Jordan aka FltAdmlWolf

DATES: The class began on May 15, 2018 and ended May 24, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy2 COMMANDING OFFICER: Captain Brell FIRST OFFICER: Commander Oddas Aria GRADUATES: Alexander Brodie (returning member) Ghant Xerix Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here! My door is always open if you ever need anything.

Nominations for the 2018 Awards Ceremony will open on Monday, May 21 at 1:15am Pacific Time and close on Monday, June 11 at 11:45pm Pacific Time. If this is your awards ceremony with us, welcome! This is a tradition that dates back to 1996, wherein we honor the people of the fleet who are simming really well, or contributing OOC. Back in the "old days," we would gather the entire fleet onto one email list (we were a lot smaller then...) and sim together an award presentation; now we do things a bit differently. Here's how it works today: Everyone in the fleet submits nominations for consideration. The group staff (ship COs, EC members, etc.) review the nominations. Each ship has their own awards presentation on their OOC email list for awards in the General Awards category. Award in this category can be given to one person on each ship. Then, we have a fleetwide presentation of awards here on the forums. Awards in the Duty Post, Special, Staff, and Length of Service categories are presented over the course of three days. One person in the fleet can receive each of the Duty Post, Special, and Staff categories. We rely on each and every member of the fleet to submit nominations so we can recognize the best members of our community who are putting in the time and effort to make this a fun place to be. So we need your help! If you don't nominate your peers and mentors for awards, they won't get recognized. We want to encourage everyone to be really free with their nominations – there's no penalty in putting in a nomination that doesn't ultimately get the award. But ships that have fewer nominations tend to end up having fewer award winners – so don't be shy! Multiple nominations from members of a ship for any given award can help send a signal to reviewers that a certain person is really deserving, but also one really great nomination can be the deciding factor for someone to win an award. So how to nominate someone? It's pretty simple: Check out the wiki Hall of Honor to see the list of awards and learn more: https://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=Award Consider who you want to nominate. Then do a quick check on the list of past award winners to make sure they haven't won the award before: https://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=List_of_Award_Recipients (You can sort the table by clicking on the column headers, or you can use your browser's "Find" feature to quickly find a character anywhere on the page – on PC, use CTRL+F, on Mac use ⌘+F.) If the person hasn't won the award before, head to the nomination form: https://www.starbase118.net/members/personnel/forms/award-nomination-panel/ Enter your information and select the award. Then write a nomination reason. For some awards, we'll ask you for a link to a sim if you have one readily available that helps justify your nomination. Don't stress out about finding a sim, but if you have one, it could help! If you feel really confident about your award nomination, chat with others on your ship who might also feel the same way and recommend they make a similar nomination!

DATES: The class began on May 1, 2018 and ended May 8, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy4 COMMANDING OFFICER: Lt. Commander Jarred Thoran FIRST OFFICER: Commander Oddas Aria GRADUATE: Lilith Seir Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here! My door is always open if you ever need anything.

DATES: The class began on April 16, 2018 and ended April 26, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy2 COMMANDING OFFICER: Commander Brayden Jorey FIRST OFFICER: Commander Oddas Aria RETURNING MEMBER: Yai'enek Kortar Welcome back to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

Basically what the article Rich shared posits is that everyone gets a “bank account” with all the money they could ever need when they’re born. You can still work and make more money, but why would you care how much money you’re making if you already have enough to live comfortably your whole life? You might earn “credits” from Starfleet but you don’t notice or worry about them. As far as the “hobo lifestyle,” sure, people may still want to live outside of society. They would just have whatever resources they wanted to do that with. Check out that article Rich shared above - it has some interesting theories on this, like the idea that that drinks are a “loss leader” at Quark’s - they’re free, as long as you gamble or pay for the holosuites, just like at casinos today. And that people do have a way to exchange currency with other cultures through the “Federation Credit,” but that this is, in fact, a “third party currency,” sorta like bitcoin. His hypothesis is very interesting and works quite well based on what we’ve seen onscreen! Re: Latinum, good discussion about that here: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/5337/why-can-latinum-not-be-replicated

Keep in mind how they got there in the story, though: The Third World War kills over 600 million and utterly tears down everything to the point that human society, as we know it, no longer exists. Governments have the ultimate power - and motivation - to quell dramatic social change. When there’s no one left with that kind of power it leaves a vacuum. In the Star Trek story, there are no significant government structures on Earth that would exercise pressure against the kind of new society that Earth moves toward after first contact. The Vulcans essentially seed the new Earth society by inspiring humanity to work together, motivating them toward a goal (space exploration), and showing them a new model for governance. It’s a bit like saying an alcoholic only quits drinking once they’ve hit rock bottom. It would take a drastic event for Earth to move in this direction.

