Like everyone else here, Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard was a foundational part of my childhood. As it happens, I'm currently on bag 27/30 of the Lego Enterprise D right now. I've actually had the thought a couple of times over the past few years that this day had to be coming, and that it'd likely hit me hard when it did, especially after my dad's passing in 2024. (They're not particularly alike, aside from the hairline, but there's still a strong association in my mind, as my dad also loved TNG and was the one who got me into it.)
Anyway, it's a sad day, but I do appreciate that both his work and the influence he's had on people like me live on.
People too young to remember the 1990's might not know that Patrick Stewart's Picard was a sex symbol.
I was surprised by how many of my friends considered the character 'hot'; on paper, one would expect young people to write him off as a balding goody-two-shoes.
To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.
> To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.
I agree and although the prestige TV era has produced some wonderful TV it’s also been overflowing with antiheroes. I hope todays younger generation gets to see another character like Picard.
I have started to wonder if anti-heros are generally bad at a social level. If you train people to believe that bad people are not that bad and good people are not that good, and you should never believe the name on the tin, then people start carrying over those lessons to the real world, and encouraging antipathy since anyone who esposes good ideals is lying, and anyone who esposes bad ideals is playing 4d chess, or is not that bad - so what's the difference?
I feel like the rise of "virtue signaling" as a critique is a symptom of all of this: if I see someone visibly doing something good then it isn't actually good, rather they're just showcasing how much better they are than other people. Somehow a positive trait becomes a negative one.
My wife and I met through OKCupid, and one of the things that most caught my eye on her profile was that she had a crush on Picard as a teenager. I knew then that she was a woman of impeccable taste.
It's interesting how he was part of everybody's childhood. I watched TNG for the first time when I was over 40. And that series became something really special in our family and we all love Stewart, Frakes, Spiner and the gang.
Some of the best television ever made if you ask me.
> and we all love Stewart, Frakes, Spiner and the gang.
I think I’m at that point the characters and their actors feel like dear friends I have grown up with. Sir Patrick will be missed. I’m glad we had a chance to say goodbye to Picard on his own series.
To me, I’ll repeat to myself he was just recruited into Section 31.
There are likely valid points made here, but I think the conclusions are considerably too strongly held. For one thing, it's already clear that humans value the achievements of other humans outside of their pure economic value. We are impressed by the athletic, artistic, and intellectual abilities of other humans, even in fields where we are surpassed by machines or computers. Cars have been faster than humans for a century, but we still value Olympic sprinters. Computers have been superior at chess for decades, but we've all still heard of Magnus Carlsen. AI can now produce art that only the most talented humans could hope to replicate, but most of us aren't particularly interested, because there's no human mind behind it.
So assuming we did somehow manage to create a post-scarcity world, I think people would still want to learn and to improve their skills. And we would still value those skills. There would also still be work to do; work that either people do because they want to, and/or that we don't want computers doing for us. Much of it work that in today's world is undervalued.
In that utopian world, there would also be room for hobbies that could fill some of the human need to produce value that work currently does. Lots of people would love to be able to learn a craft or play a sport but don't currently have the time, money, or energy to do so.
I have plenty of concerns about the impacts of AI on the world, but IF we do somehow manage to get the good outcome where it truly is transformative and the benefits manage to be at least somewhat evenly distributed... well, I agree that we won't all just hang out, but I do think we'd be ok.
The problem is that pursuits you mentioned are 'winner take all' examples. Who knows the name of the 29th best chess player in the world? Probably not very many. And that's still a very formidable bar to cross for most humans on earth.
So then, what does a laid off business analyst who built and edited spreadsheets most of their life are to do now? Pick up athletics in hopes of making it at the seniors' olympiad? Shake their ass on TikTok in hopes of becoming a 55 year old "influencer"?
We celebrate the highest achievers most, but that doesn't mean that the rest of us don't feel satisfaction in similar pursuits. Many people gain satisfaction from improving their skill at chess or sports or other crafts. I play ultimate (frisbee) twice a week, and I can assure you it's not because someone might eventually pay me to do so. I do keep trying to improve though. I'm glad that my work schedule leaves me the time and energy to do that.
What? We’re talking about a post-scarcity future and you think someone will be depressed because they don’t get to edit spreadsheets anymore? Poor guy only has infinite opportunity to pursue their limits (or not!) in the area of their choosing…
Do I play hockey with the end-all-be-all of becoming the next Gretzky? Or do I play because I enjoy it and want to push the limits of my mind and meat-suit?
