915
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The bad guys on the show were: Space Hitler, Space Karen, Quark

[-] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago

I liked the purity of quarks character. Always after whatever provided the most opportunity and profit. He frequently was thwarted in his shady dealings in the pursuit of profit, but that's capitalism baby!

Not to imply I'm a fan of capitalism, far from it, but he was portrayed so perfectly as the embodiment of pure, unfettered capitalism. Regulations were little more than a suggestion and if breaking them didn't result in a loss (of profits), or if it had a fairly low chance of affecting his profits, in his mind, then he would simply ignore rules and do whatever the hell he wanted.

Looking at the world today, that's exactly what capitalism is doing. If you have laws but no enforcement, corpos will do it because the punishment is basically non-existent. If you have laws and enforcement, but they can hide/relocate/obfuscate that they've broken any of those laws, then they'll do whatever they damn well please, and just hide it. If the punishment for the infraction is less than the profit to be made by ignoring the laws, they'll do that too.

One notable example I like to go back to frequently is relating to tobacco. The laws are there but enforcement is stretched so thin that the chances that you'll be caught are pretty minimal. So many places, like corner stores and gas stations, don't give enough of a shit to enforce the laws. They make so much from just selling to whomever asks regardless of how old they look and whether they have ID or not (within reason, I don't think anyone is selling to 10 year olds), they'll just do it anyways. When/if they catch a fine for it, they'll easily pay for it with all the profit made from not giving a shit about identifying people. As long as you look old enough, or choose enough to old enough, you can buy some. I'll strongly express that not every place is like this, but there's a nontrivial number that are.

If you take that same approach with everything, you get corpos just eating EPA fines for polluting that are a fraction of what they would need to spend to properly dispose of their industrial waste. There's probably thousands of examples, but I won't waste everyone's time to dig them up and cite them.

He was the perfect embodiment of this profit-first mentality. Easily one of the best ferengis in any of the trek universe.

load more comments (13 replies)
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
915 points (97.9% liked)

TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

3388 readers
657 users here now

/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!

Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.

~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Hating someone off of their race, culture, creed, sexuality, or identity is not remotely acceptable. Mistakes can happen but do your best to respect others.

~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.

~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.

~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.

~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.

~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.

~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon' and fuck over our artist friends.

Fun will now commence.


Sister Communities:

!startrek@lemmy.world

!memes@lemmy.world

!tumblr@lemmy.world

!lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world

Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!


Honorary Badbitch:

@jawa21@startrek.website for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.


Creator Resources:

Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)

Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)


founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS