That is going to be tricky for an unknown island. Regular flights don't go to random islands.
I mean, the Federated States of Micronesia is still a stable modern nation and participates in the international community. It has four international airports. If you go on Google I can buy a round-trip ticket that'll have me there tomorrow and back the day after that for $1500, which is not much steeper than it'd cost me to get to New York and back on the same timetable. So it's neither "unknown island" nor "random island", and it absolutely has regular flights going to and through it.
Nope, non-magical fire provides so little mana that it isn't worth using fire conversion.
Edit: Found the relevant quote:
Ah, darn. Thanks.
Well, how fortunate that I'm voting on it to encourage discussion.
As for planar descriptions, those for
Thedas and
XCOM are recent and we know that there were no major changes since we looked at
Magi and
Remnant (see: "
No change" and
Sidereal's status report).
Just... try to not jam it into the middle of a vote, please? I tend to focus on the vote because it's incredibly easy to get sidetracked and lose track of stuff, which can seriously harm the
ongoing vote and offset the value of the planning. Especially when said planning could be deferred to the point where we actually execute on it, and all we really need to decide now is that we should execute on it at some point.
On the specific question of whether we should be channeling Neph more often: absent a compelling strategic question, we should reserve her for situations that can be addressed using her mastery of Red. Yes, her precog is powerful, but she also warned us that depending on it will damage it because she'll lose access to futures where we did the real investigation. Being able to turn lands Red and casually burn cancer out of an entire oncology ward is
incredibly useful as a tactical trump card.
On the specific question of which planes we should look at: I agree that we should look at some planes when we leave. I am not yet voting to leave.
No, the leading proposal is "let Agneyastra handle it", with a comment outside the vote that one of her options is e.g. to leverage her information advantage via insider trading.
Wrong:
You're actually running out of gems; you'd need to raid another Dungeon soonish. (I need to remember that part of the character sheet when update time comes >.>)
Still, "running out" is not the same as "all out," so yes, you'd have enough to bring in well over a hundred MGs from across the world and host them at a reasonably comfortable hotel for a day. You should probably sell them at a number of different locations if you don't want to trip red flags (or simply exceed the amount of liquid money a buyer might have), buuuut that would then trip other red flags if anyone recognizes you.
-[] So, any chance she can help you sell a small fortune in gemstones?
The current plan is to sell gemstones. Also, insider trading is the
worst plan for making money quickly.
If I had to name the
single epistemic feat at which modern human civilization is most adequate, the peak of all human power of estimation, I would unhesitatingly reply, "Short-term relative pricing of liquid financial assets, like the price of S&P 500 stocks relative to other S&P 500 stocks over the next three months." This is something into which human civilization puts an
actual effort.
- Millions of dollars are offered to smart, conscientious people with physics PhDs to induce them to enter the field.
- These people are then offered huge additional payouts conditional on actual performance—especially outperformance relative to a baseline.
- Large corporations form to specialize in narrow aspects of price-tuning.
- They have enormous computing clusters, vast historical datasets, and competent machine learning professionals.
- They receive repeated news of success or failure in a fast feedback loop.
- The knowledge aggregation mechanism—namely, prices that equilibrate supply and demand for the financial asset—has proven to work beautifully, and acts to sum up the wisdom of all those highly motivated actors.
- An actor that spots a 1% systematic error in the aggregate estimate is rewarded with a billion dollars—in a process that also corrects the estimate.
- Barriers to entry are not zero (you can't get the loans to make a billion-dollar corrective trade), but there are thousands of diverse intelligent actors who are all individually allowed to spot errors, correct them, and be rewarded, with no central veto.
This is certainly not perfect, but it is
literally as good as it gets on modern-day Earth.
Some hilarious fraction of convictions for corporate espionage, embezzlement, and general corporate misbehavior come down to violation of insider trading laws. Hell, you're more likely to get away with
bombing a soccer team's bus in an attempt to manipulate the price of their publicly-traded stock than you are to get away with actually shorting said stock. The SEC and its relatives in other countries do
not fuck around.
- We worked months on our Red Cleansing and incorporated elements from our pendant, Siofra's purification process, and Firewall. We're at rank 26. I seriously doubt that a beginner will just find refinements we haven't thought about.
I wouldn't be surprised. We've repeatedly seen that spellcasters with different traditions have different amounts of difficulty with different spells. And then, for all that Jade has messed up, she's only tried like six different things. Mass brainstorming can be
staggeringly effective on tasks like this. Foundation of modern civilization.
You're also moving the goalposts. Who said we had to teach
all of them? Our goal is not to teach every single Pyro how to do Red Cleansing in one day. Our goal is to teach
enough people how to do Red Cleansing in one day that they can teach the rest of the planet how to do it over the following weeks or months. Our goal would probably be accomplished if
literally one person pulls it off. On top of that, you keep calling these people beginners. They are not beginners. Not only do they all have access to Channeling, I expect that attendance will be strongly biased toward higher-skill mages, including
everyone that's tried Red Cleansing and failed. These people will
not be beginners and they will have
already tried things that we haven't, which may give them insights into the process that we skipped right over.
Then, of course, there's the simple fact that teaching people how to do something demands more explicit, deeper, and broader understanding than application does. There's a reason that we require professors to teach their material back to students. Richard Feynman: "
If you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it." I expect Jade to gain
multiple ranks in Red Cleansing in the opening
hour of the workshop. Maybe in the opening
minutes.
So again
@Vebyast, why do you want to set place and date without asking anyone among the OMG community?
Fine, if we have WoG that Kanon is already doing everything, then we won't step on her toes. I don't understand
why we're letting her do everything, since there's no way she'll be able to do it as well as we can and the bureaucracy will cut attendance in half, but okay, fine.
[x] Decline. You have a bunch to do and not a lot of time to do it in.
-[x] That said, ask if she can send you contact info for a few people in case you have half an hour free to try to nail down cleansing.
[x] Spend a bit of time working with Mom (and Kanon, if she's still awake) to get the conference in motion.
-[x] Set up a website and a process for submitting proposals for talks/workshops and posters/demo booths.
--[x] Submit a workshop on Red Cleansing, leaving your name redacted for now.
-[x] Finance. How much does Agneyastra estimate you'll need for venue, food, etc? Do you need to do anything right now - sell one or two gems or bits of bullion?
-[x] Send anything relevant to Kanon - website link, funding, etc.
[x] Try listening for prayers. Even if you can't get worship-power across planes, it'd be useful for communicating - just being able to respond to an attack on your city on the king-selection plane would be huge.
