Probably just as intriguing will be the gargantuan number of legal micro-maneuvering that would have to go on for said Imperial dealership to circumvent all the regulations and standards that have been used to entrench such services
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The day that an Imperial AI passes the bar (probably Californiaâs bar, because of how the circuit courts work) will be a very interesting day for the legal profession.
On the one hand, my first thought was that, as we know, there are entire professions which exist to circumvent these things:
All That Makes Gold Does Not Glitter | The Associated Worlds (eldraeverse.com)
But on actual thought, gentlesophs, consider a small matter of scale. Their home market is four full orders of magnitude by population larger than the US market. In terms of relative negotiating leverage, thatâs like Palau or Nauru trying to dictate trade terms to good old American megacorporations. (And itâs only that small because I didnât feel like grabbing my envelope and estimating the size of the entire Worlds market.) If you want their stuff, get out of the way; take it or leave it.
The protests against the Galactic Trade Association will be hilarious, though, if only because of how much it will cost the usual unwashed to send even a few sign-holders all the way to the DriftâŚ
âŚto be promptly ushered off the property because theyâre making the Golden Nexus of Commerce look untidy.
(Addendum to previous: also, TBH, thereâs mail order. If several Worldsâ-wide outlets donât have at least one shipping option on their books that is an extremely thin cover for âarrange a good smugglerâ, I donât know my people. And I know my people.)
Anyway, some other random notes:
Iâd think cars groundcraft would be one of the less likely export products myself, for a couple of reasons.
(Leaving aside trying to get the State of California to allow anything powered by a radiothermal generator on the roads, obviously, and also throwing a dozen hissy fits about how the space tech bros are broing the space tech. Bro.)
((Gods, I hate that abbrev.))
Mostly, itâs paradigmatic incompatiblity.
One Iâve mentioned before is just a question of interface design, where we have spent the time from the invention of the automobile to now working on increased interface minimalism, trending ever downwards towards a single warning light reading âIâM BROKEN. PAY SOMEONE TO FIX ME.â, whereas theirs went rather the other way towards interface maximalism, on the grounds that people like to be able to see and control everything, and thus any groundcraft that doesnât let you upload event-driven Python scripts to your engine management computer on the fly is obviously for filthy casuals.
(Why? Because they suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? Whether or not they ever actually do is not the issue here.)
The other is a problem with manufacturing practices in general, where we are a inbuilt-obsolescence-embracing throwaway society and they, tactfully speaking, are not . The groundcraft manufactured there are not designed to be driven for a few years and then be thrown away; theyâre designed to last indefinitely with proper care and maintenance and to receive a potentially arbitrary number of modular upgrades to keep up with the times. (Eventually time and chance does thin their numbers, of course, but there are vintage vehicles tootling around the Emperorâs Highways that could have given Gilgamesh a lift to Uruk. The prices are set accordingly, so youâre selling into the rather specialized market of people who will happily get a mortgage to buy their car, rather than a more typical and significantly smaller loan.
Or you buy one from one of the quality arbitrageurs like Min Rosell Combine Mercantile (âItâs not the best choice! Itâs Spacerâs Choice!â) who specialize in producing what in their home market would be âfunctional but affordableâ goods acceptable for sale as vending-machine disposables, but which for much of the rest of the galaxy is still of superior quality, notably overengineered, and accordingly rather expensive.
On the last note, enjoy the vignettes as I do, I do have to wonder about the incentives of all these people relocating from the bright center of the universe to⌠um⌠not the bright center of the universe to run low-margin businesses like matter-shops.
Got a lot of economic development to go before thereâs that much hard currency to reap from a new Emerging Market by those sorts of means. Local franchisees and licensees work almost as well for that, plus theyâre already there and not used to the Core lifestyle, while the chaps at corporate are being paid generous hardship allowances for their temporary exile to this hillbilly hell where the cities are stinky, the politicians are uppity, and you keep having âfunâ new experiences like discomfort and inconvenience.
And you canât stab people even when they deserve it.
I imagine that those incentives - such as they are - probably tend to run into the valxĂjir direction, with perhaps a shade of qalasĂr in some exceptional cases. In other words, theyâre probably, mostly, not in it for the hard currency, or at least not primarily so.
Whether thereâs be enough such people to actually make much of a difference is a harder question; the Associated Worlds are big, but the Periphery is much bigger and folks like that would be scattered thinly around all that area. OTOH, in some contexts, one might well be enough.
There will always be a few eccentrics, but you still donât find many eccentrics from the wealthy parts of the world deciding that setting up an Apple Store in Mozambique is their heartâs calling.
