It's Courics, not Keurigs, named after the journalist Katie Couric. It even said so in the South Park episode you got this pretend measurement from.
A keurig is a coffee maker... though, having read your post and in the off chance that somebody at the company made the same mistake you did... I'll avoid ever buying one.
>I could write a novel following the of grammatical rules of English. I doubt that,, since you can't manage a sentence doing so.
> Are you saying it would be the same as any other novel following the grammatical rules of English Human languages and programming languages are not comparable. Many things exist in human languages that do not exist (and where they crop up are actively removed from) programming languages. Nuance, metaphors, ambiguity, puns, double-meanings, irony, sarcasm, tone these are just some examples.
> Even if one was about KIng Harold and the other was about sentient turnips? Aaah, plot... yet another one. That said, there are more than one kind of rule - and that GP was referring to the subset of those rules which are, in fact, most comparable to plot. I.E. which algorythms to use for which kinds of tasks. Which, if you follow them entirely religiously would mean you can ONLY write stories about sentient turnips or king Harold because writing about sentient potatoes is prohibited. Now the vast majority of times - those rules are actually worth following - nobody has yet found a legitimate use-case for bubble-sort, but they are not unbreakable and indeed, the start of our art only progresses by breaking them. Searching could never be faster than quick-search, until somebody added a new kind of algorithm to the table when parallel computing became practical (that the parallel and linear versions of quick-search are very similar and the ancestry is obvious does not change that the parallel version is, indeed, a new algorithm with distinct pitfalls, behaviors and things you need to be aware off - there are no race-conditions in linear code for example).
> Even if one was for finding prime numbers and the other was for finding duplicate files? You're using a bad argument because you're looking at the wrong rule. How about the rule that says "this is the fastest algorithm for finding duplicate files" that rule can be mathematically proven right - but it doesn't mean it will STILL be right tomorrow, or that hardware changes will not mean that in a specific scenario a different algorithm may actually beat it. A device with peculiar read-write speed performance may actually perform better if you use a slower algorithm that allows slow seeks to happen while you're busy comparing previous results. Such a hypothetical storage device may not be common - but there are storage devices today with all sorts of variations in read/write/seek speeds (and filesystems adding their own factors on top of that). On a reiserfs file-system seeking through thousands of tiny files is fast, on most others it would be horribly slow. Just because the big-O notation proves an algorythm uses less CPU cycles, doesn't mean it's ACTUALLY going to be faster on EVERY piece of hardware, because CPU cycles do not exist in isolation.
Interesting how many of the "rules" are considered bad form in python (as one example) - and in fact following them is considered ugly, unmaintainable code. Then again, a lot of python rules specifically contradict the rules of everything that came before. A standard rule in every OOo course is that objects should not expose data, only methods for manipulating data - and the manipulation should be entirely confined to the class. Python considers getters and setters extremely bad form and insists that the variables be exposed directly instead (ruby sits in an odd place between those two views). Most OOo languages consider the split between public and private extremely important, python deliberately does not offer true private members (though it does offer a by-convention method of hinting to other coders that they shouldn't thoughtlessly access something).
The "rules" say don't make your own data structures, but python not only encourages this - it makes it ridiculously simple to ensure your custom data structures remain entirely compatible with the system default versions, so that standard tools and operations can transparently work with them (magic methods to make your class behave like a list or an iterator or a generator for examples) - Ruby takes that a step further by actually allowing you to replace any data-structure with your own compatible version - and transparently do this into code that loads your library (personally I think that takes it a step too far - it allows for great transparency but it also means that other developers can be caught very off guard when what looks like a string doesn't BEHAVE like a string).
So yeah, rules are generic but specific problems require specific solutions which may not always follow those rules, and more than that a - a lot of rules were based on hypotheses "we think if you do X then the effect will be Y" that was never subjected to the scientific method - and a lot programming languages have deliberately changed or abandoned those rules exactly because in practice they didn't work the way it was hypothesized and actually made code worse to read and maintain.
