Life in the slow lane

[openamenta]

when you think about it, it’s actually good that civil servant salaries aren’t enough to get blues credits

people are always complaining about how being on your city council or working in orange civil or whatever won’t be enough to get you a credit, but when you think about it, that’s actually a good thing!

basically, people whose main focus is earning a credit will focus their time on real estate, since that’s more lucrative. this means that the people in politics will be one of two things:

(a) they have really mild springs and don’t care (b) they’re really selfless and willing to sacrifice the chance of a third child for the sake of helping out the world

and both of these are good things for our politicians! if they have mild springs, they’ll be more able to deal with crises that come up during spring, like the voan food crisis or the tapa red district fire or what have you. if they’re really selfless that’s also a good thing! it’s useful when politicians are selfless

[smalltownmayor]

OK, but seriously, go jump in a dumpster.

SELFLESS PEOPLE AND PEOPLE WITH MILD SPRINGS ARE THOSE WHO SHOULD BE HAVING BABIES!!!!

Selflessness and mild springing are traits that we want to promote. To the extent that credit countries don’t promote them, there’s a dysgenic problem. Real estate, while obviously important to the economy, mostly gives value to owners because they’re using vast sums of capital. 

[openamenta]

Friendly reminder that relationships between reds and people can NEVER be consensual!

If one party to a relationship could easily destroy the other’s life, it’s really hard for a relationship to be consensual. That’s because the partner whose life would be destroyed won’t feel safe leaving! So for example, relationships between permissions-granting blues and purples will almost never be consensual, because the blue can totally destroy the purple’s life!

By the same token, relationships between reds and people can’t be consensual! If it ever got out that someone had fucked a red, their life would be totally destroyed. They’d lose all their friends, they’d probably be fired, and depending on how good their record-keeping is they might face criminal charges. This means that the red can never know if the person actually wants to have sex with them, and there’s always the possibility that they’re raping the person. Honestly, reds that do that should probably all be executed.

[smalltownmayor]

So wait, it’s non-consensual because of a power imbalance in both directions? That’s absurd! You can say that either the person or the red has more power, but they can’t both have more power. 

[steel-song]

I really loved the Sunfall series (the terrain mechanics in Sunfall III were some of the most thoughtful I’ve ever seen) but apparently Sunfall IV is going to let you change the character model so you can play as any caste you want.

I’m definitely going to join the boycott. It is completely inappropriate to be able to play as any caste you want in a WAR GAME.

[smalltownmayor]

I absolutely agree that, in the particular case, this is likely to encourage war crimes. That said, I don’t think that all war games have to have only grey characters. I recently played Oversight, which is a fun character-management game with AI handling the squad-based fighting section . The player, a blue, has to manage their stable of (grey) fighters: carefully manage your team to build up their skills and motivation (the zippy fighter pairs well with the balanced unarmed + magic prayer beads fighter, but their personalities clash something hard unless you can give the zippy fighter a romantic option that calms her down), and figure out how to give broad strategic goals. It absolutely draws on the PCs blue skills and is a good blue game. You, of course, don’t direct your fighters in combat, but to call it something other than a war game seems questionable.

Similarly, many civilization management and influence games have war components, where the PC, sometimes playing a specific immortal blue, directs the war effort at a broad level. I don’t think that changing the level of micro of different parts (increasing the complexity of scientific research, for example) means it’s wrong to be able to play as a blue and manage at that level.

[openamenta]

[for @azure-skies-above-the-free-state] what fraction people in your country reproduce? i just realized i have no idea if its like, most people have around two kids, or the virtuous/good at sucking up/etc have a lot and most people have one or none, or what?

@azure-skies-above-the-free-state

That’s a tricky question to answer. About half the population hasn’t yet aged out of having a child – if a hardworking eight-year-old doesn’t have a child yet, that doesn’t mean the system’s broken, it just means that it might take a little more time. Even in the case of older citizens, if we counted every childless fifteen-year-old as a person who will never reproduce, we’ll miss a lot of people who will get a permission or two before they die.

On the other hand, we can’t simply look at the proportion of people older than twenty who have children, because the suicide rate for childless people is far higher than that of those who have children, so if we only look at over-twenty-year-olds we’ll miss a decent proportion of childless people. There’s also the complicating factor of occupational hazards – some blues use permissions as an incentive for people to take on dangerous careers, while others are hesitant to give someone with a risky occupation a permission lest that person die before their child is grown.

