Lesser of two evils

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Lesser of two evils

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 6:39 pm

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Messiah
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I assume that, as a nation grows, events become more serious. Look at my latest event and options.
Two leading parties in your government, one side focusing on social unity and the other side focusing on economic development, are feuding with one another. They are calling on you to publicly endorse one side or the other in order to resolve this dispute.

Option 1: Side with the social unity party. Economic growth is not a core focus at this time. Lose access to government supplied infrastructure purchase cost reduction.

Option 2: Side with the economic growth party. Social unity is not a core focus at this time. Lose access to government supplied population happiness. Population happiness
I think my best option is to do nothing and take the -5 happiness penalty for inaction. [/quote]

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 6:57 pm

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Isileth
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Are the costs just the loss from what your government selection gives?

If thats the case I assume you have infra reduction with no happiness bonus, surely you have nothing to lose with the second option.

Although obviously I don't have the event in front of me so what it actually means could be completely different.

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 7:03 pm

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Messiah
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I initially thought that it was just government bonuses, which is not a big deal. Unfortunately, I got it in my head that it might also be bonuses from improvements, which would really suck. I am not going to choose until I get a firm answer.

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 7:07 pm

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Isileth
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Yeah it does give you a fair amount of time to pick and the official forums are pretty fast.

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 7:43 pm

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Zephir
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I wouldn't take any happiness loss, as there is no way to make up the lost income.

You can stop buying infra for 30 days, and save up all the money, then use it to make a huge jump, and you will have lost nothing.

But any hit to happiness will reduce your income for the next 30 days, and you won't be able to recover the lost income.

And remember if you stop buying infra you can still buy tech, and land, and plan for a big jump once the event expires. Also remember if you've saved up a lot of money but paid all your bills once you make the jump you'll get a big windfall from the population increase.

I could probably run the numbers and calculate the costs if you really want to know, but I'm 110% certain that losing the infra purchase discount will not cost anything in the long run, but the happiness loss will cost you every day.

Also as you say if it's just the govt type bonuses that are lost both are negligible really, 1 happiness or 5% infra purchase cost. Although at your level 5% on ifra prices might be quite a bit.

Before any modifications 1 point of happiness adds $2 gross income per person, but then total happiness is modified by environment. I don't know your working pop or income so you'll have to work out the exact numbers yourself, and I don't know your infra costs :)

But.....

Remember currently, until you make a choice, you are -5 happiness or $10 income per person which equates to $2.80 per person in tax. Now if you are following the standard 20% soldiers for your current total pop, that would give you a working pop of about 60,000 so right now your losing approx $168,000/day.

So for the 30 days of the event you'll lose approx $5 million in tax revenue if you do nothing.



Zeph.
"You're scared of mice and spiders, but oh-so-much greater is your fear that one day the two species will cross-breed to form an all-powerful race of mice-spiders who will immobilize human beings in giant webs in order to steal cheese." - Spaced (1999)

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 8:35 pm

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W11chter
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You must be full after crunching all those numbers. :rolleyes: ;)
"Wenn der Herr die Stadt nicht bewacht, wacht der W11chter vergebens" (Psalm 127:1).

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 8:40 pm

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Zephir
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:lol:

I guess it would be no surprise to know that my degree was in Computer Science with Math.

Zeph
"You're scared of mice and spiders, but oh-so-much greater is your fear that one day the two species will cross-breed to form an all-powerful race of mice-spiders who will immobilize human beings in giant webs in order to steal cheese." - Spaced (1999)

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 8:52 pm

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Zephir
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Whatever Messiah does I'd say this event isn't going to cost too much.

Zeph.
"You're scared of mice and spiders, but oh-so-much greater is your fear that one day the two species will cross-breed to form an all-powerful race of mice-spiders who will immobilize human beings in giant webs in order to steal cheese." - Spaced (1999)

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 8:55 pm

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Kon
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I don't think this has any impact on improvements or anything. Both options should specify what is affected by them, and how much. I've never seen a "mystery event" like this, and unless you did not copy the text correctly, this could be a bug. I would recommend you ask about this in the Question Center forum if you haven't already. This is very strange indeed.
"We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution."

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 9:42 pm

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Messiah
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Zephir, it would have been helpful if you had given me a more comprehensive breakdown of the costs associated with each option. Try harder next time, please.

;)

It only affects bonuses from goverment type. I opted for option 1 and lost the 5% infrastructure reduction - bearable.

Kahn, that was copied verbatim from my event list.

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 10:44 pm

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Zephir
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More comprehensive ?

Well it's rather difficult to work infrastructure purchase cost because there are a lot of variables :confused:

Also it gets more expensive as you buy it, so I'd need to know exactly how much infrastructure you would be buying during the life of the event :smack:

Which is why I said the best option is to lose the infrastructure discount and put off buying infrastructure until the event expires, that way you lose nothing :D

That said at your current level with 4 factories you'd be paying about $87,700/level without the government bonus and approx $83,340/level with the bonus, losing you approx $4000 per level.

