melmi

melmi, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

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.

There’s a bunch of info on the economy of the Federation in this article on Ex Astris Scientia.

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.

melmi, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

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.

melmi, 1 year ago

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.

melmi, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

They even show up in Star Trek Into Darkness as furless cat girls that the writer claims are the same species even though they’re clearly not. Memory Alpha dutifully lists them on the Unnamed Caitian page, but amusingly doesn’t actually call them Caitians explicitly.

To be fair, the text never refers to them as Caitians, it’s just the writer saying it in an interview.

melmi, 1 year ago

I’m confused how something could connect all of time and space together without being omnipresent. It seems to me that the network is omnipresent by definition, because it exists everywhere.

melmi, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

That’s true, it spans the entire multiverse but only within one galaxy. It’s odd, but it’s cool that the network is so deeply tied to the Milky Way, just in every reality.

It makes me wonder what the network is actually feeding off of. Life? Some sort of nebulous “energy”?

Not something that they need to (or should) answer, but it’s just so cool to think about the mystery of it. I love fungi, and I love the mycelial network as this truly cosmic-scale organism living in subspace, holding the multiverse together. It’s beautiful.

melmi, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Well, the question still remains of “symbiotizing what”? Fungi on earth range from saprophages, which decompose dead matter into nutrients, to mycorrhizae, which form symbiotic relationships with plants which produce nutrients. In either case, they’re feeding off of things, it’s just the source that varies. All living things need to gain energy somehow.

The mycelial network is spooky and probably feeds off something more abstract, since sci-fi and all that. That said, maybe it’s in some sort of symbiotic relationship with the multiverse itself? There’s so much energy in a galaxy, let alone a multiverse worth of galaxies, that it’s not hard to imagine a fungal network feeding off just a tiny fraction of that energy. And interstellar space has relatively low energy, so it makes sense the network wouldn’t build hyphae there.

You’re right that they never said it only works in the Milky Way, I had just assumed that since it peters out at the border of the galaxy that it ends there. And if it resumes in another galaxy, it seems like it would be discontinuous and thus a separate organism. But I suppose if you imagine it as a wholly separate subspace realm, with hyphae that connect out wherever there is sufficient “energy” of whatever sort it feeds off of, it makes sense. And jumping to another galaxy could be a cool twist indeed!

I would give anything to be an astromycologist

melmi, 1 year ago

You can’t really anonymously use a credit card. Privacy.com will let you give bogus info to the FOSS project if you really don’t trust the devs having your name, but you’ll have to give Privacy a bunch of info which is arguably an even bigger invasion of privacy. I suppose it’s a matter of who you trust.

Most donations will go through an intermediary like PayPal so it’s not like you’re giving them your credit card info directly.

melmi, 1 year ago

Marco has so much charisma. A huge part of his insidiousness is just how charming he is. There are points you almost wonder if he’s really the bad guy.

On the other hand, Winn isn’t as charming, she’s not particularly sympathetic for most of the series. She’s kinda just hubristic and antagonistic, and isn’t very good at pretending to care about anything other than her own power grabs.

Plus she’s way less hot.

melmi, 2 years ago

Generally CnD letters are not generated by the ISPs themselves. ISPs don’t care what you do unless legally obligated to. When you get a CnD letter, it’s usually because someone working for a copyright holder was on a torrent and snagged your IP, then sent an infringement notice to your ISP, who in turn sends a CnD to the current holder of the IP, i.e. you.

At no point does your ISP have to read your digital communications themselves. Any one of your peers on a torrent can tell what your public IP address is, it’s inherent to the BitTorrent protocol. Copyright holders take advantage of this to catch pirates.

melmi, 2 years ago

Unlike Tor, which is built around accessing the clearnet anonymously, I2P is primarily designed around keeping traffic in the darknet. When you join I2P, you route traffic for other nodes but only within the I2P network, it will never leave through your clearnet address.

The equivalent of Tor’s exit nodes are called “outproxies”, but they aren’t often used, there aren’t very many of them, and you have to specifically set them up manually as it isn’t the default behavior like it is for Tor.

melmi, 2 years ago

I’ve heard of people doing fiber to the desktop in their homelabs. Seems a little overkill, but it’s the cool factor that counts!

melmi, 2 years ago (edited 2 years ago)

Connecting to a switch/router doesn’t change anything, that’s just how the Internet works. The fiber from the street is almost certainly connected to switches before it gets to your house as well.

If anything would break the “fiber to the desktop” meme, it’s the fact that most residential ISP ONTs I’m aware of do not support SFP, which means that you’d have to get copper out of the ONT, then convert it back into fiber. You’d have to get lucky with an ISP that has compatible options.