Did any Star Trek episode have a character with no job?

Or, in “Space Seed,” “reorientation centers.”

“Hey, Tuvok, you got any nude holos of your wife?”

“Certainly not.”

“You wanna buy some?” :smiley:

There was an article on precisely this topic in ***Playboy ***once, written by a Jewish scholar. (I kid you not!)

IIRC, since it is a man’s duty to pleasure his wife after they’ve been separated for some time, he should refrain from such acts of self-appreciation in her absence.*

Maybe so, but 70 years is one helluva long time to go without! :frowning:

*Making love alone evidently drains you of an appreciable amount of your mojo.

As more and more tasks are made easy by having a machine (or replicator) do it, I can see where it might become more of a status symbol (for people who need to feel important) to have human servants.

The point of the restaurant setup is not just the food, but the atmosphere (which you might not be able to satisfactorily duplicate at your government issue dwelling). You can watch (maybe) an actual human cooking for you. (You sit there for some time, much longer than you would with a replicator, anticipating some yummy food, which causes all kinds of physical reactions to kick off in your body.) Maybe there is a five man band playing Jazz. Here, you get to see people who took the time to get passably good with some musical instruments (or vocals), and it doesn’t sound the same as it does coming out of your computer (as the restaurant acoustics aren’t usually duplicated). You can sit back and appreciate the effort those band members made/are making for “your” benefit. You can also interact with other patrons (at your own risk, of course. :). )

Can all that be duplicated on a decent holo deck? Sure. But maybe that is a level of programming that most people can’t, or won’t, do.

Could even the most complex AI play jazz, given the improvisational nature of the beast?

Mad Hermit - Doug wasn’t paying attention on Career Day.

I’m thinking Guinan didn’t actually “work” for a living. Ten Forward was more like her salon where she entertained guests. She was a socialite like Paris Hilton. Seriously, did we ever see her cleaning anything? Unseen servants did those duties while she looked for conversations to butt in on.

Don’t know, but the military’s working on it.

She was the bartender and proprietor but she also had a staff. She more than once referred to it as her place.

You might be able to get all the food you want out of the replicator but who gets to have a Malibu beach house and who has to live in Bentonville, AK?

Star Fleet officers live on the beach. The holo-drones are farmed in Bentonville.

[pedant mode] Bentonville is in ARkansas, not AlasKa.[/pedant mode]

Some sharp operators made a fortune building housing for Vulcans and Cardassians in the Libyan desert.

The typo aside, everyone are enlightened and don’t care. They have holodecks to take care of enviable details.

I think the Vulcan Embassy is somewhere in Australia. It’s a hot dry continent filled with dangerous wildlife; they’d fill right at home.

Yes, but you make an excuse. She flat out says that the replicated stuff is not as good as the real thing. Nothing about how regulations don’t let her replicate it the way she wants.

Plus, there’s the other time when they mention how it can’t handle tomato soup right. I think O’Brien says it.

The idea that the replicator is this perfect device that has every single thing in existence programmed into it is kinda weird. It’s clear that real cooking is a thing in the Star Trek universe, so it’s clearly not the same.

I always wondered how that could be so though. Bear with me through a bit of fan-wankery / thinking out loud.

I always assumed the replicators were a direct outgrowth of transporter technology, except with a storage/duplication function. So if they scanned in(?) a ml of real vanilla extract, the machine could potentially have a record it down to the same level of detail that is necessary to transport living minds. So in theory, they could produce an identical quantity of vanilla extract with that same fidelity- i.e. probably far beyond our senses’ ability to distinguish from the real thing.

However, it’s also possible that due to computational requirements, storage space issues and the like, that when dealing with replicators, maybe it’s at a slightly fuzzier level of detail; so that if you were scanning and replicating real vanilla extract, you get something that’s not 100% like real vanilla extract, but is rather somewhere between the real thing and the artificial flavoring. Maybe as close as 98% the way to the real vanilla extract.

I imagine someone with a trained enough palate could tell the difference on something as dependent on nuance as fine chocolate or liquor.

There could also be issues with the way that the scanning/replicating process handles certain complex organic molecules within the context of that lesser detail- maybe it approximates them, and they just don’t quite taste 100% right.

She SAYS replicated stuff is not as good as the real thing. It certainly is canonical that lots of people in the Star Trek universe believe that replicated food isn’t as good as the real thing.

But it is actually true? When they serve people the exact same bottle of wine, but give it a $20 price tag one time and a $100 price tag another time, they rate the bottle with the $100 price tag higher, even though it’s the exact same wine.

When anything you want comes out of the replicator, of course things that don’t come out of the replicator are going to be rated more highly, simply because it didn’t come out of the replicator and is therefore a scarce good.

On the other hand, a mixture of chemically synthesized ethanol, water, and artificial flavoring might not come up to even cheap wine. Replicated wine may be closer to the former.

Exactly. She’s a snob. A hipster. She thinks anything replicated is bad because it is replicated, not because she can tell the difference.

She probably draws on her synthesized chocolate with a green magic marker, to make it taste more “real”, more"warm", less"harsh". :slight_smile:

I have the same problem with Picard &co’s criticism of Data’s violin playing. They called his performance “cold” and “lifeless” (going by memory here). And when he counters that he’s playing it exactly as it was written, THAT is determined to be his failing. He shouldn’t be perfect. But that’s how the music was written! Beethoven didn’t want performers to make mistakes. He wrote down what he wanted the audience to hear. I’m sure he expected mistakes, but he didn’t want them, otherwise he would have written them in.

So Picard is a hipster at heart, too.

And the ultimate irony is, there’s no way to know if what Deanna is eating is even close to real chocolate that we have now. With the countless wars and loss of culture and data between now and then, who knows what was lost. “Fine chocolate” in the 24th century could be the equivalent of the cheap waxy shit they put in crappy seasonal candy. Not even up to Hershey bar quality :eek:.

Isn’t Picard’s brother a vigneron?