As I said before: I don’t want to be the guy who defends PIC … Jurati being justifiably imprisoned or at least institutionalised may have also spared us S2. Who am I to argue with that?

I’m thinking of Quark who burgled, sabotaged, schemed, snuggled, bought more than one child from the GQuad, and engaged in weapons trade and remained for the most part a comedic diversion character 7 series long. No consequences and maybe the thinnest veneer of looking at any of his decisions from an ethical POV. That’s another reason why I don’t perceive the difference you describe.

We could probably go back and forth a couple of more times here but maybe we leave it at that? Just tell me in no more than a paragraph: Tuvix. Janeway yay or Janeway nay? I’m just curious.

I hear you. You think crossing the line mattered in 80s+ Trek but it doesn’t now. I don’t think that’s true. Sisko poisoning a planet is one of the examples where it clearly didn’t. But should have. So nostalgia is the only thing I could come up with to explain why you like the older and dislike the new stuff.

I don’t want to be in a position where I have to defend Picard, the show. Half of S1 is okay and then it goes off the rails. There are moments in it that are good. Overall, it’s a mess. One aspect that they did well is that they show a hero aging. Kurt Corbain will always be an icon because he ended his life early. So we were spared his ideas on COVID, Q Anon, or pick another hot button issue later in life or albums continually deteriorating in quality. With Picard they wanted to show consequences and chisel away at the icon a bit. The trauma of being borgified. His being sidelined for his unwillingness to bend to his superiors’ will. Why they had to bring his parents into it will be the writers’ secret. But they show consequences of lines being crossed. One of them is him standing rightly on his professional principles. It sounds to me this is exactly the stuff you’re missing and they built the whole S1 premise on it.

Burnham getting to be captain is about as realistic as chubby Kirk being demoted back to Captain.

On a slightly unrelated note:

What’s up with double-spacing every sentence?

It’s really

annoying to read

if you ask me.

I think you are partially trapped in nostalgia. Star Trek has never been this philosophically pure. Picard broke the Prime Directive in S1 by having contact with the Edo. And then regrettably prevented them from executing Wesley for trespassing a flower bed. Either should’ve cost him his command.

When Data has an inappropriate chat with a girl on a dying planet, JLP jokes with Riker about the level the shit is up to for them. And there are no palpable consequences for any of this behaviour.

Picard doesn’t feel like he should plant the Borg bug in Hugh. Admiral Valarian Canapés wholeheartedly disagrees. And while I like Picard’s reasoning, from a ten thousand foot perspective I agree with her. With the benefit of hindsight, it would have prevented the best TNG movie from existing but perhaps we would have also been spared Picard S2-3.

Late TNG and early DS9 with the introduction of Starfleet Al Qaeda, i.e. the Marquis, is a turning point for me. We get more stories that are more grey. Star Trek went from Kirk coming to a planet, telling the inhabitants their culture was stupid, to more contemporarily thoughtful treatments of ethical and moral conundrums in a utopian world, to seeing where utopia rubs up against the rest of the galaxy that isn’t there yet. Starfleet and the Federation are no longer exclusively the good guys. Sisko poisons an atmosphere just to catch one traitor and gets away with it. WTF?

Janeway gets a pass from me for most of her bad decisions because she tried and had to figure stuff out by herself. Tuvix be damned!

Enterprise also exists.

Third wave Trek is more grey than Marquis era Trek. It’s more CGI and action oriented because they can. That saves a couple of pages of dialogue otherwise spent on ethics. It’s different just like TNG was different from TOS. But it isn’t a radical change if you ask me.

Early TNG isn’t great until they stabilised the writers room. And then there is a continuation of development through DS9 and even into ENT. (Unfortunately including grade A assholes.) “Chaos on the bridge” is the default for Disco and Picard. And that’s why they often tell weird stories that don’t match up with what came before. They try to do Trek in the now passé golden age of television. And failed a lot imo.

Of all the third wave Trek, I’m most fond of Lower Decks. Because it doesn’t take itself too seriously and is littered with easter eggs. Disco S2 is good. Most of SNW S1-3. Picard had moments in it but that’s it. My heart’s not in it any more. I watch it because I see we are entering another content drought. I even enjoy SNW S4, not because I think it’s good Star Trek but because it’s a middle finger to Paramount for no longer financing any new projects.

