Mullvad didn’t donate money. One of their founders donated some of his private money to this loonie party. Money that may have come in full but in all likelihood really only in part from the payments he received from Mullvad. But it wasn’t a company decision to give them money.

Now, Mullvad, the company, in my opinion reacted poorly to this. It’s not so much the donation but the company’s reaction to the affair that would’ve been enough for me to switch VPN providers. I wouldn’t hold them responsible for the decisions one of their leaders made in his private life. But this “all politics are okay for us” PR response was the wrong reaction for me.

The party is better described as a horseshoe party. They present a mix of politics that’s mostly very left leaning except for their views on immigration where they turned hard the other way. Calling them Nazis is using the term a bit inflationarily. The real Nazis in Sweden are the Sweden Democrats and they are already in parliament.

I started a rewatch of DS9 a couple of months ago and I’m a third done with S7. I saw Oceans 11 on DS9 earlier today. Didn’t even skip all the bad Ferengi episodes in the rewatch.

I suppose it was hard for the makers of Disco to square the circle of telling Star Trek stories in a post breaking bad streaming era. In TNG S1 they use the phaser as a visual effect maybe a dozen times, most of those in Conspiracy, because it cost too much. Now they can do whatever for a dime so they overlooked that we liked the character stuff they wrote to fill the hour so they wouldn’t blow most of the budget on SFX. I hope that in a future fourth wave Trek they fill the hollowness we feel.

Yeah, I have been looking at the veritable content drought we’ll be entering since there is nothing in production any more. And in streaming TV stuff takes ages to get off the ground or even renewed. I read on the grapevine that letting all existing contracts expire is a way to kick Kurtzman out and after that there is a chance for a fresh start under new leadership. But that will take time until after Academy S2 goes online. So considering all this stuff going on behind the scenes, I’m okay with Muppets and Casablanca in space. Whatever! Better than nothing.

A prequel! What a novel idea.

This should be an org chart at the Star Trek office today when they look at show ideas: is it another prequel? Yes - don’t pursue this idea. No - Allamarain! Move along home.

Granted, they got lucky (initially) with SNW. But that needed a backdoor pilot through Disco to get launched.

If you get to that position and pet peeves are the first thing you’re thinking about you will have proven the Peter Principle correct. Again.

How would you know the baby was your deceased significant other? What have you sniffed this morning?

Are we moving towards an AI jihad? A jihaid, if you will.

Hormuz doesn’t fit in the Dune: Planet Earth narrative for me. We should stop using oil for the sake of the climate yet we don’t. We don’t have to go through that strait with so much trade. We just don’t want to take the detour and price increases. The Dune universe depends on the spice for navigation and I think there isn’t another source. We are still so dependent on oil out of habit and/or stupidity. The mullahs really aren’t the freemen. They are more of a side arm of the Harkonen clan that was provoked by the thoughtless action of the emperor’s real estate developer triggering their typical c@![ish behaviour.

I think there are more grey areas in the classification. Just take recreational weed use, which is as legal as smoking cigarettes in some regions but illegal in others. Where does the drug classification start? It’s not as clear to me as you seem to indicate.

Also, the content label doesn’t tell the proprietor of a cinema who can come and see a movie. Do they have to look up a combination of letters to see if a 14yo can go see It? How about something like Trainspotting where there is violence, foul language, and lots of hard drug use. A VLD rating doesn’t indicate anything. But for me the movie isn’t R because for all the pearl clutching it may cause for some people it’s a good promotional film to stay away from heroin.

You can run your system parallel to the existing one. And some of the streamers do that, I think. But for legal reasons, in the US as well as most of Europe, you cannot not give an age limit as well.

I stopped watching Marvel movies because I found the plots virtually nonexistent. And don’t get mad at me, dear reader, if you love them. That’s okay, I’m not taking that away from you. I’m just saying how I felt.

So I don’t know if I would sign on to your theory. I did enjoy a lot of the characters but it didn’t carry an ironman or Thor movie for me.

I would like a sequel of Hail Mary though.