And what if I have legitimate reasons to want no logging at all ?
Or, as I recently discovered, I need to change the details of how a startup service installed from a repo is launched... on RHEL7 where the suggested command "systemctl edit" does not exist, and no amount of searching could find the configuration for it - it certainly wasn't in the path where google responses said it's meant to be..
I managed to find an alternative hack to remove the need to modify the bootscript in the end (I had to change which user the service runs as) but I had wasted the better part of an hour googling and reading man pages to try and figure out how to do this on a systemd RHEL7 box... this is not something that should be hard, this is such a basic sysadmin task that it should be ridiculously easy.
Corporations are international - if they can do it anywhere, they can do it everywhere - and there is plenty of history (recent history) of corporations engaging in paramilitary activity to protect profits. Not so long ago Coca-Cola actually opened fire on striking workers at a plant in South America. Even more recently London Based LonMin pulled another favourite trick: getting the police to do their dirty work for them, and killed 38 striking miners here in South Africa.
The amazing thing is that in the ongoing investigations which have yet to yield any restitution for the survivors or justice against those who pulled the triggers, the ministers who authorised force or anybody else... nobody has so much as questioned the complicity of the lonmin executives.
The reality is that if they can do it anywhere, the effects are felt everywhere - and the laws intended to prevent that are sadly not well enforced.
The US has had a law making it illegal to import goods made with child-labour since 2001. Yet child-labour remains rampant throughout the developing world - and the factories doing it almost exclusively manufacture goods for US corporations that sell it domestically. If the law was properly enforced, the biggest market would disapear, corporations wouldn't dare buy from any factory if there is even the whiff of a risk of child labour being used - and that would destroy the viability of child labour as a business model - and do a great deal to improve the quality of life of the entire developing world. There is literally no single intervention that can do as much good as to get the children out of the factories and into schools.
Not to mention that long before he did the laws of motion Newton made his name as a scientist with his groundbreaking work in... optics.... and nobody in the entire fricking royal society of science, the university of cambridge or the planet anywhere questioned whether optics was science or not... Of course then he went and wasted decades on alchemy which wasnt a science at all and largely rejected even in that time.
>It's not like everyone doesn't have to make hard choices concerning career and parenthood, and especially in the case of men; they have even less choices, less support from law, less support from government, and an over-riding expectation to sacrifice for their careers just to even be considered for having a family.
And you do know that a major aspect of feminist discourse is about how important it is to change that. That's is a patriarchal inequality motivated by the gender stereotype that women are nurturing and men are not. Breaking down that gender role will benefit women AND men - because it would mean that men could demand (with support from every feminist in the world) that paternity leave be the same length as maternity leave (which 'lo and behold is exactly what has happened in the most feminist societies on earth like Denmark - because feminists declared that men are just as capable of being nurturing as women and should not be deprived the opportunity to do so if they want to).
I sincerely doubt the pressures on men are worse than on women (it just doesn't fit the facts) they are certainly not non-existent and there is a fair share of male specific pressures that create their own hard choices, but your best bet for reducing those pressures and making the choices easier for men is to support feminism - which makes it easier for everybody.
I wish, that I had the means to spend the next few years at home with my daughter every day. I love my job, I love engineering, I love this company, and I love my very nice paycheck... but you know what, if I didn't need that paycheck to feed her, I would happilly give it all up in a heartbeat just to stop seeing that sad look on her face when she waves me goodbye every morning.
>You can't show me any such article because they do not exist.
When your table is always forced to eat beans, and you start demanding some steak - that does not mean you are looking down on other people at your table who enjoy beans and may want some. It just means you don't need to demand beans because you already GOT all the beans you can handle, you do need to demand steak because somewhere a long time ago, a bunch of people who didn't consult your table declared that, that table is only allowed to eat beans.
Feminism does not look down on stay-at-home parents, hell if anything they actively encourage it - especially when dads do it, what they DO look down on is taking the choices away from the individuals involved. If you want a career and do not want children, you should not be shamed for it. If you want children rather than a career, you should not be shamed for it. If you want both, you should not be shamed for that either.
