And also the human race is almost wiped out on a seemingly daily basis just to be saved in the nick of time by the doctor. Not exactly comforting.

I recall en episode where they played out the events of everything had the doctor not existed/died, and it was just a horror show.

I go to star trek for hope, and 40k for a very fucked up form of “hope” that involves a lot of masochism.

Simplicity tends to sell better than complexity, and RCV is the one that’s known of already.

Agreed. And that’s why I think approval is such a big improvement over ranked choice.

“Tell us who you approve of, candidate with the most approval wins”

Is a hell of a lot simpler than

“Rank every candidate without ranking multiple as the same level, then we check if any candidate has a 50% majority, if not, the lowest candidate gets booted and the next wave of second choices comes in, repeat until there is 50% majority.”

And that’s before the peripheral benefits.

So far they’ve been more than happy to ignore everything except the status quo, unfortunately.

Agreed. It’s honestly sad.

My city/state has been warming up to these kinds of talks and candidates at least, which gives me a glimmer of hope. But for now it is not enough.

Arguably, RCV is just as complicated as STAR, and approval is simpler than RCV. And part of the difficulty in the heavy lift to get RCV is that it has some pretty rough flaws, flaws that don’t exist within the alternatives.

And the political environment is easing up to the idea of moving towards better voting methods. I’m not saying we should let perfection be the enemy of progress. All I am saying is that if we are going to be making changes, we should at least attempt the better options.

I absolutely agree with pushing the issue at a local level, however we should probably be aiming for approval or STAR voting:

https://dividedwefall.org/star-and-approval-voting/

RCV is way better than our current system, but even RCV has flaws.

We also need regulation requiring election reform within party primaries, because as of right now it is a clown show.

The prime directive is a great example of how even a good rule taken to the extreme can end up causing more harm than good.

But beyond that, it’s just an easy aid for the writers to add a point of conflict for their stories. The prime directive as a value within the federation seems secondary to me.

They wouldn’t be able to finish stealing that car before a thousand hungry lawyers ate them alive. Why do we let media companies do that?

They would probably actually have a decent shot at getting away with it, at least at first.

And to answer your question, it’s because the anger that companies generate by doing this shit ends up turning into piracy. Why would you try to punish a corp for doing this (likely wasting your time) when a cheap VPN and basic tech literacy gets you what you want?

The effort ratios are way out of wack when it comes to digital products. It’s easy to get around digital bullshitery, not so much in the real world where we are all car dependant.

Yeah, the NPVIC is… I mean, let’s be honest here. It’s not great. It’s better than our current system, absolutely.

Agreed.

But it’s far, far inferior than rank choice.

I’d say it goes like

Approval >>> Ranked >>>>>>>>>>>>> FPTP (popular vote) >>> FPTP (electoral college)

Agreed.

We would need election reform for that to change, and while we are getting closer to that state by state, I don’t think we will ever get enough states to sign on for the laws to kick in.

I assume you’re talking about the NPVIC. But yeah, we are getting marginally closer to reform each year. And public sentiment towards FPTP voting is changing, which is good. The only downside is that it is slow, and people seem more keen on rank choice instead of approval (IMO the best).

And these changes will never happen with our current system in place, so it’s a catch 22. Can’t change the system without reform, can’t reform with our current system.

Honestly that’s the case with most problems in the U.S., it’s just a bunch of catch 22s the whole way down, and the whole way up.

Yeah, congress needs to be stacked with representatives that actually give a shit about protecting workers and democracy. And that’s never going to happen with a 2 party system and legalize bribery (“lobbying”).

And those things won’t get fixed until people start giving a shit and voting accordingly, and/or we have massive protests.

I don’t think that’s a starter.

I wasn’t being literal. There are a million things that need fixed, a few of them you’ve listed and I 100% agree with. The one I named was just one of them.

IIRC about 2/3rds of americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That is not an economy that is working for the people.

We need dramatic overhauls that Biden, and especially Trump will never deliver. We need employee ownership of companies for starters.

nobody should use chatgpt to generate long rambly paragraphs complaining about nothing in particular with no point or ending or punctuation coupled with maildrop.cc as a temporary email

That, and a land tax

as “literally anyone except felons”

Oh don’t worry, they’re revising that part too. They want no limits whatsoever. They want felons to have guns.

That, and there is a lot more stabbing in the Klingon Empire.

So just filter out neurons and other majorly complicated nervous system cells. Your mind will still age, but your body will not, and that will make you last significantly longer than you otherwise would.

Couple that with advances in alzheimer’s/dementia/etc research, the average person could grow to be a century old without breaking a sweat.

Also a big fan of both series.

but if they have struggle dealing against a 2000 human civilization rebellion

There is a big caveat to this though, the combine are ridiculously pragmatic, to the point where they use humans to keep humans as slaves. Why specially create enforcers when there is already units that you can augment/brainwash into working for you, who already are well suited for the environment and atmosphere?

So that’s what the combine do, they use humans to keep other humans in check. So that revolt of 2000 humans was really only a revolt against other humans. Stories like that are a dime a dozen on earth.

The Combines dosen’t even have shields, the Combine Gunship can be throw away with just three real life rocket launcher and so far we see that’s one of their stronger airship synts units the combine have.

The shields one is a stronger argument, though again I think that might fall in line with the pragmatism of the combine. If all they are facing is humans, it could be the case in the eyes of the combine that putting extra defenses on your armored units is kind of pointless.

So they may very well have that tech, or something even more superior, but they just don’t bother wasting the resources on it.

Couple that with the fact that the gunships are themselves organic/enslaved, the combine probably don’t mind that the gunships are esentially cannon fodder. They might have the mindset that they can just breed up more.

But destroying a Borg cube? That is a feat even for an advanced civilization, or many of them.

The combine certainly are an advanced civilization. If you take the peripheral writings as cannon, they have at least one Dyson sphere. The tech for that might be beyond the borg, because even the borg’s biggest structures are grains of sand in comparison to the size of a dyson sphere.

Size doesn’t automatically mean a win, but the engineering required for a dyson sphere is huge. If they have that level of engineering, I could see them taking out pretty much as many cubes as they like. Especially if their dyson sphere(s?) are in any way weapons weaponized. And knowing the combine, they probably have sought such a weapon.

personally I think being a Stalker is worst than being assimilated by the Borg

Agreed 1000%. I’d rather be a borg than a half life stalker. If I’m going to have a hellish life with no agency and only pain, I’d rather not be conscious.

At the end of the day, the true strength of the borg is not particularly well defined (at least in my opinion), and thr true strength of the combine is even worse defined. The writers on either side have left too much up to question for any real definitive answer.

One day I’ll have more to do and you people will be rid of me.

And that day will be a sad one.

And for those that are able to keep to just one subscription, switching to another when they’ve finished watching whatever show it is that said service had, they aren’t safe either.

One of the next steps that these corporations are going to take is to add fees for dropping their services, with year long contracts.

They don’t want competition, so they will try to force you to stay.