays will always have to take into account high energy collisions with our own trash. The brightest and best of our planets' engineers couldn't plan their way around that accumulation of hypersupersonically whizzing crap.
In the last forty-five years we could have put a permanent installation on the Moon, colonies at L-5, mined many of the Earth-approaching asteroids for the entire platinum family of metals, as well as other strategic resources, and prepared for a much more ambitious project to reap the forbidding and challenging rewards of Mars. And we could have made each step pay for the next.
Space represents an absolutely inexhaustible source of energy. Unlimited! Instead we frack and prepare to trash our planet mining tar-sands, a filthy, expensive, incredibly polluting source of energy, a dead end in every sense of the word.
Instead of coming to grips with issues like this, we spend much of our time dithering and bickering over nonsense.
I notice that (almost) none of you admit your age in your information here. Why not? This is a lot bigger question than it looks. Anyone care to speculate? Why do so few care to divulge your age?
Any Centenarians here? Anyone in their nineties? Eighties? I can't be the oldest one here! This is a longevity forum.
Pointless, Time wasting x 3 Off topic x 1-
Off-Topic x 2
- Enjoying the show x 1
