One problem is that seniority confers power. Throwing out a long-serving incumbent substantially reduces your district’s effective representation.

That could be improved by getting rid of de jure preferential treatment for things like committee memberships. You’d still have informal power from seniority though.

If I had a choice, I think I’d prefer not to have my death recorded and viewed by many strangers.

Such footage generally isn't viewable by the public unless it serves the public good.

Anyone who likes Openclaw will be upset that it’s getting acquired and inevitably destroyed. Anyone who dislikes it will be annoyed that the creator is getting so rewarded for building junk. The only people who would like this are OpenAI fans, if there even are any.

This is a normal reaction to unfairness. You see someone who you believe is Doing It Wrong (and I’d agree), and they’re rewarded for it. Meanwhile you Do It Right and your reward isn’t nearly as much. It’s natural to find this upsetting.

Unfortunately, you just have to understand that this happens all over the place, and all you can really do is try to make your corner of the world a little better. We can’t make programmers use good security practices. We can’t make users demand secure software. We can at least try to do a better job with our own work, and educate people on why they should care.

But trial and error is not the only tool. So many of these audiophile scams fall apart with even the most basic knowledge. You don’t need to be an audio engineer to understand that an expensive audiophile SATA cable won’t make your music sound any different. Analog components are less obvious, but it doesn’t take too much to know that speaker cable is a lot less important than the speakers, and special deoxygenated cables are a waste of money, or that there’s dozens or hundreds of miles of wire between your outlet and the power plant so spending a thousand dollars on a power cable for the last two feet is unwise.

One problem is that they will try to convince other people to follow in their obvious nonsense. Convincing someone to spend a bunch of money on an Ethernet cable to make their sound better is victimizing them.

It’s also just symptomatic of a general failure of critical thinking that can become properly dangerous. There’s little fundamental difference between “I swapped in an expensive USB cable and it sounded better so high end USB cable is worth it” and “my kid got his shots and then he got diagnosed with autism so vaccines caused it.”

You make it sound like these two ideas are somehow opposed.

Star Trek looked much better. They couldn’t do the numbers that B5 could do, at least not until the later parts of DS9. But what they were able to show actually looked realistic. B5’s effects were very, very clearly done on consumer-level computers. They were quite good considering, but didn’t look real. Star Trek was doing things with large physical models and it showed. Ships and stations looked like real objects (since they were!) rather than the smooth curves of everything in B5.

As a young SF devourer at the time, the cheap effects were a major turnoff and one reason I never got into B5.

As if they want to help people sign up for short periods of time. You might as well suggest drug dealers sell non-addictive crack.

I’m not going to spend a hundred bucks to try a series I may not even like. It would be one thing if I loved it and wanted to watch it again, or if I had seen enough to know that I want to watch it all. But that’s a lot of money for an unknown quantity.

Didn’t B5 do it first, by years? Kira/Odo didn’t become an item until B5 was off the air.

my mistake. it still made me stop watching.