Bay 12 Games Forum

Beorn: he's not doing it. It's doing itself. The high price of Gold in eThailand was scarcity-driven. EThai Gold is now less scarce because of Hard Worker Gold, and because of foreign citizens coming here to sell Gold and buy extremely cheap products with the massive amounts of baht they get for it. Jack's done nothing but take advantage of the crashing Gold price to stockpile it for the government.

(Also: regarding presidential nominations, do not freak about the current gambit in re: TRP support. It is a gambit. The promised discussion will come shortly.)

It's not that it's not an option, but it isn't an easy or risk-free option. It may be that we could do it and make out well enough, but given the current Gold situation it'd be a substantial risk. 5 minutes work, f'r'instance, shows we could almost make this work with Canada, though we'd need to sell like 20 Houses to recoup the license fee. Their Wood is actually more expensive than ours, though, so this would be straight-up underselling them based on that and our cheaper labor costs. It's possible we could find a country where it would be profitable to export to. But the key point is that it wouldn't and couldn't be a short-term solution, as the 20g export license would mean we'd have to stick with it for a long time to recoup our investment.

UMH employees: we are at a crossroad. There's exactly no way in Hell that eThais are going to be able to afford our product at current market prices. None. We have enough Wood to finish the House we're on, and build 2/3s or so of another. Right now, it'll take 1200 baht to buy Wood enough to construct a House. Labor is running ~200 baht per House (6x4x8, plus 1x1x8), and we're taking 8 days to build one. I'm willing to continue constructing Q3 Houses on commission for internal clients (i.e., us), but if we take this tact we need to be sure we can afford to do so.

We currently have 1500 baht in the company. Do we wish to continue producing Houses for ourselves? If we do, then we need to commit to paying for their construction. I would be willing to pony up 1200 baht for the next House we finish, and at the same time give my current Q2 House to our last homeless employee. That would give us some room to breathe. However, it doesn't solve the overarching problem of not having a market for our product.

It is at this juncture that I again raise the possibility of switching to defense contracting (such as it were) for the short term. This would help consolidate Construction workers, plus allow us as workers to accumulate some more substantial capital reserves. Plus, it' be "national service". Above all, it would give the economy a chance to stabilize and hopefully grow before UMH resumed production. However, we should all go, or none of us should. Given productivity rules, a few of us leaving UMH hurts it a great deal, so we really should move as a bloc if we move at all.

Think about it. Whatever the consensus is will be fine with me. We can keep working in UMH or we can shift temporarily. It'll be 2-3 days before we finish our current House, so the decision isn't pressing.

A Fey, I've never had that problem (I run Firefox). That sounds like a nasty conjunction of their slapdash website and browser quirks.

Meh. I usually just leave it at "We need a slogan!"

Okay, in that community squad I have, one of the recruiters got arrested. She'll be charged with kidnapping and disturbing the peace. Would a sleeper lawyer be enough to beat the charges?

If the lawyer is competent, and she doesn't get unlucky. That's not a drastic slate of charges against her. She probably doesn't need the ace, if that's what you mean.

Yeah, Fey... that's the main reason I had moved to the Northeastern region, as the same thing happened last election. I'm too high profile; I expect I was picking up sixth-party and unaligned votes based on pure name recognition. But then when the bugs cropped up on Sunday and it looked like we had next to no one in Central, I moved back to bolster it (plus I figured with exactly 7 candidates it wouldn't matter as long as everyone remembered to vote for themselves).

I really, really, really hate this "electoral system". It's worse than the one we had last month, if such a thing can be believed.

No, no, no. One vote per person per day. But you don't have to vote in the region you start the day in. So you can have someone* watch the election results and "dispatch" people to regions to cast their vote to shore up individual candidates on the fly. You can fine-tune vote totals all over the country by sending exactly enough voters into a region to overcome their rivals in response to their rivals' running vote totals. Which is wrong on so many levels it's not even funny. It's essentially making a mockery of the notion that these are "regional" elections.

What they really should do is not reveal Congressional vote tallies until after the polls close. Anything else encourages extremely informed "strategic voting". Vote counts should never be displayed in real time, particularly in an electoral system structured like eRepublik's mess.

I posted a suggestion about this for the admins to ignore here.

*Judging by the shouts I'm seeing, I'm pretty sure Antonio and Croms are doing exactly this.

Hmm... ya think it's possible for non-candidates to move between regions on election day and still vote? I'll bet you anything it is. Which is so moronic it's not even funny, as the stated purpose of regionalizing the Congressional elections was to restore some of the "place loyalty" lost when mayors were phased out. Now elections will be about stockpiling tickets and having a pool of voters waiting to dispatch to various regions on demand of an organizing member to "plug up leaks", such as it were...