And this goes for ALL genders, it just so happens that since nearly all the shaming is in the direction of women, the bulk of the defending has to be in that direction as well - but when people pick on a stay-at-home-dad whose wife is the breadwinner, every feminist I've ever met will defend their family setup too.
Here's what you don't seem to get- increasing diversity IS a merrit, it adds business value !
If my company did not decide that we want to be fully diversified in all aspects of the business 25 years ago - we probably would have gone bankrupt in the 1990s (as the vast majority of our peers did).
Why did we survive ? What value did diversity add ? Well, appartheid ended - and that meant that a whole lot of people previous excluded from the economy were now part of it, 50-million odd new potential customers. And we got almost all of them - because we were the only place where they could be served by somebody who understood their languages, their customs, their values.
We are in a trust based business (I work as a programmer for an investment company) - every single tier of our business is about client trust, that's why the entire building is open-plan - it's possible for a customer in the lobby to look all the way up to my desk on the third floor.
Being able to look up in the building and be assured of seeing people like themselves handling their money at every level, and being able to talk to somebody who can explain the complexities of investment in their own languages and with metaphors from their own experience is a critically valuable sales tool.
Diversity adds incredible business value.
But this is not only true in customer-facing things. It is also true in all creative endeavours, the more different perspectives can weigh in on a design - the more robust and innovative the design becomes. Diversity is the cheapest and easiest way to maximize the number of perspectives - because there are aspects of perspective that are shaped by culture, by language, by custom - things which different races, genders and sexual orientations experience to different degrees.
Like it or not, adding diversity is a merit because that adds business value - business value that could easily exceed a small difference in bare-metal skills. Did it ever occur to you that the hiring managers are at least slightly competent at their jobs - and hiring the staff they have the best reason to believe will make them the most money ? That when companies got on board with diversity, it was often because they had recognized the huge profits they were NOT MAKING BECAUSE they were not diverse enough ?
Half the interviewers will demand she suck their dicks. That probably won't encourage her to take the job.
At the other half, a huge chunk of her colleagues will assume she GOT the job by sucking the interviewer's dick (regardless that this is at one of the places where she wasn't asked, didn't offer, and got the job because she had the right skills for it).
And a significant chunk of them will go one step further and assume they get to demand she sucks THEIR dicks as well.
Which is all pretty sucky by itself... but where it gets fucked up is that when she complains about it - all the other guys in the offices will NOT say "seriously ? They did that shit ? Get these assholes fired". They will say: "NOT ALL MEN !"
Which is why that's a comment which, in and off itself, makes you an asshole.
True, but you also get to live with the consequences. For example - most non-assholes will want to avoid going anywhere near you. And if you have enough assholes in your field, that lots and lots of people (basically anybody who isn't also an asshole) stop wanting to be part of it. Then you get to deal with the consequence of having the whole world pointing fingers at you and saying "Look what you did ! Asshole !"
Most professional photographers don't use JPG either, we take pictures in RAW - storing as much information losslessly as possible.
JPG is something you export to for the low-quality versions you put in web based portfolios. For printing you use a lossless format like TIFF pre-sized correctly to page size (because auto-scaling tends to ruin shots) but what you save and store are camera RAW formats (CR2 for canon) which allows you maximum post-processing ability.
That's a pretty good hypotheses. I can see that explanation holding true.
That said, while SF rarely inspires actual research - it's role should not be diminished, I have yet to meet a single hard scientist (and I've met a fair amount) who does NOT credit SF for their decision to become scientists in the first place. Back to the future is cited surprisingly often in this regard (I say surprisingly because as time travel stories go it was scientifically pretty meh and far better ones existed even then, even in film and television, but I suspect this has something to do with the age at which these scientists saw the movie correlating with the age when our interests first start to form).
