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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Jello_Raptor said:
Oh come on now. You're forgetting all the other actual scandals. Like the one where Clinton killed an FBI agent looking into her foundation with her bare hands, and the one where she colluded with Wall Street bankers on her plot for world domination by using the TPP to end US sovereignty.
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Ah, you're right, I did forget about those. Thanks for reminding me.

Jello_Raptor said:
Personally, I've been recently convinced that Range voting is the way to go. With approval voting as another option I would happily support.
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Oh, cool. I wasn't familiar with Range voting, so thanks for educating me. That said, after reading up on it I don't know that I would support it. It's right on the edge of "too complicated to use" and would definitely slow down voting as everyone struggled to decide if Joe Bloggs should get a 42 or a 43. More importantly, it doesn't satisfy the majority criterion. If we're overhauling the voting system I want to ensure that we will never again get a candidate that lost the popular vote.

I like approval voting because it wins on a lot of axes -- it's dead simple to explain, doesn't require changing the ballot except to swap the words "only one" with "as many as you want" (thereby saving money and easing implementation), it fits the majority criterion, and it's simple enough that it can be executed by hand if necessary. It isn't optimal -- it's not Condorcet and you can get situations where voting for someone hurts them -- but in my opinion it's the best method for widespread real-world voting.
 
Jello_Raptor said:
It was completely fake news story. The FBI agent wasn't a real person. The town in which it happened didn't exist. The newspaper on which the story was reported was a site designed specifically for making fake news seem real. Planet Money did a recent report on it that was pretty good.
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Hah! And there's why I didn't put too much stock into it one way or the other - they all lie.
 
Here's the current version of my action plan. Comments are appreciated.

[X] Action Plan: Ducks in a Row


Radvic said:
[] Action Plan: Ducks in a Row
We're a little lacking in purpose in our actions in Konoha. Let's double down on helping out Jiraiya, encourage our teammates (especailly Akane), go to a library, and continue making nice with Konoha.

Goals
  1. Survive
  2. Reduce stress on team
  3. Make sure we're all on the same page
  4. Make an explicit overall plan for our time in Konoha
  5. Maintain cover and pleasantries
  6. Progress plot lines (Jiraiya, Kabuto, Akane)
Methods
  1. Reflect upon the day
    1. We need to be more careful about what we say: we've insulted several people (e.g. Jiraiya, our minders, Keiko, Noburi).
    2. We maybe should be more careful around the doctor: Inoue seemed suspicious of him, and she's good at this sort of thing.
  2. Debriefing session
    1. Ask about if we'd like to make a tower prototype with Jiraiya for more rewards/monies/privacy (Hazou's cool with it)
    2. Discuss with Kagome things that'd make him more at ease (e.g. whittling, painting, cooking)
    3. Ask if people have good de-stressing strategies we could use (then use them).
    4. Ask for Inoue's opinion on all our interactions (since she's the best at this).
    5. Determine team policy on bloodline experimentation: we should all be on the same page (Hazou is ok with observations: primary concern is safety)
  3. Next day, be nice with Team Asume -- follow up on conversations, do things they enjoy (eating, shopping, strategy games)
  4. See about purchasing a pack or something to hide Noburi's barrel
  5. Check up on Akane, attempt to encourage her
    1. Remind her of the good times we have
      1. Beach episode
      2. Games
      3. Sparring
    2. Remind her of the times she's done really well
      1. Compliment her construction of the towers that let us find Arikada
      2. Compliment her demolition of the zombies --> she did better than we did
      3. The times she's been positive: she's been a huge encouragement to Hazou
    3. Point out things we have to look forward to
      1. She can see her family and other friends again!
      2. We can work more closely with Leaf now.
      3. We've stopped Arikada from doing more harm in the world!
  6. Go to the library for research (link to things to read)
  7. Meet up with Jiraiya for rewards discussion
  8. Encourage Noburi on his internship (he gets to learn from the best, cool! Still be careful though.)
Contingencies
  1. Be polite to everyone
  2. Follow handler's instructions to the letter (and spirit)
  3. Minimize Kagome's interactions with people, be prepared to stop conflicts
  4. Make sure Inoue has a colored jutsu for signaling for help
  5. If combat breaks out, end update
  6. If talking to Hokage, trust Inoue
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Dictator4Hire said:
What prompted you to favor Range over Approval?
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The short version is that all the best case outcomes are better than approval, the worst case outcomes are equivalent to approval. If there is even a small population of honest voters (even alongside the population of strategic voters) there's a huge benefit over approval voting.

