The Imperial Charter: Section Three

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

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@joelkreissman <zarpaulus@gmail.com> on 2016-08-28 20:38:57 wrote

I have to wonder what the “standard market price” of an Imperial Citizen-Share usually is.

@nweismuller <nweismuller@hotmail.com> on 2016-08-28 23:20:30 wrote

I have to wonder how a floating market price is determined in the first place for a commodity that is legally non-transferrable, which sort of short-circuits the market of buyers and sellers that determines a market price.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-08-28 23:29:54 wrote

It’s the supply-demand curve generated by the number of would-be immigrants (demand side) versus the number the Empire is willing to put on the market (supply side).

(The latter being determined by the limited rate of growth in turn determined by the fact that since no-one invented sovereign immunity and as such the governance can’t simply evade its half of the “social contract”, the number of citizen-shareholders can’t/mustn’t grow any faster than their ability to provide all those things that they promise to their citizen-shareholders, from running the justice-and-adjudication system through paying out the Citizen’s Dividend (i.e., the dividend stream attached to that citizen-share) to parking gunboats in orbit to remind any outworld barbarians who need reminding that one does not fuck with Imperial citizen-shareholders, no sir, and assorted other things that back up the Worlds’ premium citizenship brand.

So to achieve that, they set the number on sale so that the price floats at the point at which their return on the capital paid for a citizen-shareholdership plus the estimated future income stream from (the average) citizen-shareholder ESF payments neatly balances the per capita cost of providing all those things, plus reserves, at which point the problem goes away and they end up with the largest possible number of new citizen-shareholders to whom they can meet their obligations, and everyone’s a winner.)

@Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-08-28 23:35:21 wrote

Which in turn leads me to wonder who it is that does all the math and the bookkeeping this all would entail.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-08-28 23:40:17 wrote

That’d be the Logarchy of Statistics and Computation, or more specifically, a small part of it wedged between the Exchequer, the Ministry of the Empire, and the Ministry of State and Outlands.

@Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-08-28 21:45:12 wrote

Hoo boy… I have so many “question seeds” starting to blossom in my brain, but I think I’ll wait a bit before I start asking them (in case they’re covered in later sections in some way).

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-08-28 23:31:34 wrote

Well, there’re thirteen sections, so you might want to start asking 'em now in the comments before they have time to slip your mind. If they come up in later sections, I’ll respond accordingly.

@Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-08-28 23:59:42 wrote

Well, starting with that last paragraph: I can take a crack at what the first three items on the list mean, but I’m a tad unclear on what, exactly, “autohegemonization” is.

And while I’m at it, again I can see why (and what kinds of) regulation of unfit parents and unfit circumstances might be necessary, but what sorts of perceived threats or dangers were they trying to counteract with the other two?

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-08-29 00:14:50 wrote

Autohegemonization is basically extreme self-copying: turning yourself into a hegemonizing swarm by replicating again and again and again in an attempt to outcompete everyone else and turn the universe into endlessly repeated copies of yourself. (Becoming a runaway von Neumann machine is an obscure taste, but hey, some people juggle geese!)

On a smaller scale, while some self-copying is not a problem (and even the Sallantars of Valiár are not a particular problem because they’re just clones, not forks) there are some pretty nasty public health issues that come up when you have a significant chunk of your population all running off the exact same genotype and memotype. The generalized form of the Clone Army problem, you might say.

(As a side note, while not really a problem for the Empire - which doesn’t work this way - there has also been seen in some other polities a nasty interaction between forking and democracy. It turns out that despite being a terrible and unsustainable plan, there are more than a few political parties happy to try and stack the election by simply duplicating their voting base enough times to put them over the top…

…it never ends well, but since when has that ever stopped anyone.)

@Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-08-29 00:21:14 wrote

Autohegemonization is basically extreme self-copying: turning yourself into a hegemonizing swarm by replicating again and again and again in an attempt to outcompete everyone else and turn the universe into endlessly repeated copies of yourself.

So basically, like the Horatio from Endless Space?

(Courtesy link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx_-I-VMbxA)

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-08-29 10:49:32 wrote

Haven’t played it myself, but as far as I can tell from video & TV Tropes, yeah.