danielquinn

danielquinn , 14 days ago

Can you give some examples of this? Admittedly I didn't much care for Discovery and didn't pay a lot of attention through it as a result, but I'm not picking up what you're laying down ;-)

danielquinn , 13 days ago

Ah yeah, I remember a moment like that in DS9, where Sisko is lamenting the crew's interest in a holosuite program set in the 50s because of how "our people" were treated back then. It always felt out of place for me, though DS9 is still my favourite Star Trek.

danielquinn , 1 month ago

Voyager: One Small Step

It's one of my top ten favourites, but it's also a very typical "one off" story.

danielquinn , 3 months ago

Excluding the obvious choice of Jeffrey Combs as… well anyone really, I’m rather fond of Andreas Katsulas, though I may be partial to him for his phenomenal role as G’Kar on Babylon 5.

danielquinn , 3 months ago

“Yankees, in six games” – “One Small Step” is comfort food for me. A close second is “The Siege of AR-558”

danielquinn , 4 months ago

I really don’t get the fawning over PIC season 3. It was bad. I’d love to see more of Ryan in a new series, but only if they recruit writers on par with SNW and lose the phone numbers of those who did PIC.

danielquinn , 4 months ago

Don’t feel bad. That whole series was a disjointed mess.

danielquinn , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

It’s not “lifestyle creep”.

When I moved from Canada to the Netherlands, my salary stayed roughly the same, but the amount I saved every month exploded. The Netherlands has much higher income taxes, but it should be noted that I also enjoyed some pretty sweet tax incentives as a skilled expat.

The relevant differences between the two environments were:

• In Canada, paycheques come every two weeks. In the Netherlands it’s every month, so you have to lean to pace yourself.
• In the Netherlands, your paycheque isn’t 1/12th of your salary after taxes. Instead they actually withhold around 12% your salary and pay it out to you in a lump sum partially in December and again in May. You’re still getting the same amount, but you’re forced to budget on a lower monthly amount, while enjoying bonuses twice a year. I used the bonuses to pay down my Canadian debt.
• The Dutch don’t live off of credit cards the way North Americans do. While in Canada you’re taught to “build up your credit rating” by using a credit card, in the Netherlands, many people don’t even have a credit card. Purchases are typically made with debit cards instead. Unlike Canada, these cards don’t apply a fee to your purchase either.
• They also don’t really care about credit ratings. Instead, there are laws that restrict you from buying or mortgaging at a monthly cost higher than x% of your monthly income.
• Car ownership is drastically reduced there. While in North America people flip out at the idea of 15min cities and refuse to believe it’s possible to live without a car, people do it every day there.
• Finally, and this one may be more specific to me, going out for a meal is a bigger deal there and typically more expensive. Dutch culture expects lunch to be a home made ham sandwich or just a piece of bread, chocolate sprinkles and some buttermilk. Meanwhile I was used to blowing $20/day on eating out for lunch and often went out for dinner too. The amazing quality of food you find at their grocery stores meant that we often collectively bought groceries for office lunch every day, and I cooked at home.

In the space of 2-3 years, I paid off my credit cards ($10k) and what was left on my student loan ($12k). Inside of 5 years, I had tens of thousands of Euros in my bank account.

danielquinn , 5 months ago

We should be reading/watching/sharing more solarpunk then!

danielquinn , 5 months ago

Um, no. It’s the very opposite of that. Solarpunk addresses inequality and bigotry directly.

danielquinn , 5 months ago

That’s funny. I feel the same way, except that it’s Tilly that I care about and no one else.

danielquinn , 7 months ago

I normally like his stuff, but I think he missed a key point this time.

Bullshit jobs aren’t about the uselessness of that work. Most of the useless work we do is critical… for the furtherance of capitalism.

Whole swaths of the planet work 8+ hours a day making products worse than they should be, finding ways to squeeze in advertising, tracking, or schemes to manipulate customers into “upgrading”. We even burn through skilled psychologists, passing them to design advertising that compels children to badger their parents.

This is the sort of work that only needs to exist because capitalism requires it, and that has a huge effect on people’s morale.

danielquinn , 7 months ago

While sometimes the case, it’s not always true.

I used to work for a big(ish) NGO in the Netherlands. They didn’t have the financial backing to offer me a salary on par with what other private companies were offering, but they did have a substantial perks package because of the many tax rebates available to such organisations.

• My ISP was paid for
• I got a free laptop every few years
• €1k for home office upgrades every few years
• €700 toward a bike every few years.

When you add it all up, it was still a pay cut, but at a certain income level that stops being relevant.

I also later worked for Big Evil Corporation in London where they paid below market rates plus:

• 15% bonus
• 7% "London is expensive allowance"
• 20% pension.
• £6500 car allowance (I don’t have a car, so this was just cash)

This allowed me to stay under certain income levels for tax reasons while squirreling away a bunch of money for my pension.

They were evil assholes though, so I quit.

Anyway, it can make a lot of sense to tinker with the salary in the form of benefits. The important thing is for workers to share their compensation information openly to ensure fair dealing.

danielquinn , 8 months ago

This was on Mastodon this morning.

danielquinn , 8 months ago

Please post pictures!

danielquinn , 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

There are alternatives to driving your car everywhere and there are objective environmental benefits to centralising human efforts for around 8hrs/day.

I’m not a fan of demanding people go back to the office, but this meme is idiotic. Get out of your fucking car.

Edit: the responses to this are exactly what I expected: pleas of helplessness rooted in a lack of imagination.

Nearly every city (yes, even those in the US) where you see these ridiculous commutes has options for transit and even cycling. The trick is that you have to live closer to the centre. You can’t live in a suburb 2hrs away. You sell your car and you move closer to work.

This “oh everything is built for cars!” refrain is true enough, but only because so many people have chosen to live under that system.

“I can’t afford rent in the city!” is what comes next. Have you considered how much money you save not having a car?. I’ve read estimates of roughly $10,000 every year. Living in Ottawa, I did the math and ditched my car in 2001. I later lived in Toronto, Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, and Cambridge, all car-free.

Sure for some it’s just not possible, but for most it’s a refusal to imagine a world where you don’t own a car… and that’s on you.

danielquinn , 9 months ago

A solarpunk Star Trek would be amazing! Tell the story of civilians living in a post-scarcity economy, building a colony, farming, and running restaurants. The “Articles of the Federation” idea of “The West Wing in Space” made my heart skip a beat.

I want to see more of Federation life, through a lens other than the military!

danielquinn , 9 months ago

Exactly what I was thinking about. Though I think if you wanted to do a series, you’d probably want a little more conflict than a paradise planet could offer.

danielquinn , 9 months ago

That “antisolitions” read was fascinating! Thanks for sharing.

danielquinn , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

+1 for Bride of Chaotica! Also SNW’s “Those Old Scientists” is pretty damned good. Oh! and DS9’s “Magnificent Ferengi”!

danielquinn , 9 months ago

Wait, commercials? Since when are there commercials on Paramount+?

danielquinn , 9 months ago

Here you go!

danielquinn , 10 months ago

I loved the bunnies reference until I realised that in that moment they were talking about alternate realities. A better Buffy reference might have been to mention the reality where everything was shrimp 😆