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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • There’s also just things, like, Picard “owns” a vineyard, because he inherited it. For those who don’t have generational wealth, how would one just get a vineyard if they want one? If they’re willing to put in the work themselves, is anyone just entitled to a large tract of fertile land in a temperate zone if they ask for it? Or can anyone just get a penthouse apartment in the heart of a major city if they want one?

    Even if these things no longer have monetary value, they still have some sort of intrinsic value, and that means things to people. If the federation government can’t provide a vineyard or a penthouse to anyone who asks for one just due to population and land/infrastructure limitations, that’s still scarcity of a sort.




  • Post-scarcity doesn’t mean that everyone can have everything, though. It just accomplishes the goal of UBI, satisfying basic needs.

    I’m only about 3/4 of the way through TNG so I am probably setting myself up to be corrected, but it’s not like you can simply replicate things like a personal starship or a palatial mansion in the mountains. Some people still have assets with inherent value which are relatively exclusive.

    Replicators allow everyone’s basic needs to be met—to live comfortably, even—but it seems like some goods still need to be either rationed selectively or distributed based on merit. People still “own” things; property still exists. People still work jobs that they hate, so there must be a reason they put up with it. Some Federation citizens also still turn to crime, indicating that they desire more than the system otherwise provides. And even with the abolition of traditional currency, the concept of generational wealth still exists, as we see with Picard’s family estate.

    Regarding Holodecks in particular, they seem like things that normal people have access to, but they don’t seem to be common in homes (at least from the examples I’ve seen so far). I assume it must be something like movie theaters: most people use public ones, while bigwigs might have their own they can use whenever. And anything that is public must be time or resource regulated in some fashion, so at some point someone would order you to leave so others could use it.

    At least based on what I’ve seen so far, it seems like an economy still exists within the Federation, just a more abstract one than we are used to seeing in the real world.


  • From what little I know if it, it’s sorta twofold what it does:

    1. It looks through documentation across a patient record to look for patterns a doctor might miss. For example, a patient comes in complaining of persistent headaches/fatigue. A doctor might look at that in isolation and just try to treat the symptoms, but an AI might see some potentially relevant lab results in their histories and recommend more testing to rule out a cancer diagnosis that the doctor might have thought unlikely without awareness of that earlier data.

    2. Doctors have to do a lot of busywork in their record keeping that AIs can help streamline. A lot of routine documentation, attestations, statements, etc. Since so much of it is very template-heavy already, an AI might be able to streamline the process as well as tailor it better to the patient. E.g. the record indicates “assigned male at birth” and an ER doctor defaults to he/him pronouns looking only at the medical birth sex marker, but the patient is also being seen by a gender clinic at which she is receiving gender affirming treatment as a trans woman and brings up that earlier data to correct the documentation and make it more accurate and personalized for the patient.

    In reality, I am sure that practices and hospital systems are just going to use this as an excuse to say “You don’t need to spend as much time on documentation and chart review now so you can see more patients, right?” It’s the cotton gin issue.





  • I mean, I don’t mind brands visible on purchased goods per se, it’s the same as a maker’s mark like artisans have added to their wares for thousands of years. It’s no more an ad than a book including the name of its author on the front.

    But it’s my conscious choice to buy certain products from certain brands, with careful considerations to quality and price. If a product is good and it is reasonably priced, I don’t care if they have a logo on there. But I don’t go buying products for the brand.

    Where ads are different is that they intrude into parts of our lives they have no right to be in.

    I want to watch some sports, but no, ads everywhere.

    I want to watch a movie, but I have to sit through all the ads first.

    I am waiting at the bus/train stop and there’s business posters everywhere, and then the bus/train pulls up and it’s covered in ads inside and out, all during my commute.

    I’m in the waiting room at the doctor’s office having a panic attack about the results of some recent tests and there’s a dumb ad on the wall with some smiling white lady staring directly at me, who has everything figured out and can now live life to the fullest thanks to her doctor having prescribed [DrugName]™.

    That’s the shit I can’t stand. When it’s not possible to simply exist in life without some entity trying to extract capital from you at every turn.


    1. Because the system settings are usually not what you want, most people don’t leave their headset on all day and only pick it up for calls.

    So this is where I think you may be misunderstanding system settings, because the system device can switch automatically when a headset is connected. Teams does not.

    If I am at my home office, I don’t bother with a headset, I use the built in speaker and mic of my laptop. At work, though, when I don’t want to broadcast my meetings out to everyone, I connect my Bluetooth earbuds. So I connect those, my system knows to automatically change my audio device, I connect to a Teams call, and…the audio is still coming out of my speakers.

    No other application on my PC works like this. Zoom works fine. Discord works fine. Like Teams, those sorts of apps have in-app selections for audio device, but unlike Teams they have the courtesy to include a “use system default” option.