rwhitisissle

It's also how we got snap packages and apartheid, and I'm not even sure which of those is worse. (yes, I'm joking)

Edging is not a new thing, really. You've probably just never encountered the concept. Edging is the practice of bringing yourself to the edge of orgasm before backing away. The idea is that when you do finally orgasm it's been "built up to" by the earlier edging so you get a better climax.

I think cultures can definitely be rated by and advance in the category of how well the people living in it are treated

See, a conversation like this has to be based on a shared set of foundational premises, and those premises can be fairly complex and couched in their own assumptions. My argument is that you can't describe a culture utilizing the same kind of language that you would, say, a tech tree, where you would need a formal system of writing before you get the printing press, or combustion rockets before the warp drive. That's not to say that you can't describe a society or compare its faults and merits, but you can't really couch that in the language of "advancement." Advancement is iteration or demonstrative improvement on previous forms, and while the idea of a cultural endpoint is, admittedly, a common feature of materialist philosophical traditions (Marx, for example, believed Capitalism was a stage of economic and social development preceding communism), to argue that it's inevitable is to argue for something of which we have no real material evidence. Progressive or liberal societies can gradually slip into fascism just as easily as fascist societies can gradually become progressive and tolerant, and there's nothing that guarantees a clear relationship between societal virtues and technological acumen. Star Trek itself shows a number of very old, very powerful and technologically advanced expansionist empires, like the Romulans or the Dominion, living alongside the more tolerant Federation.

The Prime Directive is a form of paternalist condescension by a civilization (or, more accurately, by writers) with a myopic view of culture. Technology can advance, but cultures can only change. "Advancement" is not something a civilization does. And a scientifically advanced civilization can do horrible things with technology they themselves have made just as much as another culture can be given technology and not immediately wipe themselves out with it.

sufficating

suffocating

I find the movies conceptually interesting because there aren't many movies in which humans are just explicitly the bad guys, or in terms of the most recent one just a supporting entity that exists on the periphery of the story. Avatar kinda does that, too, but the Avatar movies are also puddle deep genre fiction and the "of the Apes" movies are at least structurally and narratively competent.

From a narrative standpoint, Spider-Man's entire thing is thematically tied to the idea that "no good deed goes unpunished." Peter Parker's academic, professional, and social life all pay a price to enable his crime fighting. Spider-Man 2 does a good job of portraying that. After he stops the train that was about to crash in his fight with Doc Ock, he gets lifted up, arms outstretched, looking like a crucified Jesus. He suffers for the sake of others. It's honestly a nice contrast to people like Tony Stark for whom being a billionaire playboy superhero has historically (if not in the Marvel movies) been depicted as coming with a fairly comfortable life. Well, at least ignoring the part of his backstory where he went homeless because of his alcoholism. But that was in the eighties, I think.

However, getting an MBA isn’t going to change you from one type of person to the other.

Sure, an MBA is sort of useless. Management is largely based around personality. And you can't really teach personality. It's the same way for a lot of professions, like teaching, actually. In fact, I'd say the management pool should be drawn from people who were accomplished high school teachers. There's a lot of crossover there in terms of organization, planning, and dealing with a bunch of people who all hate the work you make them do.

Dog, we're all engineers. And the worst business leaders I've ever worked with directly were good engineers before they got promoted into positions of management (or started their own terrible business, as the case might be) in which they had no business being because the skill requirements for engineering are not automatically transferable to managing people. It's called the Peter Principle, and there's some real truth to it.

I want to see engineers run companies that make things

I see you've never worked with engineers.

Thompson rightly concludes that the American dream is already dead by the 70s.

Important context for that is that the novel is a famous, and relatively early, meditation on the failures of the 1960s counterculture movement and the intense, if ultimately unfocused vision for a better future for the nation that was central to it.

And it's a great line for the gun lobby. In a lot of ways, the NRA and gun manufacturers would prefer a Biden victory because gun sales spike when Democratic presidents get elected, as gun-nuts are certain every time it happens that this is the time, for real, that they're "coming for our guns." In other words, people panic buy rifles because they think a federal ban is coming. But the reality is that Dems will never push through sweeping anti-gun legislation because there are so many pro-2FA democrats out there that doing so would be ludicrously difficult and monumentally unpopular.