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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Lord Marshal said:
sentient race oppressed by another sentient race, with their only power over the latter race being that they have an industry.

if we lift the ban on Ninja competing economically with Civilians, then you will have the Clans (and in a smaller measure clanless ninjas) crushing the civilians merchants into the dirt so bad it's not even funny, taking away the only power civilians have in Leaf on ninja, money(As weak as it is).
Every Civilians merchant will be put out of business, meaning a massive wave of poverty will hit the civilians population, while clan like the Hyuga will grow even more powerful.
Or other, worse, scenario, like Leaf Civilians population simply leaving the village, that will then collapse on itself.
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Lord Marshal said:
Just and idea that popped out in my head:
What we can do instead is creating a subset of ninjas that are free to use ninjutsu to help civilians business for free(But have a salary paid by the Leaf/The merchants) or a fee,but said fee must be fixed and affordable(and said ninjas must be enough to sustain the entire industry of Leaf).
Once that is done, and civilians can compete on the same level of ninjas, then you release the ban, but leaving this new sub-set of ninja to work with the civilians.
it would something along the lines of
1)Create Merchant Ninjas:
-Merchant Ninjas have a salary, paid collectively by the Merchants of Leaf/paid by a fixed fee.
2)Merchant Ninjas help Civilians, making their business stronger and putting them on the same level of Ninjas
3)Then you or cannot lift the ban, but keep the Merchant Ninjas(Maybe with a fixed and valuable salary, that gives them incentive to remain in the position instead of opening a business+ make it only of Clanless)

Full of problem, but it's an idea.
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Shop owners, craftsmen, travelling traders and laborers are different groups. The civilians aren't a monolithic merchant class and the ninja providing hyper-efficient labor won't weaken the merchants and will actually make them better off because it will be cheaper for them to buy raw resources. The money of the civilians also isn't an advantage over ninja because as seen with the Merchant Council the businesses are actually owned by ninja. The businesses in turn allow them to manipulate the Merchant Council to control licensing in order to maintain their monopoly and ensure only have they have access to ninja advantages like Hyuuga eyes instantly identifying jewel quality. It is worse than a state monopoly because at least in a state monopoly other people would be allowed to improve things.

The reason Mist suffered wasn't because the place had a state monopoly or ninjas working (Leaf also has monopolies and D ranks). Neither would be a valid reason for foreign traders to boycott the place if they can still make a profit. Mist suffered because the ninja were extorting goods and services from people without fair payment and Yagura didn't care about economic development.

Immortal Lurker said:
I agree that a tax and spend approach is sound policy, and might even be a good goal to work towards. But I think there are a few reasons why that fence got built. It's possible that not all of them hold now.

First, the supply of ninja is inelastic on timescales under ten years. Paying soldiers more won't result in more ninja entering the workforce. It is also not very elastic on the ten year timescale. I'm under the impression that virtually everyone with the ability to become a ninja does so. Paying them more won't make more.

On the other side, I think the merchant council benefits civilians because without a merchant council, ninja don't use comparative advantage and trade for goods, they use an overwhelming advantage to form a rentier class with its own rights and privileges. Remember that in Leaf, the first hokage had to resort to very extreme measures just to make the assault of civilians illegal. And it only mostly worked.
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It isn't about getting more ninja (that would be require an entirely different approach like paying ninja to have kids or something). Preventing ninja from helping civilians doesn't help that either (in fact it makes it worse since every ninja that dies on a mission is one that isn't available to raise the next generation). Potential ninja already have good incentives to get ninja skills with the money, propaganda and academy.

The issue is making sure ninja don't do so much civilian work that their combat skills get rusty or it weakens village defence. The solution to that is mandatory combat training and assessment spars with a retainer based on performance and rankings.

JulieK said:
Aren't ninjas not allowed to refuse military missions?
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They aren't allowed to refuse missions ordered directly by the Hokage but outside of wartime most missions are posted and paid for by rich civilians.
 
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Lailoken said:
There's a thought. Just tell her, "Optimize this unit". Bonus: it's probably the Mori equivalent of a proposal.
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Ohh. "Rewrite your values system to be as close to mine as this favour's worth allows". It stacks: we could do this with every favour, and eventually it'll turn into an absolute, open-ended "do what I would want you to do".

