• 18 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • Eh. I can see it working.

    Humans are social creatures. We like to feel useful and connect with others. In a world with a replicator in every home, dining out is much more about the social experience than the food. Working in a restaurant would be about community and shared interest. People would volunteer to staff them for the same reason people do any form of volunteer work: they enjoy the sense of purpose, skill-sharing, and camaraderie that comes with it. Plus, with replicators making preparation and cleanup trivial, there’s a lot less labor associated with food service.

    Lastly, consider that post-scarcity dining establishments that would have no tolerance for rude customers. If someone went full Karen on a volunteer, they’d be banned in a hot second. The social dynamics of such an arrangement would entirely favor the staff: if there are no “paying customers” then there’s no entitlement to go with it.

    I don’t find it all that difficult to envision a set of social incentives that would keep restaurants alive.



  • “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