BarbecueCowboy

A lot of companies do it, if they can control the spread of information, they can pretend that everything is fine for a few more months and maybe collect a bit more revenue making it slightly better for the stockholders.

Until recently when a bill was passed drastically changing how their retirement accounts had to be funded, the USPS was usually run for profit and was even usually actively profitable year over year. I think they're still dealing with the fallout of that bill meant to hobble them, but I can't imagine they'd operate at a loss purposefully.

The USPS even used to offer banking services which was also reported to be widely profitable until legislation was passed eliminating that service. Wouldn't even be the first time that they had branched out beyond just mail.

Do you have any prospects in mind for a repairable phone? I'm of a similar mindset, but the premium on the existing 'repairable' phones out there is so high that I don't feel like I can justify it.

Wow, I don't know what it is, but that actually made it a bit easier.

Everyone in this picture is still Pete.

So, the problem is... if they haven't explicitly worked on it, it's more likely that their fiancee just isn't communicating problems to them and is just letting them fester inside and telling them everything is 'fine'. Everyone is different, but statistically women are the initiators for the majority of divorces and one of the key commonalities is that it's tremendously common that the men were surprised because they thought things were going great and their former partner was 'different' and 'special'. The majority of us aren't going to be special though. There's a reason it's one of the first things you learn about in marriage counseling (Honestly, it's nearly the entirety of marriage counseling) and if you think you've solved the problem, it's more likely that you just aren't doing it right.

Ooh, you know I meant US TV, but technically correct potentially and that's my failure for not specifying, so I can't call you on that piece too much.

However, Queer as Folk and This Life both started well after DS9 and I did explicitly specify before Deep Space Nine. You're coming up on the time when we started to get over ourselves and things started to get better. The AIDs epidemic wasn't exactly... good... but people were starting to make an effort to understand it more and were at least less terrified.

Aight, give me an openly gay man on TV before deep space nine that had a role where they had even half as many appearances as Bashir or Garak because I didn't see one there.

I checked, Roy's son was apparently in 2 episodes, the answer is there aren't any who come close. We've made truly gigantic strides in LGBT representation, it was a dark time.

No disagreements on Rick Berman being a bigot, he was pretty shitty for a lot of other additional reasons too, don't have to limit to being a homophobe, but... LGBT themes doesn't mean openly LGBT characters. We did definitely have some, but a lot of those characters lived in the realm of plausible deniability to let them have mass appeal. Publicly, they could just be 'two roommates'. If you were a rare character who got to be openly gay, you tended to fall victim to the 'bury your gays' trope and probably were not long for this world.

Ellen came out in 97, on her show and then in real life, and they responded by slapping a parental advisory warning on her very family friendly show and then cancelling it as soon as they could. It may have made Will & Grace more acceptable though in 98... I feel like that was one of the first shows where they were okay having gay men regularly on US TV, but even then only as long as it was for comedy.

I know we like to put that black and white filter on it and pretend it was a long time ago, but it was a rough time, and a lot more recent than any of us like. Gay sex was technically illegal in over a dozen states until 2003 and a few of the less progressive states hadn't even had those laws that long. A full 28 states went out of their way to explicitly ban gay marriage, most of them did so in the early 2000s. DS9 had it's last episode in 1999.

Terrorism has to be violent and induce 'terror' by definition.

Fuck Rick Berman for a lot of reasons, but I think some people who weren't alive then don't realize how deeply unpopular homosexuality was around that time. Still room to grow, but the fact even that homophobia just isn't the accepted norm now... It's amazing how much progress we've made in my lifetime. Sad and still a coward, but back then Rick was probably 100% correct.