Adblock

Mr Worf scoffing in disgust at the screen

Permanently Deleted

"On Earth, there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see paradise. Well, it's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise! Out there, in the Demilitarized Zone, all the problems haven't been solved yet!"

And in fact, just about anywhere we see Starfleet officers mixing with civilians, it's invariably a seedy bar of some type. The place where Dr. McCoy goes to charter a ship to Genesis with the "place you name, money I name unless bargain no" guy, all both buildings of Paradise City, the place where Picard gets stabbed by a Nosican...

Pretty sure officers are provided with a stipend when they're deployed to places that use money. I remember sisko mentioning something along the lines of receiving pay but not having much use for it. That's reflected in how he handles situations where he has to pay for something, buying information from quark comes to mind. He barters as a formality/to keep quark from getting too big headed and then just kinda chucks latinum at him, like it doesn't mean much at all.

As for siskos family restaurant, unless I'm remembering incorrectly, I think Benjamin's dad was the first one to have it. In which case it doesn't really contradict the private property aspect. This goes a bit into anarchist concepts of private property so fair warning. There's this concept called usufruct, which is a progression of roman ideals of ownership. Basically "use it or lose it", where you can occupy land for any given purpose (in this case a restaurant) so long as it's being used you're welcome to occupy it. When you die or decide to close up shop, the land isn't passed to someone in your family, it goes back into the Commons for another person to use. Picards vineyard does throw a wrench into that though, because it's clearly established that his family has owned the land for generations. Which is pretty wack

Why do people cook themselves? Can't they just microwave something?

Probably because some people enjoy the little imperfections that but being replicated brings

Tng s4e2 shows us that the replecator doesn't give them real booze and replicated liquor is garbage

Permanently Deleted

It shows up more than once, but I think the first time is shortly after the girl goes to see Picard. Probably episode 2 or 3. There were workers and machines in the fields and I remember thinking, why even have the people if the machines beam the grapes right off the vines?

Permanently Deleted

It's far more important to trek to criticize and reflect modern society, which is a lot harder to do if your characters are living in a utopia.

I disagree... if anything, the opposite is true! Having "Federation utopia" makes it incredibly easy to critique modern society. Just introduce planets which have whatever element of modern society you want to comment on, and then draw a painfully obvious comparison to the perfection that is humanity in the 24th century, and boom, it's done! Heck, you could even make an entire alien race to critique an element of modern society like capitalism, not that anybody would do something that obvious :P

I feel like TOS and TNG lived on this a little too much, especially in early TNG seasons. It was what made DS9 so interesting when the writers flipped the script. Instead of spoon feeding you the critique of modern society in the form of planet-of-the week, they throw in stuff that makes you question whether the federation utopia approach is actually right, or if it's too naive.

The money free utopia thing never seemed that important

uh. i think you might have missed like, everything.

Well the challenge with that is avoiding making the articles stale for the wider public, given that the news typically focuses on current events. An article about, say, the negotiations to avoid the impending US government shutdown would be stale by the time it gets to the general public under such a model, so then we're effectively back to the hated paywall to get the information in a useful timeframe.

I would be down with that