I bought some 3D printing filament direct from the manufacturer. It got shipped to me by… Amazon. From an Amazon warehouse. I guess that’s how they do fulfillment. 🤷‍♂️

Not necessarily. A lot of podcasts are hosted by places that detect your ip and splice in location-targeted ads for each individual download. Hence OP’s struggle with timestamps.

Even off of Spotify etc, the source is poisoned.

DHH with a pants-on-head stupid argument just because he hates the big players in tech? Must be a day ending in Y again.

You assumed I was saying a thing because I was a racist. I explained why I wasn’t. And you just refuse to believe me. That says so much more about you than it does about me, and I’m pretty tired of explaining it to you. Consider the conversation over.

LLAP 🖖

I don’t suppose you can elaborate on what makes a main character bad without using the word woke?

Your words. Maybe you didn’t explicitly accuse me of racism. But you did the Joe Rogan “just asking the question” thing of proposing a question and already implying the answer you presupposed.

It is equally baffling to me that because you don’t understand why I have an opinion, it must be because I’m a racist.

I’m kinda done trying to explain to you why I have an opinion. It’s not that I haven’t explained it well enough. It’s that you refuse to believe me.

My dude, I am literally praising the writing they did on DS9 and LD with Sisko and Freeman. Two people of color who are in charge.

I am not criticizing Disco or the writers for the existence of the characters. I think it is very cool that there’s a woman of color running the ship. And that the mushroom engineer has a loving marriage with his doctor husband. And that they picked up a cool enby person with a ghost boyfriend who plays the cello.

I am not criticizing the existence of these characters. I am criticizing the execution.

I am saying that the writing was bad, the plots made no sense, and the characters’ motivations were all over the place. And yeah, the main character thing was bothersome. Not very Star Trek. The show about an ensemble cast doing space stuff.

If one person says hey we should do this thing, and everyone else says no we shouldn’t based on the information we have, and it turns out that the one person was right because of things nobody knew at the time, that’s a boring plot device. When it happened multiple times, and then kinda all the time, I stopped watching.

Kirk and Sisko sometimes disagreed with their crews. Sometimes they were wrong. Burnham was always right. And it got old.

Don’t worry, I’m not the type of person you think I am. I have queer friends. My partner’s a bi she/they. I drive a Prius. I’m gonna vote for the woman of color here in a few weeks. Pretty cool of you to make that assumption, though.

I actually really liked Disco S1 and kinda S2. But the whole “one special person across time and space” thing got kinda old. One person is always right. No matter what. That and the Discovery-is-special-ex-machina Burn alongside the ridiculous constantly-reconfiguring-geometry ships made me lose interest. I hear half the Disco bridge crew had like zero character development in the last season, and they just didn’t even bother having Detmer there for a lot of it.

Strange New Worlds? Lower Decks? Hell yeah. Perfect Star Trek. 10/10. Disco and Picard? Trying too hard to make “prestige TV” and ending up forgetting why Star Trek is good: ensemble casts working together.

Counterpoint: Star Trek with a “main character” is no good. Recent shows make that pretty clear.

My cat Luna died five years ago next week. She was the best cat that ever existed and there’s still a hole in my heart.

:(

I’m a process chemist. I do this sort of thing for a living.

These guys don’t even know why what they’re suggesting is so dangerous. Do not do any of this.

I appreciate your thorough response, but I think it’s clear that “maximize individual freedom” is a BS marketing phrase given how much nuance you had to use when rejecting the “freedoms” I proposed.

But also. No problem with coercing workers to do 80 hour weeks? I don’t think you’ve ever been in a situation where someone had that kind of power over you.

And selling junk but “safe” medicine is as dangerous as selling cyanide labeled as aspirin. Or are you content suing the drug company after your kid’s asthma rescue inhaler was actually just full of nothing and they asphyxiate to death?

You’re forcing a black-and-white dichotomy where one does not exist, which is a nice oversimplification that’s the exact sort of thing I’m talking about.

Everyone loves freedom! Like the freedom to:

• pay a child to work in a mine
• schedule workers for 80+ hours a week
• drive without speed limits
• use as much water out of the local river as desired
• dump waste into that same river
• sell unregulated, untested medicine

So obviously there are “freedoms” that mainly serve to infringe on the actual freedoms of others. Those just happen to be the ones that libertarians don’t talk about so much but are really what they’re after.

Libertarianism is a theory espoused to those with good intentions by people that have bad intentions.

It doesn’t work for almost anyone. But it super works for some. That’s the point.