Look, I agree on the politics of TOS being plenty woke. TOS was causing outrages regularly. Sadly, I also find TOS borderline unwatchable as television these days; to my mind, TNG is the first era of startrek vaguely watchable in completeness and having an okay time as far as acting, pacing and storytelling goes. But also, by late TNG, it feels like it already really lags behind the progress of the times, compared to TOS.

I've watched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... a few days ago, sober, and it was one of the worst expireinces consuming media I've had this year. It was physically painful, and by 1994, they really oughta have known fuckin' better.

The stuff coming out these days seems more concerned with "but what if we're too woke?? what if the fascist spook section really is good and necessary-oh whoops it got eaten by genocidal robots that just came from somewhere for some reason, well I guess it's finally conveniently evil now and we don't have to worry about moral conflict anymore".

Statrek started proper woke, then barely progressed past what was woke when it did, aging like a gen Xer getting upset that racism means something else than when it was sufficient to agree slurs are bad, segregation is bad, but opposing "well meant" racist jokes is step too far.

This year I've watched thorugh Babylon 5 with my wife, and honestly, it made me like Star Trek a lot less. And no, fuck off, the problem with startrek isn't that it's woke. It's not woke enough. So many of the plotlines are just neoliberal both-side bullshit refusing to take an actual moral stance on anything. So much "It's so very complicated :(" hogwash. Babylon 5 gets proper dirty with way more candid and realistic depictions of subtle ways fascism poisons even well meaning groups and structures and actually asks of the protagonists to genuinely own up for their past flaws and mistakes rather than "never again, I've decided I'm a good person now" caricatures of how humans actually function.

I gotta give to Lucas that while much of his work is of questionable qualities across many metrics they could be judged on, he still spends his energy and more importantly money on things that make him happy and attempt to bring something he finds cool and interesting into the world, instead of trying to usurp platforms to further his fave political agendas and stroke his ego, which cannot be said for many/most pepole of his status. Can't say he's my favourite creator, but at least he acts like a human being, rather than turning into a monstrous hollow husk chasing profit or worse, trying to make other people's life worse actively like certain individuals that give many a slashdot commenter raging hardons.

IDK about whoever pwned them in this case, but I feel like my fashion choices could get hella flexible if they were in the way of a potential $320M. That's enough to disappear real good.

I don't see why'd it make sense to make many cybercabs because by 2016 all Tesla cars will be self driving and you'll be able to just send your own Tesla to run cab overnight and just make you money passively.

Well, however bad I get I do hope I won't start conflating typesetting and literacy because that's real dumb.

Okay, cool, but the heating effect on your head of stepping into direct sunlight, even wearing a hat and sunscreen is more than the total transmission power of a phone. Even if your apparently unusually large and dense brain somehow absorbed every last bit of energy radiated by the phone (ensuring you're not having a phone call), the net effect would still be less than just sunlight hitting your head.

Any meaningful, sudden, uncorrected change in temperature of your brain will instantenously knock you unconscious and you're not gonna be having a phone call loooooooong before it has any chance of making some nebulous "unusual chemical reactions more probable". Thankfully, your brain is VERY actively controlling its own temperature, which is the reason why, for instance, stepping from a shade into open sunlight, which exposes your head to orders of magnitude higher amounts of absorbed energy than having a phone call, doesn't do anything bad to you.

In my mind, ASCII has everything anyone ever needed to write English with, including the good ol' 0x2d hyphen - nothing beats that.

Meaningfully shielding entire (or I guess at least the upper half of) airplane would also make em so much heavier that they'd inevitably end up slower (particularly in climb), which'd in turn mean you'd spend longer time exposed to the radiation and eat into the benefit and further make the boondoggle even more expensive. You're also wasting money on shielding the whole human when much our bodies are pretty resistant. A really high value one is shielding the pelvis because you're protecting both the gonads (cancer risk, also fucked babies) as well as a big bulk of bone marrow (cacer risk as well as weakened in function). Titties are like, the one other spot that might be worth it at these long term exposures because, again, generally high cancer risk that apparently multiplies with these long term exposures.

Also frequent business flyers should just bring their own shielding imo.

Except maybe it definitely wasn't those things because it's physically impossible for those wavelengths to ionize biological compounds (outside of just heating the whole thing up to a temperature where it decomposes thermally) and thus they physically cannot damage DNA. An incandescent lightbulb is more capable of giving you cancer than any radio frequency device of equivalent power output.

Male pilots might even write off some heavy duty chastity gear as safety equipment! Seriously though, some form of protection should become a norm for people with exposure this frequent, Airlines inevitable concerns of impact on aesthetics of the outfits and scaring the customers be fuckin' damned. I'd like to fly planes knowing that the people servicing me aren't getting meaningful cancer risk just because some other people think it's their job to slut it up.

Oh I thought they were built and designed to explode?

The bank web interface requires the phone app for verification, same with the legal filing app (the alternative there is generally, to do filings in person/paper). The work auth isn't just plain TOTP; it's a password storage thing. Upon checking, it actually does have a plain password accessible webpage, so I guess scratch that one! If there's a way to use Lyft or Uber from the web, I haven't figured out how, and in most towns, they're the essentially only game left.

We also have pretty decent guesstimates for times long, long before that, based effects of temperature on various biological and abiological processes that we can backdate to some time based on sedimentation layers and whatnot.