Ban TicketMaster/Live Nation from the lucrative resale market and watch how quickly they conjure up an effective solution to solve the problem of bots snatching up all the tickets.

We purchased tickets for Alanis Morissette's tour this summer, within 60 seconds of sales opening, and magically all the first sale tickets were gone and we had to go to the resale market. From nosebleed to "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", literally, every single seat in a ~20k person arena sold within a minute? Who knew she was still that popular....

TM gets to collect their bullshit fees on every single sale, so what incentive do they have to do a damn thing about bots?

There isn't any meaningful competition.

I've tried Rumble myself both as a viewer and as a content producer (very small channel), and it's just... not even in the same league, barely on the same continent.

But there's always a chance a competitor suddenly appears when some VCs with deep pockets decide it's worth the gamble.

Absolutely not. The YouTube customers are the people buying ads on the platform.

YouTube is fleecing them by raising the number of ads they can bill them for, even though they're force-showing them to visitors who have very clearly expressed that they don't want ads and are more likely to hold the ads against the customers who paid for them than see them as an incentive to buy or as a positive brand-image thing.

And that's exactly what YouTube is doing.

YT is dying. Slowly, and it'll be around for years, but it's dying. The algorithm is starting to fail in very obvious ways, like recommending you the same videos constantly, despite you've scrolled past them a hundred times before. The content has become thinly veiled advertisement in addition to the actual advertisement they shove down your throat in increasingly aggressive manner. Most of the large content creators don't make much money anymore on YouTube and would probably jump ship the moment a competitor with a comparative audience size appears.

They're desperately trying to keep the cash cow alive somehow. And when you run out of ideas to innovate and make a good product, you start to ask yourself how you can fleece your customers for more.

It's true that there is the assumption that technology and innovation will reduce interstellar travel times drastically, the way they have reduce travel across an ocean from many weeks to a few hours.

I do agree that most people probably are off by at least two orders of magnitude in estimating realistic interstellar travel times. With technology we can predict as probably going to happen, we're still on the order of hundreds of years to even nearby star systems.

Unless some magical technology breaks the light-speed barrier, space will not be "another ocean".

However, star-faring civilisations are still possible. They wouldn't be any kind of space kingdom, but independent star systems that just happen to have a common ancestry. They would certainly communicate, and the technology for that basically exists already, at least in the nearby area ( And if we can only travel to a few of the nearest stars, would we want to? Is there anything there we want?

Humans do a lot of things simply because we can. And what is vast resources today isn't so much tomorrow. Just 200 years ago, all the gold in the world wouldn't have enabled you to fly to another country for a quick visit to relatives. King, pope, peasant, no difference, simply wasn't possible. Today, anyone with an average income can do it.

So in another 200 years, who's to say that a space ship to a nearby solar system is not well within the budget of a wealthy nation?

Cinemas essentially killed themselves in the early 2000s, at least over here in Europe. There used to be local cinemas everywhere, with one or at most 2 main halls and 2-4 small ones. The main hall or halls showed the Hollywood blockbuster of the month and the smaller ones the other movies, the ones that didn't fill the main hall.

Then all of those local cinemas started disappearing and were replaced with the massive cinemas we have today, with 10+ main halls and no small ones (or "small" ones the size that the main hall of local cinemas used to be). I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been there where these massive halls were filled to even somewhat near capacity. Most of the time you can pick wherever because there's 2-4 people per row. Make it 10% full if you want to be generous.

Of course that's not viable. They thought economy of scale. They thought they can have more efficiency than the local places by having fewer cashiers and popcorn sellers per customer. They thought on paper and not in the real world.

And to have even a chance to fill those halls, the only movies that they could show were blockbusters.

spot on

I can recommend to everyone to have at least one non-geek good friend. I'll reset your understanding of how "easy" tech actually is.

Or a photo from 30 years ago that looks nothing like them today, but if asked they can truthfully say that yes, it's a photo of them.

I think Apple doesn't understand what it had with the big iMac.

I still have my 2017 one around. When it came out, it was revolutionary. A full 5K display with a reasonable CPU and GPU at a very reasonable price. Built-in webcam and speakers. The only necessary cable was power (if you went bluetooth keyboard and mouse). A wonderfully uncluttered desktop with a mean machine that also looks nice.

Why would I make many steps back from that?

