BobApril

Oh, absolutely, story/cast reasons were the real reason - but while assigning an Ensign to a Commander slot is extreme, assigning people above their rank and above higher ranks in the process is not completely unheard of, even in today’s military. Given their utterly unique situation as an in-universe excuse, I don’t have any real problem suspending disbelief on Tilly’s assignment there.

A couple of quibbles that no one else seems to have brought up. Ensign Tilly was not promoted to XO - she was assigned to the position of acting XO while remaining an Ensign. The designation of “acting” makes it clear she’s just holding down the slot temporarily until Saru makes a more permanent selection, and makes it much more tolerable for those she’s now in charge of despite the lower rank. It probably wouldn’t have been tolerated (by the Admirals at Command) even in the lax standards of Starfleet, but even ADM Vance realized Saru had to pick from the tiny crew he brought to the future with him, so he let it go.

As for Ezri, again, remember that rank and position are only loosely connected, while rank and specialty (Counselor, science officer, engineer, navigator) are COMPLETELY unconnected. Ezri is a counselor because they wanted to make her distinct from Jadzia, and is an Ensign to highlight her inexperience both as a person and in dealing with a symbiote.

But yes, it does seem like the writers’ familiarity comes and goes. I swear there are at least a few episodes (and I can’t remember which series, because I’m alternating between three right now) where people refer to a Lt. Cdr. as “Lieutenant” instead of the proper term of address, “Commander.”

Are they then going to force Google and Meta to continue to carry those links that they want the companies to pay for? It went badly for Spain, and then France had to rewrite their law - not sure how that finally wound up, but a lot of small media companies took the hit first. https://www.wired.com/story/french-regulator-says-google-must-pay-to-link-to-news-sites/

Yeah, I would definitely have added him to the center square.

Short- and medium-term, anything that leads away from fossil fuel is a good thing. Long-term, though, it seems like taking energy that would normally have bypassed the Earth, capturing it, and then adding it into our ecosystem is probably a bad idea. I’m a total layman, here, though, mostly going off of what I’ve read in science fiction.

Also, yeah, the weapons potential is a problem, though I sort of feel like we’ve already got all the weapons we need to intentionally eliminate human life, so further refinements don’t matter much. It’s the accidental extermination we’re worried about, and this might help with that for awhile.

That’s still got to be orders of magnitude less than the externalized costs of the oil companies in the same time period - even just counting the costs to the UK gov’t and population.

They think this IS their business. I say that not to excuse or justify them. But we can’t appeal to their “better natures,” because they think they’re in the right, that we are all not merely wrong but evil. That leaves us no room to convince them otherwise, because anything we might say is inherently vile deceit - their own chosen information sources have long ago convinced them that everyone else is lying.

So we simply have to beat them. Identify them, prosecute them as criminals (not as enemies nor POWs), and lock them away. Or, when they make it necessary in the moment of their violence, our police forces need to kill them.

There’s a lot of disagreement, of course, but I would rate Picard as the worst by far of the five recent shows. Even Prodigy pays better attention to its own past episodes. But the acting was indeed pretty good.

It would be a lot better if the animation and music were redone, it’s hard to enjoy the plots when you’re listening to the same 3-second snippet of music for the fifth time in 22 minutes. But most of the plots are true Trek plots, stripped down to bare essentials to fit the runtime. I found it more enjoyable to rewatch in conjunction with a podcast that dives into it - I recommend the Mission Log podcast (https://www.missionlogpodcast.com/saturday-morning-number-one/), but there’s others out there to choose from.