Funny how I SPECIFICALLY did not conflate reproduction with creation and specifically discussed them as distinct aspects - one of which is not post-scarcity.
But I guess if you got hold of a nice little strawman - then it's hard to let go eh ?
Oh - and I was talking of the modern age. Soviet Russia used to have an armed guard at every xerox machine. Copying anything was strictly controlled. Copying things you weren't allowed to was called "Samizdat" and played a major role in the overthrow of that particular autocratic dictatorship.
Modern copyright law definitely took a page out of the Russian playbook. Like I said - the motives are different, but the end result for ordinary citizens is - if anything, far worse.
Perhaps, but apply a little perspective. When Star Trek originated it was unique in having a positive outlook of the future at all. This was the height of the cold war, the height of the atomic fears. Most SF of the day were extremely dystopian, a positive - almost utopian vision at that time was a rare exception.
If anything, the dystopianism had peaked when Next Gen came out (this was the age of cyberpunk after all) - and again Star Trek saw a more positive vision.
It also didn't think we would get there easily. The Star Trek history has us close to extinction and going through several terrible world wars before we learn enough to manage to build a better world... in that regard at least, I fear it is quite accurate. Humans have a tendency to only learn things the hard way.
And what's wrong with that ? It is still an interesting thought experiment: what would a post scarcity society be like ? How would we organise it ? How would we keep the machinery working ? Is there some sort of special rewards for those who maintain automation and expend the time and effort to gain the skills to do so ? Or do we, like some have suggested, rely on the goodwill that people will choose to do so rather than give up the luxuries of a post-work society for themselves ?
Slashdot Mirror
It's Courics, not Keurigs, named after the journalist Katie Couric. It even said so in the South Park episode you got this pretend measurement from.
A keurig is a coffee maker... though, having read your post and in the off chance that somebody at the company made the same mistake you did... I'll avoid ever buying one.
>The problem then becomes one of deciding if what it fell on is a target or not.
Sssh... if the pentagon reads that line they will declare: "Obviously this is the time to replace the detonators with an AI".
> In other words, slightly less than monkeys flying out your ass
I have rectal-aero-primacitus you insensitive clod !
>I could write a novel following the of grammatical rules of English.
I doubt that,, since you can't manage a sentence doing so.
> Are you saying it would be the same as any other novel following the grammatical rules of English
Human languages and programming languages are not comparable. Many things exist in human languages that do not exist (and where they crop up are actively removed from) programming languages. Nuance, metaphors, ambiguity, puns, double-meanings, irony, sarcasm, tone these are just some examples.
> Even if one was about KIng Harold and the other was about sentient turnips?
Aaah, plot... yet another one. That said, there are more than one kind of rule - and that GP was referring to the subset of those rules which are, in fact, most comparable to plot. I.E. which algorythms to use for which kinds of tasks. Which, if you follow them entirely religiously would mean you can ONLY write stories about sentient turnips or king Harold because writing about sentient potatoes is prohibited.
Now the vast majority of times - those rules are actually worth following - nobody has yet found a legitimate use-case for bubble-sort, but they are not unbreakable and indeed, the start of our art only progresses by breaking them. Searching could never be faster than quick-search, until somebody added a new kind of algorithm to the table when parallel computing became practical (that the parallel and linear versions of quick-search are very similar and the ancestry is obvious does not change that the parallel version is, indeed, a new algorithm with distinct pitfalls, behaviors and things you need to be aware off - there are no race-conditions in linear code for example).
> Even if one was for finding prime numbers and the other was for finding duplicate files?
You're using a bad argument because you're looking at the wrong rule. How about the rule that says "this is the fastest algorithm for finding duplicate files" that rule can be mathematically proven right - but it doesn't mean it will STILL be right tomorrow, or that hardware changes will not mean that in a specific scenario a different algorithm may actually beat it. A device with peculiar read-write speed performance may actually perform better if you use a slower algorithm that allows slow seeks to happen while you're busy comparing previous results. Such a hypothetical storage device may not be common - but there are storage devices today with all sorts of variations in read/write/seek speeds (and filesystems adding their own factors on top of that). On a reiserfs file-system seeking through thousands of tiny files is fast, on most others it would be horribly slow.
