BS, TNG was a great series. However, it was really rough and kinda bad during the first season, and into the 2nd.

What worked was when Gene was the figurehead and kinda oversaw things, so that people were working according to his vision, but Gene was not involved in any nitty-gritty details. He was a lot like George Lucas: he came up with some cool ideas and visions for things, but when they were executed by other people is when the final product was really fantastic.

Gene became much less involved in the show after the 2nd season, and that's when it really shined, at least until it just got too old and stale. The 3rd-5th seasons were amazing, and some of the best TV ever made.

The same thing happened in TOS too. All the best episodes were when Gene wasn't so hands-on.

Now with Gene gone, it's gone to crap because they aren't using his vision at all, they're just recycling and trying to make money off of things from the prior series, but without the vision that really made it ST.

I actually like the guy they have playing Bones on the competing fan-made Star Trek Phase II series. The other actors, not so much, but the McCoy guy is great. They should swap him with the Bones guy from ST: Continues, because all their actors are great except for the McCoy guy. My office desk is less wooden.

Great post. I feel mostly the same way, except I never bothered with JJ's 2nd movie because I was too disappointed by the 1st one.

The real problem with Star Trek, however, was that it was unrealistic in its optimism and with everyone having such excellent values. They said many times in the series that genetic engineering was bad, was banned, etc. (except for that 2nd-series Pulaski episode in TNG, for some odd reason), but the only way humanity is going to be that moral is if it's engineered into them, or we do something to engineer sociopathy out of our species. Right now, sociopaths are in charge, and are exceedingly common, and their values permeate our society. Just look at the replies to your post: these days, the only thing that matters is money and profit, that's what makes a person "good". Even the Christians will tell you this these days: God favors people who make more money, and loves rich people more, and poor people are poor because God has abandoned them. Popular TV preachers like Joel Osteen will happily tell you this, and countless Christian churches preach this theology.

Of course, even Star Trek had its dark side, but it was in the past: we were supposed to have the Eugenics Wars back in the 1990s, and we're supposed to have WWIII sometime soon. Only after all that calamity is Zephram Cochrane supposed to invent the warp engine, meet the Vulcans, and quickly propel us into the galactic neighborhood as seen in STE, with humanity going from a war-torn society to eradicating poverty inside a century. So according to ST, we're supposed to be living in a pretty shitty time right now. That seems ridiculously optimistic however (that going through WWIII and meeting the Vulcans will suddenly turn us into a wonderful race of moralistic do-gooders without a bunch of sociopaths running our society like we have now).

What I like to tell people in discussions like this is that Star Trek does show our society, but not in the normal episodes; they're in the "mirror" episodes! That's us: the evil humans who run around murdering and conquering anyone and anything we can. If we ever invent warp drive and phasers, the galaxy is going to wish they only had the Klingons to deal with.

Exactly. Also, the Kardashians are superior people because they have lots of money, and that's why the rest of us need to spend our time watching their family drama on their TV show, because with all that money, their lives are obviously much more interesting and important than ours.

Here again, the Scandinavians prove they are the most superior culture on the planet. While much larger nations with far more resources are spending on their resources on military adventurism and weapons systems (including nations who also have possessions far north of the Arctic Circle, namely Russia), the Scandinavians have the highest quality of life in the world and are looking out for the future with this seed vault.

They're frozen, silly. That's why it's in Svalbard (go look it up on Google Maps). It's pretty close to cryogenic storage up there.

Yep, tweekers are pretty much a lost cause.

It's not just copper piping they can steal; they'll also steal electrical wiring. Nothing's too small or low-value for them.

Also, I don't think you can replace copper with PVC; you can use some other stuff, like PEX, but PVC isn't used for high-pressure supply piping as far as I know, at least not inside walls. I have seen it used for irrigation systems though. I think the problem is that you can't use PVC for hot water supply lines.

No, it was most likely metal thieves. There's tons and tons of them in Phoenix, since that city is chock full of meth-heads and illegal aliens, both of whom steal any metal they can get their hands on so they can take them to the metal recyclers in South Phoenix and get a few bucks. They've had all kinds of problems with metal theft there for a long time; not only are new-home construction sites frequently burgled of their wire and copper pipe, they've even resorted to stealing catalytic converters from vehicles in parking lots (using a portable reciprocating saw).

There's been lots of cases of metal thieves trying to steal electric wire from high-voltage installations and being killed in the process.

Catholic priests and ISIS fighters are good examples of why male celibacy is a very bad thing.

Of course, being in a sexless marriage isn't much good either...

My solution to this: we need to genetically engineer people somehow so people don't have to be single.

Beta was not superior to VHS. No one liked having to change tapes in the middle of the movie. Your analogy is like saying the P4 was a better chip than AMD's offering at that time, if your criteria for "good" is "performance per watt". Beta was better in some ways, but not ways that consumers cared about.

I'm not that young any more (which doesn't help); I'm about 40. I'm separated, not single, but that means I'm back in the dating game and looking to meet new women obviously. But I'm finding that, for me, nothing's changed much since my late 20s when I was last in the dating game. The biggest difference, I guess, is that my dating pool does seem to be a bit wider, in that there are a lot of late-20s women interested in dating men up to my age (but that's about the cut-off), so my range is from about 27 up to 47, whereas in my late 20s it was narrower, probably only about 23 to 31. And of course, I've now been through one marriage so I'm a bit paranoid about making sure I don't hook up with someone that I don't think is really right for me, as I feel I rushed into it before, so now if I see a woman's profile online and it has too much commonality with my current wife, I pass.

Your novel sounds really interesting, and does sound a lot like me (now, not when younger; I didn't consider the location factor much back then, which in retrospect I think was a big mistake; I was in a (different) big metro area then and thought that was good enough). I would be interested in reading it and providing feedback if you like. Thanks!

Um, I don't think that's going to help matters unless most of us decide to try being gay.

Slashdot dating tips, sure; surely I'm not the only one here who needs advice. But a dating service? Unless it's homosexual, you need to actually have a good mix of both sexes for that to work. There is not a significant number of women here who are looking for a relationship. (I imagine what very, very few women we do have here, are all attached and not looking.)

True, but we still hold monogamy as the ideal, and then when someone doesn't live up to it, then the relationship is ended, frequently involving the court system and some expensive lawyers.

If you're openly non-monogamous, you can avoid all that.

Well, we also delegate our politics because we have societies with more than a few hundred or thousand people now. These days, a group of 1000 people is a small town, and a small city has 50k. In the ancient world, that was a very large city. I imagine the Romans probably did a lot of innovation as far as cities, by bringing us aqueducts to improve sanitation, easily the bane of human civilization.