I love this question because, to me, it really underpins the whole reason that Star Trek is utopian in the first place. It's not Starfleet that makes this vision of the future compelling, it's the economics, which influence everything else. It's hard to imagine just how different things become – even with Star Trek as a vision – when we get this kind of "proto-post scarcity" environment. I mean, just consider one tiny thing: Birth control. What if everyone on Earth, men and women, had access to a birth control pill that was free and could be procured privately from the replicator (no judgments!) at a moment's notice, and be easily used in pill form before or after "interpersonal relations" happen? How would that change every generation on down the line? Just the simple fact that more children would be born into families that wanted them, as opposed to some children being born into situations where their parents may have felt familial pressure to allow the pregnancy to come to terms – that alone would have huge implications on the psychology of much of the world's population. That doesn't even scratch the surface of talking about the data around how planned pregnancies are (at least on a large-scale, statistical basis) healthier for everyone involved, and have long-term benefits for children. And then go a step beyond that and imagine that no one is ever hungry. No one worries about rent payments. No one has to die alone because their family members can't afford to be there with them in their last moments. These are things that happen now, every day. And we have the ability to change them, but not the willpower. What would it be like for no child to ever feel hunger pains? Or to have to sleep in a car because their parent lost their job? Imagine how stopping those mental wounds from ever happening – that we know have a dramatic impact on long-term mental welfare – would drastically improve everyone's life. One of my favorite thought exercises is this question about money and work. This is part of the increasingly popular discussion around Universal Basic Income (UBI) that's become a very hot topic lately. Lots of people who work in tech are beginning to wonder, quite loudly, what happens when automation puts a massive number of people out of work. We've crossed over one threshold with automation already – computers put millions of people out of work, and reconfigured the workforce. For example: Secretarial roles were no longer needed once personal computers became ubiquitous. So many of the women who held those roles pushed into other types of office work, which in turn put pressure on the male members of the workforce to either retire, retrain, or drop out of the workforce. The next threshold will be an even bigger reorganization. And we're seeing the first ragged edges of that right now with autonomous vehicles. Tesla autopilot in the family sedan is what gets the most press, but it's actually the commercial semi trucks which will have a much bigger effect first. Trucking is a huge industry in America, so the effects will ripple quite strongly through the economy as 75% or more of long-haul drivers are no longer needed, once commercial semis can drive between cities. (The current prediction is that semis will be driven by humans to outside city limits, where they'll switch into autonomous mode until they reach the outskirts of their destination, where a human driver will jump in the cab and take the vehicle the last few miles to the dock.) We could see that happening in the next 10 years, with drivers being phased out entirely in the next 20. That's just one tiny part of this huge change that automation will make to our economy. Check out this infographic that talks more about this: https://futurism.com/images/universal-basic-income-answer-automation/ Perhaps the biggest question around UBI is how to talk about the value of labor and a full-employment economy. Is it okay if people don't work? Will people still want to work even if they have some, or all of their needs paid for? And the early data from UBI tests seem to be the bell-curve we get in so many psychological experiments. There are some people who, when they get UBI, drop out of the workforce. There are some people who work harder because now they have the resources to, say, start a business! But the vast majority of people keep doing what they're doing with a bigger safety net for themselves and their families, and in turn live more prosperous lives because of that. So now apply that to the future – perhaps we can expect to see a similar phenomenon. Some people might never work. Video games will continue to improve and some people will choose to spend their lives engaged in this kind of non-sports competition. Some people will work harder than they would now because the ability to access more resources will allow them to bring to bear personal strengths they never had access to. Most people will probably find some kind of meaningful work that allows them to spend more time with their families or engaged in creative endeavours than they would without access to either UBI or some other kind of "Federation Credits"/social welfare scheme. Despite the cynics among us who would believe that most people are lazy and want to do nothing, the fact is that most people want to find meaning in their lives. Most people get bored when they have nothing to do, and even reading an endless supply of books is not what they want to do for the rest of their lives. So they turn to work to give meaning. It might not look the same as today's office job, but people will still want to contribute to society, they'll still to leave a legacy, they'll still want to fill up their time with something. Will anyone still do menial labor? That's an open question we don't know the answer to, and even "The Economics of Star Trek" editorial doesn't have a strong hypothesis on. I think you can argue that most menial labor, as we know it today, can be whittled down to the bare bones by automation. Surely we'll be able to invent a robot that can scrub toilets within the next 50 years? All that will be left will be to manage the robot workforce. And some people will find joy in that! And what about the desire to try different things? When human priorities have shifted so incredibly by the point that we no longer need money, perhaps there's simply a societal trend toward trying new things. Maybe I want to be a waiter for a while just to understand the other side of the "server/patron" power dynamic, which in turn gives me the ability to be more empathetic in new ways. Maybe I just spent two years working on an incredible medical project that took all of my brain power and creativity, and for a while I just want to be able to get out of the house and do something with lower stakes that allows me to interact with lots of people and experience joy in bringing them incredible food. Or maybe I just realized that I don't like desk jobs, or space jobs, or even art or sports or video games and I just want a simple job at one place where I can work for the rest of my life. The point is, there are lots of motivations we can't understand from where we are right now because we're enclosed in a system that creates perverse incentives. But things are so entirely shifted by the lack of want for anything, it will totally reconfigure our outlook on what's worthwhile and what's not. The simple fact of having – let's say, for the sake of what we know of Star Trek life spans? – 120 years of healthy life to "fill up" with something will give everyone a sense that there's plenty of time to get to all the things you want to do, and there's no reason to work yourself to death early in life or spend all that time doing one single thing. Why be a doctor for 80 years when you can be a waiter, a doctor, a librarian, an artist... ? So many fun things to imagine Thanks for bringing this up!