I wonder if asking her that would cause her to scream in Kagome and start desperately avoiding becoming indebted to us— Wait, no. It's a feedback loop: we would want her to owe us more favours so that we could make her more like us, which means post-favour!Ami would be biased in favour of strategies that involve getting indebted to us. Fascinating. @Oneiros, @MMKII, @MadScientist, what do you think about this?
 
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Noumero said:
Ohh. "Rewrite your values system to be as close to mine as this favour's worth allows". We could do this with every favour; if asked enough times, it'll turn into an absolute, open-ended "do what I would want you to do".
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We will never be able to afford that many favours and I'm pretty sure we can find a better use for the favour than making her listen to one of Hazou's speeches.
 
Tua said:
What do the dead desire?
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This isn't a meaningful question. Dead people don't exist; corpses that used to be people have no more of a coherent utility function than rocks.
MrCogmor said:
We will never be able to afford that many favours and I'm pretty sure we can find a better use for the favour than making her listen to one of Hazou's speeches.
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But what about getting her to make one of Hazou's speeches?

(Yes, fair enough, it'll probably take a lot of favour until she starts re-aligning enough for this to be noticeable. We'll have more success pursuing conventional cooperation.)
TarzanNn said:
In other words, you suggest that more people developing WMD is good for EN?
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If that's what we value, then yes, by definition.
 
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I don't believe it. @#$^ing writer's cramp again. Any recs for a good ergonomic keyboard? I already have a great ergonomic mouse, but wrong hand.

Anyway, miserably short update incoming. Sorry, @eaglejarl, I know you're keen to progress the plot, but I'm going to have to dump the rest of the plan on you.

Incidentally, hoist by my own petard. What I did with my spoons yesterday was to write a cool and important scene, only to realise that now I can't post it because it would impact the Naruto conversation.

Edit: I'm left-handed, in case that's relevant.
 
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Velorien said:
I don't believe it. @#$^ing writer's cramp again. Any recs for a good ergonomic keyboard? I already have a great ergonomic mouse, but wrong hand.

Anyway, miserably short update incoming. Sorry, @eaglejarl, I know you're keen to progress the plot, but I'm going to have to dump the rest of the plan on you.

Incidentally, hoist by my own petard. What I did with my spoons yesterday was to write a cool and important scene, only to realise that now I can't post it because it would impact the Naruto conversation.
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Post it as a non-canon omake?
 
Velorien said:
I don't believe it. @#$^ing writer's cramp again. Any recs for a good ergonomic keyboard? I already have a great ergonomic mouse, but wrong hand.

Anyway, miserably short update incoming. Sorry, @eaglejarl, I know you're keen to progress the plot, but I'm going to have to dump the rest of the plan on you.

Incidentally, hoist by my own petard. What I did with my spoons yesterday was to write a cool and important scene, only to realise that now I can't post it because it would impact the Naruto conversation.
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Have you considered a workaround of using speech recognition software to produce texts? It may be a good idea to have that setup as an alternative in case you suffer from writer's cramp again.

Also, I never owned ergonomic keyboards so I can't recommend from personal experience. I heard microsoft produced good ergonomic keyboard.

This article might be of help.
 
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Velorien said:
I don't believe it. @#$^ing writer's cramp again. Any recs for a good ergonomic keyboard? I already have a great ergonomic mouse, but wrong hand.
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I don't think the effort involved in typing is something that can be significantly reduced by using a keyboard with a contoured shape. Changing your keyboard layout from QWERTY to one that wasn't deliberately designed to make typing slow and difficult would probably be a better solution.
 
MrCogmor said:
I don't think the effort involved in typing is something that can be significantly reduced by using a keyboard with a contoured shape. Changing your keyboard layout from QWERTY to one that wasn't deliberately designed to make typing slow and difficult would probably be a better solution.
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Citation? I have been told that it's a myth.
 
