The biggest change in America between TOS and TNG was Watergate. Even if people thought that Johnson was wrong to go into Vietnam, they mostly believed that the government was trying to do the right thing.
What you’re seeing is the result of decades of Reaganomics coming home to roost.
Look up Hunter’ Thompson’s book about the “Hell’s Angels.” There’s a chapter on the economics of being a biker/hippie/artist circa 1970.
A biker could work six months as a Union stevedore and earn enough to live on the road for two years, and a part time waitress could support herself and a musician boyfriend.
In 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the price of the average home was $11,000.00. Of course people wanted to work hard and save, because they could see that it paid off almost instantly.
BTW, in 1960 $1 million would buy a mansion, a few nice cars, and a couple of businesses. Today, it’s what a rich guy pays for a party.
Lauren Hutton was a model/actress back in the 1970s. I once watched her on a talk show and she had an interesting take on Reagan. He was the long time host of a TV Western show sponsored by General Electric. Every week he’d do a commercial for GE refrigerators and every week America would see him standing next to an ice box full of food. Hutton pointed out that for people who’d lived through the Depression, that was a powerful image. Kind of like how Trump was sold as a genius businessman.
Professional Air Traffic Controllers union [aka PATCO] was one of the few Unions that supported Ronald Reagan in 1980.
They went on strike after he took office, and he fired them all, and made sure they would never work again. The country was so desperate for controllers that they were hiring people with GEDs to take the training.
Reagan hated Unions, which was funny because he boasted of being a Union President [Screen Actors Guild.] While in that job, he helped the FBI spy on his membership.
My opinion is that most traffic departments in the US rely on outdated rules for placing signs. There’s one I use on a regular basis and unless you’ve been through it a few times it’s almost impossible to figure out when to turn.
If the consumer can’t use the product, it’s a bad product. I’ve had teachers who knew their subject, but couldn’t convey the knowledge; they were bad teachers. If people can’t handle roundabouts, it’s the traffic department’s fault.
In the original story, NASA finds a glowing diamond-like structure on the Moon. For various reasons, Kubrick decided to go with something else. They edited the storyboards and put a black rectangle over the diamond. The rectangle was a symbolic TBA. One day they were looking at the boards and realized that the monolith would actually look very cool.
Years later, after thousands of speculations, a fan approaches Arthur C. Clarke and tells Clarke he’s unravelled the mystery. The ratio of the rectangle is 1 : 4 : 9; those are the squares of the first three numbers. Clarke liked it so much he used it himself.