To be fair the Yozi are lobotomized Primordials. Yozi are very specifically made to be unable to innovate or think creatively. Primordials could understand things outside of their own worldview, and change their theming and powers admittedly that very rarely happened. Yozi in fact did know about a method of breaking their prison, have a first circle hit E10 and master infernal monster style, but they could not allow that no matter how much they wanted that to happen.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
And then use Oath-Shattering Strike on the Primordial so they are freed from the surrender oath, but the Infernal takes on the full consequences of the oath as if they had sworn it and broken it themselves.
So the Yozi need a Infernal that they have been encouraging to be as evil as possible for likely centuries to make the ultimate act of self sacrifice for their sake. And by the point an Infernal is essanse 10 it is going to be clear to that Infernal that they are basically an improved version of the Yozi.
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Well, yes, there definitely is that too.
In fact, this comes back to a sentiment I saw from time to time about some particular charms: Basically, people asking *who would be stupid enough to buy the Principle of the yozi charms?* (I think this is the name of the *you become a yozi charms? Someone correct me if I'm wrong).
And there is an answer to that and why they expected it to work: They think that if you're buying their charms, you're thinking like them, and if you're thinking like them, well, why wouldn't you want to be them?
Of course it doesn't work because of what you just pointed out, but the Yozi can't think of that, that would be thinking that there are other ways to do things with their charms than theirs, and that's unthinkable, not as in, they're too arrogant to think that, as in, they literazlly cannot think that.
Yeah, thats more like something out of Mad Max than modern subsaharan Africa.
Short of places with complete governmental breakdown like Somalia, local clans have no say in things like that.
Even places like eastern Congo had governmental backing for resource extraction.
It wasnt always the Congolese govt(see Rwanda and Uganda's operations in eastern Congo) but there was a government involved.
@DragonParadox
Those are scams. They dont do anything. They dont take anything through customs. Money is made from the suckers who fall for the scams in diamond-producing countries. Examples:
The most successful scams in that list were a
Africa diamond mine scam implicates Korean ministers and execs who made quick $70 million
Originally touted as a 'model of successful resource diplomacy' Korea's successful 2010 bid for a diamond project in Cameroon now appears to have been an elaborate scheme that netted company insiders and senior government officials at least $70 million in stock trading profits.www.mining.com
Man Indicted In Alleged $11 Million African Diamond Export Scam
Prosecutors say a dual U.S. and Swiss citizen lied to investors, saying he was directly importing diamonds and gold from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Europe, Asia and the U.S.www.cbsnews.com
How one African man's gold scheme cost his American victims millions of dollars
Cassell Kuoh, a miner in Liberia, was by all accounts was a Liberian success story.abcnews.go.com
-Stock pump and dump in South Korea
-Guy who actually owned a Liberian mine and had the cooperation of a good chunk of the Liberian government, to the point of being able to borrow up to half a ton of government gold as props when investors tried to do due dilligence
===
I spent entirely too much time before bedtime looking into the export processes for diamonds and precious metals in African countries with plausible geology (because some countries dont, and if you claim to be mining diamonds in, say, Libya, that makes it easy), and this is not something where you can bribe a single official.
You need to buy off a good chunk of the entire regulatory process and actually commit prosecutable crimes with a paper trail.
Literally hundreds of accomplices at this point. Quite apart from the ethical issues, we arent a big enough player to do that even if we wanted to. Not at the scale of the operation we're involved in.
Also, like Alratan said, the Kimberley Certification Process for attempting to control conflict diamonds came into effect in 2003.
Kimberley Process Certification Scheme - Wikipedia
It can be subverted if you have enough cash.
Enough influence. Grease enough palms and are appropriately ruthless.
But it is yet an additional hurdle to jump, and an entire additional threat surface for hostiles to apply pressure through.
===
Nah.
Even before PlanetLabs started spamming cheap geospatial observation satellites and giving university professors the ability to monitor nationstate missile programs at short notice, companies like DigitalGlobe had been selling commercial Earth observation imagery since at least 1997.
DigitalGlobe - Wikipedia
Then there's Airbus' Pleiades and Spot satellites, EROS out of Israel, NASA's Landsat program et cetera.
Your cow pasture will show up as a cow pasture.
It's 2006, not 1966.
Governments CAN be slower to act. Not always. That doesnt impede their ability to collect information.
Many governments also dont actually stop coming after you if there's money involved. Not in the West, and not in the Third World. The FBI, for example, was still arresting and prosecuting suspects for the 1978 Lufthansa diamond heist in 2014, 36 years later.
To paraphrase Girl Genius: Any plan where you lose your hat is a bad plan.
This sounds like one of those.
Its too complicated, it involves buying the cooperation of too many people, draws too many eyes, and it takes something which isnt prosecutable and turns it into an actual no-shit criminal felony in at least two countries.
