Warning, warning! Scheme to fob all the ugliness off on the lowtown girl coming in 3... 2... 1...
So essentially Spider is making the transition from criminal enterprise to government service. People do this mostly because it generates more profit for them at lower risk.
You're assuming that Moore's law continues forever. It won't but we don't know when the turning point will happen. I would suggest that it's likely that point is far before the present time in the story.
The appropriate term for what you've described Kris as is "power user". Super user implies administrative access on a system as well as a comfort with the details of things that Kris is likely never to care to exercise. If you want superuser, you already have one, Grace. Focused on technology, with her own code of ethics that is a little off kilter to everyone else's, but reliable in a position of great trust.
On the incentive page, Melody seems to be having a hard time. Are the atlanteans going to be coming on scene in the main story? I can just imagine a sunlander/atlantean confab.
Shudder.
I think you have just identified a great profession for Zeke. Perhaps the Empire is looking for a sunlander to break up the local idiocy and our local boyscout mentions Zeke as someone they can work with who won't be easily pigeon holed into irrelevancy.
I live in NW Indiana in the part that is included in Chicago metro so I'm pretty familiar with the machine that runs it. It's got its tentacles deep in here so we don't become NJ to their NY and steal away all their back office work. I generally describe Romanian politics to americans as "Chicago, on a bad day". The two are not as far apart as you seem to think. Katastrophe's explanation above about Sunlander electoral foolishness makes the pieces fit so it's not like there's a serious problem because of this political digression. At most we provoked a bit of furniture rearrangement backstage on scenes that have yet to be shown.
That's cool. I like provoking thought.
Given what we know about this world, I find it pretty unlikely that such monolithic groupings would even be possible. You'd essentially be suggesting that only one person from the dominant group would want power. If two are fighting it out and are closely divided, the greens get to be kingmaker. Presumably, they redistrict them into more districts in order to narrow the split necessary for the greens to play that role but that's a sucker's game. There are always people hungry for power and willing to say what it takes to get close enough to 50%+1 that the greens get to be a player.
I've seen the game played, real life, in Transylvania between ethnic romanians and ethnic hungarians. Ethnic hungarians end up in the government time and again even though there's little love lost among ethnic romanians for their old colonial masters.
As a matter of limiting influence, this is actually wrong. If you want to politically neuter some minority you gather them up in one district, where they happily vote in one of their own who is overwhelmed and ineffective and excluded from anything of consequence in the legislature. If you want to maximize their influence, you split them up so that they can be kingmakers in a number of different districts and are thus a power to be courted for a whole block of legislators. That's actually much more dangerous to the status quo.
Does Sal have a new look going? His head seems to have more vertical in it.
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