If you’re interested, the full publicly available data set is available here, but at a guess I would say that most people get at least one.

[smalltownmayor]

It’s not that hard if you have your data formatted correctly: at birth, what is the likelihood of having children at some point in the future? Correcting this for recent changes that aren’t in the historical data set is harder, I admit, but still not impossible.

[worstblueintheworld]

As a result of the recent dueling related news some people assembled to protest outside the Erethani embassy in the capital today. 

Unfortunately, being small and somewhat isolationist, they don’t actually have an official embassy. As a result several hundred confused protesters gathered outside the Elaani and Evaleen embassies, causing much confusion

[coloursofthenight-deactivated]

Do you have your embassies alphabetized? That’s adorable.

[smalltownmayor]

I'm impressed, more than anything else. Getting nations to give up embassies just because there's a new one with an inconvenient name for the allocated space is more bother than anyone I know would willingly take on for that benefit.

[openamenta]

@shinylizardpeople

If you want to see who’s behind something, one way to do it is to look at who benefits. That’s how we know that riots aren’t a ~green conspiracy~, because greens are the ones getting killed. Or how we know that Mifan Kample didn’t rig our election, because she lost the election.

So who was behind the Rivikni massacre?

Clearly it wasn’t the Rivikni blues. They might technically have voted for it, but they didn’t benefit – fifteen of them died!

It wasn’t another country that wants to start doing cleaning. They’ve also been hurt by this decision.

But there is a country that benefits! Thanks to the events in Rivik, Miolee is now receiving payments in advance while other countries have their reds cleaned. Furthermore, Miolee has expressed a willingness to invest this money to earn more income!

The evidence is clear: Miolee orchestrated the Rivikni massacre.

[smalltownmayor]

Miolee’s profiting. We’ve also seen clear evidence that cleaned reds are willing to collaborate to protect murderers of people working for the betterment of society. It’s not entirely implausible that it could get the reds to collaborate on something. The greys would be much more difficult, but once the shooting starts you can rely on solidarity. It still seems unlikely, large conspiracies always are, but I don’t think that we should rule it out.

[Translation note: cleaned reds uses the present tense for red.]

[openamenta]

No amount of money, blue to blue, will repair the betrayal of trust by the Rivikni government.

If you murder fifteen thousand people you hang.

Rivik delenda est.

[smalltownmayor]

Rivik is perfectly within its rights to do whatever it wants with its own reds. Miolee claims to be caste-free or something, so there isn’t even a blue-blue norm violation here. What are you even saying?

[openamenta]

(original)

[smalltownmayor]

I’m sorry, your rendering of yellow seems off. 

[staringtowardthestars]

Realistically speaking, faster-than-light travel would not solve our population problem for very long. The average person would want five children [1], so if, post-FTL, we allowed people even close to the number that they actually want, our population would grow exponentially. There are only a finite number of habitable planets, and there would most likely be a smaller number of accessible habitable planets, so within a few generations we would simply run out again.

This suggests that instead of focusing on developing faster-than-light travel, which in all likelihood would be impossible, a more productive use of resources would be investing in various interventions to reduce spring severity. If there were a way to make people spring more mildly, or even a way to make future children spring more wildly, this would be an extremely good investment.

[smalltownmayor]

I’m sorry, “a few generations”? Yes, there are a finite number of habitable planets, but the universe is really big! We’d have a long time before we ran out of habitable planets.

Though, I agree that the most pressing problem in the world right now is reducing the harms of spring n a way that people will accept, without causing a demographic crash.

[prioritizingpurples]

promo me pls?

hey so i lost some followers due to recent discourse so i thought i’d make one of these!

favorite testimonial:

(i am now 7. suck it, anon.)

follow me for: - purple positivity - purple separatism - general political opinions from a radical purple perspective - occasional venty personal springposts

don’t follow if: - you’re red, even if you’re a clean or “ex”/”casteless” red - you’re blue. full stop. - you support intercaste relationships - you uncritically ship different-caste characters - you think purples-born-purple can ever have privilege over others for their caste - you don’t tag common triggers (suicide, abuse, etc.) - you don’t believe that purples are oppressed under the caste system - you’re a caste abolitionist

[smalltownmayor]

If you don’t mind my asking, what’s inherently wrong with spring relationships between greens and yellows? I’ve seen it happen a few times in my office, and it’s consistently seemed to end fairly well. What am I missing?

