Curious, what would you recommend the Americans do?

Sounds like the security guard was just a knob

Yes. This is my habit as well. I feel weird for the opposite reason as OP as I'm a guy who doesn't do it daily if not several times a day. I guess I could technically, but do I really have the time and energy for it?

I honestly have no clue what's going to happen next, but I think Mandami has proven a lot of the people in the US are getting fed up with the status quo, especially this right wing laissez faire policies the current administration embodies. It's going to be interesting to see where things end up if this momentum continues.

I've been thinking about this possible solution for over 30 years now.

I know of no factory for "vegan" food that kills the male workers days after they are born, and keeps the female workers in confined spaces for their entire lives, while forcibly impregnating them to ensure there will be a future population of workers. But please go on.

And that's kind of what I'm getting at, the writing for Discovery was lacking in a way that everything felt forced and rushed. The plot, pacing, the character relationships, etc. Why would we expect the politics to feel subtle when nothing else in that show was subtle?

Valid point, TOS wasn't always subtle. In my defense I was referring to the TNG, DS9, VOY, (and sometimes) ENT era. Whose writing often felt significantly more polished and less rushed than TOS.

So if you are trying to say modern Trek is written in a style closer to TOS, then yes I 100% concede to that point.

Yes, that was literally my point. I'm uncertain where the disagreement is?

TNG was rich with thought provoking philosophy, you would be left to ponder the morality of the episode long after the fact. Sometimes things were intentionally ambiguous, sometimes not. But the episodes always invited viewers to come to conclusions.

The writing style has shifted from that approach, with modern Trek the answers require significantly less digging, sometimes it feels like the lesson is being underscored. The morality is the same only how it is presented has shifted.

So what I'm saying is the politics is the same as it ever was, what has changed was the writing style.

I'm not even going to place a value judgement on that shift, some might prefer the face value appeal of modern Trek. Personally I prefer the writing style that was used on TNG, you may like a modern series better, either way it's all good.

I think it's very easy to claim 'woke' with modern star trek, but I think the issue is that politics used to be more tightly wound into the plot in that they used to express leftist viewpoints in a natural way that served the plot. The episodes were well thought out and were rich with allegory and metaphors.

Now the political views have remained largely the same from before, but the writing has suffered to an extent that things feel forced and no longer serve the plot in a natural way. It's less thought provoking, and more "here's the moral of the story". Which for better or worse only really underscores Star Trek's leftist views.

Right now AI companies are doing what they used to say drug dealers do "Hey it's free! Why don't you give it a try?" And once you get hooked they jack up the price.

In all my years I've never come across someone giving away free street drugs, but AI companies do it all the time. The problem is once the funding dries up, I suspect the real price of some of these services is going to be astronomical. They are giving away millions, if not billions of dollars of services free or deeply discounted all in the hopes of "gaining market share".

When the bubble pops we will likely start seeing the actual cost of some of these services.

Mix in the fact that if you've ever used some of these AI services you'll find most of the time you have to babysit the LLM to give you what you want and not go all haywire on you.

With our current level of technology I think we are in a place where we are only really able to augment some of our workers workflow. I really can't see replacing the full staff of a large to mid-sized company considering the cost and efficiency of these products.

That said I think the genie is out of the bottle, and AI services are here for good. What the landscape will look like in the next few years I really can't say. More people/companies may choose to run LLM's locally on their own machines/servers trained on very specific use cases as that might be more cost effective than what our current generation entails.

As a man I've always assumed this was the correct approach. I'll keep myself groomed as long as you keep yourself groomed, this always struck me as the respectful thing to do.