If Attorneys were in the Star Trek Universe

[a425couple]

see https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjRyxL4WYAA53dn?format=jpg&name=small

Meanwhile, has anyone else read,
"Redshirts", by John Scalzi ?

https://www.amazon.com/Redshirts-Novel-Three-John-Scalzi/dp/1491514388

Redshirts (novel) - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Redshirts_(novel)
Redshirts is a space adventure by science fiction writer
John Scalzi that capitalizes on tropes from Star Trek and
similar television series.
Publication date: June 5, 2012


Redshirts by John Scalzi - Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com › show › 13055592-redshirts
In John Scalzi's The Redshirts, the newest ensigns aboard
the Union Capital Flagship, the Intrepid, recognize they
are expendable. Not only that, they realize ...
Rating: 3.9 · ‎98,310 votes

Redshirts
by John Scalzi (Author),

Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal
Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union
since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, and Andrew is
even more thrilled to be assigned to the ship’s xenobiology
laboratory, with the chance to serve on “Away Missions”
alongside the starship’s famous senior officers. Life couldn’t
be better . . . until Andrew begins to realize that (1) every
Away Mission involves some kind of lethal confrontation with
alien forces, (2) the ship’s captain, its chief science officer,
and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive these
confrontations, and (3) sadly, at least one low-ranked crew member
(always one in a RedShirt!)
is invariably killed. Unsurprisingly, the savvier members
below decks avoid Away Missions at all costs. Then Andrew
stumbles on information that completely transforms his and
his colleagues’ understanding of what the starship Intrepid
really is . . . and offers them a crazy, high-risk chance to
save their own lives.

[Lynn McGuire]

I am fairly sure that Starfleet has Sovereign Immunity.

Lynn

[Quadibloc]

On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 1:07:14 PM UTC-7, Lynn McGuire wrote:

> I am fairly sure that Starfleet has Sovereign Immunity.

Also, who is Samuel T. Cogley, chopped liver?

John Savard

[Titus G]

On 8/12/22 08:12, a425couple wrote:
> see https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjRyxL4WYAA53dn?format=jpg&name=small
>
> Meanwhile, has anyone else read,
> "Redshirts", by John Scalzi ?

Yes. About a decade ago. The first three quarters were brilliant but the
codas were slow, soppy and boring.

[peterw...@hotmail.com]

Attorneys ARE in the _Star Trek_ universe; there is no if about it.
A long article by Paul Joseph and Sharon Carton titled
_The Law of the Federation: Images of Law, Lawyers and the
Legal System in _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ was published
in the fall, 1992 issue of the _University of Toledo Law Review_.

Enough episodes of _Star Trek_ have featured the legal system
over the years to form an extensive and consistent picture of
their system and how it differs from ours. The article can be
found in many university libraries and it has also been
reprinted in many books.

Peter Wezeman
anti-social Darwinist

[Ninapenda Jibini]

Titus G <no...@nowhere.com> wrote in
news:tmrl7i$puec$1...@dont-email.me:

> On 8/12/22 08:12, a425couple wrote:
>> see
>> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjRyxL4WYAA53dn?format=jpg&name=smal
>> l
>>
>> Meanwhile, has anyone else read,
>> "Redshirts", by John Scalzi ?
>
> Yes. About a decade ago. The first three quarters were brilliant
> but the codas were slow, soppy and boring.
>

He has a certain skill at the craft, but his books would be much
better if he were as clever as he believes he is.

--
Terry Austin

Proof that Alan Baker is a liar and a fool, and even stupider than
Lynn:
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration


"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Alan]

And I'm not just asking for an answer...

"I demand it! I DEMAND it!"

;-)

[a425couple]

On 12/7/22 19:21, Titus G wrote:
> On 8/12/22 08:12, a425couple wrote:
>> see https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjRyxL4WYAA53dn?format=jpg&name=small
>>
>> Meanwhile, has anyone else read,
>> "Redshirts", by John Scalzi ?
>
> Yes. About a decade ago. The first three quarters were brilliant but the
> codas were slow, soppy and boring.
>

Interesting. I also faded out at about
the 3/4 area.

[David Brown]

Saw others comment, there have been quite a few Trek episodes dealing with the legal system. The blind spot of the franchise is lawsuits and other civil litigation, which "should" be a major issue with the Next Gen holodeck malfunctions at least. The obvious handwave is that Starfleet would be conducting its affairs in military tribunals. The other fair excuse is that the modern legal landscape mostly evolved from the 1970s onward, after the original series was off the air.

