What. I still rember the article about the Monkeys Musk butchered with his Microchips! This was terrifying and disgusting and now he is allowed to do this to humans?! WTF.
Regulatory capture at work. If you’re the second-richest man in the world and a darling of the far right to boot, they’ll let you do pretty much whatever you want.
I was and continue to be shocked that there are conservative Star Trek fans. I just can't wrap my head around how they justify it. It's very clearly painting socialism and left leaning ideas as the universally correct ideals which will lead us to a utopia.
They’re watching it for Crusher/Troi/Seven/Dax/Uhura. The technobabble confuses them and they think any solution they come up with in the show is just a byproduct of the fantasy premise. That or they identify with the Cardassians.
The show is also about a space navy that has near total autonomy on the frontier, securing the interests of the Federation while inducting new worlds into its ranks, with our heroes being the Good Guys who are high ranking officers in the military who give orders and investigate conspiracies and hold life and death in their hands as they fly around their heavily-armed “totally not a warship” exploration vessels.
It’s very Space America, and at times almost libertarian in its politics and non-interference. It’s not even explicitly socialist, all we know is that they don’t use money, except when they do. The writing is sort of fuzzy on the matter, which results (regardless of the intention) in an economy that doesn’t actually seem that different to our modern day in practice. There’s no money, but people still own businesses and talk about buying stuff, which allows for the economic system to fade into a sort of forgettable background space.
Besides, Star Trek isn’t necessarily about a socialist future. It’s about a post-scarcity future. I think that’s a key difference. I’ve spoken to many conservative fans who say that they believe that capitalism is the only way that we can achieve a post-scarcity future, i.e. invent replicators. Because Trek isn’t about a worker’s revolution, it’s about the slow progression of technology, followed by a nuclear war, and then at some point they just sort of got rid of money because it was obsolete. All we even know about it is from one-off lines.
It makes me think of the Culture series, another sci-fi universe I’m fond of. It’s even more leftist-coded than Star Trek, yet somehow Elon Musk is a fan of it and names his rockets after ships from the books. Apparently Jeff Bezos is a fan too. Ugh. And as a result, a lot of people’s first introductions to the series is through these awful people, since it’s a lot more niche than Trek.
all we know is that they don’t use money, except when they do. The writing is sort of fuzzy on the matter, which results (regardless of the intention) in an economy that doesn’t actually seem that different to our modern day in practice
At most they use credits, which at least according to this guy, are at most a peripheral, 3rd party currency, or at least a currency the federation uses for external trade, and that’s what makes most sense to me. Why would the average person care about federation credits when they’re only used on border systems at most, and your home replicator can make you pretty much anything you’d ever want? To a person living in such a world, for all practical purposes there is no such thing as money in the federation.
There’s no money, but people still own businesses and talk about buying stuff, which allows for the economic system to fade into a sort of forgettable background space.
They never seem to talk about buying stuff unless it is out on the frontier, exchanging with foreign entities, etc. It also doesn’t seem like businesses in star trek (at least the above board, earthlike ones) aren’t anywhere near today’s businesses. To me, it seems that they are treated as family businesses, with limited “employee” count, and with each “customer” getting their service/food/item for free, within reasonable limits. It’s like going over to your family’s house for dinner. You don’t pay, you’re family and they will happily feed you (within reason). And it seems that businesses treat everyone like that.
There is no stock market, profit motive, costs of running a business. It’s all done out of the goodness of people’s hearts.
I doubt it’s that big of a difference. If they have the tech to materialize full fledged humanoids regularly, millions of times a day, I’d think they’d also have the tech to make replicated food taste good.
But sure, I can see it being marginally better. But not enough to mean money is still in use.
It might be more of a “tomatoes I grew myself” type of thing for most cases.
This is true, but also it’s implied in technobabble that replicators operate on a lower “molecular” resolution whereas transporters operate on a quantum scale. I rationalize this as a space saving measure; when you’re transporting living organisms, you need perfect precision, and thus a full pattern buffer worth of resolution. This is clearly expensive to store, so much so that it decays over time unless you do something tricky.
Replicators use a lower resolution scan, as you can just reassemble protein molecules into the right shape most of the time. Eddington complains about this issue. (The non-canon TNG technical manual mentions tanks full of protein sludge used for replicators.) Now, is this actually detectable by a human palate? Eh, maybe.
I imagine if you were to beam a plate of non-replicated food though, the full flavor profile wouldn’t be lost. It’s specifically the low resolution of the replicator tech.
I haven’t heard that take before, which is actually a decent workaround for the “why can’t we replicate living beings?” question.
