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Have you heard of Juicero or general techbro venture capitalism?
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
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Have you heard of Juicero or general techbro venture capitalism?
AKuz
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I never really considered that, but it is a really elegant explanation for a lot of things that we've seen.
That they sort of accidentally Ship of Theseus'd themselves into a tech plateau is a really interesting idea. They just kept replacing bits and bobs to get similar performance levels and just sort of shrugged and went with the reliability drop at the time because you A) still have other ships and systems that do perform perfectly well, and B) still have to have an advantage over the uncivilized barbarians.
By the time you're a few generations deep in this philosophy it just seems normal. And hey, 80% of the time you really can overawe the primitives anyway.
Orion Union contracts pre-Federation were lowest bidder to an almost absurd, Randian degree. Also that was in the old designer where you could get more performance by cutting reliability, which means they were probably actually designing a more capable ship and then began cutting corners.
My image of Orion Union vessels has always been that they are very graceful and nice on the outside, but actually horribly ugly machines once you get past the bodywork(!) or leave the areas they put dignitaries.
METAPHORS
My image of Orion Union vessels has always been that they are very graceful and nice on the outside, but actually horribly ugly machines once you get past the bodywork(!) or leave the areas they put dignitaries.
METAPHORS
AKuz
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Have you heard of Juicero or general techbro venture capitalism?
U mean "Techgirl venture hypercapitalism"?
> : P
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AKuz
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Techsapient venture hypercapitalism
You would sweep the Orion corporate culture's rampant misandry problem under the rug??!?!?!?!?
> : P
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Which tends to revolve around the idea that YES a large fraction or even a majority of your ideas will turn out crappy, but the ones that pay off will pay off so well that they compensate.Have you heard of Juicero or general techbro venture capitalism?
There may be specific individual venture capitalists who are in the habit of blowing tens of millions, then not examining how they wound up blowing tens of millions. These venture capitalists will end up running out of money in short order; Darwinian forces are very much in play here.
What you will not, on the whole, see, is (for example) a major corporation ordering an oil tanker that on further inspection turns out to be a cardboard cutout. Or someone buying jumbo jets whose engines fall apart every other week. There's a reason I talked about organizations, not specific individuals. A person can make stupid choices. You can make a lot of money by cheating the dumbest 10% of a large collection of individuals. But an organization tends to be more conservative and less likely to pick the absolute worst choices on offer, unless the organization is specifically set up to fail by people who stand to profit from the failure.
This isn't public versus private sector, it's just the iron law of hierarchies. You can't staff a large organization with incompetents at every level; sooner or later the law of averages catches up with you and some people who aren't flaming morons end up in charge of a lot of the mid- to upper level management positions.
That works, though it's a bit different from what I imagined. I imagine that the Orions really did go through a very distinct Dark Age where their technology dropped off sharply (due to crippling lack of infrastructure). They archaeologized and reconstructed their way... halfway up the ladder, shall we say, by reverse-engineering the still-working instances of Imperial lostech still around them. But so much of the reconstructed tech base was proprietary knowledge or a cut-and-try rule-of-thumb mess that was bodged together in ignorance of the (forgotten) underlying theory that there was little or no room for advancement past that point.
So the hallmark of post-Dark Age Orion technology is that it comes close enough to the Imperial peak that they can say "meh, good enough," but they would never, ever regain that peak by themselves, because they just don't do enough pure research anymore and they just don't have anyone who can cut through all the centuries-old patents some of the hypercorps have on key technologies.
As I understand it, the only customers were the Orion Navy (do you see anyone else with these designs in service?) and the only bidders for contracts were hyper Corp owned ship yards.
These hyper corps have been with no successful outside competition in centuries and their upper management are often related to one another.
The naval procurement officers are owned or black mailed into complying, the penalties for breaking contracts from the customer side bring new definition to draconian.
If you get some crusader who actually manages to force something past your pet judges, you sacrifice some middle management, change the name on the paper work of who owns the yard, and nothing else changes. After all, that crusader will either be broken or killed soon enough.