Hard-currency-wise, though, thatâs just a matter of practicality. Youâve got to pay your license fees (unless youâre only selling older, now public-domain goods, in which case you may still want to pay your branding fees for marketing purposes). Youâve got to pay your suppliers, because Earth doesnât have the manufacturing infrastructure and even if you can handle that for basic materials, ainât no-one making orichalcium accumulators or the exotic matter used in vector cores for a long way in any direction. And unless youâre happy taking a major, major downgrade in lifestyle, youâre going to want a whole lot of personal importsâŚ
And none of those guys take dollars, which is what virtually all of your customers have to spend.
(Digression on currencies: because, fundamentally, the value of a currency depends on people wanting to buy stuff in the economy denominated in that currency. The esteyn spends almost everywhere because the Empire makes a lot of stuff, some of which you canât get anywhere else, and Imperial bottoms go everywhere; all the advanced economies - Core, First Tier, and Second Tier Markets - which subscribe to the Common Economic Protocol, the exval exchange currency and the Accord Clearing Network likewise, pretty much, because the currency exchange is almost instantaneous and so the de facto exval-denominated economy is huge.
But youâve got to have a high trade volume first before that can work for you; the Accord Exval Fiscal Exchange can provide that service between all the subscribing currencies because thereâs essentially always demand for all of them and day-to-day commercial transactions always clear.
This isnât the case for the Emerging Market currencies that dominate the Periphery and half the Expansion Regions, because low trade volumes prevent that, which means unfavorable exchange rates on world - where traders who have acquired local currency need to trade it all for hard goods before they lift - and outside their own economies, trade very often at numismatic/curio value only.
And thereâs only so much demand for collectible presidential portraits.)
Which is not to say that there wonât be hard currency to be had on Earth - itâs just that the things Earth initially has that will generate it (cultural items and bioproducts mainly) donât translate directly into wide availability. Exval in the hands of book, media, and game publishers, distilleriesš, coffee/cocoa bean traders, et. sim., doesnât lead directly to it being in the hands of Joe Public, because they all have a shopping list of things they can and ought to spend the money onÂł, and their employees arenât, by and large, conveniently in the galactic economy and wonât be until someone sees enough potential to make it worth flying a skymall out here.
(This is why smart civilizations spend their hard-earned and taxed hard currency on uplift consultants early on.
Or else you came up with some suitably clever hack and are this generationâs heir to the Paperclip Maximizer, of course.)
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I mean, there is that distiller from Kentucky tearing up the local highways² in a new-model Silverwing Vectra, but that was a gift the market maker he sold a shit-ton of quality bourbon to brought back.
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The highway patrol arenât happy because he shared a whole bunch of stories about moonshiners with said market maker, who concluded that he should add the radar stealth option to his little present.
âWhat the hell was that?â
âI donât know, but it was doing 190!â
- Hershey Station, L5. Where the weather is always good, the robots do all the work, and you never have to bribe local warlords to get your beans on the feckinâ boat.
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Relevant to those contemplating just exactly how one works with primitive economies. And, yes, itâs a real shitty deal all around.
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Thinking about recent, ah, comments by the Pope on the topic of Ukraine, I canât but once again imagine the sort of ecumenical conference post-contact where you have the usual line of Earthling religious leaders preaching peace and the preservation of life that weâre used to â
â and then thereâs the big guy at the end of the row in full armor, with a big damn axe, yelling âIN THE NAME OF THE TWIN GODS OF WARFARE GLORIOUS AND RIGHTEOUS, KILL THOSE BASTARDS! RIP OUT THEIR GUTS AND USE THEM TO GREASE THE TREADS OF YOUR TANKS!!â.
(And other channelings of the spirit of the terrifying offspring of George S. Patton and Lord Shaxx.)
"So, Washington State decides to make as a condition of parole meme rehabilitation. This was aboutâŚoh, PC+11 or 12, so the tech was out there and people knew what the results were of it. And the consequences of the tech.
"But, because this was a state run by unreconstructed socialist Democrats-along with a few Republicans that had to have known what was going to happen-all they saw was âsafer streets because these people are leaving prison with a working conscience.â And they couldnât do the additional rehabilitation work of helping these people to deal with all the things they did in the past with a now working conscience, because there was a state law and a Supreme Court (state, not federal) ruling that doing that kind of âmental editingâ was âharmful to the continuity of the personâs existence without the personâs permission.â One justice compared it to involuntary assignment to a gay conversion camp if such a thing was forced on people. Ignoring the fact that even the VA made it clear that meme treatment for PTSD had to include cognitive therapy and assistance, and just about every other state in the US that had meme rehabilitation required secondary therapies for prisoners wanting to take it.
"They really, really, fucking really should have known better.
"Suicide rates of released prisoners, along with drug and alcohol abuse? It didnât just go up, it shot up through the roof like a rocket. Because you now have all of these people, some of them hard-core lifers who have done serious shit in their lives, with a working conscience having to figure out how to reconcile the things theyâve done before this and not having the tools or the training or even the common decency of a partial mind-wipe to resolve these things.
