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Does anyone know how Alexandria is supposed to fly? Does her shard mess with gravity, in ways that'd show up on Taylor's gravity sensors?

(I'm ignoring here Taylor's other sensors.)
 
Firehawk242 said:
Canary didn't happen post-Echidna. Also, Canary actually makes Taylor's case stronger as it proves this wasn't a one-time event. This feeds the narrative from Echidna that the PRT and Protectorate are irredeemably corrupt and always have been.
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Doesn't matter if everyone who might otherwise object is too busy being scared to care about nifty supposed Sacred Constants like civil liberties, innocent until proven guilty, and a largish portion of the Constitution.
 
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I would like to take an opportunity here and say something about Path to Victory. It was sabotaged. Probably before Eden got it. Abaddon (or whatever the third entity was actually called) probably sabotaged it to make Eden crash into (another) Earth!

That's on top of whatever Eden did to it after Contessa got it. My thought is, there is no telling if it actually worked long term, that it was set to subtly steer the recipient wrong. To, in effect, make them crash. Eventually.
 
Firehawk242 said:
To make matters worse, their win state involves going to trial at which point any half-competent lawyer demands the recording of the interview and promptly gets the whole case, confession included, thrown out due to duress.
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What recording? Even in cases where law enforcement record an interview with a suspect, standard procedure tapes over it afterwards. You never see court cases where the defense has the option to play hours and hours of interrogation video to the jury because that video - if there was any video to begin with - no longer exists. All you've got is a cop who can state under oath that somewhere during your eight hour interrogation, you said "I did it."

There is a very good 45 minute video from a law professor with a rebuttal from an actual police officer that addresses this sort of issue, titled Don't Talk to the Police:
 
kaosisreality said:
Alexandria relied heavily on her ability to read body language and that was something Skitter offloaded to her swarms, which Alexandria *did not know.*
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Well that just doubles back to my point in the Hybrid Hive thread about the stupidity of engaging targets you can't confirm.

Picking a fight with an unknown is an incredibly poor idea, because you don't know what its capable of. Especially with Parahumans. You never know who's the next Siberian, or worse Hatchetface. A surprise Trump could fuck up everything.

Alexandria herself should be painfully aware of this, since even at her strength level blindly rushing in did eventually lead to her watching Hero get turned inside out and her losing her own eye.
 
Nicholai said:
Didn't Wildbow say, repeatedly, that he was basically trying to write himself into corners intentionally to force himself to figure out ways to get Taylor out of them?

We can make up all kinds of rationales for why Alexandria pulled her Epic Stupid Maneuver in Worm.. but frankly it always smacked of just terrible writing to enforce conflict to me.
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Brain parasites pushing for stupid conflict sounds a lot nicer than bad writing pushing for stupid conflict. But mechanically in Worm they're the exact same thing.
Kit said:
I had just had the wisdom of Mrs. Cosmopolite floating through my head the other day for unrelated reasons, in fact ("There's a lot goes on we don't know about," to be specific).
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Funny how frequently Mrs. Cosmopolite's Way comes up in real life. Very practical. Very helpful.
 
Essex said:
What recording? Even in cases where law enforcement record an interview with a suspect, standard procedure tapes over it afterwards. You never see court cases where the defense has the option to play hours and hours of interrogation video to the jury because that video - if there was any video to begin with - no longer exists. All you've got is a cop who can state under oath that somewhere during your eight hour interrogation, you said "I did it."

There is a very good 45 minute video from a law professor with a rebuttal from an actual police officer that addresses this sort of issue, titled Don't Talk to the Police:
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Except they wanted a recorded confession from her, which changes the equation.
 
Sorrow said:
I would like to take an opportunity here and say something about Path to Victory. It was sabotaged. Probably before Eden got it. Abaddon (or whatever the third entity was actually called) probably sabotaged it to make Eden crash into (another) Earth!

That's on top of whatever Eden did to it after Contessa got it. My thought is, there is no telling if it actually worked long term, that it was set to subtly steer the recipient wrong. To, in effect, make them crash. Eventually.
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This has always been my feeling, really. PtV is one of those things that is very much a double-edged cutting thing, but Cauldron lay far too much trust in it being infallible. There are a number of problems with it; One is that as you say they have no idea at all how badly it's been deliberately nerfed, although they clearly should realize there are problems with it since it can't path the Endbringers, Eidolon, or Scion. They are simply assuming it can path everything else, without any evidence to show this. For all they know it could be silently dropping all sorts of things, but they are working on the basis that they know the only few places it won't work. This is not sensible.

Another is that even if it's not sabotaged somehow, it's not necessarily going to give you the optimum outcome from your point of view. Especially if you don't ask the right question in the first place. They should be assuming that any information it provides is potentially compromised, but they take it as gospel. They also apparently don't sanity check the results they get via other methods. Yeah, in a lot of cases that may not actually be possible, I agree, but there are still many things that are checkable and they don't seem to do it to them either.

Still another is that there is no way it can possibly prognosticate the future in infinite detail for infinite time, as there are simply too many variables to keep track of even for an alien supercomputer. It's always going to be limited in some way, and it's highly likely it's actively working to hide this fact.

