Where I vote the paper ballot doesn't have identifying info and is in your hand for like 10 seconds between the voting machine and the ballot box. Someone would have to be in the polling place accosting me to check how I voted, which would be an issue no matter how the ballot got generated.

Then you get back to the old way of punching holes in a paper ballot and well... Have you ever heard of a "hanging chad"? That shit has issues too.

Love this fact. A major plot point revolving around characters knowing the spectrum of color an element produces when burned feels very old school Trek, quiet competence grounded in science.

Compare this to all the places that newer shows paid lip service to science being cool and then went back to teleporting around instantly with mushrooms or causing all of the dilithium in the galaxy to explode with emotions or whatever.

Totally fair. I honestly didn't like the mycelial network because it broke the storytelling and the future more than the fact it was unbelievable. Teleportation is way too strong and led to too many situations with Discovery being the only ship "in range" on a show that was already way too action/emergency oriented. It needed episodes that made it feel less like the only ship in the universe.

Discovery could have redeemed a lot of the idea in my mind if they'd destroyed the network. It would have made it obvious why the tech was never pursued more than just spore drive damaging it. Or, you know, by not being a TOS prequel in the first place and taking place after all of the other stories, like it ended up doing anyway...

I agree, and am not a big fan of Wesley being warp Mozart either, but I think the core difference between those and Discovery is that they were one offs. Plenty of single episodes can be shrugged off (*ahem* Threshold) but in Discovery the spore drive was in every episode, and The Burn was a persistent feature of the future timeline. The show spent seasons dealing with these things.

I agree that was the intent, but I found the show intolerable simply being in their orbit.

Obviously the ones on the Enterprise are made of some crazy space age transparent ceramic.

Haha, I was going to make that joke but then thought aluminum would probably be just as bad or worse than glass.

It's almost like we'd have no problem with it if everyone in our society didn't need to work to survive and it didn't accelerate the planet becoming unlivable while making the worst people alive even more money.

Weird.

Economics is soft science pretending like it is describing fundamental laws of the universe.

Economists don't know shit, they are describing how the economy could work in certain conditions in a vacuum and sometimes politicians/business people buy into the fantasy to backup doing whatever they wanted to do in the first place.

Oh shit, it's religion again.

Wow, SNW over DS9? Hot take.

There is an element of this, because the people using it for policy or writing headlines always disregard a ton of caveats and qualifications in any field (including actual hard science like physics), but most economics texts I've read hide a ton of complexity behind "rationality" that doesn't exist and are implicitly describing the system that we have (capitalism) without acknowledging that we could do it any other way - which frees them from any ethical conflict with capital/exploitation and lets them pretend they are describing a natural system.

The truth is we are irrational both as individuals and as groups with outside influences, and the economy can function in whatever way we want it to function. In that lens economics quickly turns into psychology, ethics and philosophy. Which, to be clear, would be a useful thing to study in any economic system (all of which have incentives and pitfalls), but it is not nearly as objective or concrete as it currently pretends as it fiddles with interest rates while billionaires run roughshod over our entire society.

Picard and Discovery were both pretty awful.

I enjoyed the first season of Academy. It is a bit teen drama for some though, and it picks up in the far future Discovery timeline which means its basically a different continuity from the other series.

SNW is good in spurts, not nearly as bad as Discovery/Picard, but it does have some pretty clunky episodes as well as ones that are pretty great.

As others have said though, Lower Decks is easily the best new(ish) Trek show but it's a love letter to 90s Trek so I wouldn't watch it until you're ready to get the myriad references.

Not to be too much of a downer, but all of these cute Google search results and other "quirky" "fun" things billion dollar corporations do used to seem so harmless but now it just reads like a friendly logo on a baby mulching machine.

Weird Al is a national treasure, an institution. I'd bet it's his sort of music, parody, that AI threatens most simply because it's riffing on songs that already exist.

On the other hand, the only reason I'd worry that a gen-AI could attempt a masterpiece like "Alternative Polka" is that Weird Al created it first.

Perfect headline.

If I don't bowl today the terrorists win.

This made me laugh. This is the same shit we've been doing for 100 years. "Illegal orders" aren't a thing when you use your imperial military to do imperialism. The last time we had a President that wasn't a war criminal was never.

Proton is amazing, but it's entirely overhead translating library/system calls to Linux. It's accurate to say they run better on SteamOS, not to say Proton is making it run better.

Now maybe Proton makes them run better than a janky but native Linux port, but that's a separate statement about games being better optimized on Windows.

Ideally the FDA should not be swayed by business interests, but everything controlled by our government is. That said, you want the FDA to exist and protect us from bullshit snake oil products and keep corporations from lacing our food with cheap poisons and carcinogens.

Trump gutting the organization makes it go from "could do better" to "actively subverting its own purpose."