16 KiB
[FF] [RST] Economics and Superheroics in the Wormverse: Fling a Light 1.05
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Author: u/UltraRedSpectrum *
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Score: 18
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Created: 2016-05-27T03:32:44
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+3] (9 minutes later)
Short chapter. I wish there'd been more on how the Protectorate alternately stifles and aids in Parahuman uses of powers in the civilian side of things. There are some implications in canon and WoG that governments try to reduce the economic disruption of powers by stopping capes from using their powers in the private sector, which I thought this section was hinting at, but it was pretty short.
Good part at the end with the way good people cooperate.
u/UltraRedSpectrum [+2] (17 minutes later)
Good to hear you thought it was short. When chapters don't feel long enough, you know you're improving.
(Particularly since this was the longest chapter so far.)
u/AugSphere [+3] Dark Lord of Corruption (11 hours later)
Taylor's insistence on returning to school continues to grate on me. I mean, she mentions how much of a waste of time it is each time it gets brought up, so why the fuck is she still doing it? She's literally signing up to waste her time ferrying heroes for the sake of being able to go waste time in (a more prestigious) school. What, does she think that her secret hero identity will not be able to find work because she doesn't have a school certificate? It would have been more believable if she was shown to have some incredibly important reason to not just drop out, but I just don't buy that explaining her situation and motivation to her father is that fucking hard for her. I guess I can just chalk it up to her being an idiot, but I was hoping to be able to hold her to a higher standard.
u/UltraRedSpectrum [+2] (11 hours later)
For someone who strongly self-identifies as intelligent and upstanding, doing something as low-status as dropping out of school is very difficult. To Taylor, dropping out is something gang kids and would-be prostitutes do (oh my!), and in doing so herself she'd be associating herself with a thing associated with a bad thing, and thereby associating herself with a bad thing.
Besides that, her father would never be okay with it, even if she were bringing in ten million dollars a day. All those arguments go even further for him, since he's had decades longer to associate school with virtue and dropping out with its absence.
u/AugSphere [+6] Dark Lord of Corruption (12 hours later)
That's Amy-tier bad reasoning. It's not implausible for people to be that stupid, but seeing an [RST] tag sets my expectations for non-brain-deadness of characters to certain levels, and I'm disappointed when they don't live up to them. You'd think someone who strongly self-identifies as intelligent would have enough intelligence not to play meaningless status games for zero benefit.
I can kind of see her doing it just for father's sake, but it doesn't sit well with me. I wouldn't behave like that, but, more importantly, I'd rather read the drama involved in Taylor having arguments with her father about it, than about her meekly getting into bad deals with Piggot and wasting her time on useless bullshit.
Well, nothing to be done about it, I guess. Hopefully some arsehole comes along and informs her of the opportunity costs (preferably measured in dead children) associated with her school bullshit. Would make for a satisfying "The Reason You Suck" speech at the very least.
u/Iconochasm [+3] (20 hours later)
I haven't read the fic beyond the first chapter when it began (I was actually checking the comments here to see if I should), but beyond her father's sake, I'd think staying in school for her mother's would make more sense. Annette was an English professor. I could easily buy a line of reasoning where her mother had imparted a sense of the value of school and graduation as an end in and of itself. "Dead mother's most sincere wish for her daughter's future" has enough sentimental value to overcome an enormous opportunity cost to staying in school.
u/AugSphere [+3] Dark Lord of Corruption (21 hours later)
Hmm. Good point about Annette. Still, sometimes the sentimental mush is not really worth it. I hardly think that Taylor places such a huge terminal value on attending school, that the decision is a deliberate one and was made with decent understanding of the trade-offs involved. It looks more like she's just being an idiot, which is quite disappointing in a rationalist work.
Room to grow is good too, though, so I'm not too salty about this. Sooner or later she'll have to realise how much of an idiot she is being right now.
u/Restinan [+2] (a day later)
Honestly, that type of bad reasoning isn't the exception, it's the rule. It also isn't conscious, it's almost entirely sub-deliberative, manifested in flinch reactions and nebulous feelings. If you don't spend a significant amount of time regularly investigating your mind and double checking your plans for flaws like that, you'll never notice they exist and never have even a chance of getting better. We just have high enough standards that the typical main characters of stories in this subreddit would never make a mistake like that.