My two cents.
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It a marital art any E10 user capable of learning it can use Oath-Shattering Strike to free them thou. A First Circle can do it but they all get killed if they go over E5. Not sure but Akuma Dragonblood, but they could have been made with the specific motivation of using it as well.
Yeah, thats more like something out of Mad Max than modern subsaharan Africa.
Short of places with complete governmental breakdown like Somalia, local clans have no say in things like that.
Even places like eastern Congo had governmental backing for resource extraction.
It wasnt always the Congolese govt(see Rwanda and Uganda's operations in eastern Congo) but there was a government involved.
@DragonParadox
Those are scams. They dont do anything. They dont take anything through customs. Money is made from the suckers who fall for the scams in diamond-producing countries. Examples:
The most successful scams in that list were a
-Stock pump and dump in South Korea
-Guy who actually owned a Liberian mine and had the cooperation of a good chunk of the Liberian government, to the point of being able to borrow up to half a ton of government gold as props when investors tried to do due dilligence
===
I spent entirely too much time before bedtime looking into the export processes for diamonds and precious metals in African countries with plausible geology (because some countries dont, and if you claim to be mining diamonds in, say, Libya, that makes it easy), and this is not something where you can bribe a single official.
You need to buy off a good chunk of the entire regulatory process and actually commit prosecutable crimes with a paper trail.
Literally hundreds of accomplices at this point. Quite apart from the ethical issues, we arent a big enough player to do that even if we wanted to. Not at the scale of the operation we're involved in.
Also, like Alratan said, the Kimberley Certification Process for attempting to control conflict diamonds came into effect in 2003.
Kimberley Process Certification Scheme - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
It can be subverted if you have enough cash.
Enough influence. Grease enough palms and are appropriately ruthless.
But it is yet an additional hurdle to jump, and an entire additional threat surface for hostiles to apply pressure through.
===
Nah.
Even before PlanetLabs started spamming cheap geospatial observation satellites and giving university professors the ability to monitor nationstate missile programs at short notice, companies like DigitalGlobe had been selling commercial Earth observation imagery since at least 1997.
DigitalGlobe - Wikipedia
Then there's Airbus' Pleiades and Spot satellites, EROS out of Israel, NASA's Landsat program et cetera.
Your cow pasture will show up as a cow pasture.
It's 2006, not 1966.
Governments CAN be slower to act. Not always. That doesnt impede their ability to collect information.
Many governments also dont actually stop coming after you if there's money involved. Not in the West, and not in the Third World. The FBI, for example, was still arresting and prosecuting suspects for the 1978 Lufthansa diamond heist in 2014, 36 years later.
To paraphrase Girl Genius: Any plan where you lose your hat is a bad plan.
This sounds like one of those.
Its too complicated, it involves buying the cooperation of too many people, draws too many eyes, and it takes something which isnt prosecutable and turns it into an actual no-shit criminal felony in at least two countries.
My two cents.
That is a fair point, you would need to partake in quite a bit of corruption to pull off the mine and that is a prosecutable crime, but on the other hand with the start up you will either leave yourself open to a lot of questions (diamond manufacture in the garage, where does the energy come from?)... or you have to do most of your corruption in the US and pay off the people who would look into this stuff. There is no perfect solution for getting into the diamond trade. This vote is about choosing what risks you are more willing to take.
- Location
- Germany
I have no issue with people trying to look into our business.
There's literally nothing to find after all.
There's literally nothing to find after all.
- Location
- Who knows?
Regarding local inspectors getting their nose into Molly's "industrial process," as someone who does something like that as a day job, honestly so long as the permits are applied for and there isn't like any obvious concentrations of flammable/combustible liquids or gas or any other obvious hazards and the building is up to code/code when it was built if shes taking over an existing industrial warehouse I'd shrug and go on to bug the idiots who actually don't know what they're doing.
It's like I don't really care about the specific process so long as it doesn't involve stuff that'll blow up and you keep the appropriate fire extinguishers nearby/make sure the sprinklers get looked at every year
It's like I don't really care about the specific process so long as it doesn't involve stuff that'll blow up and you keep the appropriate fire extinguishers nearby/make sure the sprinklers get looked at every year
You really don't see why that would be a problem when they come to check if we don't pollute the environment?
This plan literally can't work, they will not accept to see an empty place and our explanation that *this is totally where we're making our diamonds, honest.*, if we try that, we'll get arrested sooner rather than later because this is a clear case that we are fishy, which, is true, by the way.
The mine is just one lucky find, the artificial diamonds out of our ass is asking for everyone and their mother to try and see how we do it and given that the answer is magic, we don't want people looking.
Edit:
Would you still do that if the place your inspecting clearly isn't where they're doing the job? Because the way we work makes it impossible for it to appear as if we really are doing it where we tell we do.
