Except I did -- which is why I posted what I posted. He didn't cling on to beeper like he did pebble, took a great offer and, at least for now, his staff remain employed. Like most acqs Migicovsky will likely depart in a year or two after everything transfers over to Automatic.

Don't get me wrong, I still have my main pebble watch and about 7 others I got at a firesale and they all still work. Loved pebble and would have like to have seen it continue -- but that just wasn't going to happen after other, much begger companies with deeper pockets got in to the smartwatch market -- and Mig didn't see that and lost out on getting enough money to fund a dozen start ups.

Apple's take on this uses end-to-end encryption and is a tad bit more secure than the paper journal/diary that can be pawed through by anyone from a noisy partner to law enforcement. I'm skeptical journaling on an iPhone is going to get you the same mental health benefits as journaling on paper and the last thing modern day society needs is MORE screen time, but still, there are reasons why some people might prefer a digital solution to a physical one.

My Mom stopped watching New Trek because it's insanely dark and violent compared to Classic Trek and she can't handle that. She checked out in S1 of Discovery. Stardust City Rag would literally destroy her. That's my bitch about New Trek. They turned the franchise our family grew up watching and discussing together into one that requires trigger warnings and is literally unwatchable for many people. Contrast this nonsense to The Orville, even its attempt at a horror episode never resorts to gore porn, and the serious/heavy episodes still end on upbeat/optimistic notes. My Mom loves The Orville. She refuses to watch New Trek. Thanks CBS.

Yeah, I remember all those TOS and TNG episodes about the class struggle, state control of the means of production, and total absence of private property.

Oh wait, that never happened. :-)

The prequels had many flaws, to put it mildly, but being focus grouped to death prior to production was not one of them. For better or worse, Lucas had a very specific vision, and nobody was able to challenge him on it.

My partner and I recently did a rewatch of all nine movies, the first time I'd seen Episode IX, and my first re-watch of the prequels since the 00s. The prequels are still terrible, with countless cringeworthy moments (Anakin: I killed them all, even the children | Padme: I can fix him) but I found myself playing with my phone a lot less during them than I did during the Disney trilogy. *shrug*

It was fun to see the cast. The ship? Meh. We called the "big reveal" minutes before it happened without any spoilers. The writing was that obvious. I say this as someone who LOVED the Enterprise-D -- still my favorite ship -- that scene had zero emotional weight for us because it was such an obvious/desperate member-berry. Then to see that ship, which moved like, well, a ship (first few seconds of the clip), fly like an F-16 because some idiot thought Star Trek needed to crib from Return of the Jedi. Sigh.

I'll give New Trek props for production values, the bridge looked AMAZING, but the priorities of the production team are all wrong. All you need to know, they spent three months and a small fortune to recreate the set, then had less than two days to complete the shoot before tearing it back down. New Trek is all form and no substance. Here's a shiny thing to distract you from the horrible writing, just turn your brain off and keep giving our streaming service your money.

The sole saving grace to S3 was seeing the cast back together. The conference room scene on the Titan and the poker game at the end. That's it. The story was throughly forgettable. None of the characters (except perhaps Worf) were written correctly. It copied all the bad tropes -- character deaths for shock value, wanton violence, pointless cliffhangers immediately resolved, and mystery box writing -- that made Discovery all but unwatchable. You ultimately could have told the same overarching story (Changelings and Borg team up to take revenge; the old crew unites to stop them) with a solid movie rather than a ten hour faux-miniseries. Image this same team making Wrath of Khan. It'd be ten hours long, you wouldn't met Khan until Hour 8.5, then it'd be neatly wrapped up in 45 minutes.

Anonymity is the real problem with social media/the internet, see the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. It's hardly unique to the Internet. Road rage has been around since the invention of the car and the faux-anonymity of the motor vehicle leads to behaviors that would never happen in a face to face setting.

And at its worst it prices residents out of their own city while destroying the local hospitality industry. For every "common person with an unused spare room showing tourists cool local things" there are at least ten faceless investment firms treating them as de-facto hotel rooms you get the honor of cleaning yourself.

Seriously, AirBnB is your shining example of why we shouldn't view tech bros with extreme skepticism?

Want to talk about the rest of the gig economy which only exists by evading decades of hard won labor rights/regulations?

"It's much easier to buy out your competitors to stop people from using alternatives to their messaging system."

A bit, of that -- but a healthy dose of Eric Migicovsky learning from not taking a buyout offer of $700+ million for pebble to walking away with next to nothing a year or two later.

Steve Miller Band had it right... "Take the money and run".

Remember Munich, with much fanfare, adopted Linux in 2003 only to abandon it for Windows 10:

In addition to politics and cost, the issue of having to work in a Microsoft-centric world are likely to kill this.

Because COVID taught them that

A) their kids can learn anywhere, anytime, with a variety of methods
B) they saw just how much of their kids school days had been taken up by crap that had nothing to do with academics
C) it's not necessary to be stuck in a concrete box 9 hours a day to learn, or even study 5 days every week to learn

Most of us are beginning to see what the late Michel Foucaultt meant when he said that "schools resemble prisons because they serve a similar function".

With 70+ years of examples of how collective economies work, are you seriously arguing for Marxism?

In case you haven't been to a grocery store, car dealership, realtor, college bursar, etc lately, the price of pretty much everything is up. Maybe you're making so much money that you hadn't noticed.

It's not even that so much as "Do as we say or we cut off trade/investment/loans/grants".

America may be in decline, but it still has a lot of influence, money-wise.

Sure. Declare strict neutrality, and pay for your own defense.