Wanted to type more, but on phone and the kids are bugging me to read them a book.
These hyper corps have been with no successful outside competition in centuries and their upper management are often related to one another.
The naval procurement officers are owned or black mailed into complying, the penalties for breaking contracts from the customer side bring new definition to draconian.
If you get some crusader who actually manages to force something past your pet judges, you sacrifice some middle management, change the name on the paper work of who owns the yard, and nothing else changes. After all, that crusader will either be broken or killed soon enough.
Wanted to type more, but on phone and the kids are bugging me to read them a book.
If you do the math it's not that bad. Reliability rolls once per year, if triggers rolls to determine which part is effected, then rolls again to determine severity of the incident.
So for a ship to be destroyed it needs to first flub it's annual breakdown roll (14%), then have the breakdown occur in either the Hull or Warp Core (2/8 parts), and finally it must flub the severity roll (10%). So all told there is only a 0.35% chance of Mekpali Light Escort exploding each year. With ten ships over ten years there is only a 35% chance of having lost one ship.
The bigger concern would be that regardless of the part a severity rating of Problem (5 to 9 on the 10pt scale) can knock a ship out of service for a quarter or two. So for any given MLE in any given year there is a 91.6% chance it will provide uninterrupted service but with ten ships over ten years you will be down one ship on average for eight of those years.
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Silicon Valley's "techbros" actually have something of a problem in that the main form of misogyny they get snapped at for (namely, that they don't hire or promote a lot of women) seems to be reproduced at every layer that feeds into them, rather than being created by them.You would sweep the Orion corporate culture's rampant misandry problem under the rug??!?!?!?!?
> : P
I suspect that gender imbalances in Orion culture present similar problems. If they didn't, they'd probably have been fixed by now. Even figuring out where they come from may be more challenging than most Orions care to bother with, possibly including most Orion males.
Alternatively, they just run around in circles pointing fingers of blame at randomly chosen organizations, trying to "fix" those organizations, realizing that doing so didn't fix the system, and running on to "fix" the next organization without ever really diagnosing the underlying systematic issues or fully comprehending what's going on at the intersection between biology, culture, and psychology.
In my more cynical moments I expect exactly this to happen to 21st century identity politics as a whole, and given Orion's status as a cyberpunk society, I suspect they've already long since reached that point. Outrage against the sexism inherent in the system is a permanent tempest-in-teapot that never actually accomplishes anything except to randomly cause inconsequential shakeups of people who were never really in charge of anything important anyway.
AKuz
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Personally I believe that capitalist systems unconsciously strengthen racism and sexism as a self defense measure, and you can't deal with any of those three individually, they must be tackled all at once.
But with regards to the conservative Orion Hypercorp culture specifically, I expect that a lot of the resistance to social reform would come from a combination of:
-The Hyper-Objectivist attitudes of the former executive ruling caste (Namely, that if someone were truly exceptional they would pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become rich, and since dudes never really seem to be able to, they must just be naturally more suited for submissive roles)
-And from a certain degree of Orion chauvanism. The old Empire was pretty sexist, and look at how amazing and exceptional they were. Plus the egalitarian solutions found by other species (Klingons, Andorians, both kinds of Vulcan, Humans, etc) clearly can't apply to Orion society as they are an exceptional case with very specific conditions that clearly would not apply with superior Orion culture.
Expanding on from my post on the MLE's reliability lets have a little more detail. We know that Problems can cause a quarter or two of delay but we don't have much detail. I'm going to assume breakdowns have the following distribution:
You could make a point about the fact there is a one in three chance of losing one of those ten ships sometime in that ten year period due to a malfunction. However you can just as easily make a counter argument that space is dangerous enough that the lower stats of a more reliable design actually make it more likely to be destroyed when it runs into something it can't handle. Whether or not that is actually the case statistically speaking we don't know but it seems like the sort of thing the Orion shipbuilders could easily fudge.
