I’m always bugged more by individual moments than bigger things. So while T’Pol might be wearing an old fun center carpet as a uniform, and the temporal Cold War is both overly complex and excruciatingly boring neither of those things bothers me more than the following.
In season one, there is an episode titled ‘Unexpected’. In this episode Tripp becomes space pregnant from an alien space mama. During his pregnancy he is framed as becoming irrationally overconcerned about the safety of very minor or unlikely hazards.
At one point, he is in engineering and complains that if you hold onto the handrail of the elevator while it moves, your fingers will be sliced off against the scaffolding since there is no gap.
A crew member brushes him off by just saying, essentially, “Lol skill issue, just don’t hold the handguard.”
Again, Tripp is the one being framed as irrational in this discussion. Because he has a problem with a handguard that slices your fingers off.
Space hormones or not, he’s right that it’s a terrible design.
Goods can be exchanged without currency. It’s called barter and has been around longer than money.
This is essentially not true.
There’s this popular notion that “There was the bucket maker and the fisherman. I’ll trade you a bucket for some fish, said the bucket maker. Sounds good, said the fisherman. Then when the bucket maker finished eating his fish, he went back to the fisherman and said I’ll trade you another bucket for some more fish and the fisherman said No thanks, the first one is doing just fine.” and the side quest for the bucket maker to find someone who wants a bucket right now got to the point where we just need to invent some universal third good: Money.
This is a fallacy. Small communities like those humanity started out with operate on a sort of social credit. “Ah you gave me those fish last month, we’ll call it even.” Eventually a community gets big enough that you start using a more formal credit system, then once the community gets big enough that you don’t personally know everyone in your community, you adopt a hard currency.
In practically all cases, barter is an ad hoc system used between communities with incompatible currencies and then only briefly until relations can be established, or by individuals for whom hard currency is unavailable or inconvenient at the moment.
I’m glad we could find consensus; as you confirm barter has been around longer than money (or the time it takes to build the relationship required to trust currency exchange) and it can be used where money isused too.
Yours builds on the idea, which is fine. But the point is that The Federation doesn’t need money - the gold pressed latinum is where they explore currency and seems to be missed by OP.
And there’s a reason most places use currency.
It’s quite a bit more convenient than having to actually have other goods to barter with,
But what will be stored in all those boxes on the cargo decks? Something needs to hit Worf!