Children of Borg History

As I attempted to post to the comments:

"Just came across this and wanted to say "you're welcome".  The video leans quite heavily on work and specific concepts I pioneered.  See http://www.st-v-sw.net/archive/TAborg.html .  See also DITL's article for the Federation-centric side, the other half of this video.  I'll be sure to credit you for this eminently watchable spin on the old page!   Thanks!"

I refer to this video:

Star Trek Economics Follow-Up

The ever-overly-polite reader SonofCCN has sharply noticed a detail I didn't touch in the last go on Star Trek economics:

Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek

I am very pleased to see the widespread discussion of my old idea of Trek being a post-scarcity economic model.

Almost a year ago I noted, regarding finding an old claim of the Federation as communist:

"Fortunately, it appears that my old post-scarcity argument has been discussed and written about by others since (not saying they got it from me, mind you . . . just that it was the logical idea), so maybe this silly idea is on its way toward fading."

By "others since" I referred to a variety of articles, and the list is only increasing.   There's Medium.com and Slate that pondered it in 2013.  Here it is on io9 last year, and it made The Federalist.

And, there's even a book on it now being covered by the Washington Post.   I can't keep up now . . . while this post lingered as a draft even Bloomberg got in on the act, doing a decent job of it.

O N03$, h4x0r$!!

("1-Bammer-12, 1-Bammer-12, proceed to BFE to investigate a report of a Signal 404.  Possible mental instability on scene.")

I've had a lot of distractions of late, most notably being Pluto on Twitter, so haven't paid Brian Young much attention.  This has apparently caused him to have some sort of episode, as Brian now claims that nefarious evildoers are trying to hack his site to silence him, and he has his local Alabama PD on the case!

The Ninth Planet

With the NASA probe New Horizons just around the bend from the ninth planet, I thought it a good time to once again tell Mike whatzisname, who arranged for a vote against Pluto even more sleazy than the cheat passage of ObamaCare, to publicly suck it.

Quoting myself from this Flare thread:

QotD 2015-0707: Synthelard

While searching for something else, I found an ASVS post of mine from May 2000.  Someone was talking about easy living in the Federation, and someone else suggested avoiding the result.  Then I chime in:

>> That or hook a replicator up to a big solar panel and eat ice cream and
>> chocolate all day.
>
>Just make sure to run the exercise programs, or you'd be a blimp 

Nah, he wouldn't have to exercise.  If they have Synthehol
instead of alcohol, they could probably have Synthelard.

Ironically, Olestra already existed at this point, which very nearly qualifies!  Sadly, my alternate name for it never took off.  ;-)

More importantly, where is my synthehol, anyway?   They were working on it.  It should go over a lot better than Olestra did with its side effects... after all, it isn't like drinking doesn't already have plenty of side effects, some identical.   The diarrhea is referred to as "whiskey s**ts", and abdominal cramping is matched by months of abdominal pain due to unplanned offspring.

Heck, Olestra was tame ... no table dancing, puking, hangovers, or gnawed-off arms ever resulted from a bag of Olean chips.

QotD 2015-0702: Pernicious Falsehood

From the "brother, ain't that the truth!" files:

"Unfortunately, it is not always possible to produce a rationally persuasive argument for a true conclusion. The problem is that the rationally persuasive and deductively valid argument, by its nature, is not uniformly effective against all types of pernicious falsehood."

 - Richard Goode