It’s because citrus at high concentrations kills earthworms. Citrus in compost in normal quantities relative to other compostables seems to be fine, but you shouldn’t be trying to compost a huge pile of just pulp and orange peels in your back yard.

As for why this worked here, I’m sure there are a whole lot of things that aren’t earthworms living in a formerly rainforested spot in Costa Rica which can break that stuff down over 15 years.

Nomadic people don’t just wander around aimlessly, and there are big differences in how desirable different territory is for nomadic hunter-gatherer humans. The principle is the same as with nomadic pastoralists: your group has a territory which can sustain them when hunted on/gathered from/grazed/etc over the course of the year, and your group will wander within that space in a deliberate pattern. If some other group decides to “just move on to” your group’s territory, hunting the animals and foraging the plants that your group knows they are going to need to survive the year, that’s an existential threat to you. And you can’t “just move on” yourself without wandering into the territory of yet more groups whose territory borders yours, and who will react violently to your presence for the same reasons.

Given the choice between fleeing to who knows where and fighting who knows who for the privilege of moving, or staying right where you are and fighting for the land you know your group can survive on, you stay and fight.

Humans spread out across the earth as the losers of these conflicts (those who survived, anyway) fled until they stumbled on new-to-humans territory, often displacing or eradicating groups of more “primitive” hominids they found there. This process continues until just about everywhere which humans can reach and which can support human life has humans in it. But expanding populations, the occasional natural disaster, and normal human frustration that their territory sucks while their neighbors have it great (which was often true; again, not all land is the same to a nomadic hunter/gatherer) meant that these conflicts were constantly reignited.

There was organized violence deployed by groups of humans against other groups of humans long, long before anything we would recognize as warfare. Particularly brutal violence too, because the objective was not to conquer other people (something which only makes sense once agriculture is the dominant mode of sustinence), but to either drive off or exterminate a rival group so you can use their territory for yourself.

And we don’t even need to talk about people here: we have records of chimpanzees fighting small scale wars of harassment and extermination against neighboring groups.

Pre-modern, pre-civilization, pre-aggriculture, pre-you-name-it human life was far more violent than what we deal with today.

Regarding the future uniforms, the same uniforms appear in most portrayals of “future starfleet” during the TNG era, such as DS9 The Visitor. I don’t believe they are meant to indicate a connection between alternate futures beyond being the next step for Starfleet uniform designs (although the uniforms shown for a similar time period in Picard turn out to be different anyway).

Regarding your question more broadly, yes. And also no. Both, really.

I’m not sure Q recognizes or cares about the distinction between spinning up an entirely bespoke simulated reality for Picard to do his thing in, versus altering the past such that branching timelines are created and shuttling Picard’s consciousness between them before ultimately closing them off. Or whatever other myriad mechanisms an omnipotent being would have for triggering the events portrayed. Nor is there any real way for us the viewer or Picard the participant to distinguish between those things. What is real, what clearly matters both to Picard and to Q, is that Picard did pass a test, and that Picard remembers those events in a way which will influence his future actions and relationships.

Sure. /u/williams_482

I still have a Reddit account and am willing to help people figure out Lemmy registration, but I do not moderate any active Reddit communities.

I count eight Kims (two of them only partially visible) in that shot of the prison cell, and there’s a fair bit of room around the corner for more to be hidden. I think it’s also easy to believe there are more cells containing more Kims just down the hall.

It’s reasonable to assume that the Defiant class’s 50 crew compliment is pretty close to a bare minimum already. 16-17 active at any one time is a pretty short list as it is, with roughly half that posted to the bridge during normal operations and most of the rest in engineering, plus a transporter chief, doctor, and other specialists. Having two shifts of reserves is crucial for covering both a long term assignment and for battle situations: you need to keep the crew as fresh as possible in the long run, and in combat you need those people to fill in for casualties and act as damage control, security, and emergency medical personnel. So unless Section 31’s strategic level idiocy extends all the way down to inane meddling in shipboard operations (possible, these guys are morons with dangerously inflated egos!), it should be safe to assume that the Anaximander was supposed to be staffed with about 50 crew.

That sidesteps the question of why all of these comically evil people are okay with using this arbitrary contest to determine succession, instead of the usual route of organically murdering each other until someone emerges who is good enough at disposing of potential assassins that they keep the throne for a while?

I didn’t watch the movie, so I’m probably missing something. Did Georgiou also have to deal with a bunch of normal assassination plots after officially gaining the throne? Or are we to assume that by virtue of winning this contest, she is widely seen as too dangerous for anyone to attempt to usurp?

Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Barclay?

Yes?

Lieutenant Barklay and the huge, powerful, and successful paramilitary organization who employs him are exactly who is supposed to guard Federation worlds. Which is what they do.