"First two years after this happened, we got called at least once a week like clockwork to someone released and their parole officer would be calling the station to tell us, âheâs gotten meme rehab, but not secondary treatment,â and weâve got to talk this guy down.
"One guy, really tragic case, was screaming about how no matter what he was going to do, he was going to burn in Hell because he was a kiddy-popper, he knew it was wrong then but didnât care then. Now, he did care and he knew what he was doing was wrong, how he was acting out his own childhood abuse. But he was still a pedo, still going to Hell, and his only real choices were to go to Hell as a pedo or as a suicide and if that was his choiceâŚ
"We got him tazed, thank God, before he shot himself or anyone in the cafe he took the hostages in.
"Four fucking years of that. First two years were the worst. Second two years were still terrible, but the prison grapevine told convicts that if they didnât want a quick trip back or a pauperâs grave, they needed to get all the head-work done. By that time, the Supreme Court ruled on two big cases and you couldnât do half-and-half treatment, you had to fix everything and the numbers went down.
âWorse part? Half the idiots that suggested this proposal never got voted out of office until term limits came into play. Hell, they even bragged about how their policy worked during their campaigns.â
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CORPORATE LIASION CENTER, TRANSVEIL - Cognitech, ICC responded today to criticism of their moratorium of sales of redactive products and technologies to American (United States of America, Earth, Sol) governmental bodies or contractors in a statement reading as follows: âThey created the fucking Torment Nexus. We printed a special âDO NOT CREATE THE TORMENT NEXUSâ chapter for them in the manual, Chapter 0.5, in 36 point boldface red, and they still created the fucking Torment Nexus. Weâre out. Let someone else sell these bloody idiots the tools of their own damnation.â
Of course, memes aside, Iâm guessing they bought the tech from someone more like Honest Tsinmaoâs Neuronic Chop Shop & Bar in the first place, 'cause (a) lowest bidder rule - itâs substantially cheaper that way, and only 1138% higher risk of severe brain damage; and (b) if I know the US government and its subgovernments, it would totally plotz at being asked to sign Cognitechâs standard export disclaimer that the purchaser does not intend to do anything Stupid, Evil, Stupidly Evil, or Evilly Stupid with the product.
But, but - thatâs our competitive advantage!
âWell, that was a week,â Congressman Joseph Cohen (D-NY) sighed as he sat down hard in the overstuffed leather couch in her office. âWe hadâŚsix, seven Imperial companies at the hearing, complaining about a lack of oversight, despite the fact that there was oversight and the cases are in courtâŚand might make it in front of a judge this year.â
âI agree,â Senator Barbara Linwood (R-TX) replied, and offered him a glass of water. âYou donât want to know what I had to deal with in terms of Cognitech and that whole mess in Washington state,â she groaned and sat down.
Cohen looked at the glass, then at her. âI know you too well, you want something, which is why this isnât the good whiskey.â
âOh, absolutely,â she snarled, then sighed. âIâve just had a talk with Occasional-Cortex and her friends.â
Cohen made an inarticulate groan and downed half the glass of water. âBetter you than me. I have to deal with them daily and when I think even my grandfather would push The Squad into the Dachau showers firstâŚwhat was her issue?â
âDiversity, Equality, and Inclusion requirements for joint corporate operations here in the United States,â Linwood replied and drank most of her glass of water in three large gulps. âThe good news is that I was able to convince Cognitech not to pull out of any of their contracts here. I think. It was a near run thing, and the worse thing about what Nadeen said?â
âWhich is?â Cohen raised an eyebrow in concern.
ââYouâre the best of a bad lot,â he said, and I know he was damning with faint praise,â Linwood looked at her glass of water and set it carefully down on her desk. âLook, we know that even most of the fly-by-night companies are pulling out of the PRC because of fraud and IP theft. Same thing in most of Asia and a good part of Europe. The US, UK, Japan, Canada, and Australia are some of the only places that are still having contact and contracts, and we both know that we need to modernize as quickly as we can.â
âThat bad? I donât think the Empire would just move in and take us,â Cohen sighed.
"No, they wonât do that, but theyâre slow and steady. If we donât hold our own as much as we can, my great-grandchildren will just be space elves with rounded ears, because of just how tempting they are. And that doesnât count if thereâs two bad elections in the New Voniensan Republic for them to get a Mussolini and decide that we look like Ethiopia, or some of the other smaller powers that might decide to fish in choppy waters.