@Sotak 👆

Did you try doing the form here on the forums? If so, sorry about that – the forums just pull in the news from the front page, but any forms embedded in posts won't work here. They'll only work on the front page of the site. Use this link: https://www.starbase118.net/2018/join-team-april-2018/ That's confusing!

Absolutely. We'd love to have you @Sotak

DATES: The class began on April 3, 2018 and ended April 10, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy4 COMMANDING OFFICER: Lt. Commander Jarred Thoran FIRST OFFICER: Lt. Commander Aitas GRADUATE: Wallace Williams Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

DATES: The class began on March 26, 2018 and ended April 4, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy3 COMMANDING OFFICER: Commander Oddas Aria FIRST OFFICER: Lt. Commander Lael Rosek GRADUATES: Hal Mika Marcus Drake Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

DATES: The class began on March 12, 2018 and ended March 19, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy2 COMMANDING OFFICER: Lt. Commander Lael Rosek FIRST OFFICER: Lt. Commander Jarred Thoran GRADUATES: Lewis Little T'Katt Dugoras Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

DATES: The class began on February 28, 2018 and ended March 7, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy1 COMMANDING OFFICER: Commander Oddas Aria FIRST OFFICER: Lt. Commander Hannibal Parker GRADUATES: Dante Termine Sotak Walt Thompson Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

Interesting question – I think the answer is no, but maybe he'll surprise me? I feel like Tarantino is one of those directors whose whole brand is around breaking conventions with his "unique" style, as opposed to someone like Spielberg who might have a few tricks here and there that he's known for, but generally just makes "action and adventure" movies. So I feel like he's going to take the stance that the reason he was hired was to make something like he makes things, which is just going to be ... ugh.

DATES: The class began on February 13, 2018 and ended February 19, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy4 COMMANDING OFFICER: Commander Oddas Aria FIRST OFFICER: Lieutenant Denji Ryan GRADUATES: Tyler Moore Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

DATES: The class began on February 5, 2018 and ended February 14, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy3 COMMANDING OFFICER: Lieutenant Jarred Thoran FIRST OFFICER: Commander Alex Blair GRADUATES: Talos Dakora Edward Spears Jemma Thatcher Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

DATES: The class began on January 29, 2018 and ended February 6, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy1 COMMANDING OFFICER: Lt. Commander Ayiana Sevo FIRST OFFICER: Lt. Commander Lael Rosek GRADUATES: Marcus Wrader Genkos Sim Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

DATES: The class began on January 30, 2018 and ended February 6, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy2 COMMANDING OFFICER: Commander Oddas Aria FIRST OFFICER: Lt. Commander Atan T'Seva GRADUATES: Kaine Hawkins Kurt Austin Alexander O'Conner Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

"This is the Enterprise: A big circle with a porch."

DATES: The class began on January 23, 2018 and ended January 29, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy4 COMMANDING OFFICER: Commander Brayden Jorey FIRST OFFICER: Lt. Commander Shar'Wyn Foster GRADUATES: Ferier Lanta Kol'Vat Groznin Smith Thalas th’Koro Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

DATES: The class began on January 8, 2018 and ended January 16, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy2 COMMANDING OFFICER: Lieutenant Jarred Thoran FIRST OFFICER: Lt. Commander Ayiana Sevo GRADUATES: Ishmael Aldor Solok Welcome to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

DATES: The class began on Januar 3, 2018 and ended January 12, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy1 COMMANDING OFFICER: Lieutenant Jarred Thoran FIRST OFFICER: Lieutenant Lidia Ivanova GRADUATES: Thayon Jann Jael Yal Derik Mulligan Welcome back to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!

DATES: The class began on December 26, 2017 and ended January 3, 2018 LIST: sb118-academy4 COMMANDING OFFICER: Captain Sal Taybrim FIRST OFFICER: Lieutenant Jarred Thoran GRADUATE: Sasak Welcome back to the fleet – we're so glad you're here. My door is always open if you ever need anything!