[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago

In my headcanon, the Borg eventually reach a truce with the Federation, and over time eventually become full-fledged members of the Federation. That's CRAZY right?...Is it? I mean, the Federation warred with the Klingons and Romulans, and look how those relationships changed over time.

How about the Borg's willingness to join? What we've been seeing over the years is that the Borg adapt. Their willingness to adapt had been established from their very introduction as a faceless hive-mind. Over the course of the franchise, they've experimented with individuality with Locutus, Borg Queens, becoming so infatuated with individuality that they even dispatched 7 of 9 to live amongst Starfleet to investigate directly, and then instead of efficiently assimilating her to gain her knowledge, they choose not to re-assimilate her so that they could ask her about that experience and avoid corrupting that knowledge via assimilation. Why is the Borg so interested? The Borg found that Federation individuality had repeatedly repelled Borg invasions when Borg calculations indicated that they should have won, and even after re-adjusting for past failures, the Borg still found themselves stymied in encounters with Starfleet. The Borg were even saved from total extinction by the ingenuity of individual creativity and a temporary alliance with a Starfleet ship. That is a huge motivator for the Borg to re-assess their approach and look for a new way to adapt to prevent their vulnerability to a similar event in the future.

Would the Federation be open to it? Like I said, they've allied with past enemies before. Ex-Borg members of Voyager served with distinction. Borg tech has proven invaluable to Voyager's return. Most importantly, Borg Drones are not undead zombies! Assimilation is a reversible condition, and that means that instead of hating the Borg for killing their loved ones, the Borg ARE their loved ones. Moreover, Borg assimilation is a weapon of mass diplomacy. Chakotay found that the hive-mind allowed warring alpha-quadrant races to all live in harmony in the Delta Quadrant, and losing access to the hive-mind allowed their old destructive conflicts to creep back in, and ultimately they reinstated a local hive-mind to regain peace. Chakotay joined that hivemind and came away from it with unparalleled understanding and empathy for the other members of the collective, and an overall positive experience, and he disconnected with immediate recovery and no ill-effects!

That is a game-changer, it allows the Starfleet to show up on the door of a new alien race, and those aliens would naturally be cautious, suspicious, mistrustful of the Federation's intentions. First contact is extremely dangerous. An alliance with the Borg could allow Starfleet to establish first contact by saying, "We come in peace", assimilating the alien envoy, and then the alien representatives would know that Starfleet truly and honestly means to "come in peace", casting aside all suspicion of ulterior motives. Starfleet then disconnects the alien envoy from the local hivemind, and then those envoys can go home and sing Starfleet's virtues to the rest of their race.

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

I guess it could have been worse, looks like the arm is still on....for now. I expected him to die from that.

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 81 points 1 year ago

I'd say the first option is to simply talk to the mother and offer your help and paint it as a means of helping her out. Keeping the focus on the benefit to the mother and the benefit to the kid as secondary to keep her focused on how it would help her. Sympathize with her situation, she'll be more amenable and that's definitely the easiest way to get a constructive dialog going.

If that fails, involving CPS is still available as a fallback option but.0

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

OP is not saying that Google's scrape still retains his reddit comments. He's not referring to seeing this information on Google, but on Reddit.

He's saying that reddit is retaining his comments and still serving those comments up when refreshed directly. They're de-linked from his reddit account so he doesn't see them through his reddit account, but the information is restored throughout the reddit site to be viewed.

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 132 points 1 year ago

That's pretty dubious, otherwise why would I get all these replies from 3-7 years ago? Not new replies on dead threads, but the replies were posted that long ago, and I'm being notified about them now as "new" comments. Seems a lot like deleted posts coming back.

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

Hm, can you elaborate further? I don't think you've supported in your point in that you say that AI art can achieve the same subjective outcome of invoking emotion and getting a person to think, but you concluded that it's not the same.

I feel like there's a finer point you want to make but haven't gotten across yet.

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 43 points 1 year ago

I don't want another world war either. That's the point of defending Ukraine. Germany didn't invade the USA. They started with Austria, Czech, Poland, Denmark, Norway...if NATO existed at this time, at which of these points should NATO have stepped in to defend soil that wasn't theirs?

Because the ultimate result was that the war came all the way to the US anyway, and no amount of appeasement was going to satisfy the appetite of an aggressor.

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

They are, that's why the majority of them are in favor of it. However the individual official might get more Russian money than corporate sponsorship and flip their vote to go against the larger group. Also, kompromat can be even more impactful than bribery.

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

MyFitnessPal. I had heard of it, but counting calories is a pain in the ass, no way I'd waste my time with that shit.

Workplace gives it to me for free, so why not take a look? Damn it's so fast and easy and it has made such a huge difference in dirt success. Just wave the camera over barcodes and the rest of the data falls in place. When you actually get enough protein instead of thinking you've got enough protein, then you don't have to feel hungry in a calorie deficit.

It seemed like a frivolous app, but it turned out to be the biggest driving factor for success. The key thing is, I didn't realize how much it appealed to the nerd gamer instincts. The same way out optimize a build/load out for increased performance like in Diablo, that's the same way rewarding feeling you get when you figure out new life hacks to optimize your macros even more to pack even more food into your calorie budget

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

Some women's libido goes down from the stress of seeing a lot of chores needing to be taken care of. Doing those chores reduced the stress. Going further and doing what is normally their share of housework can be an act of affection.

It's also noted in a study of women asked to rate a number of pictures of men on various factors including attractiveness and reliability. When they are also asked for dating preferences, as the age range went up, the prioritization on reliability ratings also went up. Doing chores is reliable AF.

More to the point, she's already told you she likes it. Just believe her.

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would look nothing like Russia's invasion of Ukraine. China could attack Taiwan with fires from the mainland, there isn't a deep depth of terrain within which to hide. It would be more about resisting an occupying force than trying to meet them on the battlefield.

The deterrence here isn't in stopping an invasion, but from making the fallout so costly that it wouldn't be worth it. Just rigging the TSMC plants with explosives and blowing them up when an invasion starts would accomplish deterrence more effectively than having soldiers shoot at each other. The unified economic sanctions of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine has been extremely costly and acts as a major message of deterrence against China trying to take Taiwan and risking reduction to the foreign trade that's so vital to their stability (which is why they're to develop their domestic market to reduce economic dependence).

Taiwan should stay independent, but it doesn't make sense to have a lot of people bleed for it.

[-] yumcake@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The concern is a good bit higher than "possible" since they've just recently inflicted a large scale natural disaster to slow the Ukrainian offensive to retake their territory.

The Kakhovka dam was blown up by Russians because Ukraine doesn't own the kinds of weapons that could destroy it from a distance even if they for some reason wanted to devastate their own land (they don't).

Russia clearing out the plant staff and inspectors is highly suspect. If there was a major radiation leak, that too would have to come from manually placed demolitions...which is what they've been seeing.

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yumcake

joined 1 year ago