Diplomatic immunity.

Cringe af

Does leaving the ship to it’s fate count as cowardice?

That decision technically saves the most lives.

Honestly, the scenario here is illuminating more for seeing how the cadet would respond. it’s also a great way to develop new tactics. In that sense, setting a "new high score"is a “Win”, even if you get blown up in the scenario. I still stand by saying that the excercise was a recruitment tool for selecting possible operatives for Section 31 (or whatever the agency was called then,)

I agree that it could be, but is there any canon evidence that they even assign scores? What would the score even be based on? If you take any action other than leaving the ship to its fate, you’re destined to die anyways. So is it based on how long you survive?

I’m sure starfleet officers go through hundreds or thousands of tactical sims to train tactics and encourage tactical creativity etc. From what I know, Kobayashi Maru is specifically not for that purpose. It’s useful in getting cadets to see what it feels like to be in a no-win situation, and to get them to think about it, but this purpose for it and the specific way its framed opens it up to Kirk criticism in this post.

Don’t cadets “fail” either way?

…is that James Carville?

It’s an interesting discussion. Not really what I expect from a meme sub but something out of r/daystrominstitute .

I think Kirk’s argument (essentially that there’s no ethical or moral justification for not even attempting to save them) is predicated on the fact that no-win situations of that specific type don’t exist in reality.

That kind of situations happen, Jim”

Kirk takes a sip.

“Do they, Bones? We’ve been at this for three years. Tell me bones, how many times have we faced a real no-win situation? A certain death in face of helping people? I write the logs, Bones. The answer is never. Not once. Sure, we lost feathers, and couldn’t always save everybody. But each time we made it, Bones, and each time, we saved people. The only reason the Maru is a no-win situation is because someone decided it should be. To make a point.”

He is of course right in that if you attempt rescue, the Kobayashi Maru sim will literally keep spawning enemy ships until you’re dead. So it was designed to be unwinnable in logical sense that goes beyond the practicalities of tactics and crew competence.

Kirk’s argument is that making the pragmatic choice of just leaving the ship to it’s fate is not justifiable because such scenarios (infinitely spawning enemies) don’t exist, and even making cadets take this course and conditioning them to make the pragmatic choice is therefore immoral.

I think there’s more detail that can be added to this though - in the Kobayashi Maru sim every cadet knows what the sim is before they go in there. It’s not some secret - they all know it’s unwinnable. If you somehow knew that it was unwinnable then the ethics of leaving them are tenable depending on your beliefs. But in reality you can’t know. You shouldn’t pretend to know.

I think a key part of what Kirk is trying argue here is that in reality, you cannot ever truly know that the situation is completely hopeless, and your duty as a Starfleet officer should be to try. Try your hardest. Do what you can. Save who you can. Fight. Try.

The thing that offends Kirk so much about this scenario is that it gives officers a ethical license to not even try, something that is completely antithetical to his conception of being a Starfleet officer.

On that count, I think he’s right.

One day your Internet search history is going to traumatize a police officer.

Say that again but this time put some stank on it.

Know more.

I hope they own Jones’ likeness to the point where they can give DJs the rights to remix his shouts into something of value.

What Biden does it doesn’t do is immaterial at this point. American voters have no interest in responsible democracy. Democracies grant extreme power to the people - including the power of suicide. Whether through confusion, deception, or apathy, that is exactly what American voters have chosen.

Reminds me of this ropeway thing that Tom Scott covered that doesn’t require power input either, for similar reasons:

https://youtu.be/6RiYXI1Tfu4

Niche application but still cool.

This is awesome.

If you ask enough pointless questions maybe women will start finding those pathetic losers attractive.

In this case YouTube can do literally anything they want due to the lack of real alternatives. Hosting videos for free, for anyone (and any number of viewers) to watch, for free, is rather predictably not a very profitable business model. If you want to see what it takes to actually be profitable with such a model, look at the average free porn site. Extremely intrusive ads everywhere. If you don’t want to pay, and ads are the only revenue, advertisers are the customer, not you.

I give it two weeks before you’re randomly musing about your desire to die along side Sanguinius in defence of the Eternity Gate.

Isn’t that allergy medicine and an antihistamine? How does that keep you going?

I mean you can sort of give him a pass on that. The Enterprise D is far more luxurious than any cruise ship of his time and in a completely different realm to any military ship in terms of material comforts.

Except the cancer warning thing which didn’t exactly have the desired effect. Good intent, bad execution.