The two biggest criticisms I used to have was the complexity of range voting, but studies seem to show that's a less of an issue than I used to believe1​. People rank things from 0-10 all the time after all. Likewise taking the average of the ratings is pretty obvious.

The other big criticism was the transition period, but it's easy to use existing voting machines for a range vote and it's less of a concern than the approval voting threshold coordination problem. Though I would like to see a study of what happens with the analogous problem in range voting, where people's curves of what constitutes a 0 or a 5 are different. My intuition says it would be much less of an issue, since honest voters are likely to choose from calibration curves that are somewhere between a linear utility measurement, an information preserving scoring, and a logarithmic scale. All of these are similar enough that their variance won't be a huge issue.

On the plus side. Range voting has a much larger nursery effect than approval voting. Which is to say people will be much more comfortable ranking less favoured candidates (like 3rd parties) at some point > 0. As opposed to putting them on the same playing field as their preferred candidate, as approval forces them to do. This means being an honest vote is unlikely to hurt you and you aren't incentivized to set your approval threshold high. The election will also be much better at accurately reporting the actual level of support of a populace, which is one of their really important secondary functions.

eaglejarl said:
Oh, cool. I wasn't familiar with Range voting, so thanks for educating me. That said, after reading up on it I don't know that I would support it. It's right on the edge of "too complicated to use" and would definitely slow down voting as everyone struggled to decide if Joe Bloggs should get a 42 or a 43.
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I think a 0-10 or 0-5 scale is more than enough to get the benefits of a range vote without overloading on the complexity or making the decision hard.

eaglejarl said:
More importantly, it doesn't satisfy the majority criterion. If we're overhauling the voting system I want to ensure that we will never again get a candidate that lost the popular vote.
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It only doesn't satisfy the criterion if you allow abstention. I tend to prefer the formulation where abstention is analogous to a score of 0. If you do that, it satisfies the majority criterion at least as well as approval.

The alternate stabilizing formulation, where every candidate gets a number of "default" 0 votes equal to some portion of the population, minimizes the effect of an unknown candidate with fervent voters. The larger the number of "default" votes the closer the system comes to satisfying the majority criterion.

eaglejarl said:
I like approval voting because it wins on a lot of axes -- it's dead simple to explain, doesn't require changing the ballot except to swap the words "only one" with "as many as you want" (thereby saving money and easing implementation),
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Well, I don't think it's hard to explain: "Give everyone a score from 1-10, the person with the best average wins."

There's also the fact a small, non-obvious change would lead to many people just continuing to vote for single candidates. Which would negate many of the benefits of approval over strategic plurality. I think an obvious change to another simple system would kick most people out of their default strategies.

eaglejarl said:
(thereby saving money and easing implementation), .
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You can use existing voting machines just fine. If you have a 3 person range election you just have your machines treat "[] Give A a score of 1; [] Give A a score of 2; [] Give A a score of 3; ..." as separate elections. Once you have the number of people voting in each of those elections it's trivial to figure out the average for each candidate and who won the overall election. An ideal system would have a different interface, but the cost of that is trivial compared to the cost of the rest of the election.

Admittedly that increases the number of actual circles on the ballot, but the cost for extra paper will likely be lost in the noise.

