A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations.
We’ve had numerous laws precisely because companies couldn’t play fair, and made things worse for all involved. The government didn’t pass laws against company towns, scrip, and predatory pricing because they decided to ban things for fun.
Maybe people should do research on the available milk brands before giving it to their children if they didn’t want them to drink bleach.
Without regulation, the company could also just lie. Nothing would dictate that they would have to tell the truth about their product.
Especially since the current going idea is that tarrifs are allegedly a charge/tax another country is supposed to pay. They might just blame them for the escalating prices and say it’s retaliatory, and thus deserving of even higher tariffs or some such.
I don’t know, photoshop exists, and it hasn’t stopped anything so far.
AI makes it easier, but may not do much to stop it.
Just look at Facebook, or the puff-jacket late pope. People do take AI-generated posts as the real thing so much of the time.
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If they really wanted to go into canon, you could say there was the augment era during ENT, then they fixed their ridges with a hypospray, and then just before SNW reaches TOS times, there was a recurrence of the augment craze on Qronos. Or a COVID like virus escaped from a lab. It would be odd because all the characters we know from TOS never comment on this oddity - Spock, Kirk, Uhura have all seen ridged Klingons, then the smooth kind, and then ridged again in the movies.
There’s also an in-universe explanation where a lot of the Klingons we saw were supremacists who specifically focused on their Klinginess, and had the technology to genetically engineer themselves. In the aftermath of the augment virus, they could well have overcorrected to exaggerate their Klingon features.
This issue was best left to Worf’s lampshade in DS9 Trials & Tribleations.
IMO, that was pushing the line as it was, since it still implies a distinct visual difference. It would have been better for Worf to use TOS-style make-up, and misdirect the remark as referring to the uniform instead or something along those lines.
It’s really interesting which visual differences humans will accept unthinkingly and which we will demand answers for. The Klingon ridges thing comes up constantly, but I have yet to see anyone earnestly ask why all the characters in Lower Decks have huge eyes and unnaturally uniform coloration, or why hand phaser beams in TOS go so much more slowly than later phasers and why everyone agrees to stay really still while they are being fired.
TOS, I think, generally gets a pass because it’s considered a relic of the 1960s, whereas the whole TNG-era was when Trek made it big, and they more or less defined the visual aspects for a lot of the franchise. If you talk about starships, people generally think you’re talking around the time of TNG, not TOS, or 32nd century Discovery.
Animation, meanwhile, gets a pass both because they’re not quite as big, and that any differences can be dismissed as stylistic alterations made to suit the medium. People didn’t care that TAS made tribbles neon pink, instead of the more realistic fur colours that their real-life counterparts had.
The most fuss, in my experience, really tends to happen when a visual alteration is thought of as being a retroactive change that “ruins” the existing image someone might have of something. Discovery’s Klingons and Enterprise get some controversy because there was already an Enterprise and Klingons around that time in-universe, and the new design is taken as replacing the old thing.
By comparison, the Enterprise suddenly changing in TMP, or in TNG accepted not as replacements, but as being spurred by technological development, like with phasers/transporters being massively different. Or, that the change/original characters were minor enough that it’s not considered significant. There wasn’t a spat over Discovery’s revision of the Saurians, since the only prior depiction was as a background character in TMP, and in DS9, Trill/Ferengi were only shown a small handful of times, so changing them was accepted quite well.
Personally, what I also find interesting, is what things people don’t question not changing. Like starships using the exact same technology in the exact same way, for 300 – 900 years. No-one building the human ships in the Federation has thought to significantly change the warp nacelle design, either based on the engine designs of other species, or just to shift it around a bit in all that time? No Vulcan inspiration, different successful engine technology, etc?
It’s only been 100 years since we invented the auto-motive car, and we’ve already had variants of them for decades that aren’t just changing the wheel count, or making them slightly fancier. It seems weird that the Federation, for all its technological prowess and allegedly superiority by co-operation, has barely touched them for all that time, and that everything remains separate and species-linked. You’d expect at least one Federation space-vessel that does have mixed technologies, and a human framework to put them all together into a functional whole.
The basic story ideas are pretty solid, they just get hampered by the execution (and the mess that was production).
In fairness, it was literally magic.
The whole no money utopia thing happened later. They were still using credits at the time.
Even if they did, they would jsut be used to train a new generation of AI that could defeat the detector, and we’d be back round to square 1.
Though, you generally don’t tell that to their face, not in that way, and certainly not when they’re confiding in you about/celebrating finding themselves. That’s simply hurtful, and beyond rude.
You generally won’t go up to your friends on their wedding day, and say the same phrase. You’re more likely to put it as “I’ll miss drinking with you in the back yard, but I’m happy you’re happy”, and not as a seriously-spoken “It’s like watching my friend die!”.
“capability of holding eggs” covers the vast majority of humankind. Hands are useful like that.
Especially since they’ve currently got a big, expensive war on their hands, that they’re all-hands-on-deck for.
As an example, medical care/inheritance rights are one.
Back before the days of gay marriage, there were no end of horror stories of LGBT people whose partners were dying from HIV, and were forbidden from seeing their dying partners, or for estranged family to swoop in and kick the “friend” out, preventing them from seeing their partner, often taking everything that belonged to the deceased in the process.
A relatively famous art piece has a similar story, where Boskovich’s boyfriend’s family swept in and took everything from their shared apartment after he died, effectively erasing their relationship in the process. All that was left was an electric fan.
People wouldn’t blink twice if you’d brought your partner some chocolate, or lunch because they were having a bad day.
The way she contextualises it is a bit odd, but the actual thing isn’t that bad. It’s just accommodating him, being aware of his particulars, and helping him over his issues. The gift of a single M&M is unusual, but giving your partner something nice isn’t strange. People do similar things all the time in relationships, it’s just not thought of as training.
Biggest issue is her framing it that way, because people might either get the wrong idea, or give the wrong idea. Saying she’s training him like a dog gives the idea of a lead, like with an actual dog.
And normalising it is a good thing all-round. You want privacy to be used for trivial, unimportant things, not for it to be seen as something that only most secret vital things need, and thus something most don’t.
People would be more likely to use it that way.
Plus I can’t imagine that a company who is adulterating their milk with chalk dust is going to stop to find and choose a food-safe chalk dust and supplier. They’d just scoop a bunch from whoever’s cheapest, and if they adulterate their chalk dust with bleach or something, that’ll be going straight into the milk.