- Fun event
- Fun event
- Fun event
- Fun event
- Repairs Required (1 Qtrs)
- Repairs Required (1 Qtrs)
- Repairs Required (2 Qtrs)
- Repairs Required (2 Qtrs)
- Repairs Required (3 Qtrs)
- Repairs Required (4 Qtrs) / Loss of Ship
- Nothing Happens (86%)
- Component Malfunction Occurs (14%)
- Fun Event (14% * 40% = 5.6%)
- 1 Qtr of Repairs (14% * 20% = 2.8%)
- 2 Qtr of Repairs (14% * 20% = 2.8%)
- 3 Qtr of Repairs (14% * 10% = 1.4%)
- Ship Threatening Disaster (14% * 10% = 1.4%)
- 4 Qtr of Repairs (14% * 10% * 75% = 1.05%)
- Ship Lost (14% * 10% * 25% = 0.35%)
- 86x Passes
- 14x Failures
- 5.6x Fun Events
- 2.8x 1 Qtr lost
- 2.8x 2 Qtr lost
- 1.4x 3 Qtr lost
- 1.05x 4 Qtr lost
- 0.35x Ship Lost
You could make a point about the fact there is a one in three chance of losing one of those ten ships sometime in that ten year period due to a malfunction. However you can just as easily make a counter argument that space is dangerous enough that the lower stats of a more reliable design actually make it more likely to be destroyed when it runs into something it can't handle. Whether or not that is actually the case statistically speaking we don't know but it seems like the sort of thing the Orion shipbuilders could easily fudge.
The assumed distribution is just that: assumed. How acceptable it is changes massively by just small changes to the chances or distribution.
Compared to some of the things I have been called in the past that is quite acceptable.
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For my own part, I believe that all systems unconsciously strengthen whatever unconscious biases they contain, because that's pretty much the definition of "unconscious bias." Note that very deliberately non-capitalist countries tended not to have a much better track record on sexism than capitalist ones, for instance.
There's also an open question as to how far you can go and what is natural versus socially constructed. It's like, I wouldn't exactly be shocked if Orion males DID turn out to have a biological predisposition for taking instructions and "stand by your woman" behavior that made them a bit less predisposed to take leadership positions. Stranger things can happen and have happened in evolutionary biology.
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Yes, but for species where one sex is armed with a battery of pheromonal cues fit to turn the other sex's brains inside out, that kind of "stick to the partner at all costs" mentality is apt to be unevenly distributed between the sexes. Or more unevenly, or differently unevenly, the point being that there is a biological pressure that is apt to have implications for neurology farther down the line.
Brains are not machines; they don't have physically separate parts that you can unplug and replace with different parts without altering anything else about the system. Brains are spontaneously grown organic complexes, and many of the things that "tweak" how a brain develops are very broad genetic or chemical cues that have a lot of different effects in different parts of the brain.
Brains are not machines; they don't have physically separate parts that you can unplug and replace with different parts without altering anything else about the system. Brains are spontaneously grown organic complexes, and many of the things that "tweak" how a brain develops are very broad genetic or chemical cues that have a lot of different effects in different parts of the brain.
Although, given that they were primarily in competition with each other, one would expect Orion women to have a powerful array of anti-lady pheromones as well. Or at least, ones to smooth over conflict and help with resolving who's walking away from a meeting with what. I know at least one author who did Nu-trek fic about Galia where she was annoyed by how flat and unresponsive Nyota smelled when they were roommates.
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The Romulan who's conditioning broke and tried to do a lot of damage to/destroy Vulcan.
All of the people that we haven't caught that are infiltratiors as opposed to tourists.
Everyone in the clothing industry.
Everyone in the clothing industry.
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So, I had an idea for an omake, but before I commit myself to writing it I'd like to do a little fact-checking - because both my Trek knowledge and my TBG knowledge is somewhat lacking. And if the answers to the following questions rule out my idea - well, at least they're interesting questions in themselves. (And not ones that have been asked before, so far as I can tell... though I haven't actually read every comment in the entire thread. If it turns out they were asked before, my apologies.)