Edit: Also you can compose these elections. If people are using old machines have then vote 0-5, and new machines vote 0-10, you can scale the votes of the of the 0-5 machine (just multiply the scores by 2) and use them together. It means you get a less accurate assessment of some preferences, but it's not a systematic error. People's votes aren't worth more or less, and it doesn't change how strategic voting occurs.

eaglejarl said:
it's simple enough that it can be executed by hand if necessary.
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It's also just as easy to count by hand if you remember that for any two sets of disjoint scores A and B the avg(A ∪ B) is (avg(A) * size(A) + avg(B) * size(B))/(size(A) + size(B)). Just do it in batches where you keep track of the number of votes in a batch as well as the average score of the batch, and combine them. It's commutative and associative, so with a calculator it's exactly as easy to mess up as plurality or approval.

Seriously though, people doing vote counts for individual piles of ballots would have basically identical workloads. And if someone combining totals can't do at least that much math, then I don't want them tabulating a plurality vote either.

eaglejarl said:
It isn't optimal -- it's not Condorcet and you can get situations where voting for someone hurts them.
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As for condorcet and other criterion it's just as good as approval. Strategic range voting is identical to approval voting after all.

Dark as Silver said:
Oh my god... I thought Jello_Raptor was being sarcastic.
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I was being sarcastic about "choking with her bare hands". The rest of it is pulled straight from popular stories, including gross mischaracterizations of her wall street speeches2​. The fake news machine really exploded right before the election, it was surreal.

[1]: The effect is less than it would be if I hadn't seen those studies collected on a site specifically promoting range voting, but even given that adjustment it's enough that my probability for the statement "The average american would find approval voting easier to understand and use than range voting" is right around 50%.

[2]: Which I do find scary and worrying, but for completely different reasons than the fake news sites popularized.
 
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Hey all, I've gone ahead and fixed a time for the SF meetup: 4pm on Sunday Dec 11th. See the post below for more details. I expect 3-4 people, but anyone is welcome to join us.

Jello_Raptor said:
SF Meetup Announcement: Sunday Dec 11

Date: Sunday, Dec 11th
Time: 4pm
Location: Thoroughbred
- 248 Church St, San Francisco, CA 94114

Hello everyone, I'veset up a MfD meetup in San Francisco on Dec 11th, at 4pm. @eaglejarl will be joining us. Feel free to just drop in.

We'll meet up for some food and to chat, and possibly head out to a pub after if enough people are interested.
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Edit: Obligatory /r/rational post.
 
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anti-Armageddon initative:
[X] Action Plan: Ducks in a Row
[X] Action Plan: Trees Bearing Fruit


(@Kiba and others: this is the other plan.)

OliWhail said:
With apologies to everyone working on the compilation-based action plan, this is the quickest way I know to get conversation kickstarted.

[X] Action Plan: Trees Bearing Fruit
This plan assumes the update timeline will start late in the evening of the same day as Ch. 87. The update should not go past going to sleep the night of the following day.

Methods marked with (O) can (in my estimation) more easily occur offscreen than others. If a higher-level point is marked, all sub-points should be treated as marked.

Bold underline bits are activities or information Hazou considers most important to complete or obtain in a timely manner.

