theinspectorst @ theinspectorst @kbin.social

Liberal, Briton, FBPE. Co-mod of [m/neoliberal](http://kbin.social/m/neolib

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2 yr. ago

A core problem in Wales' transport infrastructure is that it's very difficult to go North-South via public transport. The campaign for a North-South railway is something that's been going on for a while.

Currently if you want to go from Swansea to Bangor, Google tells me it's a 4hr 24m (155 mile) drive, but it's around a 5hr 20m-ish train journey that takes you east to Cardiff, then north to Chester or Crewe (in England!) before back west to Bangor - and if you want to go onwards from Bangor (e.g. to Caernarfon) then you're reliant on buses.

What that means in practice is that for international tourists we're basically saying you can visit Cardiff/Swansea/Gower/Brecon in the South, or you can visit Snowdonia/Anglesey in the North, but not both - whereas if they visit England then they've got more options.

I can definitely see how a genuine libertarian could be a Trek fan.

The politics of Star Trek is all about individual dignity and fulfillment in a post-scarcity society. A lot of people try to call it socialist (as Pelia mockingly did in the most recent SNW episode) but the circumstances mean it's not any form of socialism anyone's encountered in real life on Earth, such as in the 20th century. After unfathomable levels of technological advancement eradicates the problem of scarcity, there's neither the need for a big state nor a market to allocate scarce resources - what we know as socialism and capitalism wouldn't be meaningful concepts. What we see instead is people doing what they do (joining Starfleet, undertaking research, conducting journalism, opening restaurants) out of a sense of personal fulfillment, and with neither a state nor a society nor a need to pay the bills particularly forcing them to do anything. They're free to live their lives as they see fit - infinite diversity in infinite combinations. I can see how a libertarian could look at that and call it their personal utopia.

I struggle much more with how a conservative could embrace Star Trek. So much of conservative politics is about the primacy of the norms of the collective over the rights and dignity of the individual - whether that's in moderate forms (e.g. wanting to manage the pace of social progress so as not to offend the sensibilities of the majority, wanting immigrants to integrate into host societies) or more aggressive forms (outright hostility to immigrants, denying the rights of women and minorities, denying the existence of LGBTQ people).

I guess what I'm saying is that once you remove economics from the problem of politics (as Star Trek has hand waved away via technology) then what's left of libertarianism looks a lot like Star Trek, whereas what's left of conservativism looks very different.

🤷‍♂️

We send Boris Johnson £350 million a week in child benefit. Let's spend it on the NHS instead.

A lot of people (myself included) would argue this is the best DS9 episode.

I think the Sisko/Jake father-son relationship is a key part of what makes DS9 different to other Trek - DS9 was about putting down roots in a place with everything that entails, in contrast to TOS and TNG being about a ship going from place-to-place each week, and multiple senior crew members having their families prominent in the show was a part of how they emphasised that theme. The Visitor is the key episode of the Sisko/Jake relationship and hence a key episode in what makes DS9 different.

Season 2 is where the show proverbially 'grows the beard' - Riker's literal beard being the trope-namer. But agree that a lot of that is just in comparison to the general level of Season 1 being weak. There are some other very good and important episodes in Season 2 though, like Q Who.

Season 3 is then where TNG really takes off and becomes quite consistent.

The Measure of a Man is my all-time favourite Star Trek episode.

More then that, I think watching this and a few other key episodes at a formative young age might be a big part of why I'm a political liberal and why I put so much value on individual dignity, civil liberties, due process - a massive episode that means so much to me personally well beyond the boundaries of Trek fandom.

You're comparing the collective influence of lobbyists, donors and pressure groups with the individual influence of a single voter - no shit the former looks bigger.

The collective influence of voters in choosing (say) Trump over Clinton, or Biden over Trump, or Macron over Le Pen, or voting for Brexit, has influenced the direction of these Western democracies in recent years dramatically more than any group of lobbyists could dream of.

You're telling yourself a comforting fairytale that society is directed by some powerful secret cabals pulling the strings so you as an individual are absolved from having to do your bit with how you spend your money and how you vote. If everyone thinks like you, nothing will improve. So fucking irresponsible.

