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?

Anything that goes slow enough to be captured into an orbit will eventually spiral inwards.

Well, most of it (when we're talking matter not already in another black hole). Ordinary stuff orbiting near a black hole gets torn apart by the enormous tides and forms a disk-like structure similar to a gas giant's rings. Interactions among it and with the black hole's magnetic and gravitic fields can eject a bit of it in a pair of jets out along the axis of the disk, powered apparently by the rest of the stuff falling in.

These two black holes wouldn't stick to each other, but start swirling around each other and eventually merge together.

This is partly because of friction with and among other stuff in orbit around the black holes in their "accretion disks". (Black holes experience friction by eating the stuff in the other hole's disk of debris, with the momentum of the black-hole-plus-dinner thus being different from the black-hole-before-dinner.)

It's also partly because the rapid acceleration of things passing near a black hole or orbiting it causes the emission of gravity waves to be strong enough that it carries off substantial energy. (In less extreme environments, like suns and planets, the waves are not detectable by current instruments. In the case of two black holes,orbiting each other, they're detectable from across pretty much the whole universe.) This loss of energy amounts to "friction" that eventually causes co-orbiting pairs of black holes to spiral in and combine.

This reminds me of the sentencing of the "January 6 insurrection" guilty pleas. As I (a non-lawyer) understand it...

Regardless of whether you consider it an insurrection or a protest march petitioning the government for redress of grievances...

In the wake of the events, the fed busted a bunch of the participants and left them rotting in prison for months (over a year), with no end in sight. In many cases this left families with no breadwinner, enormous legal costs, and expectations of losing all their property as part of some eventual conviction.

Then the prosecutors offered some of the defendants a plea deal; Plead guilty to a misdemeanor or short-sentence felony and we'll drop any other charges.

Rule of thumb: a misdemeanor generally is a crime with a max sentence of no more than a year in prison, a felony more than a year - which is why you see "year and a day" max sentences on some crimes. An accused person already in prison for over the max sentence would expect that accepting the deal would result in immediate release with "credit for time served" (and others near the max might expect release much sooner). So some of them went for it.

Came the sentencing some judges applied a two-year sentence enhancements for "substantial interference with the 'administration of justice.'" OOPS! No release for you.

I'd expect them to pull the same sort of thing on Assange if he were foolish enough to plead guilty to anything, no matter how minor.

(By the way: This particular form of the practice, as used on the Jan6 participants, was just recently struck down. But the decision was based on Congress' certification of the presidential election not qualifying as "administration of justice.'" So this wouldn't apply to whatever enhancement trick they might pull on Julian.

I don't know what you heard, but baby cells can only stay baby cells, they can't become mommy cells,

Sez who?

There's been evidence for some time that post-pregnancy mothers often have clones of stem cells derived from the previous foetus. Sure such a clone would likely start out with its epigenitc programming set for whatever function it had in the baby's development (unless, say, some error in its differentiation is what led to it migrating to the woman's body to set up shop). But once established on the mother's side of the placental barrier, and especially after the birth, the stem cell clone can be expected to continue to run its program under direction of the growth factors in the mother's blood.

That amounts to a transplant of younger stem cells which could be expected to produce differentiated cells for tissue growth and replacemtnt,, with the aging clock set farther back and with some genes from the father to provide "hybrid vigor", filling in for defective genes in the mother's genome or adding variant versions of molecular pathways.

This strikes me as a bit of a shakedown, settle with out patent claims or we'll screw up your IPO by creating a new potential liability.

Back in the early days of the personal computer explosion there was a patent for the "XOR cursor" which I hear was used as a trolling operation. Story goes that every time a new hi-tek company was in that sensitive period just as they're about to go public, they'd get a notice that they were believed to be violating that (even if whatever they were doing didn't even involve a display with a cursor, XOR or otherwise) and an offer to license the patent for something substantial but far lower than the cost and risks of fighting it. ($10,000?) So the companies generally paid up rather than derail their IPO.

It was jokingly referred to as a tax on incorporation. There are rumors of discussions of buying a hit on the trolls. Apparently this netted over $50,000,000 before the patent expired. (Also there was apparently prior art discovered - AFTER the expiration.)

In Soviet Russia, correlation causes YOU!

The EU does capitalism better than the US does. What we have in the US is not capitalism. The correct term is crony capitalism.