A lot of times, they only drink it while on duty. Other times they drink it all the time while on a ship… Somebody probably compiled it, but I don’t think the authors had any unified theory of why people drink it.

But yeah, I remember many people saying it’s only a flavoring agent.

Yes, as long as you accept that the lower-priority tasks get dumped when needed.

This is a common way to deal with it. But the number of managers that know how to decide a task is low-priority is exceedingly small. Most only have top-priority tasks to distribute to people.

If you have somebody doing work that can appear at random (like somebody calling and saying they have a problem), that person will either be free for a fraction of time that seem high to naive people, or will have a line and take ages to help anybody approaching them.

That seemingly high fraction of time is usually around 50% for the line to stay under control. That’s a well known result from mathematics.

Any manager that doesn’t know about the utilization/latency trade-off from queue theory is a danger to themselves and to others.

It’s not like DISCO flaunted around saying “we don’t hate gay people in this ship.”

Well, after DS 9 it would just be repetitive. Also TNG spent a few episodes on this exact point, but it wasn’t a main topic.

But people tend to focus their complains about things being “preachy” when those things put the preach above the story-telling. DISCO absolutely had this flaw in some point or another. Never for very long, though, so it really wasn’t a main characteristic. Anyway, when a show is simply good, almost nobody gets bothered by the preaching.

Well, they falsified their stress readings so they could get out of the dam spa and back to work…

And if I had the kind of great workplace the Federation has on Trek (even more at the LD times), I can see myself doing similar things perfectly well. Hell, I’m on vacation right now, trying to add motors to a trimming platform so I’ll have a micrometer positioning device…

Almost always for the worse. Possibly always.

A war going on changes everything, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the people they were sharing with weren’t naive societies that didn’t know there was life elsewhere on the galaxy. For those ones, they just presented themselves, warned about their enemies, and moved on trying to make the minimum possible impact.