I think it's clear throughout TNG that many in Starfleet had reservations about treating an android equivalent to a biological officer, as evidenced by A Measure of a Man (where it was clear many in Starfleet had considered him a piece of property) and by Pulaski's early interactions with him. Data raised the question in Redemption Part 2 about whether Picard's initial failure to assign him to command one of the ships was because of unease about an android captain, indicating that such unease was not an outlandish concept to him.

If I recall correctly, Data also indicated at some point that even though his positronic brain meant he could ace his way through any Starfleet tests, he intentionally didn't seek to advance through the ranks any faster than a biological officer.

He's not tracking Elon's jet. The activity of Elon's jet is already public information. All he's doing is republishing it on a widely used platform.

It's great. Apart from Picard S3, this is the best Star Trek we've had since the 90s.

Consumers are also voters. Corporations are not. Whether through the products we purchase at the shops or the politicians we elect at the ballot box, it will be the behaviour of individuals that creates the incentive set within which corporations profit-maximise.

Telling ourselves that this is a corporate problem and our individual behaviour doesn't matter is a comforting fairy tale but it will accomplish little.

A corporate problem and a societal problem are two sides of the same coin. Corporations don't make money in isolation, they make money because they sell things that (directly or ultimately) are bought by consumers.

You could choose to imagine a scenario where the CEOs of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, etc just voluntarily decide to stop extracting oil overnight, and think that would be more impactful than billions of individual consumers slashing their demand for carbon-intensive products and fuels. But if the consumers don't change their behaviour and continue to demand this stuff, other companies would just step in to fill the gap, takeover the old oil fields, etc.

The sustainable way to change corporate behaviour is through changing their end-consumers' behaviour - i.e. if end-consumers stop directly buying carbon-intensive products and stop buying from carbon-intensive companies.

Are you able to take down the witch-hunt thread?

The tragedy of the commons is an economic and ecological concept concerning situations where private parties will overuse a common resource because private incentives and public interests aren't aligned. For example, overfishing or carbon emissions.

In this case, the problem as articulated in this article is that each party in the AI gold rush - Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc - has an incentive to rush their AI development without adequate controls so they can get ahead of their competitors, potentially taking us into dangerous outcomes in which one of them produces AI that has far-reaching harmful consequences for humanity. I guess the 'commons' here is the future of human society, which AI developers have private incentives to take for granted.

The solution proposed is to adopt many of the classic solutions economists have devised for tragedies of the commons - points 1-8 in the article - and apply them to AI development in the ways set out in the article.

The last time I paid money to go to a Star Trek fan event was Destination Star Trek in London in 2021. Most of the Discovery cast were there promoting season 4. The big screens in the halls for talks even had the season 4 trailer airing, prominently announcing the airing date. The first episode was due less than a week after DST and they were really building up the hype.

Two days after the convention, they announced they were pulling Discovery from Netflix and solely airing season 4 on their shitty in-house streaming service, whose launch date in the UK was still 'tbc'.

Then the mods on r/startrek decided not to enforce spoiler protections for season 4 after it aired in the US, so I got spoiled for the general plot over the course of the next few months. My enthusiasm to watch it dwindled to the extent that, even now that Paramount+ is available here, I still haven't made it more than a few episodes in.

The moral of the story is: fuck Paramount+.

If you subbed Darmok for Yesterday's Enterprise then this would probably be my top 5.

Darmok would probably then be in my honourable mentions list, along with Redemption, Unification, Chain of Command, I Borg and All Good Things. The TNG two-parters were almost always gold.

I think it was Matt Groening who characterised Zap Brannigan as 'what if William Shatner, not James T Kirk, was captain of the Enterprise?'

A lot of people miss that he's at least as much a Shatner parody as a Kirk parody.

At the start of the episode, when Ortegas was getting ready for the away mission, I thought this episode would have the scene from the start of the season 2 trailer where she (gleefully) pilots a shuttle down to a planet.

At least we know she will eventually get to go on an away mission!

Yeah, I had a good natured discussion with a Lemmy user on feddit.uk the other day where they were still inexplicably downvoting my responses each time, despite us both being polite and constructive.

It made me realise that a) they use the downvote button quite differently to how I use it and b) they probably didn't know that I, as a kbinaut, could literally see they were the one downvoting.