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An Imago of Rust and Crimson (Worm crossover)

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Gworn said:
Hi EarthScorpion, just finished your story. I really enjoyed your world building. I'm looking forward to reading more. :)

One speculation on the world building here.
Apparently there is a big depression going on with a lot of unemployment. Which is actually a bit strange. If lots of stuff gets regularly destroyed (Endbringers, parahuman conflict, etc.), wealth should fall, yes. But employment should rise. It's like a constant post-war boom.
Now of course a modern economy can be badly mismanaged by the government and central bank. We also know that the government here employs thinkers in important roles. So shouldn't they be better than their real-life counterparts in preventing such an economic disaster? We only had a Great Recession after all and not a 2nd Great Depression.
The reason this might be happening, is that The Conspiracy (or one of the many conspiracies) is maintaining these poor economic conditions on purpose for whatever reason. Actively preventing any kind of recovery. Maybe it's Cauldron trying to encourage more Trigger Events? Radicalizing the electorate to grant the government more and more power? Some other reason?

Or is the depressing situation just part of the standard setting and I should just not think so hard about it?
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This is the Broken Window Fallacy in action.

Basically, all the economic production you'd normally be using for things like 'consumer goods' and 'living comfortably' are going into things like 'not having your infrastructure collapse', thus not driving any form of economic growth. Furthermore, because you have walking disasters destroying everything, you need to harden everything to be tougher-and safety margins are expensive as fuck.

Also, note that in WWII/etc. employment was artificially inflated by large-scale drafts. One assumes no such draft exists here.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
This is the Broken Window Fallacy in action.

Basically, all the economic production you'd normally be using for things like 'consumer goods' and 'living comfortably' are going into things like 'not having your infrastructure collapse', thus not driving any form of economic growth. Furthermore, because you have walking disasters destroying everything, you need to harden everything to be tougher-and safety margins are expensive as fuck.

Also, note that in WWII/etc. employment was artificially inflated by large-scale drafts. One assumes no such draft exists here.
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Well the whole "dump people we have nothing better to do with into the army" thing could be sorta like a draft.

okay, probably not. Mod, the armed forces must be a Horrible mess outside of the special forces.
 
Gworn said:
Hi EarthScorpion, just finished your story. I really enjoyed your world building. I'm looking forward to reading more. :)

One speculation on the world building here.
Apparently there is a big depression going on with a lot of unemployment. Which is actually a bit strange. If lots of stuff gets regularly destroyed (Endbringers, parahuman conflict, etc.), wealth should fall, yes. But employment should rise. It's like a constant post-war boom.
Now of course a modern economy can be badly mismanaged by the government and central bank. We also know that the government here employs thinkers in important roles. So shouldn't they be better than their real-life counterparts in preventing such an economic disaster? We only had a Great Recession after all and not a 2nd Great Depression.
The reason this might be happening, is that The Conspiracy (or one of the many conspiracies) is maintaining these poor economic conditions on purpose for whatever reason. Actively preventing any kind of recovery. Maybe it's Cauldron trying to encourage more Trigger Events? Radicalizing the electorate to grant the government more and more power? Some other reason?

Or is the depressing situation just part of the standard setting and I should just not think so hard about it?
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Now, destruction is actually bad for an economy. Yes, rebuilding creates demand for construction, but destruction will restrict supply. You see, an economy needs things like 'factories' and 'infrastructure' to properly function. This is why places like, say, Somalia and Afghanistan are not economic powerhouses. Long-term economic growth comes from capital, the stuff needed to build products. This is factories, infrastructure, education, all that stuff. Increasing demand is only going to help in the short run, not the long run.

The reason the economy may seem worse is likely due to the capes. If infrastructure is being destroyed, long term growth slows down. The government likely has to spend far more on maintaining civil order, and all this spending on security means less spending elsewhere, like education, infrastructure, research and development. Civil unrest is almost invariably bad for an economy. This is rather intuitive stuff.

Do you know why the US went through a post-war boom? Because they were not bombed to hell and back.
 
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Chloe Sullivan said:
Well the whole "dump people we have nothing better to do with into the army" thing could be sorta like a draft.

okay, probably not. Mod, the armed forces must be a Horrible mess outside of the special forces.
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Yep!

