If Kamala would have spent half the time she spent talking about Trump, talking about corporate price gouging instead and how she would go after corporations like a bulldog, voters would have had a place to look for blame other than the Democrats.

I agree. It was really frustrating that she wasn’t hammering this home. BUT I still don’t think that it would have really moved the needle that much. Same with Palestine. Same with Biden dropping out earlier. Same with being a bit fuzzy on details. So on and so forth.

In the end, the American people wanted Trump the person. He has no economic messaging besides a nebulous idea of “fixing” the economy through tariffs, which is laughable. People who use the economic anxiety argument are either trying to deflect blame from themselves for voting for him (“I don’t like him as a person, but he has good policies.”) or because they want to believe in the fundamental goodness of their fellow Americans so that their choices can be rationally explained. The former is deluding themselves since Trump has no cogent economic policy. As for the latter, I get why they want to believe that, but the truth is a lot uglier. The majority of Americans either affirmatively approve of or tacitly tolerate Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and/or are simply too uneducated (or just plainly stupid) or (if I’m being extremely charitable) woefully misinformed or uninformed to understand the gravity of his election.

I’m tempted to blame the Democratic party and nitpick, but at the end of the day, Harris ran a good campaign. It wasn’t perfect, but even if it were, we’d still more or less be here. The core problem, I think, lies in our culture and our educational system. Trump was a uniquely awful candidate, and Harris was a competent, “standard” politician. By all measures, she should have won. Even still, the American public repudiated her, which is simply irrational. In the end, it comes down Trump being the symptom not the problem. The problem lies in our culture and society.

tl;dr: Even if Harris did message better, she still would have lost. American culture and society is flawed and ultimately at fault.

This is what’s getting me. If he won via electoral college or couping, I’d be angry and ready to do the work to pull the country out of this mess and end Trumpism once and for all. But instead, he won the popular vote. People in the United States saw a wannabe-autocrat who was specifically called a fascist by his own officers who admitted to being a dictator “on day one” among so many other things. After seeing that, a majority of people either affirmatively supported the fascist candidate by voting for him, or they are tolerant enough of it to sit at home and not vote or vote for a third party knowing the outcome. And that really just makes me lose faith in my country and the people, and so I’m just sad knowing that this country actively chose this outcome.

What’s worse is that I really don’t feel a strong desire to try to change anything since it’ll just fall on deaf ears at best. More to the point, I don’t even want to hear “their side” or “their reasons” for why they voted the way they did because no matter the rationale they give, it will come down to them being comfortable with oppression of minorities and autocracy. I always want to believe the best of people, but after today, I really can’t anymore.

Young men may be drawn to Trump because he pushes against societal pressure that men need to be apologetic for being themselves.

“Not being apologetic for being [myself]” is why I’m voting for Harris. I swear that conservatives want everyone to fit into confining, pre-defined boxes for everything. I found that among conservatives, I’ve always had to “apologize” for not being hyper-masculine and interested in “softer” and “feminine” things.

If someone is very masculine, that’s cool, too. No one is saying that you can’t be hyper-masculine if that’s what you’re into. BUT if you constantly are apologizing for “being yourself,” maybe you’re just an asshole trying to hide behind masculinity.

Yes! “AI” defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.

See, this is part of his long con. Clarence knows his wife is crazy, so instead of divorcing her, he’s just going to make their marriage illegal. /s

This is why I believe scientists should be required to take liberal arts classes; especially related to written and spoken language.

And yes, I also think liberal arts students should be required to take some level of hard STEM classes (not watered-down “libarts-compatible” stuff, but actual physics, chemistry, biology, etc) as well.

Yes to both points! I’m eternally grateful to my high school AP English teachers for teaching me how to write and communicate.

My somewhat unpopular opinion is that we’d be better off as a society if everyone in college took “real” STEM and liberal arts classes. The STEM folks can understand the why and societal implications of what they study (as well as just communication), and the liberal arts types can learn a bit about how the world actually works in a concrete way.

Unfortunately, I’ve been continually struck by how incurious people are. I get that everyone has their interests, but that shouldn’t be to the exclusion of all other study. So, I don’t think this will happen. :/

Or class

This right here. I liked how TNG did it. Series premier bring an oldster in to launch, maybe have a special episode or two with another.

If we really wanted Colm back, have it in the premier of Starfleet Academy where the new cadets are going through a hall of distinguished professors and have an elderly O’Brien do a cameo with a sample of one of his lectures. Nice to connect the show to lore and nostalgia but short enough to let the new cast stand on their own.

That said, I agree with Colm. Let O’Brien stay as he is. He had a perfect send-off.

I tend to agree and give a ton of leeway to stupid, offensive stuff from years past that people have evolved from. We all said and did stupid stuff that we regret. However, this isn’t offensive, and that’s to highlight that Vance either A. regressed in his values from being normal to being weirdly pro-hyper-traditional gender roles or B. has no true beliefs and is just saying what he says because he thinks it wins him votes.

