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Cryptic Studios Releases New Star Trek Online Details, Trailer
Two days ago, an AP interview with Cryptic Studios' Jack Emmert provided new details about Star Trek: Online, which was lost in developmental limbo for quite some time. Today, Cryptic released a game-play trailer and a forty-minute webcast discussing the game.
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
*ahem* Libertarian Socialist here.
Socialism is about distributing wealth equally
No, it's not. The bait-and-switch redefining of socialism was done by the Bolsheviks to seal their hold on power, and accepted by the western power elite for the same reason.
Socialism is about people being in control of their own labor, by owning and controlling the means of production themselves.
o If you have a set of tools and use that set yourself to make furniture which you sell, that's socialism.
o If you hire someone else to make the furniture, and you take the money and give him back enough to live on, but not enough to buy his own tools, you have capitalism. *
o If you have a set of tools and let your friends, neighbors, relatives, or whomever you trust borrow them to make furniture when you're not doing it, that's communism.
o If you give your tools to the government so they can share them more fairly, that's state communism. It's also naive, since the government will quickly be occupied by people who are not going to share squat once they get their hands on everyone's stuff. (see: Soviet Russia, China, various other state "communist" nations.)
Distributing wealth fairly (not necessarily equally) is a communist ideal.
Supposedly all our social problems have gone away because everybody's "more evolved".
In Star Trek's defense, they seem to postulate that psychiatry will make advances towards reliable treatment of abnormal behavior in the future. Someone who feels compelled to own more than he can possibly use is treated as normal, even desirable in modern consumerist society, but I'd say he's got a borderline hoarding disorder. There's not a lot of difference between a guy who spends every waking hour trying to find ways to increase the numbers in his bank account and the old lady who has 40 cats, IMO. (I recall a psychiatrist about ten years ago who had worked with a number of Donald Trump Fortune-500 types, who said the most striking thing about them was that they had no "inner lives," that is, they didn't go for walks in the park or kick back listening to music for an afternoon like normal people. They were utterly driven. They'd get up in the morning and immediately start making phone calls, because that was all they did.)
If a hypothetical future psychiatry treats and cures such individuals, then a society designed to minimize their negative impact via pricing signals and other market forces becomes unnecessary. (Not that I believe it will, but it's possible.)
* You might wonder why it works out so that the employee doesn't figure out some way to get the money to go into business for himself. It's due to the design of the unfree market -- capitalism can only function under certain unnatural economic conditions. The first thing that's done in a third world country when the WTO and World Bank come in to "modernize" their economy is to have the government rig the market in such a way as to create those conditions. This involves robbing people of self-sufficiency and driving them into desperation so they will accept a bad deal as the "best alternative available," as the sweatshop apologists love to say. Kevin Carson has some detailed analysis of this stuff over at mutualist.blogspot.com which I highly recommend.
- mantar
Unless you have reason to believe they are lying the eye candy is part of the game.
Thanks for trolling, try again.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In mariner terminology, the chief was usually the second in command on a ship, even if outranked by the pilot and mates. The captain and pilot would decide where to sail, but the chief would be in charge of how, including keeping the boat afloat, which took precedence over any orders except scuttling.
On smaller ships, he could often double as a boatswain, being directly in charge of the seamen. Later, the title was split into Chief Mate and Chief Engineer, with the Mate being an officer, and the Engineer not. Depending on nationality, the chief engineer might still de-facto outrank all officers except the captain, despite not being an officer.
In mariner terminology, the chief was usually the second in command on a ship, even if outranked by the pilot and mates. The captain and pilot would decide where to sail, but the chief would be in charge of how, including keeping the boat afloat, which took precedence over any orders except scuttling.
It is different in civilian and military usage. In the Royal Navy, for example, the Captain was the commander of the ship, but until the development of a professional officer corps, the captain's primary skill was being able to fight his ship -- and originally was in direct command only of the Marine unit aboard the ship; the sailing master was the person who actually directed the sailing of the ship. The sailing master (shortened to master) was a warrant officer, along with the master's mates, and ate in the wardroom with the ship's officers, who were above him in the chain of command; the promotion of warrant officers was under the control of various boards and commissions, not captains, unlike the midshipmen and rates. The sailing master eventually became a commissioned office, becoming the navigation officer.