I think you need to be more specific with the query. If I’m the only passenger plus crew, yes. If the plane is full of people going to a place to help out, no. If this flight could be done by train without multiplying door-to-door travel time more than 2.5 times, yes. If my blood type or bone marrow was so rare I could save a life, I think I’d be okay again even if I was a lone passenger. There is plenty of gray here to consider.

I feel this is a nothing burger. The outrage is only proportional to their level of honesty. Every company is looking to implement cost savings with this crap. These guys are just most honest and public about it. And have already started using AI in their courses, which has not improved them. So they’ll use AI to help with hiring decisions on contact workers? They’ll only hire new people if they cannot automate stuff? I think that’s pretty standard now whether we like it or not. They are not looking to reduce permanent staff, at least not right now. So let’s watch them fail with their AI strategy but we’re no closer to the sky falling.

You said they should still be considered Starfleet if they’re time-shifted. I’m saying protocol accounts for it and once you’re time shifted you get frozen in rank. Forever!

I’m just messing with you. I think he never got promoted as a message between the lines to the actor, who at that point was merely saved from show death by appearing in a good looking Asians list or something weird like that. They never promoted Kim as a reflection on Wang’s standing with the production team.

The fact he never got promoted suggests otherwise.

But promotions should be earned.

Did you skip high school? You’re equating normal with socially desirable. I don’t. There are plenty of people who behave normally while not being nice. E.g. bullies, mean girls. Some of them never grow out of it.

I beg to differ. If I were a c-word, this behavior would be par for the course.

This is not the behavior of a friend.

I think that’s my point. With PIC S2 we even get a second version of the Borgs. What’s that all about? And then dropped and never discussed again. None of it is really reconcilable. They haven’t explained it because they can’t get out of corners they write themselves into. The Klingons are just another dishonorably unfortunate corner.

By European standards nothing to write home about. By Asian standards, a Mount Everestrian protrusion.

I think with Disco S1 they attempted a reset that didn’t work. They all looked the same. Nobody really liked it. So they reverted to giving them hair and there’s a throwaway line in S2 by Burnham that’s tantamount to admitting failure by the show runners. And then we don’t hear anything about it again. My guess is SNW will continue with ridged Klingons and just never explain it.

If they really wanted to go into canon, you could say there was the augment era during ENT, then they fixed their ridges with a hypospray, and then just before SNW reaches TOS times, there was a recurrence of the augment craze on Qronos. Or a COVID like virus escaped from a lab. It would be odd because all the characters we know from TOS never comment on this oddity - Spock, Kirk, Uhura have all seen ridged Klingons, then the smooth kind, and then ridged again in the movies. But stranger plot points have been ignored in Trek. Borg Queen anyone?

I don’t mind your suggestion. I think universal mail-ins are a good idea. At the same time, I have an inkling that you didn’t read my comment all the way to the end.

I have sympathy for non-voters in the US. Not so much out of principle but because of how it is done. Voting takes place on a Tuesday. That’s because in ye olden days you had to allow people to attend church on Sunday before making the trip on horseback to participate in the election. That’s a cute tradition but clashes with the way the economy works today. People are very dependent on their low-wage jobs that they can be fired from easily. If you’re working two of those jobs to make ends meet, you may not have the “luxury” to skip work to go and vote on a normal weekday. That luxury often includes having to fill in a booklet of stuff that’s on the ballot. You’re not just voting on a president, a senator, or a congressperson. You may be asked your option on a plebiscite, a judge, a sheriff, a school board, etc. It is overinflated in my view and explains long slow moving lines at ballot stations that you don’t often see elsewhere. And that’s after a possibly Kafkaesque registration process to be eligible in the first place or to get mail-ins in some states. It is almost designed to keep people away. Maybe you’re taking these structural problems as something “politicians cling to.”

Make election day a public holiday that forces businesses who are open anyway to allow all their employees to go and vote.

I’m being put in a difficult situation here because I’m gonna have to go ahead and defend the American “snowflakes.” When it comes to interpreting the phrase “free elections” I think all democracies or close enough to that (which therefore includes the US) chose to say free means you’re also free not to participate. Except for the Aussies. And while I’m not an American snowflake, I’m still a snowflake because I agree with that interpretation. It wouldn’t just ruffle feathers in the US if mandatory election participation was prescribed. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. Horse = voter, drink = vote. And I don’t think the Aussie governments of the last two decades have proven to be superior because they’re backed by a larger voter base. Remember the guy who ate raw onions?

Lenmy offers me the freedom to get mad at many different people running instances and not just one godforsaken company running roughshod over everything communities had created over years.

I’m not mad at anyone though because I don’t share your views at all. I’m a happy Lemmy user.

And what is Lemmy dot world acting like at night?

I’m going to say yes and no to that one. At the time they establish forevermore what is left-wing and what is right-wing, we’re past the estates general being called and I think also past the tennis court oath. For me, that’s already revolutionary times, they just haven’t cut Louie’s head off yet.

Before that, I don’t think there was much exchange between the second and the third estate. I am sure there were nobles who were willing to change things around. But it also wasn’t a case where the second and the third estate, and maybe even the king, could agree on something and that would’ve been the end of that. France was riddled by internal fiefdoms with their own dumb trumpian tariffs. Any relief for the third would have had to involve rationalizing the economy and there were powerful lobbies (like the farmer general) who wouldn’t like that. Plus, people were hungry and hungry people don’t think straight. And Louie would’ve preferred to stick his head in the sand anyway and other than maybe Necker none of his ministers satisfied the requirements of “forward looking.”

What you’re asking is a counter factual. There is no way to answer this question either way. The thing with revolutions is that people suspect it is coming at some point but are still surprised when it happens. The recent fall of Assad in Syria - we’d all forgotten about that mess. East Germany celebrated its 40th anniversary with socialist pomp and circumstance and crumbled a month or so later. The French Revolution was not just about abandoning feudalist structures. It ran in parallel with famine due to terrible weather, a looming bankruptcy of the crown, inefficient leadership from the king, a new way of leadership expected by his subjects, (invented) scandals that were spread by what would become mass media, and the changes in thinking in the age of enlightenment with people engaged in virtuous one-up-manship. That’s after France had lent a helping hand to the American Revolution, not so much out of commitment to the cause but to point the finger at the neighbors across the Channel. You needed all of this in the blender to get to a point where enough people were radicalized enough to start chopping heads off. So even if they had found a negotiated solution to address the class problem, the revolution might still have happened, maybe a bit different, maybe not at all. Nobody knows.

Hoisted by my own methtard.

Hmm sound like something a meth dealer would say

I assure you. I’m not a meth dealer. Really. I don’t know what else to tell you!

Thanks for answering my question.

If I were a breaking bad meth dealer and had all my buyers as contacts on that phone and all my incriminating chats, I wouldn’t use biometrics to unlock it. But I’m not a meth dealer (and I’m not just saying that because that’s what a meth dealer would say).

There is a spectrum of convenience vs. security. It depends on where you sit. I’m okay with the fingerprint, wouldn’t go for the face.

Doesn’t Android have the panic/cop switch where you force password over biometrics unlocking? It’s not a 100% failsafe but it is a start.