Yes-ish. The characters were villains, but the organization wasn’t necessarily. For instance, in Discovery season 2, Leland and his crew were the villains, but Section 31 was portrayed less as an extremist cabal and more as a misguided morally-grey organization. Less a blight upon the Federation and more an uncomfortable, but integral, part of it.

@setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world captures it well. Instead of being a cabal of extremists doing illegal and immoral things because they think they’re connected to a higher purpose, they’re a semi-official CIA-like organization.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Section 31 isn’t supposed to be a cool or semi-legitimate organization (with ships, insignia, etc.) but rather shadowy and absolutely beyond the pale of legitimacy where very few can stomach what they do. From an artistic/thematic POV, Section 31 should be there to show us that a good society requires work to maintain and that its undoing can come from within by those claiming to protect it by eschewing that society’s values. In other words, the ends don’t justify the means.

It should be a conspiracy of like-minded individuals that exists parasitically within Starfleet, not an official (or an “unofficial official” agency).

I agree. When 31 was first introduced, and Sloan explained that Section 31 was sanctioned by Starfleet under Article 14, Section 31 of the Starfleet Charter, the implication was that they were people who misinterpreted or construed a (probably minor) part of the Starfleet Charter and used it to justify damn near anything.

Personally, I hate how Section 31 has been changed to be misunderstood, cool good guy/anti-hero types who are doing the wrong things for the right reason. DS9 had it right with portraying them as the villains within who should be snuffed out because the ends don’t justify the means.

Same. SNW has been an interesting pattern for me. The powers that be will make creative decisions that I find dubious when announced (Kirk, musical episode, La’an being related to Khan), but each time, the show pulls it off. I think Paul Wesley has done a really good job, “Subspace Rhapsody” is just so much fun, and La’an is literally my favorite character on SNW.

I’ve found this to be the case a lot, too. I also spoof my OS because a lot of government sites will refuse to work unless it says Windows. It’s stupid, but here we are.

Yeah, I’m in the same boat.

There’s also PeerTube, the Fediverse counterpart to YouTube. Unfortunately, while there’s some good stuff you can find (and some re-uploads of YouTube), there’s just not as much content. I’d imagine the userbase is pretty small, too.

I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It’s a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there’s a lot of annoying work to “verify” yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn’t be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I’m secure still needs to happen, but I don’t mind that work and find it fun.

YES! I study AI, and this is exactly how I feel!

Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out “uh…emails and productivity and things.”

I see your point, but I still don’t think the scene works, but thinking about it like that makes it much more watchable. My point is that the scene is simultaneously poignant and a throw-away. It’s a “big deal” but also just one scene.

By the 32nd century, something like that should be such a non-issue for humans, that it would be like stating just another fact about yourself (amnesia and trust-issues aside), which lends itself to being a throw-away…but that defeats the purpose of the scene. Again, I am all about the message and Stamets’ reaction, but it felt very 21st century and on-the-nose.

I’d have preferred if Adira were just non-binary from the beginning and maybe have a quick correction of someone when they were misgendered. Or, let that scene be the reveal of something else, like the symbiont. With that change (I’d have to rewatch the season to see where this scene was in relation to the symbiont reveal), I think the scene would still work while tightening up the writing. I also think it’d get the message across, too.

Now, if the writers really wanted that scene to stay as-is, there are options. Make them an alien from a culture not as enlightened (which would cause other issues) or have this scene play into a bigger theme of Earth backsliding post-Burn (like a Dark Ages) to have mores closer to the 21st century and show the 23rd century crew as horrified by it and work to bring Earth and humanity back toward enlightenment.

This kinda sums up my main problem with Disco. There were great options on the table to realize a concept, but they just wrote it in an awkward way that is unsatisfying (at least to me). Sometimes, that awkwardness reads as performative/lazily progressive.

It’s not that Disco isn’t progressive; it’s just lazily progressive. Case in point: the scene that bothers me to this day is Adira coming out as non-binary, just beyond cringe-worthy and very 21st century. As a viewer, the scene read like Adira was waiting to be judged harshly for their identity, and it just totally took me out of the era. By the 32nd century, I’d expect that being judged harshly for one’s gender identity would be at least a millennium behind us, and the conversation should either have not happened or been so matter-of-fact that it was treated as nothing. I get what the writers were trying to do, and it fell so flat and felt so bluntly obvious. I’m all for the message, but the delivery was not great.

The saddest thing about Disco to me is that there were great ideas and great intentions, but the execution of those ideas was so poor. Really, it just shows that you can have great actors, great directors, and great concepts, but if the writers can’t make it work, it just all comes apart.

I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It’s not my daily driver, but it works well when I’m on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn’t want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won’t touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.

I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they’re floundering.