Although, the nice thing about the new site is that the BoM website finally got around to enabling HTTPS support, instead of having a redirect that supported HTTPS telling you that the actual website didn’t support HTTPS.

It doesn’t. Whether that remains the case remains to be seen.

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deleted by creator

The trick is to not care, and to confidently do it like it was the most natural thing in the world, and it clearly was.

The world of the wealthy runs on appearances. The worst thing you can do there is to be ashamed. Arguably better is to look at them with confident disdain for using a knife and fork to eat a pizza, in much the same way that they might for someone using a soup spoon for dessert.

For the pizza, it’s arguably more regional than wealth related. In a few countries, like parts of Italy and Sweden, it’s more common to eat pizza using cutlery rather than using your hands.

Whereas for other places, like other parts of Italy, it may be more common to use your hands for it instead. It very much depends on where, and the local culture more than anything else. But using your hands is as valid as using a knife and fork.

However, it seemed to be one guy that wanted to do that, and the trial was held to examine if that would be right or not, and to establish the legal precedent.

At the same time, Starfleet also enabled it. The entire case would have never happened if it had just been Maddox asking for Data’s voluntary participation. Part of it was that Starfleet was trying to compel Data to submit to the procedure, and also prevent him from leaving Starfleet to avoid it (hence the property angle).

We also know that the ruling was constrained to that one case both from Voyager, where it was outright stated to not apply to the Doctor, and because Data also had to fight Starfleet to prevent them from taking away Lal. While the fight was ended early as Lal died (possibly as a result of the emotional stress), it would not be too surprising if another legal battle resulted. Maddox might have started the events of Measure of a Man, but he was not singularly responsible for that whole business.

Wheras with the Pegasus, the investigation disappears into a hole and not touched since. Instead of punishing Pressman, he gets made Admiral.

We don’t actually know what happened from after the Pegasus’ cloaking device was revealed, other than that Pressman and the rest of his crew were likely to face court martial (and Pressman had “high-up friends” in Starfleet). He was promoted to Admiral before it was exposed, and it’s unclear what he was promoted for, since he was already Admiral when he tried to get it back.

“This computer will never go out of date” indeed.

Plus, you get the prestige of having actually made and perfected it yourself.

That means a bit, especially since the Federation places value on authenticity.

It’s the difference between going to ICA and getting a bottle of wine, compared to fermenting some yourself in a wardrobe, or buying a bottle straight from the vineyard.

Food too. A lot of problems with malnutrition and food deserts would be solved very quickly if you had a machine that could churn out perfectly nutritionally balanced meals.

Not worrying about potentially starving to death would free up a lot for people to go and do what they want to do, and to decline bad work environments.

If you didn’t have to worry about food, or bills, why would you stick to your rubbish job, instead of doing something you actually wanted to do?

But would just every random human have access to a replicator 24/7?

They’re cheap and easy devices. Almost every living space on a starship has one, as does every colony. The Enterprise originally shows up to deliver and install a batch of replicators for an entire colony in “The Survivors”.

Like, that would be a tally in the Utopia column, but even then, the amount of waste and trash produced would be a problem.

Not really. Replicators are two-way devices. If you don’t want something any more, you put it back, and it’ll convert it the other way.

If you were ever worried about rubbish, you could plonk a replicator down, and just use it as an infinite hole to throw your rubbish into, until it went down to a desirable level.

Even in an absolutely ideal situation like that, it would end like The Good Place where getting anything you want burns out your dopamine system.

You have that, but unlike in The Good Place, it’s not forced. You can spend all your time having fun, but eventually you would get bored, and want a challenge, and there are a great many challenges, between colonisation, and scientific achievements. There’s no Janet to ask for all the answers.

There’s also a social element. Culturally, the Federation values authenticity. Going to Vulcan to see a sunset is more value than seeing a hologram of a Vulcan sunset, much like how a photograph today means less than going to the same location it was taken, and seeing it for yourself.

