Fyi, this is not true. California has them but they are not routine, and are a function of internal political dysfunction that is quite unique to California. The grid here is still extremely fragile, and vulnerable to e.g. cyberattack and other disasters, but let's not get carried away.

This is a little baffling to me, if you're suggesting this is an actual method people employ to make a living. Interviewing is difficult and stressful. Or maybe their approach is a shotgun strategy, so they don't care?

If they're living in NK then maybe their alternatives for making a living are mostly much worse than this?

The comment you are responding to is role-playing

There's way more middlemen then when people went to the movies in the 1950s, it's not that complicated. Back then, the theater got the film roll in a USPS delivery, and the people that manned the popcorn were high schoolers. Over the years we have injected lots of lawyers at every level of this and, alas, everything about "watching a movie" is more expensive.

The kids, in fact, are alright.

DS9 is a good litmus test for determining what kind of Star Trek fan you are. It broke a lot of the optimism and continuum of how Star Trek had worked previously, where hyper-competent people just always seem to come out okay. It smashed reality into the faces of sci-fi fans by building an actual war-narrative into the character arc (an episode of DS9 deals with GWOT PTSD better than almost any other network TV show did) and so it's not really surprising that DS9 was a little controversial when it aired. I stopped watching Discovery after "the burn" event because it didn't make any sense, and it was obvious the writers wanted to start from scratch. Space fungus powers the ship? A character has a panic attack and any ship with a warp drive is blown up? Not a serious sci-fi show and one of the worst entries into the Star Trek catalog. I hope Paramount takes a pause and we don't get any new Star Trek for 5 years, so the writers can grow up.

DS9 raised the bar so high that it's past the Oort cloud. I've watched everything up to Enterprise and I will say that I enjoyed all of them despite their flaws. I tried watching the newer trek series: lower decks, discovery and picard. Lower decks was an instant turn-off and I fell asleep on the first episodes of the other two, twice. The free month of paramount ran out before I bothered trying to watch them again. I should give them a go one day.

Glad someone else felt the same. Discovery started well but the whole "burn" thing was... stupid. There are a million narrative devices you could use to break the ability for ships to travel via warp and they chose the least sciency of them all.

Academy is a show about incompetent people being drug along by the plot. It is diametrically apposed to TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY. In just the first episode of Academy, one of the characters eats her communicator, and then the show moves on as if this is something normal that goes on. Does this sound like the usual competence porn that the prior iterations of Star Trek were known for?

It certainly does not to me. This is supposed to be, ya know, the academy that the best of the best enter into in order to commission into Starfleet. The rest of Academy is one incomprehensible plot hole after another, followed by awful (and at times disrespectful) callbacks to prior shows.

Can you link some blog posts? I'd like to read them. Not on social media these days as I gave it up for Lent a decade ago and never went back, so I'm probably missing some more comprehensive criticisms of Academy.

So your gripe is that a barely recurring character is used in a joke, and you didn't find it funny. Gotcha! Unfortunately, not every joke lands for every person.

It's important to understand that generally speaking, Academy standards are probably a lot lower than they used to be, the show, actually goes into this a couple times! Because, you know, the destruction of a large part of society and such. It is a school, and if the characters didn't need to learn something, they probably wouldn't need to be there.

You're generally going to find competency in the command staff/professors, and you generally do. Captain Ake is in at least one episode, orchestrating the entire episode behind the scenes, and in the following one, it doesn't say it explicitly, but it is most plausible that she also did as well. Episodes where the senior staff don't know what's happening, it's clear they know something is up, they just haven't determined what yet. I am not positive I can think of a spot where the officers in the show were anything but incredibly competent, and the show also avoids classic tropes like "the admiral is a jerk/evil", Starfleet is, in fact, led by an extremely competent and reasonable admiral.

I don't want to watch a science fiction show about children. That's what Academy is, a show about children. It should have been a show about young adults getting ready to be officers.

It's fine that you think this is entertaining science fiction, and are grafting perceptions of "competence" on characters in this show. I don't want to nitpic everything in your response, except for this:

>Academy standards are probably a lot lower than they used to be, the show, actually goes into this a couple times!

The explanation for this makes no sense. This is the 32nd century (allegedly). The amount of advanced technology one would need to understand to be functional in this environment is extreme.

As an aside, and maybe this is the best way to explain my aversion to this show, the ship design is awful and makes absolutely no sense. I forget which "tech the tech" explanation there was for this, but every starship in Academy is a) hideous because the warp nacelles just float out in space for some reason, and b) makes no sense canonically. Star Trek used to actually respect engineering. Academy says "nah, fuck it, it's all magic now".

TNG suggested kids in elementary school were learning calculus but honestly I'm not sure that's a reasonable thing developmentally. Just because the technology improves doesn't mean humans get smarter faster. The cadets here are college students, and generally speaking, pretty competent ones. (God, college kids were dumb everywhere I went to school.) Also technical talent and emotional development are separate topics. I'm also not sure I agree technical understanding has to continue to grow with technology.

Computing technology is much further today than it was twenty years ago, but kids these days understand less about them because the technology is abstracted away better. (People use iPads now with no idea how a file system works.) In the 32nd century stuff feels magical, a lot of people probably don't need to know how it works to use it.

Floating nacelles make plenty of sense if they're independent drive units with all necessary components in the nacelle, consider they create a warp bubble around the entire assembly, but you can obviously wirelessly control a separate structure and the ships can manipulate them with force fields and such. Think about how many times a ship in earlier shows scraped a nacelle and exploded, separation is good design if technology now allows it. And remember... this is like many hundreds of years after Starfleet had timeships that could beam a person to and from any place in space and time. If anything the technology in this series feels a bit not magical enough for the time period.

Yes, I understand that you have ways to convince yourself that Academy is a good Star Trek show. I'm old at this point, and, for me, it's bad.

Many did not. It's important to understand the distinction.

I was in middle and high school when calculators became the standard, but they were still expensive enough that we kept the Ti-80 calculators on a backroom shelf and checked them out when there was an overnight problem set or homework assignment. In a round about way, I think I ended up understanding more about the underlying maths because of this.

So, no, many did not actually learn arithmetic in school. This isn't necessarily because of the calculator, but if you don't get a student to understand what arithmetic even is then handing them a calculator may as well be like handing them a magic wand that "does numbers".

I was wondering about this. I do not write software to pay the mortgage, I just write the occasional python script, some SQL stuff to update various dashboards, R in my spare time when I'm getting ready for looking at baseball stats or something. AI has had pretty much the opposite effect for me. Watching it write something has made me ask questions, get answers, dig into more details about things I never had the time to google on my own or spend an hour or several looking through stackoverflow.

I'd say my ability to write code has stayed about the same, but my understanding of what's going on in the background has increased significantly.

Before someone comes in here and says "you are only getting what the LLM is interpreting from prior written documentation", sure, yeah, I understand that. But these things are writing code in production environments now are they not?