Goals
  1. Survive.
  2. Maintain team sanity and stability.
  3. Stay on Jiraiya / Leaf's good side, including our minders.
  4. Maintain cover / don't cause any incidents.
  5. Get to know more about Leaf / our minders.
Methods
  1. Before bed
    1. Ask Kagome how can we make his stay here in Leaf easier
      1. We know this is a very unpleasant environment for him, and it makes us sad to see him stressed out and unhappy.
      2. Remind him that we can handle ourselves, and that we're all here to watch each others' backs in case anything does go wrong.
      3. Is there any non-ninjacraft related activity or project he would like to pursue? Woodcarving, painting, cooking?
    2. (O) Sound out the team's views on handing our tower-lifting prototype to J, since we have all the pieces sealed in a bag already.
      1. It sounded like he would be willing to give a substantial payment (another favor, when combined with the paralytic?) for it, and it's not like he can't work it out himself given a little bit of time since he's already been given the idea.
    3. (O) Confirm with Noburi that he isn't worried about clan secrets being discernible from him doing repair work, since we assume there are cheating bullshit Hyuuga everywhere.
    4. After meditating upon the day, Hazou comes to conclusions/realization that the doctor was acting funny, and Inoue, Kagome, and Keiko all made valid points in our interactions with him. We should re-examine our interactions -- there might be a bit more to the doctor.
  2. Spread throughout the day
    1. (O) Dispel periodically
    2. Continue being nice to Team Asuma. Approach the situation from a perspective of genuinely trying to make friends. Throughout the day, as we build up rapport:
      1. If Hazou gets flak for being nice, maintain that with his apprentice indisposed it falls to him to maintain the group's levels of Youth.
      2. Ask about Leaf life trivialities, be willing to share in return
        1. What are Team Asuma's favorite foods?
        2. Share favorite books, especially those others are unlikely to have read.
        3. What do ninjas do here to relax -- Sarutobi mentioned a theater district?
        4. We heard you guys hosted some crazy chuunin exams earlier this year - are you allowed to tell us about those?
          1. Especially the Fourth Hokage's and Kazekage's sons. How did that fight end up going down?
  3. Morning activities
    1. (Suggestion to Inoue-sensei) Can minders or the genin taking care of us pass on to J a request for a location to have sensitive team discussions?
    2. (O)
      1. Buy at least one high quality, durable set of shoes for each of us.
      2. See if we can't find a pack of some kind on our shopping trip to disguise Noburi's barrel without compromising function, which preferrably doesn't sacrifice aesthetics.
        1. Reasoning: the visible barrel marks him as a Wakahisa and a Kiri nin. It makes us easy to recognize and thus, potentially, to track. If the Iron Nerve had easily visible markers, Hazou would be looking for ways to hide those too.
      3. Get Noburi spare barrel material
  4. Midday activities
    1. Get some light training and sparring in under minder supervision, inviting them to join if they so choose
      1. "What do you say Akimichi? Loser buys lunch with Jiraiya's money?" (In a joking way, laughing along if anyone implies we're asking him out.)
      2. Confirm whether MEW can be used while airborne, ideally in a way that will produce chakra constructs to avoid permanent modification of the area.
    2. (O) Lunch somewhere - use as opportunity to bring up topics above, esp. favorite books.
    3. (O) Library visit - look over what subjects are available, and see if we can get some light reading material to deliver to / be sent to Akane. Include any of Team Asuma's favorite books from earlier discussion if we think Akane would enjoy them.
    4. Check back in on Akane like we promised, because we promised.
      1. Get flowers from the Yamanaka shop, confirm Akane isn't allergic to any of them, and set them up in her room
      2. Don't push for a decision about sticking with us, but be willing to discuss it if she brings it up.
        1. It is a big question, and she has plenty of time to make it what with her recuperation.
        2. We won't abandon her either way.
      3. (O) If she asks for something productive to do, ask about getting her some engineering texts. If there are issues with us having insufficient authorization to access such material, see if there is there someone else who could do so and pass it on.
  5. Afternoon/evening activities