I doubt it would be detectable though. Because you’d have to be able to tell the difference between replicated molecules, and molecules that were transported, with only differences being individual atoms and subatomic particles. Neither of which I’d think somebody capable of discerning. Maybe it’s a bit if a placebo thing?
Or maybe it would be a “pure water has no taste” sort of thing, where replicators make things too pure, to the point where some consider it bland. A real tomato grew in dirt and still has at least some, and the soil effects it’s taste, whereas the same isn’t true for replicated foods.
There also may be some degree of intentionally making an excuse. Lots of people love gardening, and in a world with effectively infinite, free food, your hobby seems more valuable if you have an excuse that your home grown real food & liquor tastes better.
This isn’t a random, one-off comment - in every series, it’s mentioned over and over again how much better non-replicated food is. And getting better/ upgraded food patterns, and so on and so forth.
Hell, it even took Picard a while to get his tea made right.
Now that said, it’s mostly a software issue, not a hardware issue.
I always saw the “real food is better” attitude exists as either a hipster thing or simply because recipe they prefer just doesnt exist in the database. In TNG we see people from the past try repilcated food and absolutely love it.
So (hipsters aside) a home cook would also be more likely to have some minor variance in their meal while the replicated version would be identical on each plate every single time. I imagine the heterogeneity may be part of the appeal of human prepared meals. The replicator also may have grandma’s beloved secret recipe, but not your grandma’s secret recipe.
I largely agree with your analysis here. My point was that the way the economy is portrayed is such that we don’t get to see much of how it actually works, meaning that a lot of our understanding is speculation based on a handful of lines.
Meanwhile, they’re still participating in the aesthetics of commerce within the Federation, and literal commerce beyond its borders. The idea that there’s a currency used for trade outside the Federation, but citizens get everything for free within it, is a popular interpretation but it’s never actually explicitly stated within the text outside vague mentions of a “Federation credit”. It’s personally my favorite interpretation, but I think everything’s vague and in the background enough that I can see how people can walk away with different interpretations. Just look at that Ex Astris Scientia article; I even disagree with where some of the evidence should fall on whether it’s pro- or contra- money.
The wildcard here is that we see Federation worlds that seem to still use money, namely the Bolians who are members of the Federation, but the Bank of Bolias is a major financial institution.
The interesting thing to me is that people often assert that replicators are the reason that money doesn’t exist in the Federation, but that’s simply not the case; it’s established in VOY that money “went the way of the dinosaur” in the late 22nd century, prior to the invention of the replicator over a century later. Neither replicators nor money existed in Kirk’s era. It seems that replicators are not essential to eliminating money in the Trek universe, although I’m sure they’re a boon to the standards of living.
My point was that the way the economy is portrayed is such that we don’t get to see much of how it actually works, meaning that a lot of our understanding is speculation based on a handful of lines.
For sure, and it is rather frustrating. But it makes sense that they don’t outright explain the details, as it would just cause lots of people to complain.
The wildcard here is that we see Federation worlds that seem to still use money, namely the Bolians who are members of the Federation, but the Bank of Bolias is a major financial institution.
It also might be a planet to planet thing. Like, imagine if a ferengi colony world broke off and asked to join the federation? They would undoubtetly keep their currency. It would just be a question of whether or not it is seen as a dealbreaker for the federation. I’d wager it wouldn’t be, so long as said ferengi colony keeps to the “every one treated equal, with dignity, and sufficiently provided for” philosophy of the typical federation world.
It seems that replicators are not essential to eliminating money in the Trek universe, although I’m sure they’re a boon to the standards of living.
Yeah, that is a common theme that I’ve heard as well. If we had replicators in today’s world, it would only be for the rich, and even if it came down in cost it would still never be free to get one or operate. The philosophy of society itself has to change to agree to make sure everybody is housed, fed, and cared for sufficiently. Without that step, replicators aren’t going to do anything to get us to a post scarcity world.
Because classic trek - for all its reaching for the stars and left leanings - is still very much rooted in and reflects the US postwar mindset. We are the good guys! The best guys! We do no wrong! Which is a trough that right wingers like to feed at.
“Idk lol” one of my favorite laissez faire responses of all time, especially after some heinous shirlt like burning batteries. “It hasn’t been reported to hurt anyone yet but idk lol”
How would they have known, really? This was a real tip in the very early 1900s iirc, and back then everything gave you cancer or rotted one or more of your organs. We put asbestos, lead, and radium in literally everything.
It’s kind of a wonder that within 100 years, we managed to identify what things caused which cancer. Like at the time, your jaw would start rotting off and, looking for a cause, you could gesture broadly at everything.