[Quadibloc]

On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 9:02:22 AM UTC-7, David Brown wrote:
> The blind spot of the franchise is lawsuits and other civil litigation, which "should" be a
> major issue with the Next Gen holodeck malfunctions at least.

Indeed, it would be if the Acme Holodeck Company sold the Federation poor-quality
holodecks to put in its starships.

Actually, however, all the holodeck malfunctions depicted in varioius Next Generation
episodes have *not* been malfunctions of the holodeck itself, but malfunctions of
the ship's _library computer_ which controls the holodeck.

So the Federation would have to sue itself.

John Savard

[Thomas Koenig]

Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> schrieb:

> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 9:02:22 AM UTC-7, David Brown wrote:
>> The blind spot of the franchise is lawsuits and other civil litigation, which "should" be a
>> major issue with the Next Gen holodeck malfunctions at least.
>
> Indeed, it would be if the Acme Holodeck Company sold the Federation poor-quality
> holodecks to put in its starships.

I thought the Federation didn't use money... with the Ferengis as
a (ridiculed) exception.

[Paul S Person]

This is a very odd situation.

On the one hand, we are told (by Picard and implicitly by Kirki, and
perhaps others) that money is now obsolete. But what has replaced it
is never specified.

OTOH, in (IIRC) /The Unknown Country/, we see how the common low-rank
crewmembers live: stacked 3-deep in bunks in a common bay. This
reminds us that the rest of the people whose quarters we have seen are
all /officers/, and generally high-ranking officers at that.

Apparently, not using money has done /nothing/ to equalize access to
resources. Might make the disparity harder to quantify and so easier
to ignore, though.
--
"In this connexion, unquestionably the most significant
development was the disintegration, under Christian
influence, of classical conceptions of the family and
of family right."

[Thomas Koenig]

Paul S Person <pspe...@old.netcom.invalid> schrieb:

> On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 06:07:28 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig
><tko...@netcologne.de> wrote:
>
>>Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> schrieb:
>>> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 9:02:22 AM UTC-7, David Brown wrote:
>>>> The blind spot of the franchise is lawsuits and other civil litigation, which "should" be a
>>>> major issue with the Next Gen holodeck malfunctions at least.
>>>
>>> Indeed, it would be if the Acme Holodeck Company sold the Federation poor-quality
>>> holodecks to put in its starships.
>>
>>I thought the Federation didn't use money... with the Ferengis as
>>a (ridiculed) exception.
>
> This is a very odd situation.
>
> On the one hand, we are told (by Picard and implicitly by Kirki, and
> perhaps others) that money is now obsolete. But what has replaced it
> is never specified.
>
> OTOH, in (IIRC) /The Unknown Country/, we see how the common low-rank
> crewmembers live: stacked 3-deep in bunks in a common bay. This
> reminds us that the rest of the people whose quarters we have seen are
> all /officers/, and generally high-ranking officers at that.

Rank hath its privileges... you will find the same kind of thing
in all kinds of military organizations. Pay has litte to do with it,
except being correlated.

> Apparently, not using money has done /nothing/ to equalize access to
> resources. Might make the disparity harder to quantify and so easier
> to ignore, though.

Money (in something resembling a free market) is actually an
unbelievably efficient method of information compression.

Our products and processes are now so unbelievably complex that
even a simple part like an oil-resistant O-ring from NBR rubbers
is the culmination of an incredibly complex value chain, starting
with petrochemicals, ammonia, a highly complex rubber production
process, sulfur production, rubber chemical production, compunding,
and the machine technology for all of the above. And did I mention
the catalysts needed?

You don't need to know all that, you just need to order from a
catalog or the Internet, and it will cost you (say) 20 dollars
for 100 pieces.

Why does this work fairly well? As long as there is competition,
and somebody along the value chain raises the prices too much,
or there is too much of scarcity, somebody else steps in.

(And yes, I am well aware of where this fails, which is why
anti-trust authorities are so important).

The centrally planned economies of the Eastern bloc didn't have this
mechanism, and they failed economically because they had no way at
all to manage that complexity any other way, so they were misallocating
resources all over the place.

There is another important aspect: All large organizations have
one basic fault, communication. People at the top are being told
filtered news, according to what their underlings think they want
to hear. Companies in a reasonable free market will fail if they
overdo this (modulo "too big to fail", which is another point
why anti-trust authorities are important). Soviet-style combines
could not fail; it took the collapse of the whole system to
bring them down.

Or look at the military, which has no corrective influence as
long as it is not fighting wars.