So.....

If you were to buy say 200 infra during the life of the event it would cost $17,912,383 instead of $17,016,764 which means you would pay $895,619 extra for the infrastructure.

If you'd chosen option 2 you would have lost 1 happiness point which equates to $0.56/person on tax revenue using my earlier estimate of 60,000 taxable citizens this would be $33,600/day or $1,008,000 for the life of the event.

That works out at about the difference in price for 190 levels of infrastructure so as long as you buy less than 190 levels of infrastructure over the next 30 days you'll come out ahead.

Either choice is considerably cheaper than doing nothing and losing 5 happiness which as I estimated earlier would cost around $5,000,000.

Is that detailed enough for you ? :sweat:
"You're scared of mice and spiders, but oh-so-much greater is your fear that one day the two species will cross-breed to form an all-powerful race of mice-spiders who will immobilize human beings in giant webs in order to steal cheese." - Spaced (1999)

PostPosted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 12:52 am

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Messiah
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Much better. Thank you Zephir.

;)

PostPosted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 1:30 am

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Zephir
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Are you sure ?

I could always show the details of how it's worked out, after all this is nothing compared to the math involved in identifying and tracking objects in in image sequences :cool:

Which is what I was doing at Cardiff University in 2000/2001 before me and big brother had an ethical disagreement.
"You're scared of mice and spiders, but oh-so-much greater is your fear that one day the two species will cross-breed to form an all-powerful race of mice-spiders who will immobilize human beings in giant webs in order to steal cheese." - Spaced (1999)

PostPosted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 3:42 am

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PostPosted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 6:48 pm

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@Zephir
An ethical comp-sci guy. Wow.

;)
"Wenn der Herr die Stadt nicht bewacht, wacht der W11chter vergebens" (Psalm 127:1).

PostPosted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 7:39 pm

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Zephir
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lol

You'd be surprised how many there are :)

The problem is it's very easy to lose sight of ethics when you're doing research because it is very very focused.

My research area was image segmentation and tracking (detection and tracking of objects in images) which is in fact very useful and doesn't really contain any major ethical issues. After all it's used to identify bad fruit in packing plants, and quality control biscuit shape and size in factories, and it's used in robot vehicles etc. The ethical issues arise once someone wants to do things you hadn't thought about with the objects that you find in the images.

For example I originally got involved in object detection and tracking as an undergraduate. A significant part of my final year was my final year project in which I had to produce a working piece of software and my supervisor was involved in image processing, and artificial intelligence.

So I ended up developing a program that could monitor surveillance cameras in a car park and build a behavioral model of how objects (cars and people) behaved in the car park. After the system had learnt how objects behaved a particular car park, it could monitor the car park for any behavior that didn't match it's model and alert an operator who cold then actively monitor the cameras to see what was going on.

I had no ethical issues with that. But, after I graduated I was asked why I didn't include facial recognition into the system, that could be linked to police databases so that if known car thieves entered the car park.......

Then move on to PhD research where you are working on multi platform surveillance systems that build a 3d model of the environment and use data from multiple sensors to place and track objects within the model.

Then someone comes up with the bright idea of adding facial recognition to that. Then someone says lets link it to some identity databases. Then the government announce a plan to integrate all government databases into a single system so all data about an individual can be easily accessed and maintained.

Then you have a system that, in theory can identify you and track you the minute you enter any area covered by surveillance devices, and at the click of button show all your personal data, as well as a complete history of your movements.

Just imagine a bored operator......

Hey lets see what Mr X did yesterday, type find Mr X and the date and a few seconds later a model of part of London appears and there is a model labeled Mr X walking down the street click on the model or Mr X and you can view camera footage taken at the time, and see his medical records, tax records, bank records, oh and look Mr X is answering his cell phone. Click! Oh he's talking to Mr Y, wonder what he is saying . Click!

But of course it's all harmless, there will be safeguards, the system can't be abused. Besides if you haven't done anything wrong what have you got to be worried about. :nervous:

Oh and of course your not really involved in all that anyway, because all your working on is is some mathematical algorithms to detect and track objects (not people, objects, any objects) in a sequence of images.

Believe me there are lot of ethical people involved in research, but the issues are not clear cut, and it's not always about what you are doing but the future possibilities when what you are doing is linked with what someone else is doing.

If you want a good discussion about ethics lets start a thread in General or Lifestyles :)
"You're scared of mice and spiders, but oh-so-much greater is your fear that one day the two species will cross-breed to form an all-powerful race of mice-spiders who will immobilize human beings in giant webs in order to steal cheese." - Spaced (1999)

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