The best number.
FedX
joined 3 months ago
This is a very apt description of it. I remember the creation of Arda, but beyond that, it's all a bit fuzzy, like I read the Wikipedia page half asleep and dreamed the rest.
Send word to the elves! the time has come. The sword of your forefathers must be reforged! You have my bow. Err the break of dawn, we ride!
I guess they read the silmarillion, but understood not the words they read.
What's interesting is that this is far more an example of a social, rather than political, failing of our society. We can all agree that social media is harmful to everyone in many contexts, but can also provide a certain benefit in the sharing of knowledge, information, and ideas. How many of us had something of a queer awakening after being exposed it on social media? I sure as heck fall into that boat.
I once heard it equated to drinking, your taught from your parents what a responsible (or not) way of in taking alcohol is. Same with driving, same with work. In all these things were there is a fine balance of harm and benefit, we are taught be the older generation. But what if there is no older generation to teach us? Well, as is the case with certain indigenous communities in Alaska where no alcohol existed, you find yourself with no one being responsible. For the regulators, the obvious solution is an outright ban. But banning subsistence that are "bad" for you if addictive, never works. Prohibition, and the war on drugs are key examples of that.
We see this and scoff, because we are the ones who, though trial and error, found something approaching that balance. We see the harm is not in the social platforms themselves, but rather in the algorithmic monetization creating great psychological harm for everyone. We see that anyone using the internet is (more or less) a pseudonymous peer, and attempting to classify groups by geography and/or age is quite foolish. We also see the abuse and harm that attempting to do so would cause. Unfortunately, but rather predictably, the politicians are corrupt ass hats in the pocket of big-tech and invariably, make exceedingly stupid laws greatly to the detriment of the people. It is, therefore, of my opinion that the only reasonable solution is to get rid of them in their entirety Ⓐ.
I don't want to be a naysayer or Luddite (wait, who am I kidding?), but I hard disagree with that take. A space economy will get us nowhere. Yeah, sure, some interesting technology (arguably) came from the Apollo program, and NASA has done some amazing astronomy with JWST and Hubble. But, as with so many other aspects of modern life, the cost is far too great to society as a whole. The energy needed to get anything to or from orbit is enormous, and there is no way around that. The thing we need to curb climate change is reduction of energy usage in any form (driving, flying, electricity, ect.). This is even on top of other issues in rocketry like ozone layer depletion and the light pollution described above. As such, if climate change really is the greatest threat to humanity (which it is), putting anything into space is not a worthwhile venture.