Just because the big-O notation proves an algorythm uses less CPU cycles, doesn't mean it's ACTUALLY going to be faster on EVERY piece of hardware, because CPU cycles do not exist in isolation.
Interesting how many of the "rules" are considered bad form in python (as one example) - and in fact following them is considered ugly, unmaintainable code. Then again, a lot of python rules specifically contradict the rules of everything that came before.
A standard rule in every OOo course is that objects should not expose data, only methods for manipulating data - and the manipulation should be entirely confined to the class. Python considers getters and setters extremely bad form and insists that the variables be exposed directly instead (ruby sits in an odd place between those two views).
Most OOo languages consider the split between public and private extremely important, python deliberately does not offer true private members (though it does offer a by-convention method of hinting to other coders that they shouldn't thoughtlessly access something).
The "rules" say don't make your own data structures, but python not only encourages this - it makes it ridiculously simple to ensure your custom data structures remain entirely compatible with the system default versions, so that standard tools and operations can transparently work with them (magic methods to make your class behave like a list or an iterator or a generator for examples) - Ruby takes that a step further by actually allowing you to replace any data-structure with your own compatible version - and transparently do this into code that loads your library (personally I think that takes it a step too far - it allows for great transparency but it also means that other developers can be caught very off guard when what looks like a string doesn't BEHAVE like a string).
So yeah, rules are generic but specific problems require specific solutions which may not always follow those rules, and more than that a - a lot of rules were based on hypotheses "we think if you do X then the effect will be Y" that was never subjected to the scientific method - and a lot programming languages have deliberately changed or abandoned those rules exactly because in practice they didn't work the way it was hypothesized and actually made code worse to read and maintain.
>They were our nukes. It's not cool to drop nukes on a country you're not at war with.
To be fair, it's also not cool to drop nukes on a country you ARE at war with... that sort of shit leads to extinction level events.
And what if I have legitimate reasons to want no logging at all ?
Or, as I recently discovered, I need to change the details of how a startup service installed from a repo is launched... on RHEL7 where the suggested command "systemctl edit" does not exist, and no amount of searching could find the configuration for it - it certainly wasn't in the path where google responses said it's meant to be..
I managed to find an alternative hack to remove the need to modify the bootscript in the end (I had to change which user the service runs as) but I had wasted the better part of an hour googling and reading man pages to try and figure out how to do this on a systemd RHEL7 box... this is not something that should be hard, this is such a basic sysadmin task that it should be ridiculously easy.
Dude... that scene in fight club about planet McDonalds was supposed to be horrifying not inspirational.
Steve Balmer was 20-something ?
Corporations are international - if they can do it anywhere, they can do it everywhere - and there is plenty of history (recent history) of corporations engaging in paramilitary activity to protect profits. Not so long ago Coca-Cola actually opened fire on striking workers at a plant in South America.
Even more recently London Based LonMin pulled another favourite trick: getting the police to do their dirty work for them, and killed 38 striking miners here in South Africa.
The amazing thing is that in the ongoing investigations which have yet to yield any restitution for the survivors or justice against those who pulled the triggers, the ministers who authorised force or anybody else... nobody has so much as questioned the complicity of the lonmin executives.
The reality is that if they can do it anywhere, the effects are felt everywhere - and the laws intended to prevent that are sadly not well enforced.
The US has had a law making it illegal to import goods made with child-labour since 2001. Yet child-labour remains rampant throughout the developing world - and the factories doing it almost exclusively manufacture goods for US corporations that sell it domestically. If the law was properly enforced, the biggest market would disapear, corporations wouldn't dare buy from any factory if there is even the whiff of a risk of child labour being used - and that would destroy the viability of child labour as a business model - and do a great deal to improve the quality of life of the entire developing world. There is literally no single intervention that can do as much good as to get the children out of the factories and into schools.
