Yeah, their was far too much spent on style and too little on substance. Everything is highly cinematic, and they clearly spent tens of millions of dollars per episode, so they feel they have to make, "epic," stories that reflect that scale. The thing is, that's never what made Trek great. Chain of Command said more about war with a cheap set and four spotlights than all of season one of Discovery said on a $100 million budget.

Damn, that is the most perfect distillation of the problem I've ever heard.

I only remember latinum from DS9. I remember Riker/Picard offering outside civilizations federation credits a few times, but they were vague about how those were used. I know Earth is the only explicitly post-currency civilization, but it's hard to imagine any civilization with replicators and energy abundance still being capitalist. It could be that federation credits are just sort of an IOU for non-Federation groups.

I imagine the Picards are sorta like stewards of a historical landmark. Like, their family has been making wine for generations, so they let them continue doing that, but if they every run out of Picards that want to grow grapes the government would relocate them so another wine expert could take over. That's basically the head cannon I came up with, but I wasn't even thinking about it until Picard made it an issue.

Well, she also says something to the extent of, "we don't all have a family vineyard to live on." The implication definitely seemed to be that PIcard was a, "have," and she was a, "have-not," which seemed very antithetical to the universe established in Old Trek.

To be fair, the post-scarcity utopia was most present in TNG. TOS was more focused on the cosmic horror encountered in deeps space, and far less idealistic. DS9 really dove into how much that utopia would comprise when faced with an existential threat, while ENT tried to show how a flawed society would strive reach that utopia.

The difference is that everything after TNG was responding to that utopia, either by affirming it or challenging it, while New Trek just...forgot it was a thing. I remember watching season 1 of Picard, and Raffi is living in trailer in the desert because Admiral Picard ruined her career and thinking, "Wait, why are you poor? You guys don't even use money anymore."

I'm pretty sure that last one explains why they kept coming back to them.

These people look very tired.

Reminder that Bannon is an ethno-fascist who's just pissy that he's been sidelined for techno-fascists. If his goals align with anti-fascists for the moment, great, but don't for a second think that he is any less vile or dangerous than Trump, Musk, or any of the other chittering goobers that are gnawing away at our democracy right now.

During the Great Depression, people were so angry at banks that they rooted for bank robbers. Things are so bad now that we're just straight up rooting for cold-blooded executions. Censoring people's online activities won't make this anger go away. The genies out of the bottle now, and if billionaires don't want any more dead CEOs, there will need to be fundamental, radical changes to our society.

Ah yes, you know what's better than a taxi driver? A taxi driver who relies on a camera with a limited field of vision, experiences input and video lag, and receives none of the tactile sensations that allow drivers to gauge road conditions.

The Pelosi interview is honestly batshit insane. She doesn't see the election as a rejection of the party, thinks the Democrats are doing well, Kamala Harris did everything right, Sanders is wrong, and then she made some backhanded comments about how Biden should have dropped out earlier. I know some of that is spin she that she has to say, but it's still deeply out of touch.

You ever feel like you live in some sort of Murphy's Law parallel universe, where the worst possible outcome of every major event happens?