Precisely, so the Federation may be anarchist, even though the member races aren’t.
With what we know about how the Federation interacts with other races and planets, real world logic would indicate that the humans could be (and live) the model that the Federation is built upon.
All this is conjecture ofc, and is probably as much an exercise in understanding post-scarcity anarchism as possible Star Trek lore :p
Which is inherently anarchist :P
As it seems a common confusion in this thread, I repeat, anarchism doesn’t have to be without government or rules, several forms of anarchism are focused on not limiting individuals freedoms and/or not allowing power over eachother (while accepting government and rules not contrary to that). Both of which I believe describe how the Federation works.
That’s one form of it, but there are plenty other schools of thought that overlap quite significantly with the Federation, check out the primer on Wikipedia.
Anarchist doesn’t need to mean without government, simply that no one is above another, which is echoed in how the Federation is structured towards the other races.
I’d say they’re post-scarcity anarchist. There’s no central/communal resource dispersal as needed for socialism, nor the central/communal resource allocation/planning needed for communism.
There’s seemingly no authority outside starfleet exerting any power, nor does anyone ever claim a motivation beyond exploration or study (to do something meaningful). The lack of money and unlimited access to replicated resources pending available dilithium also points to a society without exploitative discrepancies.
The humans also never are reported to have any resource hogging, the only tensions/stratification seem to be militarily (and against external parties also diplomatically), meritocratic, and even then the bottleneck seems mostly to be to not fall behind other races.
I don’t see neither capitalism, socialism, communism, despotism, theocracy, nor fascism, but many aspects of anarchism. If you’ve read anything about The Culture, they openly speak about being anarchist, and it’s very similar to Star Trek.
The best thing about abbreviations is that they are entirely contextual, which means that if it isn’t obvious what’s meant, you can make up your own meaning and wonder/ask why the other person is using it so very wrong.
There’s even an abbreviation for it: TLB, which in this context means Three Letter Bullshit.
You are right that things would still look like we’re accelerating away from us, even if we were actually contracting.
Interesting hypothesis! How do we investigate?
What could we expect from a large central gravitational point? We should have other signs of the gravity well:
We would expect a point that we contract towards (and that seems ill fitting, as we see the expansion moves as the observer (including earth) moves), we would expect some kind of mass or similar effect, which would also have a size to fit it in (we know that gravity works different when you’re inside the mass, and we would be able to see it, much like black holes or dark matter), we would expect things to orbit the gravity well (which we know that at least our galaxy doesn’t orbit us).
You might want to actually check on these things to make sure they apply and are true, but at least at first glance it seems the expansion is better explained without a central gravity.
No, that’s not at all what redshift is.
And neither redshift nor dopplershift would have that much effect on light at the speeds we’re talking about.
Besides the sun’s color on earth it’s not a shift of wavelengths, it’s a subtraction of wavelengths, as you easily can see in a spectrogram.
A programmer might, as trained/conditioned by the limits of programming languages.
A human would intuitively not, these are meaningless and/or convoluted concepts to the untrained human.
A common problem (before learning it is impossible/fraught with danger) is categorisation, like sorting of strings.
Say you have a text, and need to count words of different lengths.
One intuitive approach is to pass through it once and add each word to a list for the corresponding length, as well as making lists as needed. No 7 letter words, no 7-letter-word-list, even though there are longer words.
As humans we’re good at sorting things into an unknown number of categories, and we have to unlearn that for programming
But the question is not what is simplest for the company. Arguably it would be even simpler for the company not to pay Bob, or anyone for that matter, they could also simplify a lot with not bothering with doing anything beside extracting money from people, slavery and robbery are very simple.
If we change the viewpoint from people living to serve companies, we might arrive at different conclusions, and maybe even a society better suited for humans, rather than companies.
Why? Bob has higher costs and longer preparation time for work.
In economic theory, the job is worth less to Bob, and he should be compensated more for taking it.
Is it fair that Bob should subsidise the company’s labor costs?
Bob’s labor also incurs greater costs on the communal infrastructure (roads, pollution, gas, etc), why should the company not also have a higher burden (higher tax) to compensate the commons for that?
But in several countries it is legally abuse to withhold emotional safety from a dependant, including withholding the right to privacy.
I know, as I teach this to youth organisations who have a reporting duty against that law.
As for the health benefits, I’d urge you to read a basic textbook on child developmental psychology. The keywords used in most models are autonomy, privacy and keeping secrets, as important parts of social (and cognitive) development from about the second year, and only get more important with age.
They both look to be enjoying themselves so much!
And oh, lordy lord, the one with B.B. King is fantastic blues
Thank you for sharing your find!
Does the sun rotate with the disc, and faster?
Wouldn’t sunwise and turnwise be in opposite directions otherwise?
Of course, all the economic rationeles are valid.
They are also not very compelling. If slaver Europe fucked over Africa for a century, should we compensate them only for stolen labor? How about stolen resources? Caused suffering? Lost progress? Lost standing? Lost lives?
How about all the exploitation that has happened since, due to slaver Europe having the upper hand? African labor and resources are still valued lower than in richer countries as local working conditions are still poor and exploitative.
Also, could paying reparations as a lump sum ever measure up to the slow development of infrastructure, knowledge, culture and national pride/trust/stability that comes with building your own wealth?
We have plenty of experience with aid getting stolen by warlords, and grants commonly get lost to corruption, cronies and other misappropriation, even without the warlords.
For the fiscal compensation to make sense, we’re talking orders of magnitude larger sums, and they would have to be given together with labor, knowledge, supportive relations, etc. over decades. And also with much fewer strings than our current economic system allows.
I find that there is no satisfying way to fiscally compensate for a century of exploitation, suffering and oppression, and have found that the sums and arguments are more compelling as an absolution. It’s about the slavers wanting to clear their conscience more than making it right.
It’s not the most noble reason for it, but it seems do do more for that than for the exploited people. Either change what we’re talking about, or face that your reasons are about you, not them.
Cats do pant, but also run hotter and enjoy higher temperatures than humans (24-26 °C depending on race).
Also, cats have lots of ways to release heat, cats can arrange their fur to release more heat (or burr it to trap more), they lay on cool ground, they can lick themselves for evaporative cooling, and of course seek shade when it gets hot.
We had a hot summer with temperatures of over 30 °C indoors and I got worried my European shorthair would overheat, got them a gel pad that wicks away heat when laid upon, but they thought it was ridiculous and just laid on the concrete floor in the shade whenever too hot and was super comfy and lazy.