    1. ((O) maybe possibly?) Go do the sightseeing part of the trip to the places that were brought up at lunch (War memorial, Hokage monument, parks, theater district....) Generally follow itinerary from Team Asuma here.
    2. If Jiraiya gets back to us quicky on a secure discussion opportunity
      1. Our desire to arrange our mom's extraction from Mist, and our concerns about how that could impact the rest of the group.
        1. Does Inoue-sensei think this is even a feasible thing to ask with a favor, or stacked favors, given Hana's large motivation to defect to work for J specifically and the additional utility she provides to our team in the form of jounin combat strength and decades of experience?
        2. Ask if there is anyone else we would need to extract at the same, and whether we should avoid doing so at all to avoid putting Inoue-senei's family at risk.
          1. Any Wakahisa or Mori clan members would be more difficult to extract but also less likely to provoke huge reprisals from Yagura.
        3. Mom would be a valuable resource, but also an addition to the team - are others okay with that idea?
      2. Communicate Hazou's feelings to Keiko CCnJ style
        1. "It seems clear to me that there have been several instances over the last few days that I insulted you with how I communicated -- in particular, when discussing your plan of action while in the Summon Realm after we apprehended Arikada, when I suggested a stronger social focus in your training, and potentially when I said you should of course rely mainly on your own judgement when choosing what reward to ask for from Jiraiya. In the first and last cases I felt that I was either laying out shared assumptions, though in the second case I do not feel I communicated my reasoning with anything approaching clarity. What advice would you give me for approaching or phrasing such discussions in the future to ensure we can continue to communicate clearly, since this is an experience I value greatly?"
      3. Check Hazou's understanding of the social manipulations performed by Dr. Yakushi against Inoue-sensei's observations.
    3. Game night (Strategic Domination [Hazou should avoid rolling all sixes, giving credence to the lie that Iron Nerve simply involves improved kinesthetics], shogi, go, maybe games that are native to Leaf?)
    4. Say a quiet thank you to Inoue-sensei for taking care of everyone even though we know it's stressful and apologize for jumping the gun at the hospital if it was not already adressed. Accept any resulting hair-ruffles stoically.
    5. (O) Hazou should continue dedicating time to actively de-stressing - meditation, stretching, relaxing in the hot bath - and should encourage others to do so.
Contingencies
  1. Don't piss off Leaf
    1. Be polite to everyone we meet
    2. Listen to our handlers and follow their (reasonable) instructions to the letter
  2. Try to minimize Kagome's stress level by not making him talk too much / interact with non-teammates if he doesn't feel like it, keeping close-by, encouraging him to eat any of the nice food we get that have already been checked for poison, esp. sweets and chocolate.
  3. Safety and Security Rules
    1. Don't split up if at all possible
    2. Keep a watch in our room even at night
    3. Make sure we all have whatever the local equivalent of white flags are
    4. When in public, try to stick to areas with a reasonable number of civilians and other ninja
  4. Combat contingencies
    1. White tactics by default
    2. Use any panic buttons Jiraiya has given us (none yet, sounds like)
    3. Try to leave the city or converge on Jiraiya's office to turn ourselves in. Make sure we're doing the equivalent of waving white flags.
    4. If we aren't able to immediately disengage, end the update for combat planning.
  5. Assume we are being spied on at pretty much all times by multiple parties
  6. If the topic of why Fire isn't a model for what Hazou wants to acheive comes up again, consider drawing from
    When you asked why Fire wasn't a utopia, I was confused because you had practically just said the answer yourself: none of the major players can trust each other, because each of them consider only their own people to have any moral weight. And that is what you said, that you would sleep well after killing a foreign citizen to save a Leaf one. Not that you would consider it a necessary tragedy to protect the people you care about, and not that you would devote so much as a second of thought toward avoiding having to make that choice again in the future, and you said all your counterparts in other villages feel the same way.