[chameleonlife]

My country has announced intent to start cleaning. It's not clear for certain yet what they'll do, but they might do integration. My eldest daughter has said if they do she wants to be grey, so that she can dance. I'm - rather worried. We know not many reds have chosen to be grey, but that some have. Do you know any? Are they doing alright? Would you have any advice for my family?

Purple Mod Says:

I have one not very close friend who went grey on the assumption that battlefield red jobs would be recasted grey, which they were (under the hazmat-suit protocol, of course) and there wouldn’t be much competition for them.  So far he’s been safe, but hasn’t been hired, I think they don’t have to have battlefield-red positions staffed actively when we aren’t fighting.  But his wife went purple and they live in a purple area so I don’t think that’s very much information.

Orange Mod Says:

@incasterainbow

Yellow Mod Says:

Dance is one of those competitive professions that you can’t plan on succeeding at without proving yourself against rivals under judgment, and lacking formal training will be a huge drawback.  She can dance as a hobby in any caste.  This is honestly my first worry hearing she wants to be grey to dance: does she have a grey fallback job?  Does she have other family with more conservative careers who’ll support her if she can’t get work?  Does she think she can find a niche in grey culture?  If your country is matrilineal, does  she think she could raise grey children?

I’m less worried about violence.  That can happen to anyone.  Mishike Ampelin was purple.  Mitigating that risk is mostly about keeping stealth and not being around evil individuals; I wouldn’t expect dancers to be a problem as evil in professions goes.

[incasterainbow]

I’m an ex-red grey in Anitam. It might be different in your country but things have gone well enough for me. I wanted to be a fighter and I’m going through training for that but I started sex work right away. There’s a niche for ex-red greys and no formal training requirements, I’ve been able to support myself off that. I definitely wouldn’t say anyone should pick a caste where there’s only one job they’d be ok with. I’m not stealth. I think being openly ex-red has helped me screen out people who really hate us, but I also get to accept or reject individual clients. Might be different for you as a dancer. I live in a grey neighborhood and nothing majorly bad’s happened. At the first place I moved into the greys next door strongly hinted to my roommate that they should get a better roommate, so I moved out after a couple of months. The next place has been fine and I’m still there. There’s resentment from some greys about docontam happening, or about them having to wear body cameras (thing our government did a while ago), or just having to deal with us. There’s some grey places where it’s very clear that I’m not welcome. But a grey gave me advice when I started decontam, and my roommates grey, no caste is all one thing you know? There are a few more risks, it’s not the easiest caste, but if she wants it and has a backup job (or a few really) it could work. If you/she wants to pm me you definitely can. -Lochem

[steel-and-toe]

ugh

of course they want to be dancers

you’re not just going to waltz out of decontamination and into the capital pointe company, okay, I’ve been training since before I turned two and graduated top quartile in one of the best dance academies in the country and it still took more than a season before I landed a contract and it could easily have been a lot longer

spoiler alert:  the montages on Step In Time were lying all along

like a month ago I would’ve been so mad about cheapening the level of the competition or whatever, but now I almost want to say go ahead and rotting try

[steel-song]

Yeah this is fucked up. If I need to trust the people around me to be actually able to lift heavy things and run fast and not collapse, I should be able to trust that they are grey.

Ex reds training at grey fight gyms are just going to get hurt. If you can’t keep up and you don’t know how to fall and you do things in stupid underconfident ways that make it hard to work with you, you’re just a danger to yourself and people around you.

Go to some other caste.

[amentansassorted]

Ok, ex-reds blah blah blah whatever, but what is with all these fucking elitist greys.

You do not have some weird one-of-a-kind caste trait of Grey Things Are So Super Speshull. Every caste has all like skills and abilities and shit. 

If somebody’s like ‘I’ve sure never danced/fought people before but now I will totally go dance in [some Amenta dance version of Carnegie Hall]/beat up [famous martial artist]’ they’re a dumbass, but they’re not like, extra a dumbass than if they were like ‘I’ve sure never programmed before but I will now be top employee at [well known tech company]’ or ‘I’ve sure never styled hair before but I’m gonna do it for [fashion icon]’. They’re just the same level of dumbass.