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- Location
- Germany
I'd propably sign that they are definitly not polluting the environment, using dangerous amounts of energy or do anything else dangerous.
I might give a tip to those colleagues concerned with smuggling, but that is another issue we can deal with, since those can't prove anything problematic either.
For all intents and purposes the diamonds manifest from thin air and there is no law against that.
- Location
- Who knows?
Honestly yes? I specifically focus on fire stuff to be clear. So I would go in specifically looking for stuff that looks like it would cause a fire. Like oh hey, you dont want me looking at your specific special machine? Cool, I'll check to make sure your electricity is ruggedized and leave a note for electrical to doublecheck. And make sure whatever fire protection systems in place look good. Oh this is some sorta chemical thing? Let me see how you're storing the pressurized cylinders and any hazmat, make sure to submit a general inventory list of the types of chemicals and how much would be on site along with keeping an MSDS book on site. I dont need your specific chemical formulas, mainly want to make sure this doesn't look like its gonna blow up or you're like storing water reactive chemicals in a leaky af space, etc etc. Oh you claim to keep minimal amounts? Well, if I can't find any obvious stockpiles or places where it looks like they'd be, unless you have a rep, I'm gonna take you at your word since yes there's time that needs to be spent on people who are Being Idiots and at some point you kinda have to start trusting people (obligatory if you don't follow what you say that's on you to explain to insurance).
I'm not a "making diamonds" expert so I'm not gonna judge viability, and even if it does look like some weird money laundering front, that really really is not my jurisdiction. I have to yell at restaurants to get their exhaust hoods cleaned before the accumulated oil vapors catch on fire, or warehouses with plastics that the shitty way their forklift people have stacked stuff has functionally ruined their sprinkler protection and I will tell the firefighters they shouldn't even bother trying to enter in case it catches. Wondering about whether or not a business seems viable is very low on the list of priorities.
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- Location
- Earth
Eh, Jails can't hold us says CCC
So if you came to go check the place someone is allegedly making diamonds in and got presented with this:
You wouldn't see any problems? Really?
Because we don't have machines to present, nothing, nada, we make them when we use them and they disapear afterwards.
I'm sure Michael and Charity would be quite proud to learn this. /s
- Location
- Germany
I'm not denying that our business would be fishy as hell.So if you came to go check the place someone is allegedly making diamonds in and got presented with this:
You wouldn't see any problems? Really?
Because we don't have machines to present, nothing, nada, we make them when we use them and they disapear afterwards.
I'm sure Michael and Charity would be quite proud to learn this. /s
But you can't convict people for nothing and there is really nothing illegal in it.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
On the topic of the common idea that Molly should take power in some place. I don't think that would actually be a great use of Molly's time. Because we don't actually have good charms for ruling anything but CODs. Not that Molly would be bad at ruling. She might not be a Solar, but she does have exalancys. It's just that she would not be that much of a hugely qualitative improvement on a mortal government.
However Molly is supremely capaibly of make sure that the governments she prefers are in power. Shadow Spite Curse and Mocking Murmurs (both charms from our favored hells) means that no government that Molly disapproves of can remain in power. In a democracy the transfer of power is likely to be smooth. In other forms of government, not so much.
Maybe we should see about making friends with Politics. Then again we could likely get a ghoul elected if we wanted to.
However Molly is supremely capaibly of make sure that the governments she prefers are in power. Shadow Spite Curse and Mocking Murmurs (both charms from our favored hells) means that no government that Molly disapproves of can remain in power. In a democracy the transfer of power is likely to be smooth. In other forms of government, not so much.
Maybe we should see about making friends with Politics. Then again we could likely get a ghoul elected if we wanted to.
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It's still unwanted scrutiny, people will try to dig deeper, search where we're *actually* making the diamonds, and as has already been pointed out, a high school girls managing to make diamonds in her garage alone will have spies trying to learn how we do it, especially since we don't have a patent, for obvious reasons, meaning that stealing our process is free real estate.
One mine in Africa is not big, a new mean to make diamonds that seems that good is, it's very big.
- Location
- Earth
Wouldn't be the first time.
For either Molly or Michael.
- Location
- Germany
As explained before, a mine in Africa takes a lot more fake documentation, a lot more actual crimes to be workable.
Better to have people curious than to have investigators able to actually find some real crimes.
- Location
- Russia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
*looking at Chicago phone book* What masquerade?
The whole "people do not believe in magic because they fear it" totally ruined my suspencion of disbelief in Dresden Files. DragonParadox managed with this aspect of worldbuilding much better, IMO. But it'll be a pleasure for me to ruin this absolutly unworthy "masquerade". People deserve to know, they deserve to study magic via scientific means, protect themselves from "supernatural" creatures, use magic in the national economy, etc.