    When the whole world does that, then everyone looks like monsters to everyone else. At that point, it's even easier to say all foreigners are morally irrelevant, trapping the entire world in a spiral of indifference and hatred, so we get the current state of the world even from initial conditions where everyone cares about people outside their clan or their village just slightly too little. And at that point, it becomes impossible to trust one another to do things like build utopias, since all that power looks like a threat.

    Which gives us the answer to your original question: the reason Fire isn't a utopia is that even though it's strong, it's not as strong as everyone else all at once, and if you withdraw resources from maintaining your current military dominance to focus on things like civilian wellbeing, other nations will see that apparent weakness as an opportunity to help their people by hurting yours, who as we've established they don't care about. Boom, the next shinobi war. And if you did anything with your vast resources that would put you on a clear trajectory to become strong enough to fight them all off at once, like letting civilians live well enough to lead to significant population growth, the entire world will throw everything they had at you, even though they'd be eviscerated afterwards and have an even harder time stalling civilization's collapse.

    They'd do it even if you weren't being hostile, like the world did to Whirlpool. It's probably pretty easy to see from the reversed perspective - if Mist suddenly became insanely good at sealcrafting, and started using it to protect their civilians and grow more food and help all their citizens live comfortably, would you be glad your neighbors were growing happy and prosperous? Or would you see the impending population boom as a threat to be sabotaged and undermined? And if you find a low-risk method that sabotages your enemies' future strength without going to war, well, how could you not take it, even if it's morally horrific and accelerating the gradual downfall of the human race.

    You can't build up because you would get smacked down. You can't truly work with other nations to break out of the downward spiral because you won't be trusted and won't trust them, since you both know that trust would be exploited. So Leaf ends up having to contribute to the status quo, even if you guys are better about humanizing the enemy than others, according to Akane. But it isn't working, and something has to change, or everything is going to crumble into dust, and everyone is going to die - including Leaf. So, again, will you help us?
    1. Part of that is why we need him on board - preventing wars from breaking out while the fixing is happening, and then figuring out a way to change the incentives that result in things like distrust and scorch squads. Make it so that "cooperate" becomes the winning option even in the non-iterated case of this prisoners' dilemma. (Massively improve agriculture per area to allow consolidation of civilian population? Set up a neurtral third party to arbitrate disputes and hand out the uplift tech on the basis of good behavior?) That, or make Leaf so strong so fast that everyone's best option is to give up, but even then people won't actually be reasonable since they're scared and angry and distrustful. Even if there were a jutsu to magically restore everyone's view of each other as people deserving moral consideration, it wouldn't be anything like a permanent solution, because the cycle would start all over again.
    2. Also, compared to slowly dying villages in the wilderness, and to some extent compared even to Kirigakure, Leaf is fairly utopian already.
  7. Plan for talking about rewards with Jiraiya
    1. Most of these rewards are centered around making us stronger and better assets, so it's against Jiraya's interests to be stingy here
    2. Check if he is okay with us discussing fairly frankly some admitted longshots first; if not, skip this section.
      1. Kurosawa Hana
        1. Getting her out of Kiri
          1. Jounin taijutsu expert with huge reasons to defect to work for him specifically, and would cause Team Uplift to be stronger, safer, saner, enormously grateful, and probably more stable due to her greater experience and mediating influence.
          2. If this is gonna start the Fourth Jashin-damned Shinobi War, obviously not worth it, and is obviously a huge ask in terms of difficulty and risk, but is this a thing we that is even on the table as far as favors, or even accumulated favors?
        2. If not getting her out, how feasible is an attempt to get a message to her, even just "your son is alive and loves you"? In addition to or barring that, could we get information on what she is up to and what her position is in Mist?
      2. Does any kind of pass to cross Fire borders come packaged with Akane's reinstatement and our continued loyalty?
        1. We recognize that this is unlikely due to the need to maintain deniability, but Akane is much less of a carrot if we can't come to see her (if she does not stick with us) / will need to be able to access Leaf resources and her friends and family if she does stick with us.
        2. If J gets smug / team gives us shit for saying we're loyal to Leaf/J, maintain that since we are loyal to Akane who is presumably loyal to Leaf, we are at least second-order loyal to them, and in any case they appear to represent the best chance at fixing things.
        3. If J asks why we're now uncertain whether she'll stick with us, maintain that we are simply planning for all possibilities and that the choice remains hers.
    3. Check if he is okay with us discussing some generalities of less-longshot options before asking for a specific thing
      1. Seal designs: are these even on the table? Would he be willing to give us either an array of low-to-medium level utility seals that he thinks would contribute most to our effectiveness, or to do a deeper dive into e.g. storage seals and the extremes of what they can be used for?
        1. Examples of utility seals ordered by preference
          1. Communication range, especially surreptitiously
          2. Night vision or other sensory enhancements
          3. Advanced alarm seals
          4. Sound muffling seals / other stealth enhancements
          5. Self Contained Breathing Apparatus
            1. Something that lets us breath when there is no clean, breathable air around
          6. Eye, ear and environmental protection
            1. Protection against bright lights and noise
            2. Protection against extreme temperatures
            3. Protection against gas or liquid toxicants that only require skin contact
      2. Jutsu: he said he would get us a teacher at the end of our interactions with him in Yuni - if that no longer holds, how much is he willing to teach us now (e.g. # of techniques at particular ranks - describe the jutsu plan quoted below if prompted)
      3. Can we safely assume we will be given / at least have the chance to buy new ninja gear and essentials, what with our old stuff being potentially biosealer-contaminated?
        1. An up-to-date bingo book or comparable intel would also be really nice but we're not about to spend a favor on it.
      4. Technique Hacking
        1. Is it something we could learn from a favor?
        2. Jiraya's analysis on its usefulness for a team like ours
    4. Are there missions he has planned for us that he can tell us about before we make our decision?
    5. The update should then end for a vote on our reward