EDIT: So, I guess what I was trying to say was that, yes, it is a hilariously bad way to reason, but it's also really common, so it's entirely realistic that even a smart and somewhat rational person could make that type of mistake.
u/UltraRedSpectrum [+1] (13 hours later)
I think you're overstating the rawness of the deal she got (or more accurately, I got a bit melodramatic in the text). She takes her afternoon classes off to use her power for the PRT, likely while sitting down in a nice little room, with lunch provided and regularly scheduled breaks. Then she has a shift, no more than you'd expect of a part time job, in which she does the same thing again, and which can't interrupt her sleep or free time without bringing down the wrath of the Youth Guard. If there's an emergency, to whatever degree Piggot can manage to stretch the definition of "emergency", they can call her in the middle of the night and ask her to come in for half an hour.
Her power doesn't really lend itself to strenuous tasks, and the canonical rules for what you can and can't make a minor do are surprisingly strict. Compared to dropping out of school (scare chord) (thunder in background) it's a pretty reasonable choice.
u/AugSphere [+2] Dark Lord of Corruption (14 hours later)
My beef is actually more with spending time on school. That's an almost utterly useless time-sink I'm more annoyed about. Working with PRT could actually be useful both from a networking perspective and to gain some experience in dealing with other capes, although I wouldn't call it an optimal use of her time either.
u/UltraRedSpectrum [+1] (15 hours later)
She doesn't really have much else to do. She isn't exactly going to Hogwarts, so she has nothing particularly useful to study, and any time she tries to set something up she has to wait a week for it to get scheduled, another week for the meeting, another for the followup meeting, and then a few months because the final agreement was on the project taking place in the next fiscal year.
u/AugSphere [+5] Dark Lord of Corruption (15 hours later)
I don't buy that. Surely the global transport market isn't so small that she has exhausted all her options already.
And if major transport companies are being such slow-pokes, maybe the thing to do is to just go ahead and open a portal between some transport hubs on different continents. Give the big guys some incentive to move quickly, when they start seeing enterprising chaps laying tracks through an intercontinental portal, while they're busy trying to find levers big enough to prise their heads out of their arses.
Certainly you can't be implying that she literally has nothing better to do with her time than go to school? I mean, did she talk to people about getting stuff into/out of Earth's orbit? To other planets? Safe, easy and free energy generation? There are plenty of applications besides shipping stuff. Just going to hang out with some engineers and scientists and brain-storm for different applications seems like a very damn obvious idea. She wouldn't even have to get in contact with prestigious big names, just hitting an irc channel would do for starters.
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (21 hours later)
You can't just open up a portal between transport hubs on different continents. I mean, you can, but you shouldn't, because you'd be violating a huge number of laws, and on top of the laws that you'd be explicitly violating, you'd be violating the spirit of a whole lot more laws.
If your portal goes from Brockton Bay to Cologne, you're dealing with:
- Invasive species laws in both countries.
- Two sets of city, state, and country taxes.
- Customs offices in two countries.
- Border security in two countries.
I don't see any way that you could get it done without a team of lawyers and another team of accountants. If you just place a portal without taking any of that into consideration ... well, it depends on what the legal landscape is like in the Wormverse, but at the very least you would make a lot of people very unhappy with you -- all people who you need to keep a transport operation going, assuming that you need it to be legal (which Taylor does). Go in half-cocked once, and you make doing it legitimately a whole lot more difficult. And at the worst, you get arrested for violation of ... let's start with the sanitary plant protection code and work our way up from there.
I mean, I agree that Taylor had better things to do than staying in school, but problems are hard, she needs help, and there are very real costs to trying to diversify. I think it was very sensible for Phase 1 to focus on a single industry.
u/AugSphere [+2] Dark Lord of Corruption (21 hours later)
I agree, actually. It's a pretty tricky thing to do. Something like opening a couple of portals in international waters near big ports might be a bit less risky both from ecological and from legal standpoint, but I get your point.
She really does need help. That's why she should actually spend her time trying to get said help, instead of sitting on her ass in school. It's just such a glaringly, obviously suboptimal course of action that I can't help but whinge about it.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (16 hours later)
I'm really enjoying this so far, mostly because I think there's not enough logistics and paperwork in fiction.
u/UltraRedSpectrum [+3] (16 hours later)
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Ahem.
u/UltraRedSpectrum [+2] (11 hours later)
By popular demand, I've added a bit of clarification as to Taylor's decision to join the Logistics Register. If you're curious, search for "I wanted to groan."
