Decent affordable Bandai kits when…

There seem to be three distinct post-Trek futures:

• genuine big shot actor
• reasonably successful voice actor
• B-movie “star”, featured prominently on the poster and appearing for 5 minutes in the actual movie.

At the same time, the gravity systems are designed by the best engineers in the Federation because they never, ever, give out, even when the rest of the ship is disintegrating.

Just as well, given the state of Trek movies by that time. DS9 was never ruined.

This means little. People always say they are okay with it, in the abstract. Then when it’s time to get specific and build an actual wind or solar farm near them, suddenly it’s a big nuisance, harmful to the local ecology, etc.

Of course. For one thing, they are a blight on third world countries, who are often dependent on agriculture. Rich countries subsidizing their own farmers directly harms economic development in poorer countries that have fewer resources with which to respond. The subsidies also lead to overproduction in rich countries, and thus needless environmental destruction.

Yeah, and the problem with the Picard and Data show is that those characters don’t really have a relationship, at least not an emotional connection like Kirk/Spock/McCoy. They basically just had a professional relationship, which was fine for the series where there’s a problem to be solved every episode, and it’s not necessary to have fleshed-out character arcs. But a movie narrative needs to make the audience care about the main characters and their interactions with each other, all within a very short period of time. Picard/Data simply could not provide that emotional core.

Another important factor is TNG’s reliance (sometimes over-reliance) on A/B plots. The B plots were often an outlet for the ensemble characters to come out and play.

I think you can even argue that in each case there are two main characters plus a third wheel (Riker/McCoy).

But McCoy never faded from view, whereas Riker almost became a background character during the second half of TNG. They should have written Riker out of the series after Best of Both Worlds; after the character stuck around, the writers seemed unable to figure out what to do with him.

The legislature picking the executive happens after every single election in parliamentary democracies. You don’t see people wetting their pants over it, life goes on.

What a great time for governments to be pumping taxpayer money into new chip factories!

Most of those Middle Eastern partners don’t really care about Palestine either, but you make a good point.

It’s pretty much a no-brainer and an easy way to score some brownie points. China has pretty good relations with Israel, and the Palestinians offer nothing. The CCP doesn’t give a shit about human rights, so the occupation means nothing to them, so why even try to be even-handed in this matter?

The only surprising thing to me is that Xi didn’t come out earlier with a much stronger show of support for Israel. A lost opportunity, and another example of their foreign policy ineptitude.

It’s actually pretty common to provide employees with stock options. But depending on the situation, it can be a better deal for the company than the employees. For the company, equity is a relatively cheap way to “motivate” employees. For the employees, it goes against the principle of portfolio diversification: if the company does badly, not only is their regular income threatened, but so are their assets.

The two state solution isn’t workable, because Israel will never allow a viable Palestinian state. The only three options are

• genocide
• a permanent state of apartheid
• giving the Palestinians the vote and letting the political chips fall however they may

All three options have downsides, but in my view the third choice is the only one that’s sustainable in the long run and not morally monstrous. But I have no confidence at all that that’s the pathway that will be chosen.

A socialist system would also feature government officials vetoing spending on the basis of cost. If you think about it, there would be even more such instances, since a socialist government has a larger say on economic questions.

Economic systems are aimed at resolving the question of how to allocate scarce resources. Switching from “capitalist” to “socialist” does not make the allocation problem go away. It only changes who makes the decisions.

And the results of those decisions would probably not be what you seem to be expecting. Real world experience shows that socialist countries tend to allocate more resources to things like heavy industry, and fewer resources to consumer goods like, say, condoms for students.

There are by now about a dozen stories, from assorted high profile press outlets, all stemming from the same incident involving Fillipino coastguard vessels on which international reporters had been invited. The Philippines have played the PR game exceptionally and uncharacteristically well. Maybe the US has helped by providing advice (just speculating).

It’s hard to predict whether this will have a deterrent effect on Chinese actions, though.

So, we expect 10,000 Palestinians dead by the end of Israel’s retaliation? 100,000? More?

I’m pretty happy paying for YouTube Premium; it seems like a fair deal given how much my family uses YouTube. But I’m worried that sooner or later YouTube Premium is gonna get Google Graveyarded, or they’re going to insert ads anyway.

12 upvotes, 42 downvotes

This is your punishment for trying to be positive on the internet ;-D