No doubt, so much shit we have done has turned out later to be extremely detrimental to our health and environment. We just have done studies about gas appliances and found it has a noticeable effect on air quality and that’s a long time using it.
I just think “idk lol” is hilarious. Kindof reminds me of the South Park BP “we’re sorry” as he’s naked on the polar bear rug.
Corporate fucky wuckies are funny to laugh about as a PR response to me. “We did a whoopsie doodle were sowwy”
We also give massive tax breaks to corporations that then don’t do the things for which the breaks were given — e.g. Foxconn in WI. Build a chip plant? Nah we’re good.
Reminder that the US Congress gave AT&T and Verizon BILLIONS of dollars to build out a national broadband network decades ago. They pocketed that money and didn’t lay a single meter foot of fiber with zero consequences.
Wait till you hear about how much money the US (and Canada) spent to bail out private railroads. The same railroads that are openly hostile to running nationalized passenger rail. Even being allowed to have passenger train wheels touch their tracks is like pulling teeth so we can forget about actual, functional intercity rail like they have in the developed world.
We have plenty of traffic on the Trans Canada Highway between cities that could be diverted away from car travel. Intercity bus service as well. The prairies is especially good for high speed rail because you can build perfectly straight tracks at ground level for long distances since it’s mostly farmland, and there are aready many straight trunk roads they can share corridor with, which could potentially start competing with planes if they go at the higher end speeds that already exist in the industry, and downtown to downtown. Bombardier even made high speed trains before we lost them. And certainly more environmentally friendly than planes and cars.
The prairies aren’t actually like that. They seem like that if you’re driving through on the trans canada, which, you’re right, would be a good high speed rail corridor if you had the market.
This has been happening in Florida for a few years now. Restaurant owners went to court so they could keep the service charge. In the beginning I thought it was just a mandatory tip to stop people from stiffing the waiter. Nope they actually expect you to pay 18% plus another 20% for the waiter. Ridiculous. We don’t go out to eat much anymore on principle.
It’s cuz they’re too chicken shit to actually raise the menu price. So they can blame the government or the workers instead of taking responsibility for paying their staff shit wages forever
Paying for servers based off of the price of the food just doesn’t make sense to me. If I order a super expensive caviar and super expensive bottle of wine the staff would be paid more than another server with large party that only orders inexpensive drinks. The second server would be paid less for doing more work.
I think they should just be paid a decent wage for doing their job well despite what the customer decided to order.
On a side note if the server has to do something like prepare a salad table side or flambé a dessert they should get a bonus for doing that.
at a lot of places tips are split between front and back of house and those tips are based on the price of the meal, not the “tip” that was given. This results in many servers losing money and having to pay coworkers out of their own pocket on big groups or expensive bills that either don’t tip at all or only tip something like 10%.
I’m not advocating for this system at all, I just wanted to share some more info on how/why tipping works the way it does (in the US at least).
It’s a tip pool. So for instance I serve a meal to a couple. The meal is $50. They tip 10%. That split means I pay (for instance) the bartender out of the $5 tip $2.50. If I get another table that orders drinks and tips nothing I end up splitting nothing. But if I work with 4 other back of house people and they each get an equal percentage of that $5 then I get a dollar. But then that dollar is taxed because tips are taxed. If the company has a policy for shares tips pooling I could legitimately make $100 in tips and not receive $100 in tips. Technically that would be receiving negative tips because what is earned vs what is paid out is so drastically different.
In addition I’ve experienced back of house workers (cooks) getting paid out of the tip pool but the brunt of tax on the tips is not paid by them. This is absolutely tax fraud. But I’d also argue that tip pools are a form of wage theft and companies that engage in one are way more likely to engage in the other.
That isn’t negative tips. The lowest you can make in tips is $0. Even when tip pooling, the lowest you can make is $0, which requires no tips what so ever to have been given. There is no 100% tax rate, and you are at no point ever paying into the tip pool out of your own pocket.
I understand what you’re saying. But for a person who is now down from $5 to $2.50 to a $100 that is then taxed you’re effectively making less money than you earned. That’s why you can have negative net even while making take home pay.
But think about what might happen if the bill is paid incorrectly in cash. The company will absolutely take cash tips to compensate in the event that you or someone else messed up when counting the cash or giving change or whatever. With tip pools it’s unlikely. But it has happened.
It’s technically tax fraud, but yes. You could be. Back of house staff can include managers, cooks and dish washers, and even the hostess. Those people aren’t paid the $2.75 to $3.75 that the wait staff are paid. They’re considered hourly employees and they fall under different pay requirements under the law. A business that doesn’t augment the amount of pay for wait staff not making the federal minimum wage ($7.25) an hour in tips, that business is committing wage theft. To then be paying non-wait staff out of the wait staff tips is illegal as part of the wage theft. But since the company is already committing wage theft there’s no reason not to commit tax fraud to cover up the wage theft.
