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?

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.

Gulfstream.

You didn't think they flew commercial with the dirty plebs, did you?

Those products all paid licensing fees to whomever owns the underlying IP. You can find examples where the IP owner decides to be a dick. I'll call out everyone's least favorite, EA, and point out that you can't legally get the SNES version of Sim City on modern hardware via any sales channel that I'm aware of. Of course, there are "gray" options to play it, but you won't find it in the Wii store and there's no (legal) packaged emulator for it on Amazon.

Meme: After years of working in tech the only "smart" device in my house is an inkjet printer. I keep a gun next to it in case it makes a sound I don't recognize.

It's pretty trivial to install your own certificate authority and perform MITM attacks against all encrypted traffic coming from a particular endpoint over which you have control. It's less trivial but still doable to decompile a program and look through the source for hidden processes like you describe. All of which is to say I doubt Google could keep something like you describe a secret for very long, if they were inclined to try it, which seems unlikely. Why risk the bad PR and inevitable lawsuits when the majority of the unwashed masses happily consent to being spied on?

It absolutely is. What Google is doing here is no different than how most endpoint protection suites work. They all submit visited websites to a real time authority to check for known pfishing/malware sites. They will block in the moment where possible and retroactively alert the IT team when a visited site is later determined to be bad. I'm assuming Chrome will at least do the first. The second would be trickier while maintaining privacy but would still be doable locally, if the browser can download the database and compare it against its own history.

You're not wrong to call out the nonsensical equation to slavery as being silly at best and highly offensive at worst....

But where do you see a choice to go to work or not? Did you mistake Amazon's home country for one with a meaningful social safety net? Did I sleep through humanity waking up in the Star Trek utopia where we only work doing the things we love and not to meet our basic needs for food, shelter, healthcare, etc.?