“It’s been a long road…” since I’ve considered DS9 the Star Trek outcast…heh

That was pretty interesting. I was expecting cost/benefit on adopting quantum computing, which I suspect isn’t going to be terribly useful to the everyday person soon. But it was refreshingly targeted on the Cybersecurity impacts, which are valid for the everyday person, already.

TL;DR - Quantum computing is great, if you’re the bad guy. For the rest of us, there’s a cost/value tradeoff in defending against quantum computing threats. People will tell us it’s too much hassle to upgrade our encryption, but it can be done with reasonable effort.

most evidence suggests that piracy goes down in response to easily accessible and affordable market conditions.

The assholes know this too. We’re about due for another round of deshitifcation, just long enough to restore complacency.

I do not advocate for piracy. I advocate for archiving.

Exactly. And if the assholes make it illegal for librarians, well then yo ho ho.

My life could have overlapped with Dr. King’s by decades, and the world would have been so much better.

Stay angry. Stay active. Stay unionized. Celebrate every oppressor we outlive.

Salutes

Dunno, it feels like rich Yanks are what got everything to this point.

Yeah. If you accept any of our billionaires onto your shores, be sure to eat them promptly. They spoil quickly, and it makes a mess.

How about we grant asylum to Americans who are at the greatest risk of persecution?

At the moment that includes well educated Americans, so that could work.

Yeah!

Weirdly, The Orville is the recently created media that stands closest, in my opinion.

I think it’s a far cry from DS9.

And I’m pretty sure I don’t share many politics with Seth MacFarlane.

But The Orville genuinely prioritizes asking the audience to reflect on tough topics through a lens of empathy and compromise.

Jadzia Dax presents very strongly as fem but behaves very outwardly as masc.

But the bit that matters is that characters we’re meant to admire chose to accept Dax as they presented at any given time, without giving them needless crap for it.

I recall most LGBT characters on TV at the time had to accept a studio mandated minimum quota of jokes at their expense.

Dax was refreshingly different, in being allowed to present as LGBT and as a heartthrob love interest.

(And bonus kudos to Garak the Simple Taylor for also being an LGBT heart-throb love interest when that certainly wasn’t allowed by the studios.)

This is a character ultimately designed to satisfy the male gaze and the male desire for a “drinking buddy”; i.e. the “action girl” trope.

I mean, yeah. You’re very correct that Dax is about male gaze much more than Trans representation.

But this sign I had made special for Star Trek applies once again:

Empathy through horniness still technically counts as progress.

Lol.

Lol. I’m gonna steal that. The first word of the first episode intro is indeed, pretty politically neutral.

We Stan Rom in this house.

If you haven’t seen Ron’s guest appearance in Star Trek: Lower Decks, be sure to check it out. It’s a delight.

Slight correction but TOS didn’t have the first interracial kiss. A very, very early one, but not the first.

Do I recall correctly that Trek did have the first one aired at primetime? I feel like I read that somewhere, but I don’t have a source.

Somebody’s bribe money check cleared.

Walgreens decided that underpaying and understaffing the pharmacy is their new secret to profitability.

It’s one of the faster enshitifications I’ve seen. Last time I had a prescription filled at Walgreens, I had plenty of time in line to realize that my stupid shopping choice could also actually get me killed this time.

Lol. I’m guessing they earned this discovery after an agile data driven pivot away from keeping the front doors of the store locked all day…

Unhireable. A real tragedy.

Yeah. Rockefeller pretty much owned the government in his heyday, too.

And then at some point he didn’t anymore. Money can buy power, but it does run out eventually.

Rockefeller was a lot smarter than Musk, and got a bit ahead of it with publicity stunt donations, before his influence ran out.

Musk thinks he can achieve a better outcome by controlling the media or the courts.

I think it’s objectively true that controlling the media does work, but I also think Musk wildly overestimates his own competence, and is in for a worse time than Rockefeller had.

Hooray for Risc-v, anyway.

I think I joke too often about ruling benevolently over the world’s robots someday after everyone lays off their Cybersecurity staff.

But if we continue this trend, this community may have the only clean secure laptops after everyone else sells out and fills their shit with backdoors.

Maybe we can rule together as a benevolent collective…

Yeah.

And there’s a very good chance that Elon spends his waning years in and out of every court, trying to stay out of jail.

Source: Rockefeller’s biography.

And that’s actually the optimistic version, from Elon’s perspective. There’s been plenty of rich assholes in history that didn’t have to worry about the courts.