Apparently Federal Law sort invalidates the legality of a tip pool altogether because the tip only counts as a tip if the person who tips determines who the tip is given to and how much and it’s non compulsory. But a lot of places ignore that as well.
I worked as a server at olive garden many years ago. They famously had their soup, salad, and breadsticks deal for like $6 something. People would run us ragged getting more of each thing. And we’d be lucky to get a $1 or 2 because the price was so low, but it was vastly more work than regular food.
I think they should just be paid a decent wage for doing their job well despite what the customer decided to order
Where I live, there’s no separate minimum wage for tipped positions. It’s the same as the regular minimum wage. Even so, it’s still customary to tip, but just for some jobs. It’s never made sense to me that it’s customary to tip a Doordash driver but not a casual FedEx or UPS employee when the latter likely has more work to do and stricter deadlines to do it.
Do you want corporate efforts to reduce delivery driver wages and processes to demand you pay their wages through delivery tips? Because I am sure are ready to go on this endeavor as soon as you want.
As far as I know, some of the casual/seasonal drivers (extra delivery drivers for holiday deliveries) don’t get paid much more than minimum wage. I’m not talking about the unionized employees.
My overall point was that there’s many jobs that get paid minimum wage, so why are only some of them tipped? It would be more consistent to either be all tipped, or not tipped.
The one with Sandra Bullock? Concept-wise it was quite realistic. But the hacking itself, man that was some unbelievable stuff. I don’t think they got any fact or term right. Almost as if the OG Clippy helped: “It looks like you want to make a hacker-related movie…”
When I saw that film I remember thinking how outlandish it was for her to order pizza on the internet. Even if somehow that were possible, how could you just give a stranger your credit card details!? So, what, you pay a stranger and just hope your pizza arrives? Completely unbelievable.
I mean, when you give them a number on the phone, the guy at the other end is just going to be putting the number in the same place the website does.
When you pay in-store with a credit card, probably same thing.
EDIT: Well, unless, for the last case, one’s using a cryptographic-signature-based mechanism, like the smartcard chip or wireless authentication. But if it’s a magstrip or someone punching numbers in…
Yeah, but at least you’re not subsidising it. Besides, surely everyone has a copy of it by now. What are they gonna do, advertise another product for me to find a FOSS alternative for?
I want ad free YouTube but don’t want YouTube music. I don’t want to pay for extra shit that I won’t be using.
I use Spotify way more than I use YouTube. Spotify does one thing and it does it extremely well.
If Spotify added unlimited free Uber eats delivery tomorrow and bumped up the price to $20 a month, then sure, it’d be a good deal but I wouldn’t want any of that.
They had that in parts of Europe for a year now as a trial. But they are discontinuing it this month, making us choose between ads, and lots of YouTube premium crap we don't want.
You see: the difference between us is that you see YouTube Music as an extra.
I see the other features as an extra since I only really use YouTube music. Sure, it sucked about 2 years ago but it has become really good in the last few months.
I’m not sure about individual plans, but YouTube Premium Family went up to $23 per month. I’ve been a member since day 1 and they eliminated all grandfathering for me. Spotify is $15 for Duo or $17 for family.
The big thing that convinced me Spotify is better as a music service is that it was able to successfully recommend me a band I like that has only 71 listeners, and is similar to another band I like with 140 listeners. YouTube struggles with even understanding what artists are similar to those two and just plays other stuff I listen to (that’s unrelated) on artist radio.
Hopefully it’s a positive feedback loop situation here. More nebula subscribers-> more revenue -> more creators -> more subscribers. It’s good that it’s owned and ran by some creators so hopefully they stay true to their cause here.
I actually miss some more letsplayer or tabletop content on nebula. Because i just compared my yt subscriptions with nebulars creators and i do realy miss the stuff i can just watch when my brain is dead.
Exactly. Premium is basically twice what I’m willing to pay. I’ve considered going premium multiple times, and have multiple times suffered sticker shock and backed away.
I have yet to try the last two. I really enjoy duckduckgo on my phone, but I know there was some controversy. I guess I’m lazy but I love the fire button that burns away all your open tabs and history in one click. Started using Brave recently and I kind of enjoy how it reports how much stuff its blocked and the breakdown of what it all is. I have had no noticeable issues with either one.
I guess you’re talking about iOS, so yeah they had no choice, everything is Safari based there (for now). But on android, as I mentioned at my comment above, it’s chromium based.
