You'd need to bundle that law with a law that would make the tickets refundable until a certain point too close to the event.

It's legitimate, in my mind, to resell tickets for some event you wanted to go to but now cannot because life circumstances got in the way. It's less legitimate to scrape a website, buy a zillion tickets, and resell them at a huge markup.

Economic populism is more in vogue on both the left and right today than it was in the 90s.

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?

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.

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.....

A National Registry of data brokers will be as effective as CFPB's consumer reporting agencies, all of whom have to allow you to 'freeze' your reports and all of whom have to provide you a free copy of your report. It's all good on paper but there are hundreds of them. What's needed for data brokers (and CRAs) is some centralized registry, like the Do Not Call list, where you can one click opt yourself out, request copies, etc., otherwise it's just a phone book and you get to do an unlimited amount of legwork to exercise your rights.

You're confusing darkness (In The Pale Moonlight) with violence/gore porn (Stardust City Rag). DS9 didn't need gore to tell compelling stories and neither does New Trek.

I could not disagree with you more about Discovery S1. I'll spare you my wall of text on that and distill it down to the only thing Trek about it was the title. There was exactly one 'Trek' episode in that season, Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad. Every single trope that ultimately ruined Discovery and Picard for our household was born that season. Faux-cliffhangers, the ten hour movie that wasn't (writers even admitted after the fact they made it up as they went along), violence/gore, bait and switch plots, mystery boxes, interpersonal soap opera drama substituting for story, blah, blah, blah, oh, and yeah, they paywalled it for the first time in franchise history.

There are exactly two redeemable things about Discovery: Grudge and the Strange New Worlds spinoff.

Sidenote: My Mom won't give SNW a chance because she feels like they pulled the rug out from under her with Discovery. She's also on a very limited/fixed income and with the crackdown on password sharing....

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.