1) In TBG canon, are Federation Councilors cleared to know about temporal affairs, and if so, to what degree? If their clearance doesn't reach all the way up, about where does it sit?
2) In TBG canon, does the Federation President have a higher security clearance than Federation Councilors?
3) Is there an established quest and/or show canon for how the Federation deals with both having classified, dangerous secrets, but also telepaths everywhere?
Also, were I to write this omake, the perspective character would be President Okaar. Is there someone I could clear the omake with to make sure my characterization is in line with the QM's intended characterization (and to get feedback on whether I've missed some key aspect of Betazoid psychology/made Okaar sound or act too human)?
Edited: because I accidentally swapped the name of the Federation President with the name of a Krogan Warlord/geneticist/supremacist.
1) In TBG canon, are Federation Councilors cleared to know about temporal affairs, and if so, to what degree? If their clearance doesn't reach all the way up, about where does it sit?
2) In TBG canon, does the Federation President have a higher security clearance than Federation Councilors?
3) Is there an established quest and/or show canon for how the Federation deals with both having classified, dangerous secrets, but also telepaths everywhere?
Also, were I to write this omake, the perspective character would be President Okaar. Is there someone I could clear the omake with to make sure my characterization is in line with the QM's intended characterization (and to get feedback on whether I've missed some key aspect of Betazoid psychology/made Okaar sound or act too human)?
Edited: because I accidentally swapped the name of the Federation President with the name of a Krogan Warlord/geneticist/supremacist.
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Looking at the clip I'm noting that, in fairness, there's a tendency to take things out of context when trying to prove the military 'wrong' or wasteful.
For example, if you're still trying to refine the sensitivity of your heat-seeking missile, but you want to test whether the sensors work at all, test-firing at a target that's conveniently covered in electric hot plates is far from the worst idea. There's a big difference between a heat-seeking missile that can only home in on excessively hot targets, and a heat-seeking missile that can't see enemy tanks at all.
Likewise with the guided bomb, with the notable caveat that the PAVEWAY bomb did in fact end up working. That 50% failure rate is a hell of a lot better than what you'd expect from a 'dumb' bomb dropped from the same aircraft. Even if the production model was missing half the time, that just meant one jet would drop enough bombs to kill two or three enemy tanks in a single sortie, instead of four or six. Vast improvement over WWII or Vietnam-era standards, where it would take numerous sorties to kill one tank.
NORMAL military procurement tends to have the appearance of a certain amount of waste, and arguably there is a certain amount of waste, but the end product is usually not grossly dysfunctional.
But it sounds as though the Orion Navy was suffering from disproportionate, grossly abnormal military procurement, the kind that really is a waste.
We know the commander of Starfleet isn't always cleared to know about temporal affairs, and there are good reasons for that not to be the case. Among other things, because the commander is the single person in Starfleet most likely to accidentally create a predestination paradox when given information about the future. If Admiral Sousa had known about the Enterprise-B's fate at Aga Carmide, she might well have ordered the Enterprise kept out of the Licori campaign to avoid accidentally-ing the timeline if Enterprise was damaged... But by the same token, that would have significantly altered the outcome of the war.
For the above reason, I suspect, but so far as I know it is not canon, that there is standing policy NOT to routinely inform Federation senior officials about a temporal incident unless it directly affects them. Given that paradoxes are things that can happen, it isn't the President's job to take a list of future events they've been informed about by Temporal Investigations and successfully navigate the Federation through that list of future events. It's the President's job to do the best they can in the present and let Temporal Investigations (and the future Federation's own time agents) take care of making sure the time travel stuff works out.
I would not at all be surprised if temporal agents in particular have training to avoid having their minds read. We know the Cardassians can do it, so I wouldn't be surprised if Temporal Investigations knows how to do it.