Maybe I'm cynical and have low status friends but when I look around only a minority pursue hobbies with any great dedication or consistency. People pursue careers to project status. When success no longer depends on merit it will devolve to proxies like nepotism, scheming, intrigue etc. We see how such utopias play out in regimes like Soviet Union or North Korea. Your only assets in such places are who you know and even that is very temporary as allegiances are reshuffled with some regularity and woe is you if you bet your fortunes on the wrong one.
i mean, i think a lot of people probably know the 29th best chess player in the world. they may not be world-renowned but i bet the experience of that person is that they get a lot of respect for being super good at chess. people still play chess at all levels to try to better themselves - i think most people who play chess don't do it because they think they'll eventually get to #1 in the world (same with basketball, or any sport).
a business analyst who edited spreadsheets already wasn't particularly high status - i'm not convinced their life would be worse if the job was removed from their lives and they could do whatever they wanted instead.
I've always wondered who the fans of minor league sports are, but I assume there's enough of them beyond the athletes' families and the major league scouts trying to farm the best players for their own teams. There's a niche for anything.
Nit: I’ve never heard of Magnus Carlsen, and I can’t imagine most people have, outside of those really into chess. The only chess person I’ve ever heard of is Gary Kasparov, and that’s only because it was a big deal when Deep Blue beat him.
It's unfortunate, but one problem with free public transport absent other changes is that then it becomes de facto free shelter, which degrades the service for people using it as transport.
That wouldn't be an issue if we also provided shelter to the most distressed people in our society. As if we don't have the technology to build housing on the cheap. Our lack of communal will to help fellow people is a real shame.
Homelessness only partially overlaps with what British authorities euphemistically refer to as "street lifestyles". The people you see blacked out in the gutter or ranting wildly on a subway car are disproportionately likely to be homeless, but their behaviour is not the result of homelessness - many of them do in fact have a stable home and most of the rest would continue to behave in an antisocial manner even if they were adequately housed.
The problem of persistent disorderly conduct by a small minority of highly disturbed people is either an unfathomably complex psychiatric issue, or a fairly straightforward carceral issue.
Yes, although the punishment shouldn't be the same as for crimes like eg. theft.
As for why, two main categories of reasons. First, for the good of the person themselves. By making it illegal, the state then has the authority to compel some sort of action. For a first 'offence' this could simply be sleeping it off in the 'drunk tank' (or in a hospital bed if necessary). For repeat offences, an escalating scale of compulsory treatment. Basically if a person is regularly passing out in gutters, it's likely only a matter of time before they kill themselves, so being nudged, then coerced, then ultimately compelled into treatment would likely benefit them. Of course, this relies on avenues for treatment rather than simple punishment being available.
The other reason is for the rest of society. People do not want to walk down streets where people are passed out in gutters. They will either feel compelled to try to help - which can be, or at least feel, risky, given that intoxicated and/or mentally ill people can be unpredictable - or they may feel badly for not doing anything. Regardless, if it's a regular thing, it will encourage people to avoid the area where they're likely to encounter such things. That will impact local businesses, residences, etc., leading to an overall decline of environment and services for everyone.
I think the argument is that it should be illegal to pass out lying across 4 subway/metro/tube seats.
And that is because it is not polite to take up more than the minimum space needed. (Like using seats for your bag, or putting your feet on the seat across from you.)
you can't possibly know that, in the world we live in. Not conclusively - the amount of other factors at play and the ubiquity of those factors - crushing social stratification, pay-to-live capitalism, the overwhelming pressure on people to produce or die (meaning that learning to produce is on them to figure out, and quick, or else.) If you had an example of a society where these things were not at issue, you could more easily make a statement like "their conduct is an unfathomably complex psychiatric issue or otherwise they just need to be punished enough".
It's quite possible that these people would have turned out fine if they grew up provided a path to integrating into society that was less burdensome. It's possible you're right, too, but without controlling for confounding factors there's no way to know.
> That wouldn't be an issue if we also provided shelter to the most distressed people in our society.
It's not an either-or. We can build more shelter to help homeless people, and at the same time we can dissuade them from using public transportation as de facto shelter.
After all, everybody's perfectly happy to keep homeless people out of their front yard or the local Starbucks. Nobody says "But we need to tolerate bums smoking weed in the middle of our coffee shop, unless we build enough shelter for all of them. ALL OF THEM."
to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...
> to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...
Aren't half of these wrong?
NIMBY-ism isn't particularly partisan. Find a suburb and it's probably full of NIMBY zoning rules regardless of which party has the majority there. This is one of the things which isn't red vs. blue, it's "got mine" vs. the people who don't get a vote because they can't afford to live there because they don't get a vote.