Call me cynical but I do think an outlet called oil price dot com may not be entirely impartial when they report on this. That is not to say what they wrote here is wrong; I wouldn’t know. It just has a touch of pot and kettle about it.

Since the power networks are linked and European countries import and export electricity, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that next to renewables power from gas stepped in to fill the nuclear gap. And the price for natural gas is often linked to a certain other commodity price.

As far as I’m concerned, that and PIC S2 NEVER HAPPENED!

Ro’s decision is understandable if you consider her life experiences.

The Maquis are not created in universe to be good or bad. They are not black or white, they are gray all the way. Because that’s how all freedom fighters/terrorists are in their time. They get their marks from history. Some upstart colonists in the 1770s tend to get a more favorable score from history. For the communists in Cuba it depends who you ask.

Reality is a clusterfuck and politics is the art of what’s possible. No one designed the situation to place colonists on these planets, to have a war in the neighborhood, and then have to come up with a compromise to end the killing. It happened and now they have to deal with it. I’d like to see the SWOT analysis of each colonized planet, just to see if they considered risking setting off the stereotypical fascist race in the neighborhood by their presence. That is to say the colonists may not be entirely blameless either. But regardless, the federation made an agreement to end the killing in a big war. They drew a line on a map and that’s never not caused other problems in history. In the middle east, in Korea, in Europe, etc. It’s often the best solution to end or prevent the fighting but it’s still a shit solution that doesn’t solve all problems. Indeed, one might argue it may only be a temporary reprieve. So the Maquis are borne out of gray, they do things that are gray, often more on the darker spectrum, and then the authorities come in and also react in dark gray when they poison an entire planet’s atmosphere. The writers even threw in some native American tribes having to relocate or accept Cardassian rule to perfect the clusterfuck.

The way some of the Maquis stories are told in late TNG and then DS9 is not the best Trek has to offer. But if you zoom out, the overall situation they’ve created is realistic and believable. The Maquis are ambiguous, the role of the federation is ambiguous. It’s all just gray. And while I don’t think it’s super unrealistic that they just get wiped out by the Ketracel White addicts, I thought it’s a lazy writers’ end to a great scenario they had created.

I am conflicted here. On the one hand, I agree that subtitles would have been nice. On the other hand, I think folks with hearing disabilities get shut out of other content so much that I don’t think this somewhat solitary case makes it good mildly infuriating material. It’s most likely just an oversight. Much less likely a clever scheme to highlight ableism.

Reverses the order of play when 3 or more people play or behaves like a skip when only 2 are left.

My kids brought home from kindergarten the house rule that you can discard all cards you hold with the same number at the same time when it is your turn so long as the bottom card matches the suit being played. Very chaotic but they love it.

Given the high degree of McGuffinness of the portable emitter, you’re probably right. I’d still think it would be difficult though. Your guts are never quite in the same place when you move so the emitter would still need to adjust for our humanoid stretchiness. And if Voyager’s big gel-packed computer core couldn’t do the calculations, I’d have trouble imagining this tiny gadget could do it while also being the power supply. Even while factoring in that it is future tech brought backwards in time. But that’s more of a feeling on my part than a scientific argument.

I was rooting for the Vidiians in S1.

I should have added /s.

Voting is better than not voting in my opinion. That being said, this is a topic I would not throw to the internet to help you decide. The way you have written your post you’re opening yourself up to a lot of partisan replies from the good people of both sides that will probably not aid massively in your decision making process.

Since there is a power imbalance, I would not put much stock in praise like that. People not wanting to leave, not calling in sick a lot, not going to HR to complain are probably some better indicators, with the caveat that every job is different and those are not universally applicable criteria.

I don’t disagree with your thought per se. I’m looking at your train reservation example and think that soon you won’t be talking with a real person but two ChatGPTs in a trenchcoat. So corpos aversion to privacy tools drives you to corpo’s desire to cut overhead. And I’m sure there are plenty of examples where the phone in option simply does not exist. Or where it cannot exist because they can’t find people to staff it or a model to fake it effectively.

I see a future where you sadly have to feed one of these agenetic models, when proven much safer to use than today, with the minimum of information necessary to get your train tickets or whatever, and then let it fight with the other side while you do something else.