Like I said I’m not a Star Trek expert, I just don’t trust a bunch of rich people working for the one world government telling us the 99.99% of humans we never see are living perfect lives.

It’s funny you say that, since they did abolish financial wealth in Star Trek, since at least the second show, for humans. Everyone gets the basics, and the rest depends entirely on who’s offering.

Going to do authentic pre-23rd century Cajun restaurant doesn’t cost buckets of money. Everyone can book and go there, anytime. It’s first-come, first-served. There’s no way to skip the queue, other than someone else pulling out, of asking them to give you their slot.

But it’s a lot more realistic if not everything was as perfect as we’re told, or even Starfleet officers believe.

At the same time, it is quite far into the future, and they have spent a lot of time and hard work cracking at their issues, with alien assistance.

Earth had to be basically rebuilt from the ground up, after all, and it’s over 200 years past that. Technology makes a lot of the issues facing us today, trivial. If we had their replicators, for example, we would solve a huge amount of issues today. Part of the issue of hunger, for example, is logistical. A single, easily portable device that can create almost endless perfectly nutritious food, and remove waste, would be hugely beneficial to solving it from that angle. Or even their shuttles, if we could just ferry aid directly to the location without concerns over how long it would take to get there, or risks of it being waylaid.

For reference’s sake, they’re about as far from us, as the USA is from its original colonies, and a lot has changed since they revolted and became a country.

I’d honestly go much further back and put it at The Measure of a Man.

A supposedly eutopian Federation should never have been in a position where it would need to go to trial over whether someone could be compelled to undergo a lethal medical procedure (Maddox admitted he wouldn’t be able to reassemble Data after disassembly), nor be reclassified as property/salvage so they could not legally refuse.

They would never do it with any of the organic humanoids in their ranks, how is Data an exception?

It basically proves Chancellor Gorkon’s words true. The Federation is an organic human(oid)s only club. If you’re not one, then any rights you thought you had go away as soon as it’s no longer convenient.

If Starfleet had wished to take Voyager’s EMH and vivisect his matrix to figure out what made him sapient, nothing would have prevented them from legally doing so, and neither the Voyager nor the Doctor would have legal means of preventing it.

Rights being conditional hardly seems like the kind of thing that belongs in eutopia.

If we want to be way more Trek, going by all the times that the shuttles got stolen, it should instead have been a scene of his stepfather going “my car!” upon seeing an empty, open garage, and then doing basically nothing about it.

The federation existed for barely a millennia in its first incarnation.

A millennium is still a good long time, in fairness. There are entire countries that haven’t even come near to that.

Remember when Picard ordered the creation of a virus that might have potentially committed genocide against the Borg in ‘I, Borg’?

The admiralty also ordered it and its deployment.

From memory, Picard got into trouble with the admiral because he ultimately decided against using the virus.

Reliable proof is also good.

Now, we can say that LLMs wouldn’t be good doctors, and point to a concrete reason why, instead of just a vague feeling, or pointing to something that may turn out to be the exception.

I was alienated by those anti-android resentments in Picard

Funnily enough, this isn’t actually anything new. The Federation has historically harboured sentiments against sapient androids and holograms, not intentionally, of course, but more that they don’t believe that they are people. Just look at the treatment the Doctor/Mark I EMH, Data, and the ExoComps received. The Doctor had fight to regain the rights to works he made, and had the Voyager crew factory resetting him whenever he had a human problem, Data had to fight to be recognised as enough of a person to avoid being dismantled, and then had to do again to avoid having his daughter taken. The ExoComps’ sapience was initially taken as malfunctions, and they were lobotomised, to be used as bombs. The Borg nearly got a genocidal virus unleashed upon them, by the Federation, and Picard specifically got into trouble for not deploying it.

To paraphrase Chancellor Gorkon, the Federation is a human(oid)s only club. Everyone else gets pushed to the wayside.

How in the hell is this the same federation of TNG, Voyager and DS9?

