Rule 239: Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
“Full self driving”
"Free speech"
It's amazing to realise Jeffrey Coombs played all those characters.
You know I hate to keep saying this bit it's absolutely true, I would rather trust the ferrangi than American capitalists.
The ferrangi have a book of rules detailing the ways that they are allowed to rip you off, you can be well-versed in them and by doing so actually get a good deal from a ferangi.
A human capitalist is just going to take their ball and go home with the slightest push, and help yourself to whatever they can take from you, ethics be damned.
Capitalists have a book they use too, and like the Ferengi, it has nothing to do with ethics. Unfortunately it has a lot more rules than the Ferengi book.
One of my favourite lines in all of DS9 is when Rom and Quark are arguing about where they've crash landed.
Quark says something like, "maybe we've died and gone to [ferengi heaven]".
Rom then says "or maybe we've gone to [Ferengi Hell]?"
Quark responds (and Armin absolutely crushed this line IMO): "The bar was turning a profit!"
No the Ferengi are actually too nice even for Elon
Well, they have world peace, and don't practice things like genocide or threats of mutual assured destruction.
One of my favorite moments in Deep Space Nine is when quark and Sisko are on a camping trip, and Sisko goes on the usual spiel about how greedy ferrangi are..
And Quark fires back by pointing out that his people have never had war, genocide, or slavery, and Sisko's got nothing because he knows humans can't say the same
"Leading"
Hyper capitalist, hyper misogyny, monopolies of business are legal, but unionizing is illegal.
He only wants the space-living because he’s a nerd and wants to create a 0th world, which is to the 1st world is to the 3rd world.
They may be greedy, but at least Ferengi are not usually racist shitbags.
Rule of Acquisition 17: A contract is a contract is a contract… but only between Ferengi
They don’t exactly treat everyone equally.
I think it's hinted that they are. I don't think they say "humARNS" like that due to a speech defect. I think they say it cos they don't like Xenos like us. They like our latinum.
They're racist and horribly sexist.
Leads? Not me, at least.
I'll give you a nickel for a disc of dessicated Elon spine
Don't you sully the Ferengi name like that. They do a valuable service to the federation. Where else are you going to buy self sealing stem bolts on the edge of federation space?
He likes naming stuff after Culture ships but he's really Joiler Veppers
As long as we become space faring super survivors, I'm fine with that. Good intentions don't make rocket fuel for the vroom vroom. We need to vroom some explorers to other places, just in case.
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Beautifully said and wraps up everything I love about Trek culture.
I saw James Cromwell, the actor who portrayed Zefram Cochrane, on a flight into Albuquerque about a decade or so ago. He was wearing a colorful kufi hat, and he’s so god damned tall I could easily see him from like three rows back. I was 99% sure it was him, and when I saw him again picking up his luggage I became 100% sure. He’s a freaking giant.
I have a very strong introvert aspect to myself. I very badly wanted to tell him how much his portrayal of Cochrane influenced my life and my career, but I chickened out. For the record, I am a research scientist who now works in big tech.
I think what I loved about him was his flaws. I especially loved how his self-awareness of the chasm between the person he saw himself to be and the legend that grew around him caused him to freak out and panic. I also really understood his whole self-destructive and self-sabotaging stage. And despite all of that, he won through, and Starfleet was the end product.
I love what you’ve written and I think it speaks to the ethos Roddenberry built into his universe to show us what is possible, but I really loved the idea that it grew from this flawed human before it blossomed.
That’s not to say the vroom vroom person was correct. Quite the opposite. A mirror universe Cochrane reimagined as Elon Musk would have lead to… probably the mirror universe but worse. It was more about the struggle possibly being worth it, despite how you feel about yourself and even if the end is something you can’t even imagine.
I always love that logic ... our planet is too dangerous and dying, so we have to leave to make sure we survive
At this point in our evolution ... we would ensure our long term survival in our galaxy if we stayed put and maintained our current environment. It's the only liveable atmosphere, environment and planet that we know of that we can live on and have access to.
How are we going to restart life on Mars where there is no atmosphere or resources when we're doing such a terrible job maintaining the existing atmosphere and environment we were born into?
I always like burning house metaphors .... space exploration to save our species at this point in time is like burning your house down, telling everyone you can't live there any more and saying that you're leaving to go live somewhere else where you can decorate a better bedroom. Except your burning house is located in an isolated desert with no shelter for hundreds of miles around.
How bout we stay where the fuck we're at, fix the planet we fucked up, and stop colonizing new places?
The main problem with colonizing places is the displacement of the people already living there. You'll notice that space is notorious for not having people. It's one of the defining traits of space, really.
As to staying where we are, well. That comes with all sorts of issues. The first of which are big rocks. Then there's gamma ray bursts, and coronal mass ejections, and a host of other potentially life ending things that could hit our planet at any time.
We have all of our eggs in one basket. This is the height of stupidity when we could do something about it.
As to fixing our own planet? Why the fuck do you think we can't also work on that? There are billions of humans, we can surely multitask. Especially since actually living on the moon or Mars or whatnot will be a monumentally hard task in and of itself.
The first moon base will need to be 100% science to figure out some pretty important biology, like is it even possible to maintain a population at 1/6 Earth gravity.
That's a huge question that we don't actually have an answer for.
Why survive if we're going to be so wretched? How do people value life itself above the quality of that life?