It’s like with planting trees. The best time was to plant some 50 years ago, the second best time is now. But it is too late in many ways.

There is no such thing as a perfect translation. Granted, languages that are more closely related and in places that are culturally similar make it easier. But translation is also making choices. Different translators will make different choices. It would be madness to assume that any book would not contain parts that are at least questionable. That’s regardless of source and target languages. You’re operating under the false assumption that stuff in English is just better, maybe because it’s the most understood language on the planet if you count nonnatives as well. Free yourself of these biases.

I would also point out that neither 死亡 nor 戦死 strictly mean “died.” Without very specific context or a version of an accompanying する they would be translated as death/mortality and death in battle respectively. There you can see how little mistakes can creep in.

Also, since we are sliding into the movie Idiocracy by outsourcing more and more stuff to LLMs, expect more shitty translations. Who knows, your book may have been translated by a bot.

You may be as outraged as you want. I just pointed out that Mullvad didn’t do anything (to their detriment, at this point) like the title of the post suggested. That’s misrepresenting the facts. If you feel like that distinction (a company endorsement vs. a private donation) doesn’t make a difference, that’s fine. I get that. I left Proton when their CEO was praising the regime of 47 for tech regulation. I just believe we should be mad for the right reasons. Facts are good.

It’s been pointed out here in the thread that the majority of the donation to the horseshoe loonie party may in fact have come from other income streams, as Mullvad doesn’t pay an awful lot. I don’t know if that’s true but that would put another spin on the story as well.

There is no shortage of c@>=s in the author community either. Let’s not mention her name again. She’s probably a lot richer and therefore a lot more impactful with her magic money than this mad meatball. In my estimation, a dollar spent in the famous magician universe will have a lot more negative impact on the trans community than a comparable amount of kronor at Mullvad for immigrants to Sweden. The bigger threat there are probably the Sweden Democrats and they’re already in parliament as the second largest fraction.

This isn’t good. It’s also not entirely correct. Mullvad isn’t financing this party directly. One of the owners took his money he made from the company and donated it to the loonies. He could’ve bought crypto with it, spent it in blow maybe, but he didn’t. “Mullvad is financing this party” is not correct. “Your Mullvad fees may have ended up indirectly financing this party” is correct and an ongoing concern. So is their tepid response to the story breaking. I would still advise caution, hammer them with public outrage pressure on the socials, and hope they get rid of the loonie party donor before you bankrupt an otherwise serviceable VPN provider. If that guy is still there in a couple of months, by all means leave.

There is no shortage of c@<%s in the tech sector.

Regardless of what this dumb party is, it’s first and foremost a donation by a private person. Who happens to run Mullvad. So in the medium term this should have no bearing on the company and how it operates from their point of view. The article hints at disagreement on the board about many things. So if this news story turns into subscribers leaving by the thousands, I would sooner think the “generous” donor might be pushed or bought out.

The tech sector is run by people too. Some of them are mad. Our modern outrage economy demands drastic and public knee jerk reactions to be on the good side. If you’re considering leaving Mullvad, voice your concerns to them first. Put pressure on and wait and see for a bit. If they all turn out to be Nazis in trenchcoats, by all means leave. But they could correct this internally (push out/buyout) and then there is no need to destroy an otherwise okay VPN provider just because one of the founders turned into meatball Melon Usk.

I don’t use Mullvad but I have used Proton VPN and am now using AirVPN. It’s my experience that if you’re using VPN to stream Netflix content or the iPlayer from the UK, you’ll be equally sol on other providers because the streamers have gotten better at spotting and defending against VPNs. So switching in a huff may still leave you disappointed as well.

Radio playlists are a science like marketing. Half the budget is wasted, you’re just never sure which half.

Stations have a target audience. They will have focused grouped this. They know their favorite music, how long on average they listen, and how much they will expect to hear certain artists. The DJs are mere announcers, they have little to no choice in what they play, and they are grateful to have a job. So like anybody working in retail during Christmas, they can tune out the music in their heads.

BUT IF YOU READ IT YOU WILL FIND OUT THAT PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED OVER THIS ISSUE. SO THERE IS NO CONCLUSIVE ANSWER.