548. Star Trek: The Next Futurama 39 - The Luck of the Fryrish
Added 2022-11-29 14:00:08 +0000 UTC
If you forgot, this show takes a Futurama episode and thematically pairs it with an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which works surprisingly well.
This episode Michael and David discuss what’s happening on twitter right now, whether or not Kirk would be into talking about cancel culture, and the classic Futurama episode “The Luck of the Fryrish.”
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Comments
Two quick thoughts on how star trek's post needs no money system could work; A positive spin would be access and speciality of product: yes, if you want wine you can go to a replicator and get some Synthahol, but if you want the 'good' wine you have to grow it out of the ground and bottle it. This takes time, and even if they're distributing g it to anyone who asks, it's still going to have a long waiting list. But if you work at the vineyard, maybe you can get bumped to the top of the list, or get bonus bottles or some such. Would encourage people to specialize in certain jobs that gives them a 'unique value' without having to pay them, and people can self sort to the things that intrest them/ they want extra be edits from. Another, grimmer idea is that all the manual labor is done by prisoners... we know that the federation has penal colonies...
Russell Fournier
2023-06-19 21:05:10 +0000 UTCThis is my favourite coherent incoherent rant on the citadel
Vindalf
2023-01-23 16:27:15 +0000 UTCSame! Every episode of the Fry's family tetrafecta hits hard
David Astika
2022-12-02 20:51:20 +0000 UTCDamn, and Adam by the Birch thought they went long lol
E l i j a h
2022-11-30 21:58:32 +0000 UTCGreed is actually somewhat new, in the mass accumulatory sense that we think of it now at least. Two books by the anthropologist David Graeber go into both the common myths we believe about pre-capitalist societies, and about how different cultures have always formed their society structures with much more novelty than we ever usually think (we tend to believe more deterministic things like: hunter gatherers were like this, introduction of agriculture did this, and hierarchies and economy types are predictable outcomes of the conditions that they arose from). One of which is quite famous, it's Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, and the other, which is much more recent (2021) and thus less well known, is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Graeber actually died within a month of finishing the second book, and so press/publication tours were handled almost exclusively by the Co-Author, archeologist David Wengrow. That's all to say that humanity has had egalitarian structures under all kinds of conditions in our history, and whether or not a culture goes that way is not really dependent on access to magic scifi replicators. If you look at how humans have lived to compared to other complex life, we basically eliminated a large variety of scarcity conditions within the first few generations of having our minds/bipedal legs/opposable thumbs/mouths the way they are now. We've been living in -near- post scarcity ever since, with almost all deviations from that being man-made. It is generally agreed upon that all famines of the 20th and 21st centuries are the result of either mismanagement or cruelty. The first hunter-gatherer tribe that ever had its work habits studied, living in a very brutal area of African desert, was found to work an average of 15 hours a week. 30 something during the very hard times, and almost not at all during the easy times (it was remarked that they would go about their day and the food they needed would just be growing right there on a bush that they would pick up and just keep walking on their way to do whatever). If you are a black 5-year-old living in Washington D.C. your life expectancy is not higher than it would have been for you 30,000 years ago, but you are going to be expected to work around 3 times as many hours, and that's before you even count hours spent in commute or under the duress that this system costs you. Now I love blood transfusions and obstetrics (the largest contributors to our life span increase) and vaccines and moving pictures, but none of that necessitates that our society be one way or another, and has never necessitated that. And while the biggest player in the game right now is what it is, it is not that way because of how it represents some core human nature element better than any other model, but rather it has a lot more to do with chance and incomprehensibly complex elements than is often comfortable to admit. What if Genghis Khan hadn't had a heart attack right before entering Europe, which caused his army to turn around (and thereby leaving Christian countries more intact than their Islamic neighbors)? What if the black plague had started first in North America, and European contact had the opposite flow of novel diseases? The Confederate South could have won their war for independence. Einstein could have never written a letter to the president outlining how to make a nuclear bomb. Mathematicians could have rediscovered how to do Fast-Fourier Transfers earlier, which would have allowed the early attempts at nuclear non-proliferation treaties to go forward (early 50's) as the reason it didn't work was an inability to detect underground atomic testing (which made them unenforceable), preventing the nuclear arms race. Justin Timberlake could have played Elton John in Rocketman. Justin Timberlake! Nothing in this world is certain, not even the casting of beloved gay rock ballad icons. Wait.. what was I talking about?
E l i j a h
2022-11-30 20:25:28 +0000 UTCGreat episode! It's funny, in listening to Dave's arguments for Hive vs. Post, I'm reminded of when I sold Mini-disc vs. iPods back in the day. Mini-Disc seemed like the much better option but iPods won out. Very hard to know what tech will take off, and betting on "better engineered" sadly doesn't always correlate to success.
Dre
2022-11-30 16:11:57 +0000 UTCBest episode ever. Every section was excellent. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this pairing. Excellent podcast gents.
Steve Snyder
2022-11-29 23:39:16 +0000 UTCI think, for a post-needs world to work, all of the basic needs (food, shelter healthcare) should be guaranteed but just at or a little above subsistence levels. You should be able to live basically without having to worry. However, work should still be rewarded and incentivised. Especially work that improves or progresses society, but also if someone is willing to put in the time and effort to become an artisan at something or preserve a culturally significant way of doing things. But also there should be a ceiling, no billionaires. Fundamentally, businesses would have to change from being profit driven to being motivated by progress or social standing. Wow, this got long.
Adam by the Birch
2022-11-29 16:27:28 +0000 UTCEven hearing the summary of the twist in fryrish makes me tear up a bit
red sands
2022-11-29 15:47:43 +0000 UTC
