Literally every time I want the remote.

Yeah. It was the weakest writing in the show's history, including the entire Lore introduction.

I don't particularly care for this plot.

Q is omniscient, so he already knew that our history is rife with examples of good people and bad people, brilliant and ignorant… and he comes to judge a fairly utopian future society of a unified, post-capitalism, post-religion Earth? My dude, they're doing fine.

Someday in the not too distant future, we’ll have the technology to swap actors in and out of roles in movies. Not just the masking stuff we see with deep fakes, but fully alter the timing and dialog and reactions.

No. Anything JJ Abrams has ever touched doesn’t count.

That episode had an interesting premise but I hated the interactions between Will and Thomas.

The nerve of cmd. Riker using his rank to bully Thomas.

And in the end, Will is like: “I have all our stuff, but here, I’ll give you one item. Have a nice life.”

It was absurd.

No orange jumpsuit. No prisoner number. No height lines in the background.

Very unsatisfying mugshot.

I honestly think that music did more to hurt the show than anything else. It was the musical equivalent of starting EVERY EPISODE with a voiceover saying: “we hate all that old star trek. This is the new WB Network Star Trek, with 70% more down home, Midwestern American values! Yeehaw!”

Reimagining the Gorn:

Writer 1: remember the Gorn?

Writer 2: are you talking about the guy in the lizard costume?

Writer 1: yup.

Writer 2: that was so stupid.

Writer 1: …

Writer 1: okay. But what if we redid the Gorn and made them scary?

Writer 2: scary?

Writer 1: sure. Like … remember the movie ‘Alien’?

Writer 2: of course.

Writer 1: let’s do that.

Writer 2: do what?

Writer 1: let’s do Alien.

Writer 2: I’m not sure that I underst-

Writer 1 scribbling furiously: shut up! We’re doing Alien.

Not necessarily. You can put safeguards in place. For example our appeals courts don’t ever decide fact. They make rulings about the law.

You can also have bipartisan panels that oversee this, with extremely limited power unless they rule unanimously.

You also have congressional oversight adding another check.

If the original inception and scope of all these things is cleverly drafted, we could see a lot of new media pop up that is vastly superior to the crap we have now.

Absolutely. And a new version of the Fairness Doctrine, and guidelines that take into account everything we’ve learned since then about media malfeasance.

I think it would be great to publicly fund journalism. And make public funding contingent on whether news sources accurately represent the full substance of their source material, practiced evidence-based fact-checking, and had rules to prevent the selective application of either of those first two conditions, and by omission bias their audience.

Journalism is a public good and should be publicly funded.

Have the Midwest states been mentioned? Bill Bryson describes them as interminably dull. Not sure how they’d stack up against the deep south, though.

I remember going from MS-DOS to Windows and being really annoyed that I couldn’t see the loading log.

Same with Android phones in the beginning when they were still the scrappy underdog. I wanted to see machinery at work!

I believe that Russia has dirt on a number of prominent Republicans. Trump is a given, what with his shady Russian financing, his connection to Epstein, the tape mentioned in the Steele dossier. But I think that there were a number of anti-Trumpers who turned on a dime. Lindsey Graham, for example, was very anti Trump for months and then became his biggest cheerleader literally overnight.

I think Russia had planned to damage Hillary in 2016, but never imagined that their man Trump would actually beat her. I think when they realized they had their man in the white house, they went all in, and used every bit of leverage they had to help him gain control of the party.

That honestly sounds like clinical paranoid delusions. I have a couple of bipolar friends who think this way.

I think Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both illustrated that radically changing the Overton window is best done from within the established parties.

Bernie pulled the Democrats pretty far to the right of where they were, even in defeat.

And Trump … Well, I mean, he transformed his party into a cult.

Absolutely.

Boomers were born into a country that handed them everything. You could walk into a factory, tell the manager you were looking for a job, share a handshake, and walk out with a unionized position, where you would make good money with great job security for the next several decades.

Then these clowns told themselves that they were rich and successful because of their own hard work. And they pulled the ladder up behind them.

It never occurred to them that their parents worked harder for less, and in a million years they won’t acknowledge that their kids have it harder, work smarter and longer hours for way less.

The American dream has always been a fiction for huge segments of the population.

What we’re talking about, technically, is the idea of meritocracy. If you work hard and smart, you should thrive. If you are dumb and lazy, you should flounder.

But that is not at all the case in the United States.

We have smart people working 2 or 3 jobs only to barely stay afloat, and we have morons sitting on mountains of money.

Briefly in our history we had a strong middle class. The Greatest Generation built it, wrestling wealth away from the top 1% with strong unions. Then they handed it over to the Boomers, who pissed it all away, and destroyed the power of organized labor.

Boomers inherited a nice system, but refused to fight to expand it. The 5-day work week, for example, was supposed to be just a stepping stone. The people who originally fought to get it would have never believed we hadn’t gotten that number any lower 80 years later.

Boomers allowed the minimum wage to stagnate. They allowed pensions to go extinct. They voted time and again against universal healthcare. They did nothing to stop predatory lending. They did nothing to stop the explosion of tuition prices. They did nothing to make social security viable for future generations.

The stupidity, gullibility, self-entitlement, laziness, greed, hypocrisy, and frankly psychopathic governance of the Boomers has essentially wiped out all the progress that came before them.

They are retaining a death grip on their power, and have used it to give us a choice between a Trump cult, and Democratic party that is virtually indistinguishable from 1980s Republicans.

Oh, and when they found out that they were killing the planet, they just stepped on the gas and killed it faster.

So, yeah, the American Dream, if it ever really existed, is absolutely dead right now.

When the boomers are all gone, the voting power of millennials and gen z might have been able to fix things … But honestly, we’re riding the razor’s edge with fascism right now, so it’s a coin flip whether or not we’ll even have a democracy with which to repair things.