Lord Marshal said:
Well, the horses industry isn't controlled by a sentient race oppressed by another sentient race, with their only power over the latter race being that they have an industry.

if we lift the ban on Ninja competing economically with Civilians, then you will have the Clans (and in a smaller measure clanless ninjas) crushing the civilians merchants into the dirt so bad it's not even funny, taking away the only power civilians have in Leaf on ninja, money(As weak as it is).
Every Civilians merchant will be put out of business, meaning a massive wave of poverty will hit the civilians population, while clan like the Hyuga will grow even more powerful.
Or other, worse, scenario, like Leaf Civilians population simply leaving the village, that will then collapse on itself.

Uhm...
Just and idea that popped out in my head:
What we can do instead is creating a subset of ninjas that are free to use ninjutsu to help civilians business for free(But have a salary paid by the Leaf/The merchants) or a fee,but said fee must be fixed and affordable(and said ninjas must be enough to sustain the entire industry of Leaf).
Once that is done, and civilians can compete on the same level of ninjas, then you release the ban, but leaving this new sub-set of ninja to work with the civilians.
it would something along the lines of
1)Create Merchant Ninjas:
-Merchant Ninjas have a salary, paid collectively by the Merchants of Leaf/paid by a fixed fee.
2)Merchant Ninjas help Civilians, making their business stronger and putting them on the same level of Ninjas
3)Then you or cannot lift the ban, but keep the Merchant Ninjas(Maybe with a fixed and valuable salary, that gives them incentive to remain in the position instead of opening a business+ make it only of Clanless)

Full of problem, but it's an idea.
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1. You have some good points. We might want to go slow, increasing ninja's economic options, but only if at the same time we are increasing civilian protection from being literally oppressed by ninja.
For example, we could start by letting ninja transport goods between villages, but they would have to then sell them wholesale to civilian merchants who would handle retail sales inside the village. (Why should Leaf get to control economic activity outside the city walls, anyhow?)

2. If civilians leaving would cause the village to collapse, that proves that ninjas need civilians. Ergo, civilians have economic power, and would continue to have economic power, even without special carve-outs preventing ninjas from competing with them.

3. If Civilians can hire Merchant Ninjas at low cost, there will be a huge demand for their services, greater than the number of available ninjas. How will it be decided who gets those services?
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
What I'll push for largely depends on how this ambition congeals when merged with invisible IC data (aka gets sanity checked by someone who can know things we weren't told) and we get viability estimates for each path, but while I'm keeping my mind open for bringing Hana to Leaf I also do not want to discount the options of Hazou going to Mist for training sessions or to involve some Kurosawa other than Hana.
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We could turn Hazou into a junior diplomat in Mist, but that probably means saying goodbye to some sealing research.
 
Velorien said:
I don't believe it. @#$^ing writer's cramp again. Any recs for a good ergonomic keyboard? I already have a great ergonomic mouse, but wrong hand.
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I googled ergonomic keyboards to see if they work.

There seems to be some benefit in angling your wrists away from each other when touch typing but I can do that easily enough on my own keyboard. Apparently it can cause elbow strain but I think if your elbows are at an awkward angle then you are sitting too close to the keyboard. Reddit and Hacker News seem to recommend the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 for being effective and inexpensive. I suspect that the real benefit isn't with the shape of the keyboard but with the plush wrist rests. You could probably achieve a similar effect by putting a folded cloth under your keyboard and wrists. I did find a site that advocated keeping your wrist raised off the keyboard when touch typing but when I experimented that position also caused muscle pain after a while practicing a touch typing program. It might be better long-term though in that the arms can probably eventually adapt to holding a position in space a lot more easily than they can to being compressed against a surface.
 
MrCogmor said:
I don't think the effort involved in typing is something that can be significantly reduced by using a keyboard with a contoured shape. Changing your keyboard layout from QWERTY to one that wasn't deliberately designed to make typing slow and difficult would probably be a better solution.
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Anecdatum of disproof, I choose you.

Years ago, my wrists would become debilitatingly painful after a few hours of typing...a significant problem for a programmer who writes as a hobby. I bought a DataDesk SmartBoard II and the pain stopped instantly, never to return. Unfortunately, I think the company is out of business now.


EDIT: Also, I tried learning Dvorak. It made no difference to my pain and even after a month I was still at half typing speed and it made it difficult to use other people's computers. Maybe there's some advantage if I sunk yet more time into it, but life is short.
 
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