The caste division is not ‘people whose jobs anyone off the street can do but who can’t like, learn any other kind of skill ever’ and ‘amazing so inimitable greys’.

[steel-song]

Meh. I’m sure yellows and oranges and greens could all learn to do okay at each others’ jobs. They all have to be good in the brain department, just in different ways. Brain stuff is all connected anyway.

Greys need physical skills, no other caste is that, and if you get stuff wrong in a high pressure environment then you’re actively dangerous to people around you. Contrast some orange who fails to be sufficiently kind and snaps at someone once… that person will probably be okay.

It’s not like I’m some caste elitist, I know blues are better than me. But of the skilled castes, grey is obviously the hardest to learn for ex reds. That’s why so few of them are joining us. It’s…. just straightforwardly true.

[smalltownmayor]

Purples also require physical skills for the safety of those around them. Construction requires being able to use tools, being able to lift with both technique and strength, etc. I am not saying retail purples need it in the same way, but purples are one of the castes of the body for a reason.

[industrialbruise]

sometimes it just seems so weird that being blue is a thing

[riverrunslong]

In what sense?

[industrialbruise]

uh

if i give you a straight answer here you definitely will not doxx me and get me kicked out of my apartment right

[riverrunslong]

I definitely won’t do that, and given how small Veraim is we’re almost certainly in different countries, but I will understand if you don’t want to take my word for it.

One of the reasons I’m on tumblr is to see more perspectives, because online has different filters and selection effects than offline, and I’m asking you out of curiosity, but again, it’s understandable if you don’t want to answer anyway.

[industrialbruise]

nah i think it’s okay, just wanted to do a quick check because blue tumblr is a slugfuck and “doxxing somebody in a different country because of an internet argument” is definitely something that’s happened more than once

i feel like…blues are set apart from the other castes in a way that doesn’t really add up. like, blues are rich automatically, blue jobs are completely protected, blues get punished less for the same crimes

and, like, people say that’s because they have more responsibility, but that seems weird to me, cause i don’t get how these things connect

but what gets me especially is…i don’t know if you can genetically select for being decent to people. and i think that’s kind of the most important part of controlling a bunch of people’s lives, the being decent to them

[strawberry-poison-frog]

I pay my rent to a red-haired person so I get to say that it’s all power. It adds up perfectly if you just assume it’s the gross, vicious kind of power, and nothing else, and always has been.

Individual blues can be great, anyone who thinks I’m aiming this at people instead of the whole legal thing, just … no, stop it.

[worstblueintheworld]

Its a weird historical quirk that blues are both the politics caste and the property renting caste. Honestly I think we’d be better off if property was de-casted and skilled businesspurples could invest in it in the same way as any other asset. Poliblues make just as much sense as any other caste does, so if you are having castes at all they make sense. The skillset is not so much goodness/decency but being able to resolve competing interests and collective action problems. Often being too principled is a drawback because it makes it harder to make compromises that move things forward, and leads you to not think through the practicalities of things (*cough* Savo). I agree the legal protections are mostly bullshit, if anything greater power should bring greater responsibility. [As an aside, you know that meme going around a while back about how every caste thinks they’re the most oppressed/underappreciated? I’ve heard several blues say that they’re worse off because they have to look after the other castes and be responsible for them. 😕 ]

[smalltownmayor]

Fun fact: there were states that didn’t give blues a monopoly on property ownership! A few generations later, many of their blues were poor. A few generations later, those states didn’t exist, because their leaders and diplomats and judges could be really easily bribed, and this ended exactly as badly as you’d predict.

This is why I’m in favor of Blue Basic Income. Instead of segregating a “skillset” that doesn’t involve much work or intelligence beyond picking the right purple or yellow for the job, just provide blues with enough money that they can’t easily be bribed by corporations and foreign powers. It would provide a fairer system for blues, improve overall economic efficiency, and in auction countries the vast majority of the money would be given directly back to the government for a credit. 

[tidalwave-shiningsky]

what's your favorite thing about your job?

I really like being able to read research about what architecture and features and balance of commercial and residential zoning and so on make people happy and productive and figuring out which of it I’d find appealing to try and then trying it. I really like the rent forgiveness thing I blogged about a while ago, it’s not super profitable but it’s unique and a bunch of researchers have asked me for my data and sometimes I get emails thanking me from tenants which is neat.

