Proton had up until two days ago ostensibly cornered a niche of the market where they could basically collect taxes off security conscious nerds and other people wanting out of big tech. This wasn't a start-up with 3 months runway. Proton was by all accounts very financially stable.

The literally only way they could imaginably fuck up what they had was if they squandered the goodwill and trust of their users.

Andy Yen wants us to live in a dystopia where we all pray at the alter of maximum profit and sacrifice everything to it.

I refuse to believe we live in that world. While we're a long way from a star trek utopia, there's no reason to believe standing for morals and principles is impossible in this day and age. A lot of social media and the news are here to tell you thats a hopeless dream, but it's not. Get out an meet people especially the up and coming generation. People have been raised to be kind, and it shows.

The long arm of history bends towards progress not because of inevitability but because _we bend it_. Get out there, do the right thing and leave the world a little bit better than you found it. There's still plenty of profit in that. Enough to share even

Fred Rogers tells a story about his mother saying that any time there's a catastrophe that someone should look for the helpers.[0]

So if we look at this from that perspective, granting that the world is far from a utopia, who in our society is the closest to the kind person that the fictional character Jean-Luc Picard represents?

It sure ain't the usual suspects that we talk about here all the time, or whatever the dweeb villian of the week that just so happens to be Andy Yen this week, so maybe let's not talk about them for a bit.

Who is this[1] in our society?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LGHtc_D328

[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---

Great thought. I think Sisko is Picard in a much more difficult, fallen, and true to life world. The utopia is receding, the man of principal faces trauma and angry traumatized people, terrible decisions to make under pressure. He’s a sadder character in a piece of culture with less room for optimism. I quite like him, and think he was a harbinger.

Picard is both the writing and Patrick Stewart. Picard would not be the same character if they'd cast Kevin Sorbo to play him[1]. Picard without Stewart's presence and gravitas would be something else entirely.

[1] Sorbo's portrayal of Dylan Hunt is basically just taking his Hercules role and putting him on a space ship and I have no doubt it would look the same on the bridge of the enterprise.

Well you can watch 178 episodes of Star Trek and have to actually deal with episodes that force you to think and take the perspective of others, or you can doomscroll TikTok where alt-right influencers tell you all your problems are caused by women having bank accounts or whatever the manosphere is raging about this week.

Proton is a for-profit owned by a non-profit foundation, and Yen is the majority shareholder of the company and board member of the Proton foundation. They were ostensibly also very financially stable. He had every opportunity to be a Picard. He chose to be a Ferengi instead.

[dead]