In my head cannon, that’s more or less how the borg started. I can see it starting off as a much more basic networked community that started off legitimately respecting people’s wishes to join/not to join. But over time it grew and changed, and become so invasive to the point they snowballed into the borg we know and love today.
And if we REALLY want to speculate, their first act of violence/force may have been against some entity that sought to attack them for being new and different. And whatever war or conflict that turned into ended up shifting the values of the borg such that forced assimilation was then seen as morally acceptable. And once that’s condoned, why stop?
That’s not something that really works with industries that are zero sum games. You can’t have a dozen competing rail companies in a given state because there is only so many paths that a rail system can take, and you need to clear out continuous stretches of land through eminent domain.
If a company provides a vital services and fails, it should be nationalized. If a company does not provide a vital service and fails, it shouldbe allowed to fail and the employees themselves bailed out.
This fundamentally and thoroughly explains what this Christmas has been like for me. Trying to move from one room to another has been a constant battle of stepping over things and pushing past clutter.
Sleeping on the couch of dog fur hasn’t been pleasant.
And the cherry on top has been my girlfriend having to go home because of her dog allergies. Hopefully next year will be better.
I did as close to that as I could, going to community then transferring to a 4 year. The problem is deeper than people wanting extra stuff, part of the problem is that nobody respects community college degrees, and they’re usually 2 year programs.
Yeah, it was more or less the same experience for me. My community college was the same quality teaching (and in some aspects it was better). Which just makes it infuriating that 4 year community college programs aren’t really an option.
It may not be much in comparison to others, but that doesn’t make absolve me of my debt. Practically every other developed nation has this figured out, it’s long past time we caught up.
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.
They’ve also run things like the pioneer plaques (or maybe it was arecibo) past other scientists, who often have difficulty discerning the meaning behind them. If human scientists have difficulty discerning the meaning, I can only imagine what kind of difficulty aliens who speak in metaphor would have, let alone if they weren’t linguists/scientists, which appear to be the case in the episode.
We evolved to hunt, and so it is suspected that as a result of that, we understand arrows to indicate direction. A species that hasn’t evolved in such a way might not understand the meaning of arrows. Apply that same principle to language and you potentially have your problem.
it’s possible that they only use that weird allegory reference pattern when speaking formally to strangers or whatever
It seems like an awfully bad idea to use a communication method that doesn’t transfer what you mean if you have a better option available.
It’s also possible that their language in the original version makes more sense and is more practical and it just gets mangled by the universal translator.
I doubt that’s the case. I don’t see how a non-metaphor based language would get turned into a metaphor based one through a software bug. Some big hand waving would need to happen for that.
IMO the Tamarians probably have brains that are structurally different such that their metaphors come far more naturally.
I think half of the episode is the Tamarians genuinely struggling with human language. If the federations translation software wasn’t up to the task, it isn’t surprising that the Tamarian’s software wasn’t up for it either.
Based on the episode, it was posibly the first time Tamarians ever had friendly and successful first contact. Because if they had it previously, they might have asked for help translating when meeting new races such as with the Federation. The episode would have went a lot different if they had an Adorian ambassador with them saying “Yeah these guys talk in metaphor and only metaphor”.
They may have tried that in the past to no avail. The episode specifically mentions there was several failed attempts at first contact.
A guide only works if you understand the guide. Think of it like this, if I sent you all 1679 ones and zeros from the arecibo message to you, but you didn’t understand the concept of zero, you’d have a hard time understanding what the message meant, even if the message itself was self explanatory.
Their language isn’t just grammatically different, it is uses a fundamentally different structure, and the Tamarian brain might be structurally different as well, able to easily account for language when young. So there may not be much of a “base language” that the metaphors are built on so to speak.
It’s only going to be a matter of time before they start requiring contracts, forcing you to stick with a service for long periods or face fees for dropping them.
They are capitalists, and so they must always profit more and more, never ending, for all of time. One of the things they will eventually do to hit that unsustainable proift motive is contracts. It’s what the cable companies did, and it’s only a matter of time.
If the borg were a religion (lemmy.world)
Government money (lemmy.zip)
I will rue the day this inevitably happens. (lemmy.world)
Linux reaches new high 3.82% (gs.statcounter.com)
Meat stuffed inside an animal intestine (lemmy.world)
Electric cars: The equivalent of switching from binge drinking whiskey to binge drinking wine. (lemmy.ml)
Riker's always thirsty (www.dailykos.com)
When you go home for the holidays, do you ever stop feeling like a kid?
My dear Doctor, it's all true (i.imgur.com)
“Even the fan fiction?”...
*Cries in Debt* (lemmy.zip)
Picard Maneuver (i.imgur.com)
Manager: This task only takes 30 minutes. Why did it take you the whole day? (programming.dev)
Trek Club (lemmy.world)
Before long, it'll be all grill and drivers won't be able to see which direction they're going. (startrek.website)
Sokath, his eyes uncovered! (startrek.website)
Accurate. (lemmy.ml)