Based and friendpilled

You’re preaching to the choir. “Concede the point” is a figure of speech which means the speaker is going explore an assumption despite not believing it themselves.

My point is that the whole “capitalism is the best economic system we know about because humans are greedy” argument is sophistry. It doesn’t even make sense in the context of its own flawed premise.

Let’s concede the point: humans are inherently greedy and selfish.

But greed and selfishness are bad, right? We want less greed and selfishness in the world.

Given these two assumptions—humans are greedy, greed is bad—shouldn’t we architect society to explicitly disincentivize greed?

It’s extremely easy, you just install AdGuard.

In the US you either had unlimited SMS or no SMS plan at all, in which case you got charged for every single message, sent or received. But I remember having unlimited SMS as early as 2003.

If you had no SMS at all then you certainly didn’t have a data plan, which ruled out WhatsApp entirely.

That’s easy: unlimited SMS was common on most mobile plans in the US as early as the mid-2000s. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans had no financial incentive to use WhatsApp.

Yeah, exactly. I find criticism of Apple products from people who are deeply familiar with their products to be quite entertaining, but that’s not even close to what’s happening here. Most of the comments in this community are one step above “DAE Macs can’t right click??”

I dunno about favorite, but my go-tos are an Old Fashioned in the fall and winter, and a Tom Collins in spring and summer.

Those become a Manhattan or an Aviation if I’m feeling fancy or just want to mix it up.

Creator or Daystrom here: the conditions that created Daystrom eleven years ago don’t exist on Lemmy. More simply, Lemmy isn’t big enough to host a new Daystrom.

I made Daystrom because /r/startrek was so full of memes and jokes that it was increasingly difficult to have an actual discussion about Trek. Discussion posts were drowned out between low-effort posts like memes and jokes and even if you did get a discussion prompt to garner some votes, the thread itself would have a bunch of jokes at the top, because jokes are easy to upvote. If you wanted actual discussion, you had to go hunt for it.

On Lemmy, the meme subreddits have already taken off and so it’s unlikely that StarTrek@lemmy.world is going to be flooded with memes. StarTrek@lemmy.world is so small that if you posted a discussion prompt right now, it would very likely be the top post in the community for the next 24 hours.

Now of course, there’s no guarantee that if you posted a discussion prompt in StarTrek@lemmy.world, the answers won’t be jokes and dismissive replies. For whatever reason, Trekkies love to respond with comments like “the real answer is ‘don’t think about it!’” which is mildly rude, honestly: if someone makes a thread about it, obviously they would like to think about it. But, outside of the very largest communities on Lemmy, there is so little comment activity that it’s easy enough to sift through the replies and discuss with people who would like to discuss.

One could make a community that enforces Daystrom’s two key rules: only discussion prompts allowed, and no memes/jokes/dismissive comments. But daystrominstitute@startrek.website exists… and it’s pretty much dead. Enforcing these rules in a place as small as Lemmy comes across as heavy-handed.

So, tl;dr if you want “Daystrom on Lemmy,” I invite you to post discussion prompts to StarTrek@lemmy.world.

We are absolutely worse off in the real 2024 than what “Past Tense” depicted.

• Vin asks Sisko for a “UHC card” when trying to identify him. A universal healthcare card. In the real 2024? Still no universal healthcare in the US.
• The famous billionaire’s role in the story of “Past Tense” was to get residents of the districts access to “the nets” to tell their story. In the real 2024, Elon Musk would just take to Xitter and advocate for crackdowns.
• Once on the nets, the resident’s stories actually swayed public opinion. Can you honestly imagine the stories they told making a dent in the zeitgeist, even if they trended on YouTube and TikTok?
• Sanctuary districts exist too, they’re just on the border and privatized.

Ira Steven Behr set out to depict a horribly dystopic 2024, succeeded, and undershot.