In essence the whole point of PtV is as a blatant Deus Ex Machina 'I win' thing, and its a pain in the ass to deal with. If you take it seriously, Cauldron should potentially be untouchable. Since they're clearly not, even in canon, you can't really take it seriously. So I don't, to one degree or another :)
 
Basically, Path to Getting What I Asked For, without anyone thinking "Oh, did we actually ask for what we want, or something that only sounds like it?". The Devil is in the details and let's face it, English (and most other languages) is incredibly vague even at the best of times.

Me sat at a table, salt pot at one end and someone sat at the other.
Other person: Could you pass the salt please?
Me: Sure *gets up from table and walks to the paper serviette tray and picks some up then walks back to the table and sits back down*
Other person: I asked you to pass the salt!
Me: I did... twice, once on the way to the serviettes and once on the way back.
Other person: *facepalm*

EDIT: And now I've got a mental argument going with myself... if they then asked me to hand them the salt pot and I emptied if of salt before handing it to them, would it still be a salt pot....hmmm....
EDIT no 2: On thinking about it, it depends on if the pot was designed to hold salt specifically, or if it's just a generic pot.
 
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Eewec said:
Basically, Path to Getting What I Asked For, without anyone thinking "Oh, did we actually ask for what we want, or something that only sounds like it?". The Devil is in the details and let's face it, English (and most other languages) is incredibly vague even at the best of times.
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Obviously none of the people who formed Cauldron had ever played a pen-and-paper RPG. If they had they would have heard horror stories about rules-lawyering and wishes to "create unique roleplaying challenges for the players."

Frankly the minute Manton was traumatized badly enough to become the Siberian should have been an enormous warning flag to Cauldron. You can bet that wasn't in their ideal scenarios or anything they'd ask for. Hero dying would be another one. At that point by "following the path" they had lost a good researcher and one of their own. They were already fighting Scion. How they didn't assume "enemy action" at that point and start looking closely at everything PtV asked Contessa to do is beyond me.
 
I don't remember where I heard this, but someone said that Flight was an ability all shards could grant, but most didn't because it was a solved problem, so there was no real use in giving it out. That's why Glory Girl has such good flight, because her shard is pretty weak and ultimately "useless", so it gave Victoria every advantage it could think of.
 
mp3.1415player said:
This has always been my feeling, really. PtV is one of those things that is very much a double-edged cutting thing, but Cauldron lay far too much trust in it being infallible. There are a number of problems with it; One is that as you say they have no idea at all how badly it's been deliberately nerfed, although they clearly should realize there are problems with it since it can't path the Endbringers, Eidolon, or Scion. They are simply assuming it can path everything else, without any evidence to show this. For all they know it could be silently dropping all sorts of things, but they are working on the basis that they know the only few places it won't work. This is not sensible.
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While I agree that they put way too much trust in it, there is a span of about 25 years in which Cauldron could well have done as much testing of its capabilities and limits as they could. We don't know that it happened, but we also don't know that it didn't.

But yes, it's way too good to be true, even if they have done that testing.
 
They could have done that in a day merely by asking for a path involving everything they could think of between them. I find it probable that they did do that, made a note of the results, and never checked again :)
 
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Lightwhispers said:
While I agree that they put way too much trust in it, there is a span of about 25 years in which Cauldron could well have done as much testing of its capabilities and limits as they could. We don't know that it happened, but we also don't know that it didn't.

But yes, it's way too good to be true, even if they have done that testing.
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To use a tired old adage that you've probably heard "Infomation is ammunition"

PTV is a useful tool but it shouldn't be treated as the be all and end all it's a sharp poisoned blade that cuts both blades. A good way to actually set up Cauldron would probably have had networks or cells of agents both powered and non powered set up and use the PtV in conjunction with them rather than depending solely on it.

Having just one failure point in your plan like the PtV is always asking for trouble.
 
Sorrow said:
I would like to take an opportunity here and say something about Path to Victory. It was sabotaged. Probably before Eden got it. Abaddon (or whatever the third entity was actually called) probably sabotaged it to make Eden crash into (another) Earth!

That's on top of whatever Eden did to it after Contessa got it. My thought is, there is no telling if it actually worked long term, that it was set to subtly steer the recipient wrong. To, in effect, make them crash. Eventually.
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People often get this wrong, but based on the interlude where Contessa sees the Eden/Abbadon meeting, PtV WAS NEVER AN ABBADON SHARD. PtV was the precog shard that was REPLACED by Abbadon's precog shard. We know this because Contessa saw the interaction from Eden's point of view rather than Abbadon's.

It is quite possible that Abbadon messed with the Precog shard he gave Eden to make her crash, but that wasn't the PtV shard. Abbadon's shard was supposedly BETTER than PtV, in that it showed Eden methods of using factions of hosts instead of individual combatants, and other more subtle methods, rather than the "punch good" that PtV, and all other Eden and Zion shards, canonically push towards. THAT is the big limit to PtV, in addition to Eden slapping on an emergency update to block the Entities, shards, trigger events, and sufficiently powerful trumps from the precog. PtV will, despite doing rube-goldberg plans, default to "eliminate this person" over "convince this person", "destroy the obstacle" over "go around", which is only increased by Contessa being from a bronze-age society (and Doctor Mother from a medieval to renaissance society), and thus defaulting to heroic archetype warriors like Heracles or King Arthur rather than people like James Bond.
 
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