That was, in fact, already referred to implicitly in Interlude 1. There's the special forces who are a bunch of hoo-rah "overpaid, overarmed, and over here" elitists in power armour with VTOLs and tinkertech ordinance, there are the "liberation" forces who are a fairly solid late 80s colonial force busy "liberating" the oil from Venezuela (among other things), and then there is the it's-an-army-because-it's-not-politically-acceptable-to-call-it-welfare National Guard units who manage to combine a lot of the problems with conscript armies with whole new problems, who damn well know that if an Endbringer attacks their job is to fire some rockets at it and distract it from the people who actually matter, and then pick up the bodies and handle the refugees afterwards.
 
It sounds to be like using National Guard units as superhuman cleanup is both sensible and utterly demoralizing.
 
The humanitarian role must be bad for morale, but I doubt it'll be quite as bad as the 'draw the unstoppable city-killing terror's fire' bit of the job description. :V
 
Congratulations! Welcome to the national guard. Should an Endbringer attack, please use the following instructions.
A. Behemoth- Die Heroically! by Spontaneously combusting, getting radiation poisoning, being crushed by falling debris, or getting hit by a lightning bolt.
B. Leviathan- Die Heroically! by drowning, being torn apart, being crushed by a fast moving water, drowning again, or being stepped on.
C. Simurgh- Die Heroically! Do your duty and kill yourself, and anyone else exposed to signal for too long.
 
Just noticed this a couple days ago and read through it. I'm a big fan of your work, EarthScorpion, and this is just as awesome as I'd expect from you.
 
Amorous Intent said:
TIL that flight isn't a superpower because birds and planes do it. Coil's (supposed) power is a power because it lets him exploit the creation of universes by his actions. It's still creating the universe to exploit, and that's what Wildbow ruled out.
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No, it is not creating a universe to exploit. When Coil makes a decision, his power links him to an alternate reality where he made a different one. The alternate universe was already there, his power just establishes a, purely mental, link to it. Your inability to grasp this simple concept is increasingly frustrating. His power creates nothing but the link. And no, the ability to make birds and planes fly is not a superpower, unless you somehow change the manner in which they do so. Coil's power does not change the manner in which new universes form, that part just happens naturally.
 
jerkface said:
Just FIY, in Worm canon, there are a fixed number of universes. The number is very large, but it's finite and non-increasing. New ones do not appear.
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Correct. The finite nature of the multiverse matters insofar as it's the major motivation of the Entities. Further, Scion, Eden, and the Shards are Unique, and he specifically opted against connected to universes that were to similar as he felt that it would be pointless. Though since we don't yet know the entity equivalent that exists here (or if their even is one), I'm not sure of it's relevance.

Still, the Precognitive capes aren't the ones that definitively drive home the Space Magic message. Time travel and acausual information flows are certainly threatening to any hard sci-fi story, but the real nail in the coffin has always been Imp. Imp has a power that hits every brain within a huge area; I'm pretty sure some of her feats require her to be hitting multiple earths at the same time during the last story arc, as Taylor never gained awareness of her even when she was rapidly shifting universes.

So she's plugged into every brain in a huge number of earths. Why is the problematic? Because her power should be able to causally turn off or damage any of those brain far easier then it is to do the kind of delicate interference her power requires...

Yet Scion didn't just turn off the brains of everyone threatening him. Instead he uses his ultra expensive Path to Victory multiple times fighting Taylor. And failed, because he had a hard override that kept him from any course of action that seriously risked running into the Sting.

That's Bull***t. No interpretation that looks at Imp as anything but a Forget Me spell makes a lick of sense. It's not even Star Trek level soft sci-fi. That's pure space Glamor straight from space fairyland.
 
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TheLastOne said:
Imp has a power that hits every brain within a huge area; I'm pretty sure some of her feats require her to be hitting multiple earths at the same time during the last story arc, as Taylor never gained awareness of her even when she was rapidly shifting universes.
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Point of order, Taylor shifting universes rapidly doesn't really matter if Imp's riding her back. On the other hand, all those capes she's controlling, many of them in separate universes, failing to sense Imp makes it about the same.
 