You can use systemd-analyze blame if you want raw numbers:
This command prints a list of all running units, ordered by the time they took to initialize. This information may be used to optimize boot-up times.
Good way to see if your systemd also waits 2 minutes for a network connection which already exists but it can’t see it because systemd doesn’t do the networking (lxc containers on proxmox in my case) lol.
In my case i masked the service because like i said, inside the lxc container there is no networking to do, it’s done on the host (proxmox). Note that disabling the service in my case was not enough since it could be invoked by other services, and then you would have to wait again.
See this for further info and maybe arguments why you shouldn’t do it.
I wouldn’t say it’s leftist, though there’s a lot of leftists here. Lemmy is more like how internet discussion boards used to be. There’s a lot of people with weird opinions on things, and there’s no Reddit Karma pushing people to conform to the consensus. So people are going to have weird takes on things, and there’s not 1000 comments upvoted above the weird ones, so you’re going to see comments like that. So reply to with you your weird opinions on those weird comments.
Welcome to the version internet that’s not pre-packaged and filtered to be bland!
I don’t mind weird and different opinions on things. In fact, that’s what make the discussion interesting instead of some boring echo chambers. I just wish people wouldn’t be so aggressive about it and hurling personal attacks left and right. The old discussion board had thing called netiquete to keep the discussion civil, but here in certain communities it’s like the wild west.
I think people misremember when discussions could be blunt without being abusive, because they didn’t recognize and appreciate sensible small-forum moderation. I don’t want oversight that forbids people from using a list of no-no words. I want human beings to skim a conversation and judge when people are causing problems.
In real-life interactions, there are legitimate occasions for being rude. Civility is an ideal. It’s not a death cult. You don’t pledge your honor to never calling someone an asshole. You just try to avoid dealing with assholes.
If a forum does not want strife between users, the mods better be proactive in removing fascists, trolls, bigots, and other dehumanizing forces.
If mods don’t remove that crap, but demand everyone play nice with those assholes - the forum exists for the benefit of those assholes. Everyone else is an unwitting victim for them to play with. And any moderation against accurately and reasonably saying ‘fuck off, abusive liar’ is acting as cover and force multiplication for abusive liars.
A vulgar explanation of how someone’s incorrect is often good-faith participation. Infuriating bullshit in televisable language is not.
I’d understand if it were the kind of ‘fuck off, abusive liar’, but more often than not it’s about something so minor, certainly not worth the extra negativity added to the community.
But that’s never what happens, when rules demand “civility.” They don’t actually enforce positivity. They just punish people who are honest toward minimally-cautious assholes. Quite often without spending one moment looking at the other side of the conversation.
Reports cannot be handled correctly in a vacuum. Context is necessary. Otherwise ‘you are wrong’ is undecidable.
It’s like a generation grew up not knowing what trolling is. It’s not harsh language. It’s being an infuriating douchebag, in a way that people understandably tell you you’re an infuriating douchebag. And for all the forums I’ve seen where trolling and getting trolled are equally forbidden, every god-damn one of them treats ‘shut up, troll’ worse than being a fucking troll. Even if it is those exact G-rated words.
That’s a great point about moderation, plenty of forums outside of just banning would have mods post in the thread and say ‘knock that shit off, try to be nicer’ or whatever to discourage a toxic atmosphere.
There can be appropriate times for a range of civility like you said so having nuance is important, but I’ve rarely seen a forum outside of something like Stormfront afraid to ban Nazis or racists without question, unlike some big venues today that try to be ‘tolerant’ or ‘free speech absolutists’.
I’ve seen several subreddits insist that politely-stated fascism is better discourse than calling out fascists. In one case, with ‘so you’re a fascist’ being treated as an intolerable insult… even though being a fascist was apparently fine… and that guy was absofuckinglutely a fascist.
Yeah… but that’s what the internet is. You’re connected to different people with different points of view, but you’re also connected to assholes. Just don’t take it personally, they don’t know you and you don’t know them.
Game preservation is dying because of DRM. You want games you can still play in 10 years, pirate that sht and donate to those keeping up the good art of game cracking. It’s either that or buying remakes a decade later that are just thinly reskinned. I can live with sht like denuvo since newer games just remove it after a year and then I can buy it. Storefronts like uplay or egs that are dependent on a malignant profit only entity are at best mid-term rentals and at worst spyware you have to pay for the privilege to use.
Furthermore, if you don’t want to pirate: Buy your games on GoG. They are DRM free and you don’t need the launcher to play (GoG Galaxy is amazing though btw)
lemmy.world
Top