I was so tempted to try their service, but it was always in the back of my mind, inside the part of my brain that was conscious during marketing 101 class in college: “What’s the long term business model here? What happens after they have everyone’s genetic identity?” Then it dawned on me like ooooohhhhh that’s the plan… no thanks.

The automotive manufacturers General Motors and Chrysler were partially nationalized in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis as were several banks… these were less a full government takeover and more of a government guided restructuring, but the government owned large stakes in these companies. Before that, the only full nationalization of anything substantial was the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad and subsequent establishment of Consolidated Rail (branded as ConRail) the US’s only national freight rail company.

Conrail was later privatized into what is now the private companies CSX and Norfolk Southern. The collapse of Penn Central was the largest bankruptcy in history until Enron in the 1990’s. Amtrak, our national passenger rail corporation, is also a nationalized entity created around the same time as ConRail, for similar reasons, and is still nationalized (although the Trump admin wants to privatize it).

Leonard Nimoy was a pretty tough celebrity death for me. It was like losing a super cool uncle, a person who’d been in my life for my whole life, but hadn’t seen in a long while, was dead.

If only we’re that lucky. Like, I’ll even take “caught in a hot mic” trashing what few fans he’s got left while in a k hole. After he dies we’ve got to commit to a global effort to never allow his legacy to be white washed. Make him Benedict Arnold… did some good things, but was an unforgivable jackass otherwise. Maybe we can make his name synonymous with something anti-social? I dunno what that should be but we did it with Rick Santorum and it should be easy to do with Musk.

Skin on different parts of the body tastes different. It also depends on how it’s cooked.

I think it’ll be more of an Enron slash Theranos docudrama… questionable accounting and overvaluation mixed with a superstar CEO stuck in a faking-it-till-you-make-it corporate death loop with investors drunk on hype.

Still… I expect hurricanes in Florida, not in Tennessee.

Rugby players.

I don’t care for sports so much, but a ton of my friends play rugby. Several of my exes play rugby. I’ve got cousins who play rugby. I live in the States and, while rugby is popular, it’s no where near the levels of enthusiasm where like 90% of the people a person hangs out with plays it (and you not also play or have any real interest in it). Mostly to support people I was dating, I’ve been to like ten games in my life and, while I understand how the game is played, I’m just completely uninterested in sports and following sports as a hobby or interest. I don’t know why, but rugby people love me and I love them.

Season 1 was basically Seth MacFarlane’s TNG fan scripts… it’s a Star Trek series through and through.

They’re kinda like the S-Pen… is it cool? Sure! Do I find myself using it? No, not really.

Don’t forget: dollars are votes.

I mean, like the OP said, unless it’s a worker owned co-op or, at the very least, a small mom-n-pop that treats their workers fairly.

One time at a TV station I worked for, the manager of our marketing department decided that three $90k pieces of robotic studio camera equipment were actually fun toys with which he could (without training) just mess around. I came into the studio that day to find two of my fellow production department coworkers trying desperately to wrangle the situation. At one point, the manager nearly crashed two of these robots into one another and my co-worker threw himself onto the emergency stop switch halting the imminent collision and, potentially, tens of thousands of dollars of damage.

Knowing we had work to do with these units shortly and having been trained on how to reset everything after an emergency shutdown, I turned to the manager at the control panel. Y’all, as the words “wait let me help you reset it” were coming out of my mouth he shouted directly in my face “I said I fucking got it!” So… I threw up my hands and walked to the break room, which was across the hallway from the chief engineer’s office. About two minutes later the marketing manager walked into the chief engineer’s office saying “hey [chief engineer], we’re having a problem with the studio robotics, can you come take a look?”

My coworkers told me that, the moment the door closed behind me, the manager turned back to the robotic controller and said “I don’t think I’ve got this.” An hour later, the GM sent out an email announcing basically “union shop rules” for the incredibly expensive robotic equipment… essentially: if you’re not trained on them, don’t touch and we weren’t training anyone else. Come to find out that when my coworkers explained what happened to the chief engineer (who had fought corporate bean counters for nearly five years to get us these robotic units), he had apparently chewed the marketing manager out to the point of causing an HR situation and nearly succeeded in getting the idiot fired.

Since then, every time I realize that I am doing something that will make the company more money or even just save them money, I always think back to that moment of “I said I’ve fucking got it” and stop what I’m doing. I’ll do a ton of extra work to make my job and my coworkers’ jobs easier long term, but I am NEVER going to intentionally contribute to making any place at which I work run more profitably. It’s just not worth it.

Haven’t seen it here yet, but it’s one of the greatest and most prolific YouTube channels about science fiction and the future… Science Fiction and Futurism With Isaac Arthur

• How to Colonize Mars
• How to Colonize Venus
• Building Orbital Rings Around Earth
• How to Get to Alpha Centauri
• How and Why to Industrialize the Moon
• Settling the Atmosphere of Jupiter
• Godlike Aliens
• Alien Invasions
• How to Escape the Galaxy

WTYP Pod, the podcast that hates you back!

WTYP Pod, the podcast that hates you back!

Behind the Bastards is fucking great! If you like their stuff, you might also enjoy “Respect The Dead (A Podcast Where We Don’t).” It’s a kind of queer younger sibling to BTB and a whole lot of fun, but they only cover people who are for sure dead.

All your need to do is drop in one card randomly with all the holes punched out to screw up those things… there was a name for doing that to be a dick but I forgot and am drunk right now so I don’t feel like looking it up.

Democracy©®™

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From what I’m given to understand of my state’s laws, this would be covered under the same kind of thing as the surveillance cameras at a convenience store or shopping center parking lot and the expectations a person would have for their privacy… it just sucks.