Well yeah, Greedo didn't shoot. Because Han Solo shot first. I don't think it needs to be stated that Han Solo wouldn't miss at a range that close.

There have been periods of human history within some groups that did have no needs scarcity. Shelter, food, water, all there. Replenishing faster than they could consume it.

Which periods are these?

I'd say right now we have the necessary resources to provide for everyone's needs in the world. Providing for basic needs isn't a scarcity issue, it's a resource allocation issue. We aren't prioritizing providing for everyone's needs before providing for people's wants.

I'm lucky enough to live in a developed country, I have shelter, a fridge full of food, I turn a tap and I have potable water. It's all there for me. My needs are taken care of. I still think would be awesome if I owned a private island in a nice climate, with a big house on it and a pier with my own yacht I could sail around when I feel like it. But there's the problem, how do we determine who gets what they want? If I got the private island, yacht, etc. while you only had your basic needs met, would you consider that to be an equitable society?

Why does Picard get a vineyard in France while someone else has to be satisfied by whatever the replicator provides them?

TNG makes it clear that Picard values original artifacts. There's a scene where he assumes an artifact someone is giving him is replicated but then is told it's the original. He basically pisses his pants over it being a much too valuable of a gift. So no, in Star Trek people do place greater value on non-fungible items. You don't even think of this scene as unusual because of course people think that way.

Starfleet needed more starships to defend themselves from the Dominion. Do you consider that a need or a want? They don't have an infinite number of starships. Apparently building starships involved some kind of scarce resources.

Because they didn't have enough starships, a lot of people died. If we consider not being vaporized by a phaser to be a need, the Federation was not able to provide everyone's needs because of a scarcity of resources limited the number of starships they could produce.

Like I say, Star Trek is incredibly inconsistent about this. If an episode requires scarcity of resources so Nog can trade different things to different people in a fun episode, then those resources are scarce. If they need to use gold pressed latinum, they use currency. If someone asks "how does your economy work?" then suddenly "they don't use money, they don't need it because they have everything they want." And this is fine, if someone 300 years ago were to write some fiction about our time, it would probably be about people more Scrooge McDuck (who had a giant vault of shiny coins) rather than Elon Musk (who has no need for that because that's not how the economy works). Star Trek can't have a realistic economy, and it doesn't need it. We're just meant to assume it's broadly equitable, everything is fuzzy beyond that.

This is the case where if I were to replicate it, what would be the difference?

You can't replicate an infinite amount of land in France. You can't replicate an infinite number of private islands. People will value these things and they will be scarce. Why would Picard live on a vineyard in France instead of in a holodeck version of a vineyard if there was no value to the real thing?

Israel uses proportional representation. To maintain power Netanyahu made deals with some far-right crazies.

The EU is proportional representation. This allowed Nigel Farage to make a name for himself, and ultimately the UK left the EU.

PR systems give all of the power to political parties. They have negotiate backroom deals so they can form a coalition and govern. Minority interests are often ignored. If some extremists want to harm minorities, and a party needs those extremists to form a coalition, the minority groups will be harmed. This is not a hypothetical, this has happened in Israel. Nothing anyone can do about it but hope in the next election Israelis vote for parties in the correct proportions to make a coalition like this not possible.

Yeah, PR looks better on spreadsheet. And maybe some people spread across the country with specific interests might get an MP in Parliament. But if that MP doesn't get into the ruling coalition, their interests will be ignored.

Calling it a "first past the post" system is just putting the thumb on the scale to slant the debate by making the system sound arbitrary. Let's instead call it what it is, a community representation system. In a community representation system, community leaders control the seats, not the parties. In the case where there's a minority group spread across the country, they will be well represented. Not by a single MP that gets ignored by the ruling coalition. But by multiple MPs in representing ridings. A party may ignore the interests of a million people. But an MP doesn't want to ignore a thousand people in their riding. If their party refuses to address the concerns of those thousand, they might cross the floor. If they don't, they might lose votes to someone who will represent that minority group in their riding.

Community representation is bottom up. People in a community choose someone to represent them in Parliament. The parties need to keep those community leaders happy or they lose seats. And parties hate losing seats. The Liberal party of Canada has really worked on attracting community leaders into their party. This isn't solely altruism, they do this because it gains them seats. So in a community representation system the most cynical strategy focused operatives are made to talk to community leaders and make compromises with them.

A PR system is top down. You have the party leadership, the MPs are just trained seals because they can't cross the floor. They have to fall in line with the party leadership or you lose your job. MPs are basically pointless in a PR system, you'd save money by just having the party leaders declare what legislation they want, their vote is worth X votes (with X being the percentage of the vote their party got) and the legislation passes. We would find out what compromises they made with the other parties to form a coalition immediately and wouldn't have to pay a bunch of MPs to vote the way their party requires them to vote. The only reason to have MPs in a PR system would be to create the appearance that communities are being represented, when really it's just some party leaders making decisions in backrooms with zero oversight by community leaders.

A PR system only looks good on a spreadsheet. It's actually terrible when power dynamics are considered. And we should primarily be thinking of power dynamics when discussing political systems. I don't think numbers on a spreadsheet lining up don't matter all that much when minorities are having their houses bulldozed by a country governed by coalition formed in a backroom.

Post-scarcity isn't actually possible. Not even in Star Trek this is true. Picard's family owns a vineyard in France filled with artifacts and antiques. Not everything is fungible. People will desire these non-fungible things. Not everyone that desires these things will be able to have them, because they aren't fungible. You can't have a billion people all owning vineyards in France. Some people won't get everything they want. There will always be scarcity.

Star Trek was made in the 1960's at the height of the cold war. They didn't want the show to be about how capitalism was superior to communism, or vice versa. So they side stepped the issue by saying in the future there's no scarcity, no money, and they live under some ideal future economic model. The show writers don't know what that ideal economic model is, so it's deliberately vague and inconsistent. And that's fine because the show isn't about economics.

It was wise of the writers of Star Trek to avoid trying to make predictions of that nature. 300 years ago, Wealth of Nations wasn't yet written, the field of economics didn't really exist. They believed shiny rocks had intrinsic value. They had some vibes about things like currency devaluation and inflation, but economics was still mostly about acquiring shiney rocks 300 years in the past. So what will economics be like 300 years in the future? None of us know, and certainly writers of a TV show don't know.

The writers of a TV show saying there will be no scarcity in the future just means they didn't want to discuss economics. It's not any kind of prediction about the future. There will always be scarcity.

After those clones are finished hammering on that generator, I guess they'll get to work on building an oil refinery, and get that done within a week so they won't run out of fuel for the generator?

If you were really about having that independence from society you'd have a bunch of solar panels and an EV.

Yup, the idea is good. How this this idea is being implemented... not so much.

He gave Democrats a pathway to win elections in safe Democratic parts of the country.

A decade ago, if someone asked someone working on an Open Source project if they'd be ok with an AI reading their code and learning from it, they'd most likely say "yeah that sounds really cool!"

Somehow the tech-bros have fucked up AI so much that something that should be really cool seems creepy, lame, and nefarious all at once.

He could have a five minute phone conversation with a respected journalist and instantly kill all of these rumours. The fact that he hasn't done so indicates he's either dead or at minimum no longer of sound mind.

Ok and the US is #2, only behind China.

I think you'll find every country has contributed to this problem.

The difference is was the the President of the US that blamed Canada for the smoke, refusing to recognize that Global Warming is the problem. The post you're replying to is not from any Canadian official, it's just a joke on a shitty web forum.