NoGravitas

Picard says in TNG: "Peak Performance" (S02E21) that Starfleet is not a military organization. But other characters have expressed the opposite. I think the best synthesis is that Starfleet is "military like the Coast Guard and Commissioned Public Health Corps" and not "military like the Navy".

Deep Space Nine is about people from a utopia dealing with the realities of a place that is just emerging from being a dystopia (Bajor under Cardassian occupation). Later, they struggle with the need to uphold their utopian values in a conflict where it might be more expedient to abandon them.

Star Trek's vision was that social progress had caught up with technological progress. People who think it's all about replicators forget that part.

> Pure utopias were very rare for a reason: They're really hard to set compelling in stories in, and so most of the ones that do exist tend to set stories on their edges and fault lines.

True, and I think Iain M. Banks specifically commented on this in interviews and essays. The Culture novels are mostly set outside of The Culture. Star Trek is mostly set on the fringes of or outside of Federation space, but especially during Roddenberry's lifetime, no matter what the crew was dealing with, they were very self-consciously people from a utopia.

I like your analysis of Cyberpunk.

This is a graph of household wealth, not household income. Most of the wealth of the median household is home equity.

> I think there is a rise of "this is legal because we used a computer to do it."

Arguably, a lot of the modern tech industry is built on this. AirBnB to sidestep hotel regulations. Uber to sidestep taxi regulations. There's a bit of "this is legal because a private company is doing it and not the government", too.

It's also in Flatpak, if that makes a difference.

That's what I think of neurotypicals, so it checks out.

The DSA may be the 'zeitgeist' of the democratic party, but the party institutions are still firmly under the control of the party's most conservative faction, the neoliberals formerly of the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council), a group specifically founded to "exterminate the progressives" according to Clinton adviser Bill Curry. The DNC (Democratic National Committee) very visibly and explicitly ratfucked the progressive candidate in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, and barred pro-Palestinian delegates from their 2024 national convention. When a DSA-backed candidate defeats a DNC-backed candidate in a primary, it is a big upset and a high profile news story. But it is also extremely rare, and when DSA-backed candidates get into office, they often tack to the right in order to work with the existing power structures.

Let me know how your BYD dealership in Texas is going.

I don't think we need to worry too much about there not being enough xscreensaver source tarballs out there for disaster recovery purposes.

I mean, you can hotlink to jwz. There are just well-justified consequences if you do so from HN.

Nah, JWZ is great. He can be a little much online, but you would be you too if you had to put up with the kind of stuff he has had to.

Apple brandy and applejack are distilled from apple cider. Applejack is usually made with freeze distillation, which is perfectly safe. Simple alembic distillation is safer than some things you might already do in the kitchen, like pressure cooking.