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (an hour later)
Extremely good prose in the first couple paragraphs. I want to try to remember and steal the "X fit Y in a way I wouldn't have expected" technique, it is used here very well.
The obvious solution to her problem would be to join the Wards, get transferred to Arcadia, then quit the Wards. They can't force her continued participation.
"The King's Men"? Have the S9 been confirmed to exist in this story?
u/ulyssessword [+5] (3 hours later)
"The King's Men" is a major hero group in the UK, IIRC.
u/rationalidurr [+1] If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight! (6 hours later)
YES! The Update schedule is on the track!
I am definitely liking Mr Chesterfields good wins reasons, it goes in line with rationalist "coop mode is best mode" ideas.
I am liking the fact that organisation and regulations are such great obstacles, from a "realistic/goody two shoes" perspective. But u also hate it from a heroic "just fix the world" point. And what the heck happened to Ms. Gaunthier and driver girl, did she plan to torture her for fucking around on their drive to boss?
Overall good, minor mistake/tidbit:
However, with your help, obviously that changes. However there isn't time to get money.....
Repeating "however" is slighty jarring and reads on first pass as a copy error. Maybe change second "however" to "but" or "unfortunately"
VERY IMPORTANT REQUEST: I've said this to other people before, but I must repeat it to you. Please, pretty pretty please with sugar on top: Whenever you post a new chapter of fic, add a small summary of previous events and general plot, just to jog readers memory a bit. This is especially important in cases such as yours, where there is a big gap between updates.
u/Geminii27 [+1] (6 hours later)
I hadn't read this before, but I'm guessing it's Taylor with Doormaker's power, or something approximately equivalent, and she can apparently make portals permanent?
Hmm. It's definitely a power with a lot of scope for expansion, much like the original. She hasn't figured out how to use it to cancel momentum, yet, and her chaining technique needs work. Not to mention options such as having a low-poly costume and learning to build similarly-shaped sets of portals which open onto the interior of mountains or oceans, thus giving her shielding, effective multipresence (multiple construct bodies), and psionic shielding via routing her senses through a telepresence rig instead of directly.
She's figured out how to summon wind, but not that she can equally summon anything there's a pile of under pressure somewhere. Water, lava, oil. Or, "somewhere" being "somewhere she has set up previously", tanks of anything, either raw or via the tip of a hose/dispenser. Gases, liquids, fuel, icecream.
Or have portals to the business ends of a whole lot of auto-loading weaponry, with their triggers being touchpads a millimeter from her fingers (or toes, if she wants to use the Bakuda ruse).
And of course she should have a cave/warehouse of useful things she can reach into from anywhere. Everything from grenades to legal paperwork to spare burner phones.
Not to mention that she can see the moon but hasn't gotten around to building a base there.
And of course mini-portals are great for tracking people if they don't have cape-level evasion options. I keep wanting to tell her to track things like drugs back to their sources, steal everything from the top dogs' houses in one fell swoop, and use the money and non-drug supplies to get started on her world-changing plans. "Hey railroad guys, need money? Here's five cubic yards of cash in plastic wrap on pallets."
u/Lugnut1206 [+2] (18 hours later)
I was shocked the momentum cancellation thing wasn't immediately obvious when she considered it in this chapter in the car.
Also, to my understanding, her portals just have to be maintained/refreshed ~daily, but I think they're not permanent. They're also stationary, so unless she can make them rapidly with her subconscious she'll turn into grated Taylor because they don't move.
u/Geminii27 [+3] (a day later)
If they had to be refreshed daily, I'm not sure that a transport company would want to build their services around portals. All it would take would be one miscommunication, one falling-out, one bit of corporate headhunting, or Taylor stepping in front of a bus to completely wreck the company in 24 hours flat.
The only company which would ever go for hanging everything on a single person, even a cape, would be a company owned by that person or a company which was super-desperate (as in this story) but also looking to eventually transition as far away from that model as possible.
Either the portals are semi-permanent, or the company is only considering Taylor as an extremely temporary emergency measure, or something else is going on.
u/VanPeer [+1] The shard made me do it (7 days later)
This story is really inspiring for some reason. I love the economics based plot. Also wish there was more Worm fan fiction focusing on Accord.