TheLastOne said:
That's Bull***t. No interpretation that looks at Imp as anything but a Forget Me spell makes a lick of sense. It's not even Star Trek level soft sci-fi. That's pure space Glamor straight from space fairyland.
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Even barring some kind of highly-exploitable hole somewhere in the human visual processing/cognition/memory spaghetti-code, I'm pretty sure the prerequisites for casually dropping selective retroamnesia onto targets are significantly short of a planet-sized Culturetech hypercomputer plugged into an arbitrary number of arbitrarily precise no-shit wormholes.
Sure, making people fall over with inexplicable catastrophic cerebral haemorrhages should be much (much, much, much) easier, but excise the bullshit spacemagic rules of engagement Manton Effect and you've got a lot more problems along the lines of '... and then the entire cast fell over dead. The end.'

Yes, it's pure spacemagic, but you can rationalize an awful lot of spacemagic within the bounds of the in-universe explanation.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
This is the Broken Window Fallacy in action.

Basically, all the economic production you'd normally be using for things like 'consumer goods' and 'living comfortably' are going into things like 'not having your infrastructure collapse', thus not driving any form of economic growth. Furthermore, because you have walking disasters destroying everything, you need to harden everything to be tougher-and safety margins are expensive as fuck.

Also, note that in WWII/etc. employment was artificially inflated by large-scale drafts. One assumes no such draft exists here.
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I don't think I'm committing the fallacy here. I specifically said that I'd expect wealth to fall. That isn't surprising. Employment on the other hand shouldn't suffer. Even in the classic broken window example employment stays the same whether you buy from the glazier or the tailor.
As you said, we'd usually use the economic production mostly for consumer goods and services, but here a lot of infrastructure investment is necessary, additionally. You'd expect there to actually be a labor shortage in this situation.

Erik Tiber said:
Now, destruction is actually bad for an economy. Yes, rebuilding creates demand for construction, but destruction will restrict supply. You see, an economy needs things like 'factories' and 'infrastructure' to properly function. This is why places like, say, Somalia and Afghanistan are not economic powerhouses. Long-term economic growth comes from capital, the stuff needed to build products. This is factories, infrastructure, education, all that stuff. Increasing demand is only going to help in the short run, not the long run.

The reason the economy may seem worse is likely due to the capes. If infrastructure is being destroyed, long term growth slows down. The government likely has to spend far more on maintaining civil order, and all this spending on security means less spending elsewhere, like education, infrastructure, research and development. Civil unrest is almost invariably bad for an economy. This is rather intuitive stuff.

Do you know why the US went through a post-war boom? Because they were not bombed to hell and back.
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I was actually thinking about post-war Europe and Japan, where a significant fraction of the industrial base was destroyed. Again, I didn't dispute that living standards would fall, but rather that there isn't that much reason that employment should suffer so much.
Maybe the supply shock of collapsing globalization was bad enough to cancel out the higher demand due to rebuilding, I don't know.
But most economists would agree that idle resources (high unemployment) on such a high level would be at least partly due to mismanagement by the government. (Even though they would disagree on how to fix it. Which is where thinkers would come in.)

A good reason for high unemployment would be large-scale automation in the economy to a degree where low-skilled labor just isn't needed anymore. But the existence and obvious profitability of the sweat shops disproves that theory.

So I would again venture that economic conditions this bad are probably due to either malice or incompetence. In real life I would just go with incompetence, because it's the most plausible. But in this setting here, malice would probably be more likely.
 
jerkface said:
Just FIY, in Worm canon, there are a fixed number of universes. The number is very large, but it's finite and non-increasing. New ones do not appear.
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Then how come Earth Aleph only split off from Bet 30 years ago? If they really didn't split, there wouldn't be alternate versions of Earth Bet citizens on Earth Aleph. Do you know the odds of any particular sperm hitting an egg?
 
I'm pretty sure there's a LOT more splits, but that it would not be in the Entities interest to grant access to many of them, so most are locked away or unreachable for various reasons.
 