âSo, that means technology, infrastructure, education, the whole works,â Linwood continued. âAnd thatâs why I have this.â She tossed him a small file folder. âExecutive summary of a bill that weâve been working on the Senate side. If we move fast enough, I can swing enough Republican votes for it and one of the conditions is no riders or add-ons, straight up-or-down vote. Legal and economic reforms that we should have done, hell, thirty years ago, let alone twenty years after First Contact.â
Cohen looked at the abstract, and read it. He was a quick reader from long experience as the New York DA before he went to Congress. âSo, why are you coming to me?â
âI think you can swing enough Democrat votes to get this voted on-once again, straight up-or-down, no riders or add-ons-in the House. I know we can get enough Republican votes there. And enough for a veto-proof vote so that the bobble-head wonât fuck it up,â Linwood half-snarled.
Cohen winced slightly, more out of empathy than anger. âHeâs notâŚyea, as even a candidate for President, he was definitely a bobble-headed idiot. Hasnât gotten better the last three years, mostly because our bullpen is full of shitty idiots older than I am. Swinging those votes is tricky, but possible. How soon can we put it up for a vote?â
âMonday morning,â Linwood chuckled, and pulled out a bottle of very nice single-malt bourbon.
âThat quickly?â Cohen replied, eyebrow raised.
âWhy wait?â Linwood asked in return.
Oh, there are so many contractual issues that would be fun to sort out. For one, as I just posted over on Minor Weirdnesses:
- When you buy electricity on Earth, you sign a contract that does not specify voltage, available amperage, frequency, availability, or other rather crucial parameters of the product you are purchasing. Does that seem right to you?
âŚI mean, they can be reasonable. We donât have the most advanced electrical grid ever so itâs not like theyâre going to insist on an eight-nines SLA like they can get in civilized parts, belike. (Note to logistics: weâre gonna need to bring in some batteries.) But theyâre sure as hell not going to sign up to a âyou take whatever we can manage to provideâ deal.
"It is the policy of this company to avoid all of those things in favor of having a monoculture of people who are exceptionally good at their damned jobs. That has been our policy ever since we were building atomic piles - before the age of fancy automatic systems - that required fissioneers to manage the control rods with a quick wit and a large spanner, and thus failure to be really good at the job was punishable by merciless physics melting your flesh from your rad-rotted bones.
âOur corporate culture hasnât changed much since those days⌠and given that we build and operate bottled stars, do you really want it to?â
- HasimĂr Estantel, Director of Operations, Extropa Energy
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On another noteâŚ
PRIPYAT, UKRAINE - Contruction Begins On ĐОва ĐŃипâŃŃŃ
A ceremony conducted in the ruins of ĐŃипâŃŃŃ today, attended by Malk mor-Tirek, CEO of ReClamation, ICC, the President of Ukraine, and several former residents marks the start of construction on the new city of ĐОва ĐŃипâŃŃŃ.
Following their demolition and cleanup of the confinement structure and the remains of the ŃĐžŃнОйиНŃŃŃĐşĐžŃ power plant, a ReClamation team remained behind to fully decontaminate the former zone of exclusion using nuclear dryer technology to accelerate the decay of remaining radionuclides. The new city will be built on areas of old ĐŃипâŃŃŃ already prepared for construction by this team; all regions of the zone are expected to be cleared of radioactivity by the end of the year.
While glad to have seen the end of this tragic chapter in local history, it is not the end of nuclear technology in the region. Local civic leaders have requested that Empire Nucleonics, ICC, bid for construction of Earthâs first modern split-isotope fusion plant on the old ŃĐžŃнОйиНŃŃŃĐşĐžŃ site.
Because while itâs probably racist, sometimes itâs handy to hire the species which considers human-lethal levels of radiation âbasically a sunny day, makes me tingleâ.
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âŚIâve seen some of the idiots that migrate to HR in big companies. Who eventually get somewhere dangerous like governing âboardsâ or in actual government.
Yes, I would prefer the Imperial POV of competence and merit above all.
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Yeah, I was on submarines. Either youâre competent at your job or youâre GONE.
Trying to deal with sillyvilian âyou canât fire me, Iâm blackâ etc is maddening beyond all explanation.
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I donât have the writing or comedic chops to replicate Explosions&Fireâs script style, but Iâm just trying to imagine the videos heâll come up with after he gets his hands on a cornucopia.
The âbad exampleâ likely to be set by having a polity around that isnât even slightly reluctant to admit that the second step in dealing with a riot is fixing bayonets.
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I thought the second step was a whiff of grapeshot. Third step is fixed bayonets.
No, fixing bayonets happens first, to give the rioters one last chance to disperse before getting turned into steaming chunks by grapeshot.
The bayonet charge is what happens immediately after the whiff of grapeshot.
Though I imagine the average Imperial Legionnaire looks about like that infamous deputy that was bending his âcorrective phrenologyâ stick that has made the rounds the last couple of days.