About half the other posts discussed those cases, you think it's okay if one of them considered something else ?
It's not hard to find feminist discourse like you describe, only ALL of it.
Not to mention that long before he did the laws of motion Newton made his name as a scientist with his groundbreaking work in... optics.... and nobody in the entire fricking royal society of science, the university of cambridge or the planet anywhere questioned whether optics was science or not...
Of course then he went and wasted decades on alchemy which wasnt a science at all and largely rejected even in that time.
Now this is stuff that matter.
>It's not like everyone doesn't have to make hard choices concerning career and parenthood, and especially in the case of men; they have even less choices, less support from law, less support from government, and an over-riding expectation to sacrifice for their careers just to even be considered for having a family.
And you do know that a major aspect of feminist discourse is about how important it is to change that. That's is a patriarchal inequality motivated by the gender stereotype that women are nurturing and men are not. Breaking down that gender role will benefit women AND men - because it would mean that men could demand (with support from every feminist in the world) that paternity leave be the same length as maternity leave (which 'lo and behold is exactly what has happened in the most feminist societies on earth like Denmark - because feminists declared that men are just as capable of being nurturing as women and should not be deprived the opportunity to do so if they want to).
I sincerely doubt the pressures on men are worse than on women (it just doesn't fit the facts) they are certainly not non-existent and there is a fair share of male specific pressures that create their own hard choices, but your best bet for reducing those pressures and making the choices easier for men is to support feminism - which makes it easier for everybody.
I wish, that I had the means to spend the next few years at home with my daughter every day. I love my job, I love engineering, I love this company, and I love my very nice paycheck... but you know what, if I didn't need that paycheck to feed her, I would happilly give it all up in a heartbeat just to stop seeing that sad look on her face when she waves me goodbye every morning.
>You can't show me any such article because they do not exist.
When your table is always forced to eat beans, and you start demanding some steak - that does not mean you are looking down on other people at your table who enjoy beans and may want some. It just means you don't need to demand beans because you already GOT all the beans you can handle, you do need to demand steak because somewhere a long time ago, a bunch of people who didn't consult your table declared that, that table is only allowed to eat beans.
Feminism does not look down on stay-at-home parents, hell if anything they actively encourage it - especially when dads do it, what they DO look down on is taking the choices away from the individuals involved.
If you want a career and do not want children, you should not be shamed for it.
If you want children rather than a career, you should not be shamed for it.
If you want both, you should not be shamed for that either.
And this goes for ALL genders, it just so happens that since nearly all the shaming is in the direction of women, the bulk of the defending has to be in that direction as well - but when people pick on a stay-at-home-dad whose wife is the breadwinner, every feminist I've ever met will defend their family setup too.
Here's what you don't seem to get- increasing diversity IS a merrit, it adds business value !
If my company did not decide that we want to be fully diversified in all aspects of the business 25 years ago - we probably would have gone bankrupt in the 1990s (as the vast majority of our peers did).
Why did we survive ? What value did diversity add ? Well, appartheid ended - and that meant that a whole lot of people previous excluded from the economy were now part of it, 50-million odd new potential customers. And we got almost all of them - because we were the only place where they could be served by somebody who understood their languages, their customs, their values.
We are in a trust based business (I work as a programmer for an investment company) - every single tier of our business is about client trust, that's why the entire building is open-plan - it's possible for a customer in the lobby to look all the way up to my desk on the third floor.
Being able to look up in the building and be assured of seeing people like themselves handling their money at every level, and being able to talk to somebody who can explain the complexities of investment in their own languages and with metaphors from their own experience is a critically valuable sales tool.
Diversity adds incredible business value.
But this is not only true in customer-facing things. It is also true in all creative endeavours, the more different perspectives can weigh in on a design - the more robust and innovative the design becomes. Diversity is the cheapest and easiest way to maximize the number of perspectives - because there are aspects of perspective that are shaped by culture, by language, by custom - things which different races, genders and sexual orientations experience to different degrees.
