Universal basic income vs government provided living utilities

Eh? Even if that were true, why could they not then coexist in the same society? In, say, 1600s Britain, you had feudalism coexisting with proto-capitalism despite each being antithetical to the other. No society ever consists of only a single mode of production.

Couple of thoughts here:
1. Fuck voting Republican, and fuck voting Democrat. Voting for someone simply because their party letter matches yours is one of the worst ways to vote.
2. I'm not going to get into Mormons and 'clean living'. I'd rather not have to channel @Asyncritus (or @Tererun) and type up a wall of text.
3. Reading up on the Mormons and the United Order is important if you want to educate yourself on Communism and whether or not it's viable.
4. A group that practiced communism then decries communism while waxing poetic about communism is something always worthy of attention, regardless what you think of them.

Communism and capitalism are antithesises.
You're equating socialism and communism; they're not the same.
Socialism and capitalism do coexist in the same society. IKEA is very much a Capitalist enterprise, headquartered in a Socialist country.

Every Mormon I have ever known personally has been a good person: generous, helpful, and kind.

I sure as hell can't say that for any other denomination of Christianity.

And in the end capitalism won out. One of our posters, @RickDeckard, I believe, has a custom title, libertarian socialist or something like that. Those two concepts cancel each other out, you cannot believe in socialism and libertarianism. I believe in libertarianism and while yes I accept a certain amount of socialist policies like SS, they are not ideal, nor desirable. If we had a true free market, which we don't, there would be no need or desire for socialist policies. In a truly free society, there would be no place for socialism.

Back to UBI, there are some UBI experiments going on in several Kenyan villages funded by private organization GiveDirectly.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out in the years to come.

My prediction: it will be a great help to those who already have a great work ethic to achieve even greater things with their businesses, and it will enable those who don't to continue not to pull their own weight. Children who come of age in such a system will grow to have a poorer work ethic unless they have "tiger" parents, usually of the great work ethic sort. There might be emerging resentments between the two groups. If things go awry, we'll be reminded of the Tuskegee or Vipeholm or other experiments and wonder why we haven't yet learned our lesson about experimenting with poor people's lives regardless of how well-meaning we think we are.

I can see the whole "socialist libertarian" thing. The idea being that a perfectly socialistic economic system/society would largely eliminate the need for formal governmental structures.

Basically the Federation from Star Trek. About the only thing we see the Federation do is maintain a huge military.

The Federation also maintains a fleet of exploration vessels.

About the only thing you see, maybe:

A command economy always goes wrong.

Suppressing individual initiative by insisting that everything must be owned by the state always goes wrong.

However, there is a vast range of possibilities between that and the laissez-faire "give the rich and powerful the maximum amount of leverage needed to fuck everyone else" approach that the Republicans and their robber-baron owners tend to advocate.

Really?

Tell me, you are IIRC a Star Trek author.

Besides Starfleet (the military I referred to) what other governmental structures and institutions are shown existing in the Federation?

The Federation seems to maintain a robust research program. How many times does the Enterprise stop at a research outpost, science station, and so on? They also have quite a few vessels dedicated to science and exploration, such as the Grissom.

Are you talking about buildings (“governmental structures and institutions”) or governmental entities? And why limit yourself to government?

Not to mention a diplomatic corps...

I suppose you know that the military can and does perform research and exploration duties.

How many of the personnel at these scientific and research facilities are members of Starfleet as opposed to civilians?

You tell me.

No. You made the claim that the only governmental entity we see in Trek is Starfleet. The burden of proof is yours.

I didn't say that.

I said "about the only thing".

Then you should be able to state (and prove): “X% of the personnel we see on Star Trek are members of Starfleet, whereas only Y% are civilians.”

Your "False" is false.

The outpost at Mintaka III appears to be all civilians. So does the Regula I lab -- in fact a point is made of that in the movie. So does the research station at Ventax II.

And while Starfleet is clearly much more military than some of the dialogue claims, many of its vessels, despite having crews that use military ranks, aren't really an armed force to speak of. (Much like how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Public Health Service have commissioned officer corps, but most people wouldn't consider them military.)

Had.

so millions of people are devoting their life to what they believe is serving him, and yet will be punished for eternity because they failed to accomplish the near impossible thing? Grace ain't a bi thing in the CoC is it?

and, so I was taught, the smaller gate was called the "Needle's eye" in the native tongue

don't mind it, it's taught to every evangelical alive, right from the pulpit

(which is kinda of a nice analogy for some other points I'm prone to make as it turns out)

kinda think the latter is theoretical speculation mixed with pipe dreams. The year just past illustrates we're much further from doing anything truly remarkable than most would have thought (various technological innovations notwithstanding)

It's not just that Trump narrowly won, it's the universal triumph of "my ignorant opinion is exactly as valid as your documented fact" in the arena of ideas.

Until that is defeated - and I have no clue how that might be done since the acolytes of the former view have arranged it so their opinions can never be seriously challenged - we're headed into Dark Ages 2.0

shouldn't a history teacher be interested in the lessons we can learn from an historical event?

well, we've seen the federation council.

we can presume the ECS freighters of ENT are operating under marque as they seem to have dedicated, therefore chartered, routes. pre federation sure, but it's unlikely they disappeared the moment the charter was signed.

DS9 was a federation station, administered by starfleet but property of Bajor. As it had been designed as a mining facility, it'd be fair to say that its a civil port more than anything.

anyway, Memory Alpha (so, canonical reference) lists the following as at least being referred to:

• Central Bureau of Penology
• Department of Cartography
• Department of Temporal Investigations
• Earth Broadcasting Company
• Federation Archaeology Council
• Federation Astronomical Committee
• Federation Bureau of Industrialization
• Federation Bureau of Planetary Treaties
• Federation Naval Patrol
• Federation News Network
• Federation News Service
• Federation Science Bureau
• Federation Science Council
• Federation Standards Measurement Bureau
• Solar News Network
• Starfleet – see below.
• Starfleet Broadcasting
• Terraform Command
• UFP News
• United Earth Space Probe Agency (UESPA) (existed from the 21st and at least into the 23rd century)

Likewise, Section 31 isn't a SF organization, but a civilian service with operatives serving in SF.

Arguably, even uniformed science officers may not be proper military as there is both a bureau and a council.

How many civilian run research stations did the various enterprises visit? somewhere between several and a lot. So we know the UFP.gov is not jsut funding the shit out of civvy scientists, but occasionally gives them space stations and even planets to play on.

IIRC, SF and the Fed have separate diplomatic corps. I suspect that they work pretty tightly together though, each specializing in that aspect of treaty negotiations.

a (perhaps overly) simplistic way of saying it is that Capitalism is generally supposed to value the "organic-ness" of both production and distribution. Every capitalistic society will drift off that ideal to SOME extent with regulation but that's the core philosophy

Communism is predicated on the concept of a command and control structure for both production and distribution, with the same caveat as above.

Socialism, in he ideal, would lean towards organic means of production, a "free market", but introduce a certain level of command in terms of distribution (an amplification of the "safety net" in order to somewhat equalize wealth distribution) - in this sense socialism would be a hybrid of the other two.

Of course, that's probably not entirely aligned with academic definitions