You also don't have to "solve housing the societal level" to keep the homeless from using the subway as a bedroom. That's the better way to do that, but you can also do things like build homeless shelters that resemble (and therefore have the density of) college dorms in places where the "neighbors" are auto salvage yards, warehouses, prisons, abandoned buildings or the like and are correspondingly less likely to object to putting them there. And then anyone you catch being disruptive on the subway gets a free one-way ticket to the shelter.
They are wrong but also unrelated to the issue of free public transport and hence include trade offs which don’t directly affect public transport.
Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.
To promote solar power, you have reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
To promote anti-vaccine ideology, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
To promote a strictly equal society where every person is judged by their abilities and not ethnic history and skin color, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
There are vested interests in every debate and saying we should aim for wholesale societal change for every low hanging result is a recipe for inaction (or at least, very delayed action)
> Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.
Do you actually though? Or do you just have to do it in a way that they won't stop you?
There are at least three ways to do that. You can do it in a way that it actually doesn't cause trouble for them, you can do it in a way where they can't stop you (e.g. at a different level of government where they have less influence), or you can do it in a way where they can't see what you're trying to do until after it's already done.
"Reduce the influence of lobbyists and money" doesn't even mean anything. If you want something to happen or not happen, you're lobbying. If you spend time or resources trying to achieve your goals, that's money. What people mean is they want to reduce the influence of people they don't like. It's fully generic, you might as well say that in order to win you have to defeat your opponents.
Shelter should be, but doesn't need to be housing. When people fear that public transportation becomes shelter they're not arguing houses will be built in train stations.
Having other places with a roof, some security and some public amenities should go a long way to avoid other services getting bogged down by homelessness.
homeless people are already trying to build that but the so-called "protectors of law and order" keep showing up with bulldozers for some reason, as if they actually want people to be sleeping on public transportation instead of in their own private tents. This is probably because they get paid proportionally to how many people they catch sleeping on public transportation.
People sleeping in their own private tents on public land in urban areas is as much of a problem as people sleeping on public transit is. I want protectors of law and order to catch and arrest people sleeping in tents in public parks just as much as I want them to do so for people using public transportation as shelter. If there isn't enough law enforcement resources to do both and it's necessary to prioritize, then I would reluctantly say to prioritize public transit, simply because public transit is more enclosed and so it's harder to quickly get away from people who are a threat on it. But ideally we'd do both.
people don't want to live in shelters. they don't provide enough safety or privacy. being out on the street feels safer. any housing must at least provide a private room and bathroom. and ideally not have all those people concentrated in one place.
an important factor in improving your life is integration in society. but that only works if you live among people already integrated, not if everyone around you is also not integrated.
the same reason why it's hard for people to escape poverty uf everyone around them is poor too.
Why shouldn't we have exactly the ambitions you're using as an argument against change? I support all of those proposals. The richest nation in history could do all of that easily if there was the will to do so.
If giving away free public services could be grifted to increase the bottom line of the ultra wealthy, we'd have a utopian society.
It's worse than that even. It is 'things are bad, therefore we can't begin to improve'. Weirdly enough that never goes in the other direction. The day that people realize that people without a lot of money are also people things will start to improve. And this is rather more than less likely to happen because I suspect there will be a lot more people without a lot of money soon compared to today.
We don't actually have the technology to build housing on the cheap for the most marginalized people in society, who would trash that housing without intensive and expensive and very often coercive support from some kind of social worker. One of the biggest reasons many homeless people avoid the homeless shelters that do exist for the most distressed people in our society, is because the other most distressed people in our society living in the same shelter are prone to stealing from them or physically harming them. And another reason is that they want to irresponsibly use drugs in a way that makes them a potential threat to others and so is banned by the shelter.
That's fine, but the original question asked why people respect devs who work at Meta given they haven't contributed anything. (It didn't explicitly say devs, but when meta employees are getting respect around here, that's who's being discussed.) Your parent reply demonstrated that they have in fact contributed a lot, so there are obviously some accomplished developers working there.
It's certainly possible to see the company as a net negative for society while also recognizing those contributions. One could even argue that that could simultaneously be the case, while the net effects of some particular devs working there are positive (though I could imagine reasonable arguments on both sides of that one).
Your local community also probably doesn't know or care a lot about water purification, power distribution, standardized shipping, or the myriad other technologies that make society work.
I believe that this is how your brain works, but it's far from universal. I've certainly never made anything like either of those number associations, nor do I associate most abstract memories with physical places (though I am familiar with the memory palace technique).
No, I decelerate as I'm landing, similar to what the car did. Obviously it's not literally jumping with legs, but surely you agree this was "more like jumping" than it was controlled falling, which was what I was responding to?
Anyway, it's a sad day, but I do appreciate that both his work and the influence he's had on people like me live on.
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