I can’t say what their corporate culture is like now, but they’ve had a pretty poor reputation in the past, including the notion that the lowest performing 10% should be fired every year. The Amazon folks I’ve known have been great people - not at all the Gordon Gecko types you’d imagine from that - but culture in large corporations varies a lot by the team you’re in.

I came up with a saying back in the 90s when I was doing the startup scene - “Do you want it right, or by Tuesday?” Sometimes they do indeed need it by Tuesday. More of the time they have no idea why you need the extra days to get it right. But it’s really important for those in a leadership position - whether they’re managers or senior engineers - to push back and set expectations.

YBI

The correct procedure if you thought the experiment posed an imminent danger to the crew would have been to erect a force field around the container until any ill effects could be scientifically determined.

You also violated Starfleet protocols which require us to not interfere with developing cultures.

Absolutely amazing! You have given me a playlist for this Christmas that’s going to blow everyone away.

The eye hook through the top of his head kind of ruins the feel-good effect for me.

She really changed after she was sent to that women’s prison though.

Other than checking with other countries, I’m not sure what else you could do.

I also used to watch Spanish language programming to help learn Spanish. I do have to warn you that the subtitles will often not match the spoken words. Sometimes they’re completely different, as if they were produced by two different translation services. I found that telenovellas were often very accurate, but other kinds of media were hit or miss, and the translated ones were the worst. If you don’t need to read subs, though, you should be fine.

I mean, first of all, that’s exactly the kind of thing nobles did. I know the word as an adjective in current usage reflects the image that nobles want people to hold, rather than the reality of assassinations of both reputations and persons for political and personal ends, but I think that the distinction is material to the discussion.

Garak is conflicted about many things. He’s a brilliant and multidimensional character - a torturer with a heart of gold - and it is exactly that Janus-like relation to morality as conceived of by Starfleet that makes him so key in the Dominion War. Like Division 31, his character brought into relief the existential question of the role of intelligence services and dirty deeds in a liberal democracy. The Roddenberryverse Federation was the Galahad (or at least the Lancelot) of the galaxy, and the occasional dark aspects that surfaced invoke the role of organizations like the CIA in a democracy. Garak, as a Cardassian and officer in the Obsidian Order, adheres to a broadly different morality, but ends up aligning with the Federation because of his conscience. His multi-faceted relationship with Bashir is often used to show his “odi et amo” relationship to the Federation.

In any case, I think that I’d have to characterize Garak as “noble.” He was constantly thinking about the big picture and the greater good, even if the deck he was playing had a few more cards than some of the Federation folk were comfortable with. If you define “noble” as being completely exclusive of “evil,” then the character concept of the OP cannot exist. That would be a shame, because it’s an interesting concept to explore.

The world is closing in
And did you ever think
That we could be so close like brothers?
The future’s in the air, I can feel it everywhere
I’m blowing with the wind of change

I think that Trek plays with ideas like this by creating throw away alien races. By that I mean they’re not foundational, but rather are used as a cardboard cutout to illustrate a point for the plot of an episode.

For the tech angle, I think there’s a couple of candidates. The Bynars, for instance, had an intimate coupling of technology and society - and here I’m mostly thinking about the way they were floated in TNG.

At the other end of the spectrum you have the Pakleds. Although they have a high tech space faring society, their grasp of the science and engineering that the tech requires is… rudimentary and primitive. They’re not creating new technologies.

I agree, but I was concentrating on the Roddenberry-verse, since I think we started with the idea that it would be something apart from his conceptualization of the world-building he was doing.

In fact, I think that Lower Decks is a comedy, and one of the organizing features of the humor is poking good-natured fun at Roddenberry’s conceptualization of the universe and the Federation. It’s not outright parody in the sense of Galaxy Quest, but the non-Trekness is deliberately used as a source of humor.

I think that’s the pivot point. The US Army is worthy of endless parody and it doesn’t have to be good natured. We’ve hit a weird part of our timeline where we (as Americans) are idolizing our military as heroic icons. As someone who has been there, I’d rather go back to what we had in the 70s and 80s (not the institutionalized homophobia, but the skepticism of civilians). Starfleet was created at a time of such skepticism, and was set up in deliberate contrast as a near-utopian future. We’re coming to a different place now, where any given soldier is a selfless defender of freedom around the world but Starfleet is getting a more comedic and skeptical treatment.

Anyway, I’d really love to see the idea get a treatment, but it’d be tough to balance the Trekness with the MASHness.

The problem is that they’re not really trekking anywhere at that point. I remember that being a big criticism of DS9 when it was first airing. DS9 partially made up for it by having a very cosmopolitan setting and the occasional offworld episode, but it wasn’t until a few seasons that they were regularly having adventures off station.

Interestingly, I think DS9 was also the most war-related series, at least of the first four. Voyager had their ongoing Odyssey combat adventures, but not a larger war the way the Dominion War was portrayed. Generally speaking, wars with the Klingons or Romulans just provided context for episodic plots, not drive a multi-season story arc.

I even think there were several MASH-like episodes - stories like Nog playing medic, Jake as a war reporter, Kira being forced to evict that farmer, and some others. They showed the cruelty and absurdity of war, but of course without MASH’s humor. And I think that’s what made MASH, MASH. The bitter, jaded, drafted doctors and medical personnel using humor as a defense. It’s not war that’s non-Trek so much as that kind of human attitude (even if it did surface in later episodes of later series). There’s no Burns and Hot Lips versus Hawkeye and Trapper kind of dynamic in Starfleet.

Come to think of it, Q was a literary trickster character, like Hawkeye. They both had a bemused but sometimes quite angry disregard for authority and did what they could to show it up as absurd. That analogy never occurred to me before. Q is what Hawkeye would be given the power of a god.