Like it or not, adding diversity is a merit because that adds business value - business value that could easily exceed a small difference in bare-metal skills. Did it ever occur to you that the hiring managers are at least slightly competent at their jobs - and hiring the staff they have the best reason to believe will make them the most money ? That when companies got on board with diversity, it was often because they had recognized the huge profits they were NOT MAKING BECAUSE they were not diverse enough ?
Half the interviewers will demand she suck their dicks. That probably won't encourage her to take the job.
At the other half, a huge chunk of her colleagues will assume she GOT the job by sucking the interviewer's dick (regardless that this is at one of the places where she wasn't asked, didn't offer, and got the job because she had the right skills for it).
And a significant chunk of them will go one step further and assume they get to demand she sucks THEIR dicks as well.
Which is all pretty sucky by itself... but where it gets fucked up is that when she complains about it - all the other guys in the offices will NOT say "seriously ? They did that shit ? Get these assholes fired". They will say: "NOT ALL MEN !"
Which is why that's a comment which, in and off itself, makes you an asshole.
True, but you also get to live with the consequences.
For example - most non-assholes will want to avoid going anywhere near you. And if you have enough assholes in your field, that lots and lots of people (basically anybody who isn't also an asshole) stop wanting to be part of it.
Then you get to deal with the consequence of having the whole world pointing fingers at you and saying "Look what you did ! Asshole !"
Sounds like a great way to save the great white from it's current vulnerable state.
Most professional photographers don't use JPG either, we take pictures in RAW - storing as much information losslessly as possible.
JPG is something you export to for the low-quality versions you put in web based portfolios. For printing you use a lossless format like TIFF pre-sized correctly to page size (because auto-scaling tends to ruin shots) but what you save and store are camera RAW formats (CR2 for canon) which allows you maximum post-processing ability.
That's a pretty good hypotheses. I can see that explanation holding true.
That said, while SF rarely inspires actual research - it's role should not be diminished, I have yet to meet a single hard scientist (and I've met a fair amount) who does NOT credit SF for their decision to become scientists in the first place. Back to the future is cited surprisingly often in this regard (I say surprisingly because as time travel stories go it was scientifically pretty meh and far better ones existed even then, even in film and television, but I suspect this has something to do with the age at which these scientists saw the movie correlating with the age when our interests first start to form).
Funny how I SPECIFICALLY did not conflate reproduction with creation and specifically discussed them as distinct aspects - one of which is not post-scarcity.
But I guess if you got hold of a nice little strawman - then it's hard to let go eh ?
Oh - and I was talking of the modern age. Soviet Russia used to have an armed guard at every xerox machine. Copying anything was strictly controlled. Copying things you weren't allowed to was called "Samizdat" and played a major role in the overthrow of that particular autocratic dictatorship.
Modern copyright law definitely took a page out of the Russian playbook. Like I said - the motives are different, but the end result for ordinary citizens is - if anything, far worse.
Perhaps, but apply a little perspective. When Star Trek originated it was unique in having a positive outlook of the future at all. This was the height of the cold war, the height of the atomic fears. Most SF of the day were extremely dystopian, a positive - almost utopian vision at that time was a rare exception.
If anything, the dystopianism had peaked when Next Gen came out (this was the age of cyberpunk after all) - and again Star Trek saw a more positive vision.
It also didn't think we would get there easily. The Star Trek history has us close to extinction and going through several terrible world wars before we learn enough to manage to build a better world... in that regard at least, I fear it is quite accurate. Humans have a tendency to only learn things the hard way.
And what's wrong with that ? It is still an interesting thought experiment: what would a post scarcity society be like ? How would we organise it ? How would we keep the machinery working ? Is there some sort of special rewards for those who maintain automation and expend the time and effort to gain the skills to do so ? Or do we, like some have suggested, rely on the goodwill that people will choose to do so rather than give up the luxuries of a post-work society for themselves ?