Clergy is the one I would say most breaks the dichotomy.

All the others listed still lack the title and privileges that come with nobility. There is some nuance I skipped over: different laws for urban citizens vs rural peasants. But a peasant could become an urban citizen by fleeing their land and living in a city for a year and a day, after which their former lord could no longer claim them.

If we’re going by the historical use of the term, yes.

At the beginning of the early modern period, you had two classes: peasants and aristocrats. You were born into your class and that was that. But early industrialization lead to a funny thing; people who were born peasants, yet through owning things like mines or factories, had amassed enough wealth to rival (and sometimes surpass) the aristocracy. Aristocrats derisively refereed to these wealthy peasants as “The Middle Class”.

If you were to show an aristocrat our present world, they’d tell you we’re ruled by their middle class.

go buy bread and sanitizing wipes with satisfaction

With how the lake is drying up, yes.

So we’re not all that removed from a database of citizens and their faces. The work of actually collecting that information is already done, it’s just a matter of organizing it. And there are already private contractors who specialize in just that kind of data organization.

Doesn’t the NSA have exabytes (at a minimum) of data scrapped from the internet?

Europeans bemoaning brain-drain that’s working in their favor…

Sounds like lead exposure, unfortunately.

But not to worry, Millennials and Zoomers are closing the generation gap with lead from disposable vapes.

More than that, most of the old testament is stories about how you don’t debate God, you don’t test God, and you definitely don’t force God’s hand.

Honestly, this Intel guy is cute compared to the Christian Zionists, who somehow think God wants and will be happy with their attempts to manufacture prophecy.

Part of the reason the show works is that we never really see Federation life outside of Starfleet. Mostly this is for practical budget reasons; what does a post-scarcity egalitarian society actually look like? That’s difficult to depict in a show designed to recycle the same set every episode and only very occasionally go outside to film.

So what little we see of the civilian federation looks… a lot like the US. There’s a president. Member states planets. Constant references to US history. A military that operates how Americans like to think their military works, rather than what it actually historically has done.

Newer shows take this even further. Section 31, as it was first introduced, was supposed to be a highly illegal, unsanctioned conspiracy acting in the shadow of the proper Federation. Now they’re presented as the ultra official, coolest badasses who are the only reason any of the egalitarian principals are able to survive.

That image is at least a decade old, note that it says “wi-fi” and not “5G”.

lol

the Sun does the same thing but also with a profit motive

thank you

the effects were nice, the sets memorable, the costuming was good

too bad it was a boring slog that kinda soured any desire I had to go back and see the first one again

Some answers may literally beyond our comprehension.

Sure that may definitely be the case. But in practice, that means we should be exhausting the comprehensible possibilities first. Many Worlds is an explanation of last resort.

So what is this “objective” perspective? Could you break it down like you broke down the subjective one?

The point of the thought experiment is that a cat that is both alive and dead is absurd and clearly not what actually is happening. Schrödinger intended it to demonstrate that quantum mechanics was not a complete description of the universe, we’re still missing something(s).

well, some of the bulbs probably survived, at least

You know Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, right? How early roman christians viewed and treated Jewish people is reasonable context to include in a conversation about the history.