GuyFleegman

“Is Discovery canon?” is an interesting question because the only real purpose canon serves is to give us boundaries for where it’s reasonable to stop expecting (searching for?) a degree of consistency throughout all of Star Trek

When someone says “that’s not canon” what they’re usually telling you is that they don’t care to reconcile it with other Trek

Given that Discovery is two seasons of “top secret classified never happened” and three seasons of “800 years later than any other series,” even if we decided it was canon in some technical or legal sense, it gives us basically nothing that could potentially influence other Star Trek, before or since. In other words, it’s not canon in any practical or meaningful sense.

tl;dr yeah I guess you’re right

Shit man they had universal healthcare in Star Trek's 2024. In Star Trek's 2024 the tech billionaire decided to help the homeless. We're doing worse in the real world than what Star Trek depicted as being near the absolute nadir of human society.

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?

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.

The Empire can shield an entire planet. Those big spheres on top of a Star Destroyer's command tower are shield generators.

It depends on whether you are approaching the question from a narrative perspective or an empirical perspective.

Narrative: The Federation wins because the Federation are The Good Guys™ and the Empire are The Bad Guys™. The Federation starts out on the back foot and it looks pretty grim in the middle, but ultimately they eke out a win. If this is a TNG two-parter it plays out the way "The Best of Both Worlds" did: engineering prowess combined with timely application of the human factor wins the day. If this is a DS9 arc or Discovery season, then Section 31 does what needs to be done.

Empirical: The Empire crushes the Federation like a bug. The Imperial industrial base is enormous and their power generation capabilities vastly surpass anything the 24th century Federation can muster:

• The Death Star could violently destroy an entire planet, reducing it to asteroids. In "The Die Is Cast," a combined Romulan-Cardassian fleet requires multiple volleys to simply glass the surface of a planet.
• The Millennium Falcon—a ship a little larger than a runabout—could cross the known galaxy (Tatooine on the rim, Alderaan in the core) in a day. Voyager estimated a similar journey would take 70 years at maximum cruising speed.
• In the 2360's the Federation built six Galaxy-class ships and maybe a few dozen more throughout the course of the Dominion war. These are among the largest, most powerful, most advanced ships the Federation can build, yet they are dwarfed by an Imperial II-class Star Destroyer and the Empire built hundreds of these in the mere two decades it existed.

It you could somehow snap these two spacefaring nations into existence and pit them against each other, it would be like late-WWII United States facing off against Napoleonic France. It's a blowout.

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.

You really do not want compare this place to /r/Star_Trek. I saw a lot of really hateful shit in that sub. It was hijacked by bigoted culture warriors almost immediately after being created. It was easily the Reddit focal point for "Discovery is too woke" discourse.

The lone mod for that place was a creepy weirdo who was completely oblivious to what being a responsible moderator entailed. He regularly left comments containing actual hate speech up due to a combination of being too incompetent to use Reddit's mod tools and too ignorant to understand that yes you actually do need to remove hate speech and slurs when you're in charge. The Reddit admins had more than enough justification to nuke it.