Odysseus2099 said:
Then how come Earth Aleph only split off from Bet 30 years ago? If they really didn't split, there wouldn't be alternate versions of Earth Bet citizens on Earth Aleph. Do you know the odds of any particular sperm hitting an egg?
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I know the odds of the Entities being able to over-write worlds, it's 100%. That's exactly what Labyrinth's shard does.

If Scion & Eden wanted a pair of identical worlds for some reason, they could make that happen. I suspect that in fact they did just that.
 
Gworn said:
Apparently there is a big depression going on with a lot of unemployment. Which is actually a bit strange. If lots of stuff gets regularly destroyed (Endbringers, parahuman conflict, etc.), wealth should fall, yes. But employment should rise. It's like a constant post-war boom.
Now of course a modern economy can be badly mismanaged by the government and central bank. We also know that the government here employs thinkers in important roles. So shouldn't they be better than their real-life counterparts in preventing such an economic disaster? We only had a Great Recession after all and not a 2nd Great Depression.
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Employment should rise - assuming that the government responds to the destruction by doing the things they were already doing plus the rebuilding. In practice this does not happen because governments typically see themselves as being budget-limited. So:

a) They don't spend as much on repair as they ought;
b) They spend less on everything else to compensate; and
c) Since the destruction reduces tax receipts, they end up lowering expenditure even further, prolonging the recession.

Fundamentally, the problem with depressed economies isn't that no-one understands how to fix them. Keynes published his General Theory in 1936, and its prescriptions are still a pretty good first approximation for demand-side recessions today. So why, for example, did it take Japan so long to make a serious attempt at exiting the zero lower bound? There are many hypotheses; a couple I like are:

a) Group psychology. Politicians and finance gurus and other Very Serious People are hardwired to think of governments as if they were companies. And, if everyone else is tightening their belts, surely the government should too, right? Right? (Facepalm.)
b) Revealed preference. Really, politicians don't really care about the economy; all they care about is getting re-elected. And re-election is easier if you don't try anything that looks like a wealth transfer from old well-off people to young poor people. Because old well-off people vote more reliably and contribute to PACs.

In both cases, the government's response to any Thinkers who point out their epic failure will be the same as the US legislature's collective response to former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke when he said it should be spending more: "That's nice, now shut up and get back in your ivory tower." (I paraphrase slightly.)

Why yes, I do read too many economics blogs. Why do you ask?
 
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TheLastOne said:
So she's plugged into every brain in a huge number of earths. Why is the problematic? Because her power should be able to causally turn off or damage any of those brain far easier then it is to do the kind of delicate interference her power requires...

Yet Scion didn't just turn off the brains of everyone threatening him. Instead he uses his ultra expensive Path to Victory multiple times fighting Taylor. And failed, because he had a hard override that kept him from any course of action that seriously risked running into the Sting.
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Less problematic if you assume the Entities actually lose powers when they give up shards, though.
 
SolipsistSerpent said:
Me, too, but people are going "Why didn't Scion do that?"
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Mostly because he wasn't fighting to win. He's playing magnifying glass on ants. Note he had a power that simply stops everything in the affected area. Hearts, brain function, most powers, etc. He could vaporize entire countries.

But it didn't matter because he wasn't fighting. People were fighting for their lives and the world. Scion was throwing a tantrum, and occasionally being bitten by ants.
 
I have only skimmed the arguments above but would like to add my two cents.

1 The entities are only aware of a finite number of universes, don't mean the multiverse is not infinite , when speaking of what is makes sense from a physics perspective, either a infinite amount of universes or just one.
a Finite amount of universes is possible, just not probable.

2 Any precog shard just needs to simulate between one and two hundred planets, hardly universe creation, still just as improbable as actual future sight though.

3 A simulation of our planet could get away with enough shortcuts to not need to be as big as a planet if the computational power is close to a 1-1 correspondence as far as matter simulated vs computer mass goes. Just one example is just enough accuracy in simulating the core of the earth to model surface manifestations.

4 Scanning alternate timelines to make predictions is the least physics breaking way to do so. And if alternate timelines exists then coils power is just to be aware of two at once and dropping one from awareness to latch onto another one. The powers are not for the capes benefit but the entities after all:)
 
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