MudMan

I’ll be honest, I don’t think that’s the reason. I also think those numbers may be different but they may both be indistinguishable from zero when plotted against natural languages. You’re right about it being hard to define what counts as a “Esperanto speaker”. I can’t decide if that makes the Python comparison better or worse, though.

Oh, sorry, you misunderstood, I didn’t mean you specifically, I mean you as in “why would you ever do this”, as in “why would anybody ever do this”.

Languages, as we’ve established, are complicated.

Yeah, but that’s my point. The author clearly isn’t thinking about the hundreds of millions of native French speakers around the world, they’re an American thinking the word “mutton” sounds fancier than “sheep”… in English.

Which yeah, okay, that’s their cultural upbringing causing that, but then maybe don’t make a joke entirely predicated on making sharp observations about how languages work and aimed specifically at nerds. I can only ever go “it’s funny because it’s true” or be extremely judgmental of your incorrect assumptions about how languages work here.

“The root of all modern languages” is a heck of a thing to say about Latin, and I’m pretty sure several billion people haven’t quite gotten that memo. Calling a chunk of Europe and a thin slice of Africa “the entire Universe” is also a spicy take. Come for the programmer humor, recoil in disgust for the rampant ethnocentrism, I guess.

I mean, French is vulgar Latin at best. And even if it wasn’t obviously spoken by all sorts of French people, elites or not, it’s also the official language of a bunch of other countries, from Monaco to Niger. “Elites and certain circles” is a very weird read, which I’m guessing is based on US stereotypes on the French? I don’t even think the British would commit to associating the French with elitism.

Russian speakers being “mostly autoritarian left” is also… kind of a lot to assume? I’m not even getting into that one further. I don’t know if the Esperanto one checks out, either. “Esperanto speaker” is the type of group, and this is true, whose wikipedia page doesn’t include statistics but instead just a list of names. Which is hilarious, but maybe not a great Python analogue. It may still be the best pairing there, because to my knowledge English speakers aren’t any worse at speaking English than the speakers of any other language. They are more monolingual, though.

It just all sounds extremely anglocentric to me, which is what it is, I suppose, but it really messes with the joke if you’re joking about languages specifically. One could do better with this concept, I think.

I think this thread is meant to flatter programmers and make linguists and sociologists extremely angry.

Oh, yeah, it’s ALL handwavy bulls#!t. It’s a 60s sci-fi TV show. A great one, but… you know.

I’ll say that the transporters are some of the most consistent pieces of tech they came up with, though, at least as they get explored over time. They need a beam, they are disrupted by shields and interference, they turn people into a data buffer “pattern” that seems to follow the way data would behave, in that they can add and substract to it. You need to assume they don’t use them as full-on cloning machines because of regulations, rather than tech limits, but it mostly makes sense.

Unfortunately the version that makes sense is the most disturbing interpretation, so they still need to handwave the crap out of it.

Yeah, I think in canon the curvy bit at the front of the ship (or the nacelles, sometimes) is just gathering dust to then burn into energy. It gets trickier with the transporter, because in theory the dust is going into a matter/antimatter thing, but if the transporter is fueling itself from the body it’s disintegrating… well, where’s the antimatter?

I think in their minds the transporter isn’t doing that, and is instead taking energy to both turn a person into a pattern and then build the pattern back into a person. Seems like a waste, but I guess the raw matter isn’t the real concern here.

But we know that’s not how transporters work. If that was the case you wouldn’t be able to get “accidents” where you end up with two copies of the same guy. The transporter must work like the replicator, not the other way around.

Also, that doesn’t work with some of the stuff they say, like how they don’t replicate anything alive, and so food does taste noticeably different. Plus… you know, no massive farm deck anywhere on the Enterprise and no transwarp to beam that in from a planet, so… we’re going to have to accept this stuff may be just handwavy bulls#!t at some point.

I’m a bit shocked that nobody has pointed out the obvious:

The economics of Star Trek are super inconsistent and make no sense because multiple writers had a crack and they each liked and believed different things.

Sometimes it’s a post-scarcity socialist utopia where money is obsolete. Other times, Picard invites someone out on a date and she answers “you buying?”.

This is obvious enough that multiple people have tried to fix it, which as always in franchise worldbuilding only makes things less consistent and more complicated. So now some things just can’t be properly replicated. Sometimes it’s because of regulations and laws, other times it’s because of technology limitations. Sometimes the Federation doesn’t use money but they still have it for trade, other times they use money, just for random commodities.

The middle of the road for Trek seems to be some form of socialdemocracy where you’re provided with anything you need and labor is largely vocational, but out in space there is enough variation over time and different areas that there is still a bit of a pseudo-capitalist economy even in regions where Federation-level post-scarcity tech is still available. Go into any more detail and the whole thing breaks down.

This goes for other political elements of the series, too. Picard gets super mad at the notion of endorsing religious beliefs in a prewarp society because he finds it barbaric. Meanwhile, Sisko is out there becoming Bajoran Space Jesus and everybody is just cool with that.

It’s almost like Rick Berman’s, Ronald D. Moore’s and Gene Roddenberry’s political beliefs were different from each other’s, huh?

You know the irony of this interpretation? By canon, replicators are energy to matter conversion devices. Basically a 3D printer using relativity to poof atoms into existence from an energy source.

Replicators are straight-up the most expensive way to make anything. Using that technology to make you a cup of tea is the most inefficient use of any resource put on screen in media history. It’s absurd. The notion that instead of heating up water you would go ahead and make the atoms out of energy is so much worse than just filling in a space station’s worth of water and carrying it with you into space just to keep Picard’s Earl Grey habit going.

It’s not the replicator at all that drives the post-scarcity, it’s whatever nonsense antimatter generator stuff dilithium is enabling where they get infinite energy forever. Although we know dilithium is a limited resource, since they don’t seem to just replicate some when they need it, so… somebody should do the math there and figure out how expensive all those Janeway coffees actually are.

Hi.

That’s called “socialdemocracy” and it’s been around for centuries. It’s actually older than the marxist concept of socialism, if you’re gonna get pedantic about it.

I get that Americans have completely sandblasted off any remaining meaning in the word “socialism”, first by having conservatives use it as an insult and then by having weird US lefties get all purity test about it, but most of the world has a pretty clear picture of socialdemocracy, it’s not that ambiguous. Most socialdemocrat parties across the planet are called some version of “Socialist Party”, “Labour Party” or “Worker’s Party”. It’s a thing.

So no, it’s not a bad habit. It’s just… what that’s called. It does get easy to mix up with the Marxist concept of socialism, which is likely why most marxist parties advocating for a socialist society are called “Communist Party” instead. The bad habit is to not challenge the fundamentally conservative, deliberate confusion between the two that any range of neoliberals and protofascists continue to use to pretend milquetoast socialdemocratic policy is some form of revolutionary action.

Man, US politics are so weird.