Alright read some of the arguements and heres a new plan for you.
1. Use crown to win the lottery.
2. Using winnings to buy a small artificial diamond making company that already exists
3. Use that to launder your exalted made artificial diamonds
It should already have a proprietary way of making diamonds your just throwing in some extras
1. Use crown to win the lottery.
2. Using winnings to buy a small artificial diamond making company that already exists
3. Use that to launder your exalted made artificial diamonds
It should already have a proprietary way of making diamonds your just throwing in some extras
New process. Original Character, Do Not Steal.
Not to sound like a broken record, but we are literally under no obligation to share the specifics, any more than say Coca Cola has to share their drink formula or KFC their spice formula.
Im pretty convinced that its paradoxically safer and easier to operate this in the US than to do so abroad.
-Mines are not lucky finds. That paradigm went out back in the 20th century.
Even small mines involve months and years of surveying and hundreds of people up and down the regulatory framework.
There are hundreds of people who have to be in on any African mine maneuver.
Thats a lot of people to bribe, a lot of people with loose lips, and a fuckton of immediate and future criminal liability.
Literally two orders of magnitude more people involved than in any US operation
-I've always found the "lol Africa, noone will check" explanation suspect.
Rando on the Internet warning, but roundtrip economy-class tickets to Nigeria back in the early and mid-2000s were in the thousand dollar range. I have had friends in Nigeria who I havent seen in 15 years but who I have stayed in contact with at daily and weekly intervals, first by email and then by messenger apps.
This isnt the 1960s. Africa isnt far or hard to get to. No more than Nepal is.
Its not difficult to check on these things.
You need a lot more setup, and the buyin of a lot more people, to run these sorts of scams in a foreign country.
Even with a Whampire as your front person.
-You are under a severe misapprehension about what environmental and workplace regulators do.
They are supposed to regulate hazards to the public. They are not there to find out how you do your manufacturing.
If you arent using high temperatures or hazardous chemicals or what not, and if your permits are up to code?
Once they can physically check for this, and look for all that stuff, and you're in compliance?
They. Dont. Care. About. Your. Process. They are not paid to care. Feel free to bankrupt yourself. Or not.
There's a fuckton of work to regulate and insufficient funding and personnel to do it.
-If there is a legit product being delivered, which can be taken out and analysed and assessed?
They might think its fishy, but as long as our other ps and qs are valid, fishy isnt actually a criminal offense in the US.
Especially if you pay all your relevant taxes and duties.
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- Location
- Who knows?
Ahh well, now we can get into the weeds of permitting and inspections! So first off presumably Molly/Thomas will apply for some sort of businesses license to sell diamonds. That's pretty much entirely mostly for tax/bookkeeping purposes and in my experience silo'ed from permitting/safety inspections. Finance does their thing and Development/Construction does theirs. Wonders of specialized labor! And Finance generally really does not care so long as the taxes and bills are paid.
Now for permitting/developement. If Thomas has an existing empty warehouse and doesn't make changes, well if Molly keeps on the DL and doesn't make too much noise then the building stays on the record as an empty warehouse, no point in looking further unless Molly is doing her hell crafting on literally like the one day of the year the inspector wanders around the empty warehouse block to do very cursory sanity check that people haven't turned them into slum tenants. If he does buy an empty warehouse and does the permitting to convert it into an "industrial," sure a plans showing a literally empty space would get rejected as "give us the acutal info pleas". But even then drawings showing incredibly perfunctory stuff like "here are where machines will be, they need X volts and we'll make sure the sockets are upgraded to provide that, here's where the hazmat cabinets will be" is more than enough to get stamped, and then we go over to make sure stuff is where you say it is and there isn't suddenly 1000 gallons of Class A peroxides out in the open. So get some sufficient scientific-y pieces of equipment, like a chem hood, crucible, etc, to plop into the space. And no, absolutely no one is gonna check afterwards to see if electricity is actually being drawn since after approval, there's other stuff to do. (and utilities billing is generally in finance and not part of the safety inspectors)
Bluntly speaking Chicago likely has a thousand other things that are more urgent than a single business apparently being less hazardous than it appears on papers.
New process. Original Character, Do Not Steal.
Not to sound like a broken record, but we are literally under no obligation to share the specifics, any more than say Coca Cola has to share their drink formula or KFC their spice formula.
You are indeed under no legal obligation to reveal trade secrets, but strictly legal tools are not the only issue at hand, there are all sorts of ways the government could make your life hard to get you to show them the goose that lays the diamond eggs and that is not even mentioning industrial espionage.
Ok for this kind of inspection, there is still:
That, a new scientific process is way more interesting than one little diamond mine.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
That would be a waste of a good prison sentence. We should spend the time in jail turning the entire prison population and the guards into our personal cult that we train to super human extent.