It is also the same Federation that saw no qualms about using multiple genocidal weapons against their enemies. The moment they were threatened even slightly, out comes the big G.

Sure, Wolf 359 had a considerable death toll, and one of the Federation core worlds was threatened, but the automatic reaction shouldn’t have been attempt genocide at the first opportunity. DS9 at least made an attempt to show that they were breaking the rules of engagement by putting down self-replicating subspace mines.

Similarly, the Dominion War. The Federation response to realising a rogue organisation had unleashed a virus designed to wipe out one of the main species of the Dominion seems to have been to sit pretty and wait for them to be forced to the negotiation table, rather than work towards a cure, and try to send it over ASAP. If it wasn’t for the DS9 crew going out of their way to make a cure, one might never have existed, leaving them to die. It would be unimaginable, if, during the Federation-Klingon war, the Federation had simply sat back, and told the Klingon Empire “good luck” in response to both Narendra-3, and the Praxis incidents, instead of offering aid. Nor did they just sit back and tell the Romulan Empire to go away when their main star blew up.

Voyager at least gets a little pass since they were working on their own, and didn’t have the support of the rest of the Federation backing them up, but ethically, it’s still not a good look for them to promote Captain Janeway for her work assisting Admiral Janeway in deploying the neurolytic pathogen that we know ultimately wiped out the Collective.

Star Trek is supposed to be the ONE fiction with a positive, utopian view on mankind and the future. I totally get the attraction of dystopian settings but for that I can read some Warhammer 40k novels. This really makes me furious.

I would be a little curious about where that came from. The Federation is better, but it thinks of itself as a perfect utopia, when TNG shows it to be more due to hubris on the part of the Federation, and that they not only have some ways to go, but have to work to stay there.

In my opinion, the difference between the Federation as it is now, and the way it was back then is that the flaws are more front and centre now.

Whereas previously, it seemed to be treated as more of a case of it being the actions of a lot of bad eggs within the Federation. Starfleet famously has issues with the admiralty trying to order reprehensible things. Similarly, for DS9, where it’s left ambiguous whether Section 31 is a rogue organisation made of people who think that the Federation is “too soft”, and thus needs people to do the dirty work behind the scenes, or a clandestine black organisation. The actual flaws within the Federation, like the mess about what rights to personhood androids and holograms had, were mostly skated over.

Compare that to now, where we see a bunch of Admirals convene to decide to blow up Kling/Qo’noS. In older shows, it would have just been one admiral giving the order, and the decision would laid solely at their feet, rather than something that would be attributed more to Starfleet, or the Federation in general.

In early TNG, the Federation is seen as entertaining ending Data’s rights and allows a Federation colony to deteriorate to the level of drug wars.

There’s honestly a good argument that Data arguably had none at all. His status was automatically changed to “property/salvage” the moment that he exercised his rights in a manner that Starfleet found inconvenient, by not wanting to be irreversibly dismantled.

The Enterprise might have treated him as a person, but they were unusual amongst Starfleet for doing so. We know later on, that the Sutherland considered him to be little more than a legged computer, and nearly mutinied against him because they interpreted all his actions in that light. Considering Data’s storied history of serving in Starfleet without having the support of personhood the Enterprise crew gave him, it would not be at all surprising if the Sutherland’s attitude was the norm, and the Enterprise was unusually accepting, on account of being the best and brightest of Starfleet.

I must have horse-blindness, since I can’t actually see the horse photobombing in any of the other photos.

the phone case is obviously beyond useless anyways because it has a horse glued to it.

It actually might not be.

Sure, you can’t fold the horse flat without some applied origami, but the spacing of the legs isn’t an unreasonable place to put your fingers through to hold the phone without gripping it.

Although they’re falling out of use these days, both because they’re not very environmentally friendly on account of being instant bird death-rays, and also because regular solar panels are cheap enough that it’s not worth it to make a big thermosolar plant.