[Paul S Person]

On Thu, 15 Dec 2022 06:38:59 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig

<tko...@netcologne.de> wrote:

>Paul S Person <pspe...@old.netcom.invalid> schrieb:
>> On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 06:07:28 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig
>><tko...@netcologne.de> wrote:
>>
>>>Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> schrieb:
>>>> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 9:02:22 AM UTC-7, David Brown wrote:
>>>>> The blind spot of the franchise is lawsuits and other civil litigation, which "should" be a
>>>>> major issue with the Next Gen holodeck malfunctions at least.
>>>>
>>>> Indeed, it would be if the Acme Holodeck Company sold the Federation poor-quality
>>>> holodecks to put in its starships.
>>>
>>>I thought the Federation didn't use money... with the Ferengis as
>>>a (ridiculed) exception.
>>
>> This is a very odd situation.
>>
>> On the one hand, we are told (by Picard and implicitly by Kirki, and
>> perhaps others) that money is now obsolete. But what has replaced it
>> is never specified.

Just a correction: I have no idea where the second "i" in "Kirki" came
from. D*mned typos!

>> OTOH, in (IIRC) /The Unknown Country/, we see how the common low-rank
>> crewmembers live: stacked 3-deep in bunks in a common bay. This
>> reminds us that the rest of the people whose quarters we have seen are
>> all /officers/, and generally high-ranking officers at that.
>
>Rank hath its privileges... you will find the same kind of thing
>in all kinds of military organizations. Pay has litte to do with it,
>except being correlated.

You find them in our military organizations, but this is the future,
and it is discouraging to see the regression.

I mean, really, even in Basic in 1969 the bunks were only two-high!

>> Apparently, not using money has done /nothing/ to equalize access to
>> resources. Might make the disparity harder to quantify and so easier
>> to ignore, though.

<snippo Paean to Money -- I agree with it, BTW>

>The centrally planned economies of the Eastern bloc didn't have this
>mechanism, and they failed economically because they had no way at
>all to manage that complexity any other way, so they were misallocating
>resources all over the place.

When I took one of my Math Courses (Linear Programming?) we learned
that it had been developed in WWII by the Western Allies precisely to
solve the problem of getting the /right/ products to the /right/ place
at the /right/ time. The "products" were, of course, tank/ship
components, supplies for the troops, transport for the troops, and the
troops themselves.

Seems to me that such a thing would make a planned economy quite
practical, since the main problem in such an economy was and is
getting the rignt things to the right places at the right times to
avoid bottlenecks and shortages.

But of the course the People in Charge would have to be willing to
keep their mitts off the process, and that they were not willing to
to.

>There is another important aspect: All large organizations have
>one basic fault, communication. People at the top are being told
>filtered news, according to what their underlings think they want
>to hear. Companies in a reasonable free market will fail if they
>overdo this (modulo "too big to fail", which is another point
>why anti-trust authorities are important). Soviet-style combines
>could not fail; it took the collapse of the whole system to
>bring them down.

It's worse than that: when they /do/ ask their employees what they
think about job-related issues, they use multiple-choice tests -- thus
restricting the answers to those they are willing to accept.

>Or look at the military, which has no corrective influence as
>long as it is not fighting wars.

That's true in the sense that actually having service members in
combat does introduce a degree of realism otherwise lacking.

But you mustn't ignore the role of tradition: "The US Army: 200 years
of tradition unhampered by progress" was a humorous part of the
bicentennial, but it is correct: military traditions impose a certain
amount of corrective influence.

This is why it has apparently taken 40 years for the Army to develop a
maternity uniform. Or maybe it's an improved maternity uniform. In the
mid-70s, the "maternity uniform" was -- civilian clothes. That's quite
a while for tradition to be overcome by reality!

[Quadibloc]

On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 10:05:23 AM UTC-7, Paul S Person wrote:

> On the one hand, we are told (by Picard and implicitly by Kirki, and
> perhaps others) that money is now obsolete. But what has replaced it
> is never specified.

Here is what I'd say to Captain Picard if I met him on that subject:

You don't have money in the 23rd century, you say?

This Enterprise-D of yours is a fine ship. Somehow, I doubt that it
just popped, one fine day, out of a giant industrial-sized replicator.

If, instead, it was put together by people, then they must have had
some reason to tear themselves away from listening to music,
writing bad poetry, or doing whatever else they might normally do
to amuse themselves, in order to spend time working on it. I suspect
that the construction of a starship like this involves enough hard work,
and work that must be done by qualified people to a high standard,
that it really wouldn't be practical to expect to be able to make a starship
like that by requesting volunteer labor.

Thus, your starship is convincing evidence that if you don't have anything
that you choose to call money, you must still have something which
performs the function of money.

