Rule 239: Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
“Full self driving”
I just wanted to add how I enjoy this community and all the witty banter. Thanks for boldly going where no meme or gif has gone before.
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.
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
I feel the scene is deeper than that. Quark isn’t just dunking Sisko, he’s shining a light on the fact that Sisko doesn’t see the Ferengi as they are, rather he uses the surface level similarities of capitalism to apply his human anxiety about pre-post-scarcity to them instead.
“Leading”
I’ll give you a nickel for a disc of dessicated Elon spine
Leads? Not me, at least.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
