The iPhone was the first smartphone that hot insanely popular. It launched the app store model that’s now used on every mobile platform including Android. Those apps have gotten hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in India and China who are doing e-commerce and opening small businesses from their phones. That’s food on the table for the working class. They can earn money while looking after their children because they’re not chained to a desktop computer for internet access. People in remote areas can know instantly about natural disasters and the news, educating them and making them active citizens in a democracy.

People across the world can chat with each other for nearly free using messaging and social media apps, and won’t have to send letters or pay extra fees for long-distance calls. The iPhone got more people onto what formerly only Blackberry-owning business executive had.

It’s such a first world thing to belittle the impact of smartphone (an industry which the iPhone shaped tremendously), when it has so much tangible impact, especially to working people.

It’s just extra seasoning.

I think many CEOs are the peaked-in-high-school types but the business environment has kept them in check, until now. Now with MAGA unleashed, they feel free to show off their idiocy.

I agree there’s intention to present optimism and humanism in the face of conflict, but I find the execution to be lackluster. An example that comes to mind is Pike objecting to using mines in season 2 of DIS. He raises the issue directly to Cornwell, saying it’s against Federation values. Then for some reason, the discussion becomes finding out why the Enterprise was diverted away from the Klingon war and ends praising Pike being “the best of Starfleet.” The entire discussion about using unethical weaponry during wartime is sidetracked and left unresolved. The mines are still there on the station, and the responsibility of Starfleet Command for not taking down those Klingon mines is not explored.

Another example is the explanation of the Burn. From interviews I’ve seen, the intention behind the crying Kelpien is to highlight the need to understand and sympathize with people vastly different from you even when the universe is as vast with warp travel impossible. The resolution is Burnham and Saru finding this Kelpien and help him understand his visions and thoughts, calm him down, and make warping safe again. But this Kelpien lacks characterization from the beginning. The audience doesn’t know him that well, and we don’t know why we should sympathize with his personal resolution. It would be much stronger if the cause of the Burn is the Emerald Syndicate, which we have established as a hostile force against the Federation. And we know they have good cause to be suspicious of the Federation from Osyraa’s meeting with Vance. In the show, despite this message of reaching out to the vastly different, the Federation and the Chain never understood each other and resorted to using force. Another good candidate for the cause of the Burn is Ni’Var, which has its reasonable suspicions of the Federation at the time.

Why did the UK refuse?

We already have Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, and Lower Decks under Kurtzman that are considered “optimistic.” The question is, do kids want optimism?

It’s an example of one company coercing another to enshittify for revenue. Getty also gets the blame here.

• Google Image Search removing the ability to go directly to the raw image after Getty complained that web users are bypassing its website and therefore not generating traffic
• Facebook removing chronological feed
• Facebook showing you pages that you never followed on your home feed without the ability to turn this off
• Microsoft trying to introduce ads to Explorer and the start menu
• Microsoft making it difficult to create a local Windows account by making the process unintuitive, leading the user to believe that a Microsoft account is needed to use Windows
• Apple dropping support for iOS web apps because it doesn’t want to support browsers other than Safari
• Reddit and Twitter’s ban of third-party API use that killed nearly all third-party clients
• EA producing games that require users to be always online, despite the game being single-player, presumably as a DRM measure
• Ad companies making it easy for you to give consent to data sharing and selling but really difficult for you to opt-out

Edit: More examples

I don’t like the normalizing of using “woke” to describe progressives.

Is this on Wikifeet yet?

Empire: A bland comedy spacecapade stuck between two (strange new) worlds

Hollywood Reporter: Not Even Michelle Yeoh Can Save Paramount+’s Subpar Spinoff Movie

New York Times: Set the Phasers to Shun

Los Angeles Times: ‘Star Trek: Area 31’ is diverting, but it’s more pilot episode than film (weird and glaring typo in the headline)

Space.com: It isn’t classic ‘Trek’, but the Paramount+ exclusive offers some flashy fun

Engadget: An embarrassment from start to end

CNN++?

I had the same thought when NFTs became popular, but no longer. NFTs are artificial scarcity, since they have no inherent value and the uniqueness of each should therefore hold no inherent value. But the hype’s gone now. Nobody cares about NFTs because everyone knows their value is artificial. I think that is what’s gonna happen when replicators are invented. There will be brief periods of hype to create artificial scarcity, but they will pass.

Why would China want to sell the lucrative secret TikTok algorithm to the US government?

Oh, how thoughtful.

Mike McMahan had an idea that S5 could be the last season before the news was announced, so there was probably some pressure to tie some loose ends instead of focusing on the season arc.

Mike McMahan said on Reddit that that’s how she wants to be credited. He didn’t say why tho

Lol fuck Elon. Leave and divest.

So Simcity 3000 meets the Sims?

A slight inconsistency with Voyager logic is that the Doctor’s mobile emitter seems to disappear when the Doctor is deactivated. That seems to suggest the emitter is holographic itself. But what emits the emitter?