    The winning plan from the jutsu vote:
  1. Things to do while in Leaf
    1. Look out for a gift for Keiko
    2. If we meet Lee, challenge him to a friendly spar (of the no-chakra-boost-yes-Roki kind)
    3. Get Akane's family and Lee to visit her in the hospital
  2. Lingering Jiraiya Questions
    1. What purpose did lying to us about not knowing the identity of the summon clan serve?
    2. (Think of less insulting ways to phrase this) Why didn't he ever reply via summons, to assign us somewhere / at least give us new recognition codes / at LEAST tell us our codes were out of date / AT LEAST acknowledge that he got our message?? Why didn't we get told how long they would be valid for?
    3. Advice on uplift plans? ("I want your advice as someone who has spent multiple times my lifespan preserving peace and gathering knowledge about the world: in what way can I maximally contribute to improving the state of the world, by which I mean to reduce the exploitation of civilians by ninja, to improve the quality of life for both civilians and ninja, and to reduce and eventually reverse the erosion of civilization by the forces of nature and war?")
    4. Sealing lessons? Access to examples of seals? Don't want to offend Kagome, but this would be an excellent opportunity to pick up new ideas.
    5. How to acquire power inside the current system
    6. Any organizations/groups/polities Jiraya and Leaf would not mind us getting rid of?
      1. You know, just in case we need to acquire limited resources (land, vassals, political legitimacy etc.)
[] Brainstorm Everyone: Scorch Squad Squash
Background
  • Kagome suggested that the sparseness of the population is the fundamental reason behind the effectiveness of scorch squads.
    • Can we fix either or both of the contributing problems?
      • The difficulty of patrolling large areas of populated land
      • The difficulty of growing enough food in a small area to support a condensed population
    • Make that technique or technology available
      • globally?
      • to our allies?
    • Doing this might be a quick way to modify the tradeoffs for that method of warfare.
  • As discussed in the thread, there is an additional underlying problem of lack of empathy and trust between nations which prevents simple de-escalation.
Some initial brainstorming:
  • Teleportation tech like the safety poles/safety sticks in Significant Digits (which we may want to keep for ourselves/Hidden Heaven)
  • Automated defenses against ninja (golems? seal-based clones?)
    • Would need to be good enough to stand up to jounin, which implies that this would only be a good solution at much higher power levels than we're currently playing with
  • TH-ing plant growth jutsu, or creating relevant seals, or combining existing jutsu and seals in a clever way that optimizes plant growth, or in any way enabling large numbers of people to be fed while being secured against invasion, seige, crop burning...
  • Bigger-on-the-inside tech to let people farm in their own homes within cities (heavily modified storage seals?)
Further Steps
  • Get others' thoughts/critiques/contributions, and start working on the approach we judge to be most promising
  • Learn about current agricultural practices and try to figure out improvements to equipment or techniques (e.g. better fertilizers, seed drills, focused selective breeding...)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
BTW, we need to vote retroactively on what flowers we got Akane.

[X] Flower Plan: Red, Yellow, and Light Pink Roses
Wikipedia suggests this would convey a combination of "Joy, happiness and excitement" and "Desire, passion, joy of life, youth, energy". "Desire" is somewhat problematic but whatever, I understand we have a number of Hakane shippers in the thread.
 
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