The holovids always skip over Voyager’s many, many detours to extract resources and manufacture replacement torpedoes. Between this, negotiating with the Borg, and massively altering the timeline, Captain Janeway is as much a popular topic of conversation outside the federation as she is within.

I wanna see Curzon Dax in SNW. Pretty sure the timetables match up there, given he negotiates the Khitomer accords.

Yeah, if anything the TOS ships are more realistic in regard to their interfaces. In an emergency, when you may not have lights or gravity or whatever, buttons and knobs come with certainty. Flat, featureless touchscreens? Not so much.

i feel like the answer to what is and isn’t canon can be summed up with;

Why do the klingons look different?

They always looked like that, you just didn’t notice before.

Canon has always been squishy. The Eugenics Wars takes place in the nineteen-nineties… oh but didn’t Voyager’s crew visit our nineties? Plus, DISCO had that Elon Musk name drop.

…so the timeline floats up as the present day does. Canon is just a vague sense of the things everyone agrees on.

If i were gonna write the Borg going forward, I’d have the queens be a failed experiment to elevate one drone to the role of tactician specifically to deal with the Federation. It didn’t work, so they don’t do it anymore.

We’ve never built nuclear. We not only need a reactor, buy need to buy all the relevant skills and build all the supports to create an industry.

Oh, that does change the calculation quite a bit. I wonder if this push has more to do with those submarines than any energy considerations.

excited to see how the thorium rock-salt reactors progress

It’s a long-term investment. Once it’s built, nuclear outright breaks the pricing scheme on fossil fuel energy. Surely the prudent thing is to have both it and renewables? To have one to shore up the other?

This is somewhat confusing. He’s against nuclear power, a thing that would offset a considerable amount of carbon emissions… because building a plant is a lengthy process? It’s not as if you can’t also install solar panels in the mean time

I like to think by the time Kirk gets the enterprise, all those spacious crew quarters we see in Strange New Worlds have been eaten up by retrofits and upgrades.

Isn’t “the state” just cultural mechanisms extended beyond familial or interpersonal ties? There’s a threshold where the group becomes too numerous for a member to form social ties with all other members. At that stage, culture becomes a force unto itself, propagating further than the members that comprise it. That point, more than money, seems to be where exploitative behavior becomes more likely to take hold.

Like, feudal aristocracies were plenty exploitative, plenty domineering. But they didn’t necessarily need money for it; a lot of them operated on barter economies. They just needed a knife-point and a cultural belief to justify the domination. Money is just an innovation on a much older process.

Ah, I see, you just meant that other species don’t share our capacity for learning and adapting. Although, why do you continue to describe exploitative behavior as an instinct if you agree that it is a learned trait?

neuroplasticity is limited to what our genetics will allow

sorry, what do you mean by this? Surely the benefit of a learning and growing brain is that it can respond and adapt to situations faster than germ-line genetics ever could. Why would there be a genetic limiter, what purpose would that serve?

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…

From further up the thread

A liberal is someone who:

• Upholds the modern nation state and is thus against monarchy (against whom the first liberals rebelled against)
• Upholds capitalism and market economies, and with it property rights
• Upholds electoral parliamentary systems of governance
• Usually believes in some version of the social contract or similar theory from which the legitimacy of the nation state and capitalism is derived.

This describes the bulk of the Democrat and Republican parties. US politics doesn’t have a left-wing as it is understood in the rest of the world, our center is between two right-wing ideologies.

Does it need to be instinctual, for some people’s brains to be “wired different”? Seems to me that this phenomenon is more easily explained as learned behavior. Since people’s behavior changes the environment, it creates a feedback loop; societies form a semi-artificial environment where people learn that domination is successful behavior, and are rewarded for continuing it. Thus, the behavior is propagated across generations, no instinct required.

…and neuroplasticity doesn’t really fit well with the idea that people are “hard-wired” to certain behavior. The only thing we really seem to be pre-programmed for is language and communication.

almost like our property codes were written for an era that is more than a century gone

squatters rights take entirely too long to kick in these days

she’s the only reason the Enterprise runs as smoothly as it does

The ship is the size of a city and it only has a day shift and a night shift, for peat’s sake!

Star Trek prefigured a lot of modern police procedurals.

Hello Computer, could you pretend this picture has more pixels? Now, extrapolate wildly off one incidental data point! Oh, could you run this through the face identifier programme? You know, the big database that 100% perfectly identifies everyone on the planet with absolutely no mistakes ever? Thanks computer!

Troi: I can sense a feeling of deep and profound spiritual connection, genuinely I do. However, I do have other appointments. So, in the mean time, I’m going to replicate you a weighted blanket and a Nintendo DS.