These systems vary by country and you’ll find fault with most of them. They are more often than not rating systems that were introduced to appease a loud group in society, possibly the pious folks were one of those. Society’s natural inclination “to think of the children!” makes these rating systems more about age appropriateness than about clearly labelled content. I can see the logic in your approach to the subject. Logic probably wasn’t the driving force behind introducing labels such as “parental guidance” or “restricted.”

I think it might be easier as a committee to be compelled to come up with an age of people, for whom the content is appropriate, and not argue over labels until they’re blue in the face. Is vaping drug use? How much blood (if any) is required to be labelled violent? Etc. Can this committee agree with a majority vote that 12 year olds probably shouldn’t see this? That’s probably easier.

A fan on a boat would work. There are these fan boats people ride through the Everglades. There are propeller sea planes. The difference to a sailboat is the profile of the vessel under water. A sea plane has two or three smaller areas that are submerged. The everglade ones are just breaking the surface of the water and are very flat so they can glide over water and plants. A sailboat has a big, often deep profile under water, the whole length of the boat, possibly a keel underneath. And that’s moving through water, which is thicker than air. So you need possibly more than one propeller and the engine may need to give you more horsepower to move the boat through water with the force of the air above deck. That’s inefficient so boats tend to move their propellers under water.

A few container ships have a spinnaker sail they can deploy. If the wind is favourable they can reduce the engine output and save diesel. Just in case you’re wondering about the reverse situation.

In contrast, do you know any words that are near identical when written down between two “alphabetical” languages based on their spelling?

Yes.

Idiot (English) Idiot (m) Idiote (f, French) Idiot (m) Idiotin (f, German)

Time keeping developed as a local phenomenon. We are stuck with this dumb 24-hour clock. People don’t want to have to get up at 22:00 in Vanuatu to go to work when it should be 7:00 AM because it’s dawn outside. Time keeping stays local. Unless you live in the West of the PRC.

GMT has been rebranded UTC to remove the reference to Greenwich and whose acronym doesn’t stand for anything so not to annoy the French. NATO uses Zulu time, which is UTC, regardless of where they are on the planet.

We’d improve the situation if we all just agreed to get rid of daylight savings everywhere. If it wasn’t for that, the UTC +/- whatever would work much better. Alas, politics.

It’s a Tuvix level decision I’m glad I didn’t have to make. I think reuniting a child with their biological parent is a general, understandable guideline. And if you look at this clusterfuck in sequence, the first crime in this case - the illegal invasion of Bajor notwithstanding - is Rugal’s abduction by Dukat’s aide and his subsequent depositing in an orphanage. If it hadn’t been for that, Rugal would not have had Bajoran foster parents. Who were understandably not very nuanced about the Cardassians. (There must have been a way to raise him not hating his “kind” unconditionally as he does. So they carry a small dose of guilt for this mess in my opinion.) Which led to Rugal biting Garak.

The biological dad makes a convincing case that he was fucked over. Rugal is fucked no matter what. Sisko went back to where this train was sent on the wrong track and corrected that. I can kind of see the logic of that decision. He had to weigh different factors and decided to give less weight to Rugal’s wishes over the crimes that preceded him ever being in a position to express them this way.

Tough call but he (somehow, there doesn’t appear to be a legal system with a metal sphere gavel and the social worker from Mrs Doubtfire presiding just yet) had to make one. And there probably isn’t a right decision.

As a starter, Duolingo isn’t bad. Sure, it’s mostly slop at this point so keep that in mind. And only stick with it until you realise the mistakes.

When I hear “I’m seeing X everywhere,” I suspect you might be Baader-Meinhoffing.

1. Is this from Xwitter? And if so, why? Nothing on that platform is worthy of our time and attention.

2. Even if it isn’t Xwitter. This could be just a joke. Admittedly, not a good one. But a screenshot may not be enough to banish this father of the year.

The index of content available online, which they built and updated themselves. A policy of constantly tweaking the algorithm to make it understand what us monkeys want. No ads on the first search page. And then absolutely dominating the online ads market, which kept financing the continuous improvement to the service. Until they realised this was to their own detriment and made it ask Jeeves level competent again. They won the initial war but lost the peace.

I just wanted to point that out because a lot of praise heaped upon them comes from the more zealoty side.

Did your identical post in asklemmy get taken down or did you delete it?