They would have to call cubes back from where they are pushing territory on the other side of their territory.
The Borg were not just fighting one species when they came to get the Federation, they were expanding outwards on all sides. So they committed the lowest level of resources they believed were necessary, and because the Queen was an arrogant fool, that was just one cube.
For First Contact, you can argue that having been thus far unable to assimilate the Federation they are unaware of the speed of human advancement. In the Star Trek Universe it has been implied that humans are EXCEPTIONALLY inventive especially when faced with a problem, and that the Federation is even FASTER than humanity alone because of the additional viewpoints added to human inventiveness. Basically, the Human Problem of Fantasy Games where the humans are an average, all-around boring species while Elves and Dwarves and others all have specialties? That's not applicable to Star Trek Universe, where humans are especially well-suited to be engineers, and highly valued for their social abilities which foster teamwork. The presence of humans in the Federation is one of the ingredients that makes the Federation uniquely effective at technological advancement. Not only is the Federation large and powerful, it advances more quickly than the species that the Borg have assimilated, and has advanced to a level that the Borg never allow other species to advance to, AND it advances the way the Borg do by peacefully trading and adding technologies when it admits new member species.
The Queen never dealt with a society like the Federation before, and she didn't expect them to advance very far beyond their capabilities at Wolf 359. She figured her cube was better, and that should be good enough and if by some weirdness it wasn't she would destroy the Federation by destroying its weirdest, least predictable species: humanity.
This is bad practice, says the joint report, because for hybrid workplaces, the mix of employees coming and going at different times a week makes it "impossible" for a manager to know how many employees are on site on a given day.
They're taking the wrong lesson from this, and are going to try to force us back to 5 days a week in the office.
The problem here is that people want a service and businesses want a product. The "free-rider" period is businesses masquerading as a service in order to accumulate a product: Us.
Because that is what they are selling. Our writing and our thoughts and our interactions. They are selling them to advertisers, to AI developers, and in the case of membership communities they are selling us to each other. But make no mistake, they are selling US.
The problem with the enschittification model is not that "it's from the point of view of a freeloader err, free-rider" but that "it applies to a poor business model." It can only be solved when the business model changes, when userbase is no longer a product, or consumers AND a product, but are treated as the recipients of a service and members of a community. Right now only the Fediverse model does that.
What's really killing the business end of this is the rot economy. Vampire capital keeps throwing money at companies that present their userbase as a product. The vampires want a profit, and they are told that the profit will come from a largue userbase creating user-created content. So they lure the product to the company by presenting it as a service, and then pull the rug out so that they can monetize the userbase and get endless growth. Things get progressively worse as they try to min/max the business: minimizing the costs and maximizing the revenue by rent-seeking from the users. Then the users, the PRODUCT, up and leave.
Enschittification is happening because companies see users as their product, their source of content, and their source of revenue all at the same time but have presented their business to the users as a service.
Their business model needs to radically change. And social media needs to shift to governments and non-profits providing it.
They're willing to pay idiots to ramble on but they aren't willing to pay international lawyers to straighten out all the paperwork so they can do this outside the US.
