As Carlin said: it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

Oh shit the third Semiosis came out? Loved the first couple, how did I miss that?

“Two movies we cite as comps for what we’re hoping to do are Training Day and Crimson Tide,” Goldstein tells Inverse.

Hmm, I like both of those movies but way different vibes. Crimson Tide might as well already be a Trek script, but Training Day? Freshly minted Captain versus effective but corrupt badmiral perhaps? XO and captain maybe?

My hopes this will be made are pretty low, but there could be some good Trek here. Especially if they actually made a movie that wasn’t a cameo fest (it does say all new characters).

I’m not sure I agree this is an awful location if you’re going to make a big studio campus. It’s not in Austin atm but it will be eventually (it’s currently surrounded) and 290/183 are useful veins. You say “outside Manor” like it’s also not ~10 miles from the capitol and downtown. In LA terms that’s basically nothing.

That said, as an eastsider, yeah fuck the billionaires generally and the Ellisons specifically.

Trans? More power to you.

CIA? Go fuck yourself.

If you’ve read all the OG Dune content, I say go for it. They aren’t at the same level, but they’re… Fine. Get it from the library or wherever and try it. Go in with low expectations and possibly get pleasantly surprised, or never pick them up again.

Uh, what? The Ayn Rand garbage philosophy? I’ve never heard that and don’t see how that jibes with a free, crowd sourced encyclopedia…

I’ve never seen a repo so reticent to tell you what it is.

My guess is it’s the journal software running the .org but everything also seems to be down half the time.

I like this comic but Beetle Moses needs to actually look at a tortoise, haha.

Their arms and legs don’t pop out of holes in their shells, their shells are more like wraps around their torsos (it’s a strapless dress, not a onesie). Also those scutes (panels of the shell) are fucked.

… Why yes, I’m fun at parties, why do you ask?

American people have plenty of empathy and compassion, what they don’t have is literally anyone else to call.

If you have an emergency, you call 911 and as soon as they hear the word “gun” cops are the only outcome. Maybe in some universe a person has some foresight in case of a suicidal person with a gun and can look up local resources or something, but until we have something built into emergency services for this, panicked people are going to do the one thing they can think of when someone needs help.

I’d vote for AOC a thousand times harder than for Newsom. I’m not sure she actually wants the position though, she’s potentially got a long career as a rep (or senator) in front of her and could probably turn into a Presidential candidate in any cycle, but having a major legislative win is bigger than that, according to her

Bari Weiss is a disgusting hack, and laughably unqualified, but being a news outlet editor is way more complicated than just rubber stamping factual reporting. Editors allocate resources - from writers and photographers/crews to even start a story, to how the front page is divvied up, how stories are promoted, how many column inches (or words, or minutes) a topic gets.

Point being that there are definitely feelings involved. Even if it’s one story is more interesting than another, or we’ve covered this topic more than enough lately, or this story is factual but not adding anything new, etc. etc. etc. It’s a hard job, and more subjective than you’d think, so I don’t blame her for being defensive when she’s literally the worst editor to ever hold a national news desk down.

AOC had to walk so Mamdani could run. Not only proving DSA candidates were electable, but also that they could actually do the job by being pragmatic (for better or worse).