Science fiction is in it’s essence the exploration of a situation when all the confounding factors have been magicked/scienced away.

Not uncommonly it explores the requirements of the technical solution, what would the machine need to do for this to work out? And/or What happens if it doesn’t?

Take for example “Do androids dream of electric sheep” by Philip K Dick, it’s about finding androids advanced enough not to know they’re artificial and how to identify and relate to them when the only diagnostic is slow, clumsy, and suspect. It’s more an exploration of what makes a person than it’s around the marvels of The Machine™.

During the 1900s the vehicle for science to magick with had been machines, computers and AI. Remember that space travel, fission power, psychology, modern medicine were all new, hope inducing breakthroughs just this same period.

There’s also the issue that the definition of the genre came after it becoming large enough to matter. The edges between scifi, punk/cyberpunk, speculative fiction, isekai and even to fantasy are all made after the fact, meaning modern machines go into scifi, old machines go into steam-/diesel-/etc-punk. The main difference between Science, Magick, and Eldritch horror is how detailed the mechanics of the solution are described, and speak to different people.

But on the topic of the story not being centered around a machine: try the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.

Or go the entirely other way with Ring World by Larry Niven. There’s plenty of machines-did-it in the fringes, but the central theme is to figure out what would be needed for a Ring World to exist, what would happen on it, and how would it be managed. It’s an exploration of physics more than anything - more “what is the machine” than “machines-did-it”.

And the Foundation series (Asimov) famously explore the premise “what if sociology works”, and the other details solved by throwing machines at them.

You also have The Culture (Iain Banks) series that center on/around post-scarcity society and explore that.

Apparently privileged (cis, white, educated middle class or equivalent) men apply when fulfilling 60% of the requirements. Women and minorities 100%.

Maybe that’s why they have the ridiculous reqs?

Cats do pant, but also run hotter and enjoy higher temperatures than humans (24-26 °C depending on race).

Also, cats have lots of ways to release heat, cats can arrange their fur to release more heat (or burr it to trap more), they lay on cool ground, they can lick themselves for evaporative cooling, and of course seek shade when it gets hot.

We had a hot summer with temperatures of over 30 °C indoors and I got worried my European shorthair would overheat, got them a gel pad that wicks away heat when laid upon, but they thought it was ridiculous and just laid on the concrete floor in the shade whenever too hot and was super comfy and lazy.

A conceivable way could be to disrupt the nuclear force of the target atoms, maybe like an anti-Pion/Gluon ray that self-propagates the reaction through the released energy.

(As we might remember, splitting the atom yields a bunch of energy, and uncontrolled such reactions go Hiroshima)

It might be controlled by sub-particle lensing, probably some kind of magnetic field, to be active at a specific distance.

For the reaction to be contained, either there’s a radially limiting component (air is not particle dense enough to propagate the reaction, or atoms not energy dense enough) or it’s a cascade triggered by the beam which stops when the beam stops (or the reaction gets too far away from it)

As I believe Pions and Gluons are their own anti-particles, I don’t know how we would go about doing this, but hey, that’s for Science!™ to solve.

Precisely, so the Federation may be anarchist, even though the member races aren’t.

With what we know about how the Federation interacts with other races and planets, real world logic would indicate that the humans could be (and live) the model that the Federation is built upon.

All this is conjecture ofc, and is probably as much an exercise in understanding post-scarcity anarchism as possible Star Trek lore :p

Which is inherently anarchist :P

As it seems a common confusion in this thread, I repeat, anarchism doesn’t have to be without government or rules, several forms of anarchism are focused on not limiting individuals freedoms and/or not allowing power over eachother (while accepting government and rules not contrary to that). Both of which I believe describe how the Federation works.

That’s one form of it, but there are plenty other schools of thought that overlap quite significantly with the Federation, check out the primer on Wikipedia.

Anarchist doesn’t need to mean without government, simply that no one is above another, which is echoed in how the Federation is structured towards the other races.

I’d say they’re post-scarcity anarchist. There’s no central/communal resource dispersal as needed for socialism, nor the central/communal resource allocation/planning needed for communism.

There’s seemingly no authority outside starfleet exerting any power, nor does anyone ever claim a motivation beyond exploration or study (to do something meaningful). The lack of money and unlimited access to replicated resources pending available dilithium also points to a society without exploitative discrepancies.

The humans also never are reported to have any resource hogging, the only tensions/stratification seem to be militarily (and against external parties also diplomatically), meritocratic, and even then the bottleneck seems mostly to be to not fall behind other races.

I don’t see neither capitalism, socialism, communism, despotism, theocracy, nor fascism, but many aspects of anarchism. If you’ve read anything about The Culture, they openly speak about being anarchist, and it’s very similar to Star Trek.

'murr’ca?

One percent relative what the market was at the starting point.

The market today is 237 % of starting point (probably 1990).

That’s not how the legal system almost anywhere works, and especially not at the ICC.

It’s the prosecution that had to present evidence for their claims.

From the video it seems they were spotted by drones on the way to the deployment site and were under drone surveillance during setup, during which artillery hit.

I have a hard time imagining that the observation drones are that sneaky, so I’d guess it’s another issue of poor battlefield command structure forcing the compromised position

Eggselln’t

Because countering Russia has been the US’ primary offer in all deals and bargaining for the last 50 years

Because countering Russia has been the US’ primary offer in all deals and bargaining for the last 50 years?

I’m guessing because a lot of them aren’t clearly marked “Russian state war chest part 12”, but rather things like “Gazprom reserve fund” or “Oligarchs discretionary fund” which would muddy the border between state and private assets.

State assets might be fine to seize to cover state costs, but the legality of seizing the others’ might by grayer.

Looks so cool!

I have no experience with your particular printer, but I’ve had an issue where the bed was very sensitive due to being the edge of the adjustment range.

The bed screws on the Ultimaker 2 are manual screws with springs, and you can level the bed throughout most of the screw length. Having it at one end means the spring is quite loose, and things like weight and nozzle pressure affected the flatness of the bed.

So if you have an elastic tensioner for your bed, maybe set it at higher tension for a more robust flatness?

If you’re always adjusting in the same direction though, it’s not that, and is probably a software error where something doesn’t count Z-position right. Unless of course your printer is somehow getting longer?

The best thing about abbreviations is that they are entirely contextual, which means that if it isn’t obvious what’s meant, you can make up your own meaning and wonder/ask why the other person is using it so very wrong.

There’s even an abbreviation for it: TLB, which in this context means Three Letter Bullshit.