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.

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?

There is good greed and there is bad greed. Good greed provides the driving force, the battery voltage, needed to motivate people to risk everything to start a new business, to mortgage the house to make payroll, to borrow money from friends and family to buy parts for a new gadget. The desire to succeed, to attain wealth, is the force behind going to college, behind learning a trade. Without good greed, very little would get done in the world, and you probably wouldn’t have the phones and tablets and computers to enjoy.

There is also bad greed, which provides the same motivation as good greed, but is utilized by evil persons such that they will do anything to attain their goals no matter who they or what damage to attain those goals.

Capitalism has been the force behind society’s advancement since time immemorial. Probably since before recorded history. The desire to have things, to take care of family, to succeed at a profession are all based in capitalism.

Without Capitalism, there would be little or no motivation or drive to invent all of the things that are required to have what we call "AI" today - the internet, massive banks of servers housing massive banks of AI-related chips, and a reason to spend money on those things.

> There's also the Text Size slider under the Accessibility control panel.

There is no text size slider under accessibility on my machine (4k monitor, M1 Studio Ultra.)

What works, sort of, is to select the desktop then right click (or control left click), select "Show View Options" from the context menu, and then in there, select a text size from the drop down. You can also do this in the context of any finder window.

However, maximum selectable text size is 16pts — which is very small on a 4k display. As an "accessibility" setting, it's laughable. Which is perhaps why it's not under accessibility.

I have been using a free app from the Mac app store, "Loupe", which provides a comprehensive zoom capability much more convenient than Apple's "Zoom." It's not as good as actual reasonable control over system fonts would be, but it's better than being stuck with 16pt fonts.

There wouldn't be any AI without capitalism.

Is it online somewhere?

I have not shared it with the world, which I think is what you're asking. Nor do I plan to, at least anytime in the near future. This reduces the attack surface and the support loading.

Otherwise, yes, it's online — it's a networking WAN application bringing together people from widely disparate locations.

The real question is where will everyone go now that Discord is enshittified?

After putting up with Slack... slacking... for a while, Ryver ignoring bugs and getting worse over time, I wrote my own system from scratch. No ads, no randos, no spam, no cost. I am running independent family and business instances.

It's got a decent set of features, including a broad range of text formatting (it does _x_ and *x* and emoji :) markdown-like formatting too, but that's just for the comfort of our oldies), audio/video media, wide image support, file and image user libraries, various carefully designed bots, a full range of emojis, post previewing, search, and an integrated to-do system.

Sometimes, if you can, you just have to say "nope" and put your nose to the grindstone a bit.