I like being able to talk to the people whose decisions affect my life - municipal government and planners and so on - and understand what they’re doing and why and how I can plan for it.

I like the people - they’re mostly smart and relaxed with good taste.

[smalltownmayor]

I think that this is something that a lot of people don’t get about blues. There are relatively few problems that are faceless: impersonal bureaucracy isn’t, if you’re a blue. It may not be the fairest system, but sometimes I read purples or greens complaining about struggling against rules by nobody for nothing, and I just wonder what that would be like.

[openamenta]

@weirdnews

Rivik is now selling red-hunting licenses to tourists.

“We find that issuing additional red credits and tacitly allowing an outlet for some impulses contributes to an enviably low rate of violent crime,” said a legislative spokesperson.  “What other countries prefer to construe as property damage we have officially down as ‘unconventional use of a public resource’, or in some cases ‘essential services quality feedback’.  Given how inexpensive offering more credits is we’ve always been puzzled that more legislatures haven’t hit on this solution, but perhaps they anticipated the problem we face today.  In the current political climate, there have been an unusual number of red deaths which don’t serve those purposes, and moreover any salutary purpose they have is sometimes being diverted away from our own population.  If the trend continues it will be difficult to step up credits enough to compensate, given how long it takes a new red to mature.

“Accordingly, non-Rivikni who wish to take advantage of this Rivikni public good must purchase a license, to expire after one week; the price may adjust as we determine how much demand remains and a current figure can be found online.

“Furthermore, while reds are a public resource, they’re not intended to be monetizeable.  Any recording of a red’s unconventional use will be subject to a comparably priced tariff if distributed for anything that would normally not be defined as domestic personal use.”

[tidalwave-shiningsky]

Well, I guess I see where they’re coming from, but still, they could have some empathy for people elsewhere in the world.

Fundraiser for a license here.

[smalltownmayor]

I don’t normally talk about reds, but this would be a significant fundraiser for our government, at the cost of some increased risk of pollution (I’d expect reds to be less trained on average in how to do their jobs). I’ve donated [small sum by blue standards]

[smalltownmayor]

@steel-song, shadow-reblogging https://steel-song.tumblr.com/post/168484466461/how-about-firefighters-are-they-real-greys and tagging you because, as you correctly noted, kindnessismandatory shouldn’t have to be part of this conversation.

I’m not a diplomat, but I’ve studied a little foreign affairs. To measure “military power”, broadly defined, there are four basic variables that you can toss at every country in the world to generate a ranking. Sophisticated analysis is more complicated, taking into account terrain, leadership, experience, etc, but the basic model is a remarkably good predictor of success.

The factors are the size of the economy, the fraction of that economy devoted to manufacturing/industry, the annual budget of the military before the war, and the number of greys in the country.

Relatedly, you may have noticed that we have a grey unemployment problem. Every country wants to have greys to defend itself in case of need, wants them to be well-trained reservists, wants some available as a well trained and smooth officer (including non-com officer) corp, but mostly just tries to have them waiting around.

So we subsidize sports; debate grey basic incomes; declare “everyone’s a half-grey so they can all fight”; debate letting half-greys serve (which is politically inconvenient and a small-magnitude solution to a large-magnitude solution [I’m aware that this phrase doesn’t always translate well, it means that you’re proposing something that at most could fix 11% of a problem as if it will fix everything], a classic green idea if ever there was one; blur the line between acting and fighting; and most importantly make more jobs grey.

Sex workers. Bookies. Dance callers. These jobs don’t emphasize grey virtues, as you identify them. But every grey sex worker is someone who can, when the war comes, at least help with transportation (and there’s a long history of grey camp followers who assisted with all sorts of work in addition to sex on Spring campaigns). Every dance caller can help with getting a crowd from point A to point B, an important skill if your military isn’t yet well-disciplined, perhaps because a large number of troops were recently added. Every bookie can help check ammo and food supplies. And these are roles where it’s really valuable for the person doing them to be able to pick up a gun in case of need. And, of course, reserve duty is an option if and only if there are greys with primary jobs who can use their spare time for the military. Sex workers are particularly convenient for this, as they spend about a fourth of the year very busy and the rest of the time trying to make ends meet.