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 11:39:03 PM UTC-7, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> Paul S Person <pspe...@old.netcom.invalid> schrieb:

> > OTOH, in (IIRC) /The Unknown Country/, we see how the common low-rank
> > crewmembers live: stacked 3-deep in bunks in a common bay. This
> > reminds us that the rest of the people whose quarters we have seen are
> > all /officers/, and generally high-ranking officers at that.

The _undiscovered_ country, but not the one "from whose bourn no traveller
returns"... it's a Shakespeare quote.

> Rank hath its privileges... you will find the same kind of thing
> in all kinds of military organizations. Pay has litte to do with it,
> except being correlated.

Well, this could indeed exist in the absence of money. One could
have a society that detests "fiscalism", as described in Isaac
Asimov's _The Caves of Steel_.

> > Apparently, not using money has done /nothing/ to equalize access to
> > resources. Might make the disparity harder to quantify and so easier
> > to ignore, though.

> Money (in something resembling a free market) is actually an
> unbelievably efficient method of information compression.

I don't know about information _compression_, but it certainly is
effective at information *transmission*.

In a free market, if somebody wants something, and is willing to
pay for it, someone will make it his business to supply it. This is
why societies with free markets don't _usually_ suffer from severe
shortages of toilet paper.

However, the free market is only good at transmitting information
about *that which can be monetized*. Information that the smoke
coming out of your factory's smokestacks is killing people (at least
if they're not people your potential customers particularly care about)
or other externalities resulting from market activity... never seems to
get anywhere without... the dreaded heavy hand of government
intervention.

> Our products and processes are now so unbelievably complex that
> even a simple part like an oil-resistant O-ring from NBR rubbers
> is the culmination of an incredibly complex value chain, starting
> with petrochemicals, ammonia, a highly complex rubber production
> process, sulfur production, rubber chemical production, compunding,
> and the machine technology for all of the above. And did I mention
> the catalysts needed?

> You don't need to know all that, you just need to order from a
> catalog or the Internet, and it will cost you (say) 20 dollars
> for 100 pieces.

Now, _this_ is true, and there was a famous essay on the subject,
called "A Pencil" or some such thing.

There is no alternative to the free market - but there is also a need
to recognize its limitations. Your comments on the importance of
anti-trust legislation and enforcement show you realize this. What
comes first to my mind are externalities like pollution, but guarding
against monopoly and monopsony - or, more specifically and generally,
guarding against the abuse of market power - is also very important.

As well as externalities like pollution, the information-handling
abilities of modern-day free markets tend to have another blind
spot.

Successful industrialized nations with free-market economies
normally have *convertible currencies*. Communist countries
as a matter of policy, and tin-pot dictatorships much of the time
by accident, have worthless paper which they pretend is more
valuable than it is.

However, while it is good to be able to have a convertible
currency, this basically removes information about the balance
of payments of one's country *from* the free-market system.

So people buy the cheaper stuff from China - with the result that,
since the expensive stuff workers in your own country could
produce is in little demand abroad, the central bank has to raise
interest rates to keep the money from becoming worthless, thus
throwing people out of work...

Creating a domestic economy that has full employment 100% of
the time, which is immune to disturbance from things like a global
depression - if the fundamentals are sound, stuff gets produced,
and the people are able to afford to consume it, only _imported_
goods might rise in price due to what's going on in the rest of the
world - requires a very different way of thinking about the world than
the one Adam Smith advocated in his book "The Wealth of Nations".

Now, his book _was_ a corrective to a destructive form of mercantilism
that was also unsound. In his day, nations had, as a goal, accumulating
as much silver (and, of course, gold) as they possibly could. That way
also lies disaster.

The _correct_ goal is for each nation to ensure that it doesn't spend more
than it can afford, thus balancing intake and outgo of foreign exchange.

In order to do that, while having a domestic economy that is stimulated
enough to provide full employment, being able to restrict and control
imports is absolutely necessary.

John Savard

[Paul S Person]

On Fri, 16 Dec 2022 06:05:06 -0800 (PST), Quadibloc
<jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:

>On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 11:39:03 PM UTC-7, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>> Paul S Person <pspe...@old.netcom.invalid> schrieb:
>
>> > OTOH, in (IIRC) /The Unknown Country/, we see how the common low-rank
>> > crewmembers live: stacked 3-deep in bunks in a common bay. This
>> > reminds us that the rest of the people whose quarters we have seen are
>> > all /officers/, and generally high-ranking officers at that.
>
>The _undiscovered_ country, but not the one "from whose bourn no traveller
>returns"... it's a Shakespeare quote.

<Quadi is responding to me here>
Thanks for the correction. What can I say but ... memory fails.

<snippo economic stuff>