I've done the math last year. I also thought Mac mini + Studio Display (it's not that much more expensive than a good 4K display) would do it, but it turns out that once you upgrade the Mac mini to something actually useable for desktop work, you're not that far from a Studio price-wise.

I really, really, really wish someone took a big fence post and hammered some sense into the idiots at Apple.

They have. I've seen such in several different offices.

The very first episode of Star Trek I ever saw was Duet. Have you seen it? It was Season One and by the end of the episode we're pretty far removed from "Terrorist Kira." It did not take seven years for her to view the Cardassians as people or to think that a political solution was possible.

So finally a new 27" or even 30" iMac with an M4 chip?

Come on Apple, wake up. People want an affordable desktop machine, not $4k+ for a Studio+Display combo.

Reducing something to just over 1 % of its original planned size isn't "scaling down". That's an euphemism for "giving up, just finishing the stuff we've already largely built".

Converted to your typical house, it means instead of building the whole house you're building the tiny guest toilet and nothing else.

There's nothing in any canon I can recall that would imply that. I do recall household fusion reactors and replicators (TNG's The Survivors) which is pretty much the opposite definition of central control by the State, unless we assume the replicator has DRM or some such, which was never said or implied. There's also civilian ownership of weaponry in every show, again, opposite of central control. There are privately owned ships, privately owned restaurants, privately owned French estates, the only thing missing is currency, but what good is currency in an abundance economy?

Did you watch the same show I did? That might have made for a compelling story. The story we actually got was about a cartoon villain from a literal universe of cartoon villains. That twist ruined what was up until that point a fairly compelling character story acted brilliantly by Jason Issacs. Discovery has done this time and time again, take a concept from Classic Trek best used sparingly (Section 31) or not taken seriously (tMirror Universe) and drive it into the ground.

That's nonsense but I'm not surprised you worship at the altar of DS9 because it feels like all DS9 worshippers have to throw this shade at the other shows. You don't see any character evolution between S1 Data, Worf, or Picard vs. S7? S1 Doctor vs. S4? S4 Seven of Nine vs. S7? There were certainly characters (Harry Kim) the writers forgot about but it's nonsense to say they stayed the same as they always were. Side note: I like DS9, a lot actually, so don't mistake this as a condemnation of that show, just the more rabid parts of its fan base.

Episodic television is not mutually exclusive with character development and serialized television is not automatically superior. I would posit that it only works when the show runners actually have the whole story sketched out in advance, e.g., Babylon 5. How many B5 episodes ended on a cliffhanger? I can recall only one. How many Game of Thrones episodes ended in cliffhangers? I can't recall any. Those shows (well, GoT until they outran the source material) are how you do serialization, a novel for television, not what Discovery and Picard pull on us. Discovery and Picard take story ideas that could be told in a two hour movie or three episode television arc and try to stretch them out for 10 hours. They do it with cheap tricks, like cliffhangers (invariably resolved in the opening act of the next episode), twists to drive engagement on social media (OMG, Lorca is from the mirror universe!), manufactured interpersonal conflict on a soap opera level (what happened to the professionalism in Starfleet?), blah, blah, blah, all there just to pad the run time and keep the rubes subscribing.

This isn't uniquely a Star Trek problem. It has happened to a lot of other productions. I blame Netflix, or rather, Hollywood's reaction to Netflix. Everyone rushed to copy that production model without asking themselves if there was still room for traditional TV (e.g., Strange New Worlds) or (crazy idea) new concepts.

Blood isn't the problem my friend. It's the gore, torture, and violence for the sake of shock value that ruined Discovery and Picard for me. Something else you said:

You don't need gore porn to tell a story about the horrors of war. If you think you do you've probably never seen the horrors of war. The two Star Trek episodes that most effect my partner -- who actually served in the GWoT and came back with the TBI and PTSD to prove it -- are Chain of Command and It's Only a Paper Moon.

Communism implies the state controls the means of production, which is impossible if every citizen owns a replicator and fusion reactor. It's better described as an abundance economy. In Trek it's implied (in The Orville explicitly said) that humanity evolved first and later got the cool tech that allows you make anything you want out of thin air. That's probably how it has to happen because you just know if some tech bro actually made the replicator a thing it would be burdened with DRM and onerous licensing fees. Here's a replicator, it will feed you a gelatinous mass that tastes like garbage but meets all your nutritional requirements, if you want to replicate actual food you can purchase our Recipe Add On license at an annual fee of.....